A few weeks ago we went round to friends for dinner. They’ve just moved, from ‘round the corner’ (where everyone should live) to… Hadley Wood!!! Holy shit! Where is that, FFS? Well, turns out, according to Waze, it’s 5.8 miles away. You could walk it in an hour and a half. I couldn’t, and didn’t have an hour and a half to spare, so we drove.

Last night we went out to dinner. To a hotel in… Hadley Wood!! I mean; what are the chances. I’ve never been there in 69 years and then it’s twice in a fortnight. And it is very lovely out there. Possibly a bit too ‘out there’ for an urbanite like me who gets panicky if not surrounded by bricks’n’mortar on all sides, all day. But you just drive out there, and it’s, kind’a, ‘normal’, with shops and houses and stuff and then… it stops! There’s trees and fields and all that ‘Cotswoldy’ stuff, and as soon as the McDonalds/Miles ratio drops below 1/2 I instantly get a bit ‘clammy’, trying to avert a panic attack, but we drove on and eventually arrived at a building. I hugged it. Sweating.

But whilst I was there, my football team was doing me proud. Now there’s a rare sentence. We went to Frankfurt and we beat those Eintrachts 2-nil. Easy peasy, Euro-breezy. As we’ve beaten virtually everyone in Europe, other than those Qatari Parisians at PSG. Then, generally, we come back home and celebrate our midweek victory by losing to Port Vale at home. It’s the Spurs way. Until this week!!! We’ve changed. And if there’s one team we do really like beating and often do, it’s Manchester City. If it was a really shit team, we’d have no hope of winning. But City… we are definitely their ‘bogey team’.

And if we do beat City, that’ll start to reaffirm our strength in belief of an ‘omnipotent and omniscient’ force worthy of at least some of the attention he/she/it currently receives. It’ll be a sign the world is turning for the better.

A concept borne out by events in Minneapolis. And Washington. Where, unaccountably, Donald Trump’s eyesight has miraculously been cured!! Because he re-looked at the death of Alex Pretti and it’s amazing. What he originally saw as ‘a terrorist, hell-bent on killing security personnel; an armed terrorist threatening havoc on innocent ICE agents’, has now become something much more akin to the video which everyone else in the world saw that day. An innocent civilian wrestled to the ground by 9 armed officers, he did have a gun, but it was legal and in the small of his back, and then gratuitously executed by a hail of completely unwarranted gunfire.

So, what I’m saying is: there’s hope. Not a lot, either where Spurs or Trump is concerned, but it’s enough. It’s a start.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx