Andy's Glasses

Here’s an interesting statistic. In the last 48 matches in which Spurs have gone 1-nil down, they have won… none. Not one. Not even come back to draw. Lost all 48. Ok, so we don’t ’come from behind’ very well. If at all. It’s almost ‘Spursy’ but that word is really reserved for our countless examples of throwing it away at the end. It also has to be said therefore that we don’t ’come from behind’ even when we’re ahead. Basically, if there’s a way to lose a match, my boys will find it, one way or another.

My beloved grand-thug, Joey, played his first ‘proper match’ yesterday for his Sunday league team. Joey has been a regular at Spurs since he was about 4, so he knows about shit football and humiliating results. Even if, at 7, he can’t spell either one.

His team were 3-1 down. Oh no! Would Joey use the example of his much-loved heroes and crumble to a 7-1 defeat???? No, they did something Joey has no precedent for in his life. They ‘came back’ to 3-3. And then, they went on to win 6-3. Well done, Joey, well done HMH under-whatevers.

Here’s my point. You’ll need to follow. With a calculator. Then possibly with a straight-jacket.

If Joey could come back from behind at 7, a team of say 25 year-olds, being 3.5 times older, should be able to come back 3.5 times better. Meaning for every goal we concede we should score 3.5 goals. To match Joey’s achievement. In which case, on Saturday, having been 3 goals behind, Spurs should have replied with 10.5 goals. And won 10.5-3. Call it 11-3 as we don’t really do ‘halves’ in the Premier League.

So the main difference between Joey and ‘a Spurs player’ is approximately 22 years, 150 grand a week, 3 Lamborghinis, 9 rape charges, an arm and a leg of tattoos and the fact that with a little coaching and a great attitude, Joey doesn’t pitch up arrogantly and PLAY LIKE A FUCKING SPAZZZZ!!!!!

Here’s another great number. In 36 home matches since 2024, Spurs have won 5. No team with such a proud number attached has ever survived relegation. But we did it. Twice. The first time winning the Europa League in between losing every fucking game played at the Lane.

The worst thing of all in Arsenal’s 3-nil loss at Brighton… ok, the only bad thing about that loss, was that the Brighton fans were singing ‘are you Tottenham in disguise’ at Arsenal.

So we are now just a metaphor for a team which loses. Badly.

And as we go into the 3 week international break (3 fucking weeks!!!! What’s that all about, suddenly???) we lie at the very bottom of the league. The only way is up.

Or down.

O.M.G.

Happy Yom Kippur

A xxxx

I’ve never been the sort of person who lets tragedy get in the way of a good laugh. I do try. But when I read a headline like the one above…

I mean; how small does your penis have to be, FFS? Do you need scaffolding after your third? But basically, this is obviously a serious and tragic lesson for us all. Stop at 4.

And so to the football. Another tragic lesson for us at the moment. As my two favourite teams both lost yesterday. Spurs finally reached their season’s first and paramount objective of scoring a goal. Which was a brilliant moment. Unfortunately in the 94th minute of a match in which we’d already conceded 3. Although we did get an even later goal as well, making it ‘almost a draw’!!! But for the fairly obvious fact that it wasn’t a draw. And about 95% of Spurs fans had left the stadium before we scored either. Thus missing the two moments which almost represent all the ‘glory’ we’ve enjoyed this season.

Yet I have faith. In Tottenham, in our players, in Roberto Di Zerbi, in… everything. Because we look good. Nice haircuts, smart kit, good footballs. And we even play good football; easy on the eye, flowing, good burst of speed. Pretty much everything. Except goals. Ok, except goals that matter. We seem to lack any player capable of putting the ball in the net. Which, for a football team, may be considered something of a problem.

It’s not a problem for Brighton. Who played my other favourite team, Arsenal, yesterday. In what as, quite frankly, another shit-show.

Arsenal strutted out onto the pitch like the invincible, arrogant, swaggering champions that they are. But somewhere during the first 3 minutes they forgot that you actually have to play like champions to win matches. And they didn’t. They really didn’t. Mainly because Brighton didn’t let them. They were too fast, too aggressive and just too good for ‘my Champions’ to deal with. So instead, ‘we’ just entered a spiral of self-destruction and cried. It was all very upsetting and in particular I felt for Mikel Arteta. Who has absolutely no love for either Brighton nor their manager, Fabian Herzeler because the German slagged of Arsenal’s tactics last year. So after the match Mikel went back to ‘sultry’ mode. Without the smile which we’ve been seeing every other weekend of the season so far. Which has caused me to smash 4 tv screens so far. I seriously can’t afford Arsenal to keep winning.

Today Fulham play Manchester City. If Fulham should win or even draw, (unlikely, I grant you, but football is football), Spurs will go bottom of the table. And if City win, they open a little gap on Arsenal at the top. Hmmm…

I actually now want Brighton to win the league. Because one thing’s for sure. Spurs aren’t going to.

Happy (fucking!) Sunday

A xxx

“OH MY GOOOOOD!!!! YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED (dot, dot, dot), ITS THE BEST THING EVERRRRRRR!! THEY TRACK OF FAMILY OF REAL LIFE ZOMBIES… OK, REAL ZOMBIES, DEAD, OBVIOUSLY, THROUGH THEIR CHRISTENING, BARMITZVAH, WEDDINGS, ITS BRILLIANT. FILMED IN THE CZECH REPBULIC, DUBBED INTO URDU AND SUBTITELED IN GREEK BUT ITS JUST SOOOOO VISUAL. ONLY 37 EPISODES, HOUR-AND-A-HALF EACH, JUST TAKE A FEW DAYS OFF AND BINGE-WATCH. YOU’LL THANK ME!!!!!”

Everyone has a ‘must watch’ and, to be honest, they’re all shit. Addictive shit, which is the secret of a ‘good series’. It’s like watching darts, boring as all fuck but once you get the rhythm of the numbers, you can’t look away. And so with 95% of Netflix/Apple/Amazon, even the revered i-player.

We don’t watch much tv. We either don’t have time or Mel falls asleep. And thus we’re very selective what we do watch. First rule, obviously, for anyone over 33, is ‘no fucking reality shows’. Whether filmed here, in New Jersey, California or Melbourne. No faux marriages or other ‘dating’ shit, disabled or otherwise. And obviously everyone goes for their preferred genres. Ours is definitely ‘thriller’. Yet the best thing to come out of the entire Covid business, the 2 years of hell, was ‘the Queen’s Gambit’. And the amazing ‘Heist’, a Spanish series about… well, a heist. But quite a brilliant one and with quite amazingly gorgeous women in it. Otherwise, all just different levels of shit. Other than… the BIG TWO! The ones where you’re sitting on your sofa, unmoving, for 9 months until the next series starts.

Fauda is one. It is brutal, both physically and emotionally, it’s bloody, violent, loud, exiting, totally edge-of-the-seat gripping and… it’s Israeli. The devil’s nation. Apparently. You shouldn’t watch Fauda before retiring for the night. Your heart won’t return to resting values for at least an hour. The new series has just begun and it’s very October 7.

And the other; the absolute best thing ever to reach our screens, is, of course, Slow Horses. Read the books, they’re incredible. The TV series though, are sublime. Gary Oldman at the best he will ever be because there could never be a better role for him to play than Jackson Lamb. Kristen Scott-Thomas is allowed to give the full ‘ice maiden’ and hams it up to the max. This series has a different script writer from the last 5. And I know her.

And thus warned her of the awesome responsibility she’s signed up for. She has the God-given duty to maintain the incredibly high standards, sufficient to keep MEEEEE happy. She even emailed me yesterday to see if I was ready to pass judgment. But I have to finish Fauda first. Otherwise I get confused, watching two series simultaneously. Slow Horses, I’m ‘saving’. Once I got involved in watching ‘Married at First Sight’ and ‘The Night Manager’ alternately and couldn’t understand why Tom Hiddleston had just murdered his wife of 3 days, and why she no longer had an Australian accent.

So there you have it. Other than the News (hate it but can’t ever miss it) and, obviously, football, if I can bear it, there is NOTHING to watch other than Fauda or Slow Horses.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Sidney Sweeney has caused a storm. Another storm. She’s quite a stormy person. Not only did she cross the absolute rubicon in Hollywood circles by being a Trump fan!!!, she then made the jeans/genes ad which was immediately leapt on by the champagne democrats, who love a bandwagon more than they love being educated or informed, as ‘EUGENICS!!!!’ Hitler’s dream reduced to a pair of Wranglers. With big tits. And now this!!!

Novig is a gambling company. In which Ms Sweeney is an investor. So she created a series of adverts in which she’s positioned as, pretty much, a porn star holding a sporting item. There’s a series of them. There’s ’Gridiron Gel’, there’s ‘Tits’n’tennis’, there’s even Boomergang Babe. And Baseball Blow-job. OK, I invented that last one, just to stress the point. Which will probably emerge at some point, I’m sure. Fairly sure.

There’s the normal post-feminist crapola about ‘empowerment’ and ‘body pride’ and ‘if you had a pair of tits like this you’d get them out at any opportunity too; if someone was paying you hundreds of thousands’, from Ms Sweeney’s camp. And then there’s the outrage. The disdain. The horror!!! As flocks of sporting women queue up to shout their sheer disgust that all their lifelong, tortuous efforts and achievements have been reduced to something between mere objectification and outright pornography. Which, you have to admit, Sidney, they have. Wimmin’s sports is all about da bodies, innit? Fit babes. Fit MAGA babes, if necessary.

Amy Hunt complained. Our brilliant sprinter who came from the Commonwealth Games with four gold medals. Saying how she’s all about muscle and sweat and blood and tears. And she’s totally right. Yet I couldn’t help notice that she wouldn’t get into the blocks without her false eye lashes and full make-up. Obviously for the speed advantage, but also because she wants to look good. We all want to look good, whatever we’re doing. And Amy Hunt does look good. Like all sprinters, she doesn’t over-dress either.

Unfortunately all of these arguments miss the point by a mile in under 4 minutes. It’s not about representing athletes as ‘things of mere beauty’, unless they choose to do it themselves, it’s about the target market. This is a gambling site. And who, in the most part, are the gamblers? And if you want to attract gamblers, I reckon Sidney Sweeney outdoes Ray Winstone by 10 to 1. Maybe 100 to 1.

And the cruellest irony of all; that by making all the fuss, Novig are getting about a million times the advertising coverage they actually paid for. Once an advert makes it onto the front pages of newspapers, FREE OF CHARGE, the advertisers and their clients are laughing all the way to the bank, the race-track and the ball park.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

So Reform get a £72million windfall. Yaaaaay. Those small boats have no fucking chance now; Farage will use ‘Star Wars’ missile defences modified for rubber dinghies. He can afford it. He can afford ANYTHING!!!

Because 2 ‘crypto-billionaires’, which sounds like they belong in the Rocky Horror Show, but in fact means they’ve made shit-loads of money from Bitcoin-type currencies, are each donating 36mil to the Reform Party.

As they are legally entitled to do. Breaking no laws, no protocols, no parliamentary regulations. Both donors are British citizens and, temporarily at least, are residing in the UK. Ok, so normally, one can be found in Hong Kong and the other in Thailand, but, noodles aside, they’re as British as fish’n’chips.

The Labour Party calls this ‘undemocratic’. Mainly because Reform are a big threat in the next election. ‘Democracy’ is all about level playing fields, and the government set that example by trying to impoverish its closest rival in case they beat them. The last thing Andy Burnham wants is a level playing field. This is democracy, not fairness.

As things stand, including Reform’s recent acquisition, Labour, the Tories and Reform all have about the same size money-boxes. About 140 million each. Which Labour don’t want. So they’ve come up with a fiendish plan. Of accusing this as ‘undemocratic’ because it might make a government of the UK ‘in debt to’ a couple of, basically, ex-pats, who may call in favours.

Nothing like our current government, who owe virtually all their riches to the trade unions who fund them. Who constantly want ‘pay back’ because the threat of de-funding is so massive.

Yet by ‘de-funding’ Reform’s 72 mil, the government would be at a serious advantage. So let’s come up with a new rule. Well, an old rule, that ‘donations can be capped’ from overseas sources. Let’s redefine ‘overseas’ as ‘not living here for the last 3 years’, and let’s apply this retrospectively from last March. Which is not only… errrr… nicer and… errrr… more democratic, but it will screw Reform over royally.

There ya go.

So who’s ‘dodgy dealing’, the (admittedly fairly dodgy) crypto billionaires, or the government?

Happy Monday. Unless you’re a Man United fan, in which case I hope tomorrow is better.

A xxxx

We all watched Terminator, right? What, you didn’t???? Never mind, I watched it for everyone. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Well, lots of bits of it. But even if you didn’t, you understand the premise: super-computers get a bit too super, take over the asylum and declare nuclear war on each other. But when they made that movie, in 1984, there was no ‘AI’. They called computers ‘AI’ sometimes because they could do things we couldn’t. Or do them faster. Then somewhere along the line, the differential between a ‘supercomputer’, which can complete your tax return in 4.7 seconds, given sufficient data, and ‘AI’, in which computers become self-learning, was forced upon us. Because they were making computers which could learn better ways, or even new ways, to do things. Acting on pure logic and statistics, which is all any computer can do, AI teaches itself, using ALL existing information (which is pretty much every fact, theory or football score in the entire world, ever) available, it learns to use it in different ways. New ways. And if such a computer decides that the world will be a better place without Russia, which is probably right, why wouldn’t that computer get rid of Russia? Ok, there are ‘checks and protections’ in place on all ‘red buttons’, but they’re put there, in computerised form, by man. At whom, AI laughs.

Ok, extreme example. But why not? Its Terminator come true. All these ‘checks and protections’ and ‘wire fences’ and ‘safeguards’ are put there by man. Thus AI can unpick any of them in one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a second. The ONLY protection we have is that we can unplug them.

Or, we can show any AI model that the world is not currently fucked. Worth saving. Because if you were an objective observer, DEVOID OF ALL EMOTION, currently, looking down at a war torn, environmentally-challenged environment, you too would probably decide it’s not worth saving. If you’re not a human, you don’t get the ‘salvation of humanity’ angle. And AI is not.

The monster has been un-caged. Now YOU try and put it back.

More importantly, Spurs played Everton last night. Oddly, the last team we’d beaten in the league at home, the only league victory at home in the last year. This time we didn’t win. We drew. Nil nil. And one of those ‘nils’ is very big. Very telling. Very instructive. Because it’s the fourth ‘nil’ to appear next to the words ‘Tottenham Hotspur’ in the last four games played this season. The only 4 games played this season. Played four, scored none. Nil. De nada. Not a sausage.

And because I love a statistic so meaningless as to be way the wrong side of irrelevant, in the last season, in all competitions, club and country, Harry Kane scored 73 goals.

I know. Means nothing.

Still fucking hurts though.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

I’m still on holiday. Got back Tuesday, skived off yesterday to… errrr… unpack? Whatever. And today is Joey/Lila day. And a very important one. Because this new term, Joey is no longer in the ‘infants’, but has moved to the junior school!!! Which is a bit like university but with more toys. In fact, he’s basically changed classrooms. As they do every year. Moved ‘further back’ in the building. So when he left the infants, they had a ‘graduation ceremony’. I kid you not. And make a big fuss, as if they’d just signed a contract with PSG for 300 grand a week. But it’s ‘nice for the kids’. And anything that’s good for them must be good for us. Innit?

Andy Burnham made such a good start to being PM that it’s taken me almost 4 weeks before I hate him totally and think he’s the ‘worst prime minister since the last one’. And when you remember the last one; that’s no mean feat. But from starting out all ‘Tony Blair’ and statesmanlike and “I’m really not just another northern scumbag with a grudge against Loondoon, honest”, he’s become a total tosser.

First we had the sanction against Israel, which will come back and bite him hard, you can be sure, and now we have the greatest soundbyte since “we shall fight them on the beaches…” He said: “national security can’t come at the expense of social security”. Which must be some hard-left mantra, or a new tattoo. Because the left are always ‘anti-nuke’ and ‘anti-war’ and big on benefits. What he’s saying is that the money we desperately need to spend on defence cannot come from reducing social security payments in any significant way. No, we must always put the malingerers, the work-shy, the terminally lazy, those poor souls inventing ‘mental health issues’ and the ‘disabled’ who post on Facebook their hot-dog skiing pics, first. I just hope that when the Cossacks come rampaging through Rochdale, because we have no battleships or air defences to stop them, they don’t rape or murder those in the benefits queue. Because the irony would be too sweet to consider. The conflation of social security and national security. INK THAT ON YER FUCKIN’ ARM, BURNHAM!!!

Basically, we are in dire need of defence spending. And the logical place to start would be at welfare payments which are simply astronomical here. About 25% of public expenditure spending. Over 10% of Britain’s GDP!!! Ok, much of which is genuine and essential. Like my pension. But much of it isn’t. There’s industrial sized fraud going on with the benefit system. But like the leaks in the water system, they just go on. And on.

So where can the money come from? We’re honour-bound to spend more on military due to our NATO agreement, and our current tragic level of defencelessness. We can restructure benefits. We can shut a few hospitals down. We can screw over the pensioners one more time. Or we can increase tax.

And if it was only defence we might be ok. But Burnham is ‘old style Labour’. He wants to ‘improve services’. Like he did in Manchester. Which was fine there because his hated London picked up the bill for his excesses and ‘improvements’. But that’s his mindset.

In the week of Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, when even I get dragged screaming to the synagogue, may God help us all.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

This pic is of Deauville Town Hall. So beautiful you’d think you were in Milton Keynes.

So we’d just got in the car in a car park outside Le Touquet, when a young woman comes up to my window and asks if she can take a photo of the car. Of course, I said, bien sur! Where do you want ME?? (Cos it’s all about me). I’m ready with my best ‘Zoolander’ look. No, she wanted the car. And she said to me: ‘she is very beautiful’. Which of course ‘she’ is, but how insolent to presume my car’s pronouns! I’d always presumed ‘it’. But of course, the French language designates gender pronouns to every fucking thing. And a car is LA voiture. La. Feminine. Hence the presumption of ‘she’. I would have slapped her but firstly she loved my car, and secondly, she was drop-dead gorgeous. About 18, auburn hair, green eyes… Help meeeee…

However… we have things to discuss! Namely, my government’s decision to sanction goods made in the ‘occupied West Bank’. A fabulously clever, brave and popular move. Putting Ed Miliband’s (suddenly) Jewish head in the firing line of International recourse. Though France, Canada and a few other nations that no-one cares enough to name, have also joined the moronic, posturing, appeasing, virtue-signalling, knee-jerking tossers known collectively as ‘Westminster’.

The reason for this brave and clever move? To ‘stop building on the land designated E1 because it would cut off East Jerusalem and remove any possibility of a ‘2-state solution’’. Which is the end point wanted by all the world’s tossers and morons who really know sod-all about that part of the Middle East. Jeremy (fucking) Bowen pointed out on last night’s news that ‘most Israelis don’t want a 2-state solution!’ What bastards. What he didn’t mention was that such a proposition has been tabled about 10 times since 1947, and each time the Palestinians have refused to even consider it. Yasser Arafat turned one down in 2000 at Camp David, Mahmoud Abbas rejected one in 2008. Do our leaders not know this?

So our brilliant government has imposed its ‘ban’ for an end that no-one who actually understands the problem even wants to consider. And by doing so has incurred the wrath of Israel (so far) and possibly America (later; depending on how many cokes Trump’s drunk by Friday). They evicted the British Embassy in East Jerusalem. No big deal. But they’ll refuse cooperation on ‘intelligence’. And Israel leads the world, by miles and miles, on extremist Islamic terrorism. Which has many times allowed us to prevent an attack over here, in Britain. Well, what’s the lives of a few hundred people who’ll die in terrorist attacks, compared to adopting a politically correct pose and cow-towing to your own party’s massive Palestinian-obsessed following?

Israel also produces a massive amount of tech, like i-phone programming, and even more drugs which keep people alive. So if they decide to ‘retaliate’ further, that might be interesting. Ed Miliband better dust off his fax machine.

The ‘facts’ about the West Bank are all in the public domain. Which our government chose not to use in case they got in the way of a good posture. So they found a ‘Jew-hating Jew’, cynically, to break the news because ‘then it can’t be antisemitism’. Miliband’s father, the original Jew-hating-Jew’ would be proud of his son’s treachery.

Fuck ‘em all.

Otherwise, Happy Wednesday!!! I’m going back to caress my car.

A xxxx

We have almost devotional belief in Waze. The navigation system. The one used by Uber, by all the driverless cars coming soon and everybody who ever wants to get anywhere. Which I’ll admit, excludes about 90% of road users who drive like they never want to get anywhere. But as we always say: in Waze we trust.

It started life in Israel. Oh. My. God. Better sanction it! Delete the app!!! It’s a genocidal route-finder!!! Anyway, someone said ‘you must get Waze, it’s brilliant’. So I downloaded it, about 15 years ago, in a coffee shop in Rishon-le-Zion (everyone remembers EXACTLY where they were when they downloaded Waze.) And it was brilliant. But all the street names on the maps were written in hebrew. Oh. Never mind, like all good Jewish boys, I can read hebrew perfectly. Just can’t speak it. A year or two later it arrived in the UK and about 5 years after that it was swallowed by Google. Who probably paid the usual 634 billion, trillion, zillion dollars for it.

And Waze had taken us from Calais to Le Touquet, on various road trips, over to Deauville, and its final task was to get us back to Calais for Le Shuttle. I checked the route over the preceding days. Obsessively. To see time differences. And it always said “2 hours 47 minutes”. IF… you take the toll roads. You can take the ‘free’ roads, save 11 Euros and it takes 3 days. Ok, maybe 3.5 hours. I don’t know. I wasn’t interested. If it’s faster, there’s no price not to be paid. Other than speeding fines, obvs.

So we had our breakfast in this morning and hit the road. Let’s rock and-fucking-ROLL!!!

Twenty minutes later we’re on dirt tracks, going over speed bumps, following a massive tractor. Ok, stop, re-set Waze. THE TOLL ROADS!!! WE WANT TO PAY AS MUCH AS WE CAN!!!!

And we ended up in some industrial town filled with lorries and with 17 sets of traffic lights; all red. I counted them. I had plenty of time to count…

Eventually we found a toll road and whizzed along at 81mph. Yes, that’s the legal limit there, faster than ours. Ok, if I hit 85 or 88 at times, my ‘navigator’ informed me pretty sharpish. Thank you, Mel!!!

They have another interesting law ‘over there’. The speed limit is different if it’s raining. At first it wasn’t raining; we even had the top down. Rather optimistically cos the clouds were black as night. Then it was drizzling. Ok, what do I do? Slow down? Or ask for a proper definition of rain? Then it got progressively harder until there was not much ambiguity about rain or not. It was fucking torrential. Ok, so how fast do you can? Can you go? And as only about 5% of the speed signs actually say “130 but 110 if il pleut’, can you assume that it only applies on those roads or sections where they sign that? I didn’t have a clue. Nor, apparently did many Frenchmen, as I dropped my speed to find myself being overtaken by Citroens doing 140, Renaults doing 145 and mopeds ridden by onion-wearing, beret toting, Breton-striped Frogs doing 155!!! Others were adhering rigidly to 110. So I ignored them and chased the mopeds.

We made it. Plenty of time. Rain or no rain.

Got back to Folkstone, even more rain. Buckets of it. Lovely ride up the M20 in the rain and spray, fab. But even that was heaven compared to… driving back through South London in endless fucking traffic. Ok, north London wasn’t masses better but at least it felt like ‘home’.

And here we are, where it all began.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

It’s our last day here. It’s been fab. Loving northern France. And tomorrow we drive back to Calais, then hop on the train and whizz back from Folkstone. Ever tried ‘whizzing’ through the Blackwall Tunnel? It’s pretty much ‘whizz proof’. But you can’t come back through Dartford because for some reason the traffic is simply horrendous for miles and miles coming up from the south. Whereas from the north it’s seamless and non-stop onto the bridge. Don’t get it. But there is much I don’t know.

We could just leave the car here and get a boat across. Because the small boats are now coming from Normandy and landing on the Hampshire coast. Well that would do me. I reckon I’d be processed by the immigration team by about February next year and home by March. But no, Calais it is.

Today’s trip took us to the outstandingly gorgeous little town of Honfleur. Another little port, this one at the mouth of the Seine and eye-wateringly cute and fabulous. They all are. The French do ‘towns’ very well, it has to be admitted. So that’s ‘towns’ and ‘cakes’. And not much else. Oh, roads are pretty good, even though it costs you money for the really good ones. And they are all obsessed with the speed limit here. If it says ‘50!’, you got at 50. And I do. Well, no-one told me it was kilo-meeeters, did they? So we have a little chart which Mel holds, a conversion table. From kph to mph, just so she tell me off for going too fast in 2 languages. The motorway top speed is 81 (130kph), which is fab, but it drops to 110kph when it’s raining. The signs tell you. But they’re fixed signs, not digital. So how do you define ‘rain’? As opposed to ‘drizzle’? Can you do 120 if it’s light rain? We’ll see. Rain is forecast for tomorrow.

So we did Honfleur and came back to Deauville to go back to the beach. Which, anywhere else would be described as ‘a desert leading up to the sea’. As this photo almost shows, the beach is just fucking massive. From the boardwalk to the sea is a 15 minute walk. Honest. No exaj. Wonderful soft, golden sands and, unlike yesterday when half of France was here because of the weekend, today was almost Frenchman Free. The dream.

Because wherever there are Frenchmen, and/or French Women, there are dogs. French ones. They take them everywhere. It has become fashionable of late for cafes in England, particularly ones in parks and near recreation areas, to proclaim themselves ‘dog-friendly’. Which means little Rhombus the Cockapoodle Terrier Cross, can join you for a latte in the morning and they’ll put it in a little silver doggy bowl, specially. Whereas here in France, little Hercule, the Alsatian/Chihuahua mix, goes just everywhere. Cafes, restaurants, cinema, dentists, everywhere. There’s no question. It’s possibly the most dog-obsessed nation in the world. I think I might introduce a few more Korean restaurants over here. They need the culinary diversity.

We shall speak on the other side.

Happy Monday

A xxxx