Living in London brings certain responsibilities. Most importantly you must always avoid any of the big tourist attractions. Even though no person with any degree of sense or taste should ever visit Madame Toussauds, whatever their nationality, for Londoners it is an imperative that such a shallow, hollow, pathetic facsimile showing of humanity’s obsession with celebrity, should be avoided at all costs. And it costs a lot. The Tower of London is great, one of our ‘national treasures’ so long as you’re just looking at it as you drive past and don’t join the queue to enter. Sherlock Holmes’ house is the best, probably. Or rather, the house that is situated at the address randomly selected by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle for his fiction. “Yes, on the left you can see the bedroom where Sherlock would have slept if he’d been a real person. On the right is the room where Watson took a shit in ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Constipated Medic’ and that window facing the rear is where dastardly Moriarty would have fired his sniper shot if he’d been real, if Holmes had been real and if the building behind had 9 stories, which it doesn’t”.

The only tourist attraction I’m ever interested in is ‘tea’. High Tea. I know, its not a strictly ‘London’ thing, but it is to me. Because its better here, it has more history here, its nearer to me and its certainly much more expensive here. Normally.

Yesterday Mel & I ‘took’ tea (you don’t fucking ‘drink’ tea, ya pleb, you ‘take’ tea; Jesus, where was you brunged up???) at the Charlotte Street Hotel. And as well as wonderful, it was free. On the house. Gratis. Because the ‘tea’ we took a few months ago had ‘issues’ for Mel, so she complained (shock! surprise!! horror!!!! my wife complains…) and yesterday we took our freebie. And there may be posher places to take one’s tea; there are certainly way more expensive places where you can pay a hundred quid for two people to eat a scone and drink a pot of Tesco’s Red Label, but there’s certainly nowhere cooler than Fitzrovia’s fabbest hotel. And when they bring that layered tray over, filled with cakes and sandwiches and scones and buns, to me that is ‘the challenge’. It has to go. All of it. And it did. Well, mostly. And I felt sick. Really sick. But, in a good way.

Whereas Chelsea make me sick in a bad way. Though recently, I’m almost horrified to admit; its sick with a big dollop of admiration. They just win. Ok, except when they don’t. But that’s rare. And poor Liverpool (the absolute, undisputed, champion ‘victims’ in the entire world of football) are in a slump. Which they pretty much have been since about 1977 but most Liverpool fans seem to be under the illusion or delusion that they’re still the ‘world’s biggest team’.

Even more fun is watching Manchester City just crumble and fade. I used to only enjoy such sick schadenfreude whilst watching them in europe but now every league match they play is fun, fun, fun. If it wasn’t for the quite unbelievably brilliant Sergio Aguero, they’d be in the relegation zone.

Spurs have a massive game today. Massive. Stoke City. Who are so bad that on the rule that ‘we always lose at home to shit teams’, they will see little resistance from my absolutely dire team.

But hey, the sun’s shining and I’m still full of scones.

Happy sunday

A xxxx