Andy's Glasses

As the football transfer window winds to a close, there are protests in London. I’m not sure of the connection there, but there must be; I don’t believe in coincidence. The protests are ‘allegedly’ about vaccinations and the ‘great Covid scam’ (if you can actually Adam-n-Eve that there are sufficient numbers of brain dead imbeciles to constitute a protest), and Extinction Rebellion’s annual fuck-up-the-traffic-fest. Neither specifically mentions Harry Kane, nor Ronaldo. But its all there. In the sub-text.

I’m sure that both Harry and Christiano have been vaccinated, its part of their contract, doubtlessly, so that’s one black mark. And they tend to fly around in private jets, so that’s the other. Personally, I think both groups of protesters are the same. They look the same. Smelly, tattooed, loud and violent. The Extinct Rebellers are slightly smellier but the anti-Vaxers worth keeping well away from. On Covid grounds. Which they believe doesn’t exist. The whole world’s been ‘havin a larf’. Right.

Christiano Ronaldo, the greatest… the bestest… the goal-scoriest… person ever to use more than a gallon of hair gel a week, everyone’s favourite Portuguezer, is moving from Juventus. To… Manchester. All week we’ve been reading how Man City crave the superstar, even though he’s really old, because let’s face it, if you need goals and you can’t afford Harry Kane, Ronaldo’s yer man. And Juve no longer want to pay him half a mil a WEEEK. Even though he’s undoubtedly brilliant. So that’s set then, going once, going twice, BANG, Ronaldo moves to Manchester UNITED???? United? Surely City? But no, United swooped in at the final moment and nicked the preening poseur back to the club where he learned the word ‘vanity’.

Real Madrid, meanwhile, are desperate to buy Killian Mbappe, the French wonder, from PSG. The latest offer is 170 million, but ‘only’ Euros. Phah. Wouldn’t get out of bad for that. Yet he’ll only move if PSG can get Erling Haaland from Dortmund. For I hate to imagine how much.

And if all that actually happens, this summer will have seen the transfers of Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappe and Haaland. Four of the top 5 strikers in the world.

The 5th is staying at Spurs. So fuck you!

Happy Saturday.

A xxxx

I can’t remember whether it was about Iraq or Afghanistan (those ‘wars’ sort of ‘blend together’ into a fuzzy, grey, Blairite history) but some sage said “winning the war is easy, but you have to know how to win the peace”. And 20 years later, that’s where we stand. You can’t fight wars forever, there’s questions whether you should fight any in the first place, if just for ideological reasons (as opposed to defending you borders or people, which are allowed wars). So fighting wars in foreign lands is not exactly a vote-winner. Particularly in America, the greatest exponents of ‘wars over there’, where such a vast majority of their people are rather unworldly. Or consider that the world starts at Florida and ends at Canada. So they send their sons and daughters to die in lands they’ve never heard of and have no concept nor care for.

‘We’ invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to ‘rid the world of Al Quaeda’. Noble. And justifiable on many levels following 9/11 and other atrocities. The terrorist war was being fought on our streets and in New York City, so action was taken. And it was ‘easy’. We flew in, right behind the military might of the Unarted Staytes, and ousted the Taliban. Who were, it was believed, training Al Quaeda, as well as operating the harshest of strict, Islamic regimes on the poor people of their nation. Virtually overnight the Taliban ‘vanished’. Gone. Yaaaay, fly our flags, we’ve won. Headscarves came off, women could resume the education the Taibs denied them, radios could once again play music.

But the Taliban didn’t commit mass suicide. They didn’t ‘move to Cannes to retire’. They didn’t throw away their arms and become opium farmers. They’re clever. They took to the hills and stayed there for 20 years. They play the long game. Which is why within about 20 minutes of the withdrawal of US and British troops, Afghanistan was pretty much back under immediate and total Taliban rule. Seemingly unopposed by the government forces we’d spent 20 years training up to defend their nation from the Taliban.

The Taliban ‘formed’ from disparate groups of Mujahadeen fighters when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1992. The Americans funded them, armed them and encouraged them to war with the Soviets. And in doing so, they created a monster. So as the Taliban strut round, like all deeply religious men, carrying anti-tank machine guns and hand-held rocket launchers, the country descends back to the dark ages. With any civilian who in any way acted for, acted with, helped, assisted, worked for or gave food to the ‘foreign invaders’, effectively receiving a death sentence.

America has frozen about 7 billion dollars of Afghan money. Oh, so that’s how you win the peace. Yet the Taliban don’t really appear short of funds. Probably because they’ve always been supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to some degree anyway.

What a fucking mess.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Dele Alli’s career thus far, at the ‘mid-life’ age of 25, has been neatly summarised. In fact the summary was constructed about 70 years before he was born. But back then they were actually talking about ‘a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead’, rather than ‘a big, mixed-race geezer from Milton Keynes wot plays football’. But that little girl and our midfielder could have been twins. Because ‘when they are good they are very very good, and when they are bad they are AWFUL!’

So the ‘Spurs Renaissance’ continues apace! Which is a nice, poetic way of saying ‘we won agen’. Spurs, because they are God’s team, are allowed at least 5 Renaissances per season, depending on how many managers we get. Some people say ‘it’s too soon to judge! The season is but 2 matches old!!!’, to whom I say ‘FUCK YOU!!! WE’RE WINNIN’!!!!!’ And truly, to measure a real, bona fide ‘renaissance’ we’d need to ditch Harry Kane now and figure out where the 40-odd goals he was in some way responsible for last year will be replaced. But meanwhile, Harry exists in that horrible ‘want-away’ limbo-land where no-one likes him. Not our fans. Not Man City fans. Not our management, nor theirs, nor anyone else’s. And I feel sorry for him as its not really a predicament of his own making.

Thus to our beautiful game. Never more beautiful than when we’re winning. Even if its not a beautiful win, in the truest sense of anything really ‘beautiful’, those 3 accompanying points up the beauty to 100% every time. And thus Spurs have won their first two matches of the season. With yesterday’s victory at Wolves in no small part down to Dele Alli. Who, one can only imagine, is a rather ‘sensitive’ soul. Such does his form, his passion, his commitment, his ability seem to fluctuate from ‘genius’ to ‘get that tosser off the pitch!!!’, in the blink of a manager’s eye. And Nuno, our lovely new manager, seems to be handling ‘the boy from MK’ rather splendidly. Which is great because there’s no question that when Dele is being ‘very good’, he can be simply brilliant and inspirational to the whole team. Long may it last.

And I’m not one to gloat, its not (normally) in my nature. Thus I can only assume that football is a very unnatural condition. One in which the winning is only ever really half the fun. Completed only when others lose. And although Chelsea are the team I really despise (as does every decent, moral, cuddly human being), there is no loss in our national game that gives me as much pleasure as when experienced by Arsenal. I don’t know why, I’m just being honest. And if that makes me a horrible person, I can live with it.

Which all together made yesterday a very special day indeed.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

Did you know that there are people out there whose job is to monitor patterns of swearing? I mean WTF? How is that a job? It’s like being paid to count how many times the word ‘the’ comes up in 22,647 conversations. Who fucking cares? Yet of course, that’s rhetorical. Everyone cares about our language to some degree or other. Whether its wincing when a BBC newsreader repeatedly drops their Hs or when one hears one too many glottal stops in the sentence ‘I gotta getta new battery for my little kettle’, and you know the speaker must be a footballer, we like our language. And some of us like swearing.

So here’s the new league table.

‘Bloody’, the reigning UK champion at the last count, 20 years ago, has slumped. Michael Caine (no relation to Harry) brought it to new heights in the Italian Job with his ‘blow the bloody doors off!!’ but its now plummeted. At its peak it was used 650 times out of every million words, now down to a mere 120. Overtaken by… no fucking surprise, ‘the F-word’. Used 550 times per million words. As a simple comparison, my own personal best was after getting through to Barclays Bank after 3 hours of delays, 97 forgotten passwords, 14 key-pad ‘menus’ and eventually only being answered by an educationally challenged non-English speaker. I reached the phenomenal 995 f-words in each 1000 words.

Woman swear less than men. But significantly so. 50% less. Except in my house. Where the air is constantly blue. Until Lila and Joey come around then there’s a temporary amnesty. And if I’m honest, there’s nothing more wonderful than a posh-spoken woman being profane. From the mouths of dodgy Dagenham slappers it lacks class, as do most things. But to hear some Kensington yummy-mummy effin’ and blindin’ because she broke one of her Jimmy Choo heels getting into her Range Rover outside Harvey Nicks is the stuff of fantasy.

Why should Dominic Raab disrupt his holiday in Crete just because a few misplaced Brits are having problems in Afghanistan? He was probably just out of the pool, taking his first sip of an ice cold bottle of Mythos when his mobile rang, the word ‘Boris!’ displaying on the screen. And the kids are crying and his wife’s calling and… and… hit ‘green’?, or ‘red’…

Not like he’s got a job with any responsibility or anything. Fuck it, he thinks, knowing he must wait at least 2000 words before thinking it again, and finishes his beer at leisure. What harm could it do?

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

It must have been around 1970 or 71 when BBC2, and only BBC2 started transmitting in colour. Which was partly a shame because BBC2 only ran from about 6 o’clock in the evening until about 11.30, when they switched to a photo of a little girl accompanied by a high pitched whistle. Which was good viewing back then for about half an hour, then even the most insomniacal went to bed. And partly it wasn’t a shame because no-one had TVs that could receive in colour anyway. But a few did. So every afternoon at about 3 o’clock they showed what they called ‘trade test films’ just so you could watch something in colour. But not just any something, it had to be something really awful. A ten minute, throw-away (which most should have been) snippet of nothingness. But coloured nothingness.

I was at home a lot. ‘Revising’ for some exams or other. And every day at just before 3 I’d hear the roar of a pretty much unsilenced exhaust disturbing the neighbours as my brother’s mate Barry arrived. He was 3 years older than me so was probably ‘revising’ (euphemism in 1970 for ‘day off’) for something else. But we shared a lot of common interests and became good friends. We went to music together. We got drunk together and loved driving round at ridiculously high speed together (he had an insane sports car, I lacked the age for a license). And we watched trade test films together.

There were only about 10 of them so they just recycled them. And you never knew which would come up. Thus every day we sat in eager anticipation, hoping with all our hearts that today would be… CATTLECARTERS!!!

The truly worst film ever made, ever, anywhere, anytime, any-any-anything. A film so bad, so stupid, so simply awful that it became an obsession. It was hilariously un-funny. Set in Australia it featured a lorry. Not just any lorry but one designed to travel thousands of miles across that barren wasteland (I refer of course to all of Australia here, not just the Outback) with cattle. Think the biggest truck imaginable and then tow two more behind it of the same size. And fill them with cattle, just for fun.

They managed to find two Aussies who were such caricatures that they needed no training or acting skills. They didn’t need to ‘become the part’ like method actors, they were the parts to begin with. Add in a really really cheesy theme song by Frank Ifield and what you had was the ultimate movie for teenage layabouts to roll around the floor in hysterics to.

And I found it. Cattlecarters. You can watch it. You should watch it. To celebrate its enduring awfulness into future generations.

Happy Viewing

A xxx

Jake Davison went on a shooting spree last week, in Plymouth. Killed four people, injured a bunch of others, then shot himself. We call that a ‘mass killing’, the Americans call it ‘a bad day at the office’. Though we don’t have the advantage of being able to just go out and buy a submachine gun or a nuclear bomb like you can in Kansas. “Would you like some grenades with that, Sir? They’re on special, buy four get two free!!!” Not like that here. We’re tightly controlled, gun-wise, regulated, lots of checks, references, investigations of worthiness.

And after all that, they decided that it was ok to return the license and rifle to Jake. A depressive, OCD weirdo with a history of assault, violence, anger issues and a major gun obsession since he was 8 years old. And a recent social media decline from moderately ‘special’ to nihilistic depths of depressive insanity. All available for even the police to view. But they didn’t.

But we can’t blame Jake for this atrocity. Because he was an ‘incel’ and therefore has been dealt a bum hand and is a victim.

Incels, or Involuntary Celebates is a kind of club for those who, in previous generations, would describe themselves as, ‘not getting any’. But being a kind of support group, it has to have an ideology, a philosophy, a mission statement.

So those simply ‘not getting any’ feel themselves duty-bound, or genital-bound, to try harder, do better, meet more people, ingratiate themselves to worthy potential partners, befriend, chat-up, beg, anything to try and get laid. There are rumours that you can even buy sex. Almost like a commodity. Who’d’a known?

Incels are not responsible for their celibacy, hence the ‘in-‘ bit. It has been forced upon them by women who… who basically have standards and won’t just jump into bed, or onto the back of a pick-up truck, with any gun-toting quasi-rapist who believes its his right to put his penis wherever it wants to go. Incels’ problem is that women have choices. They also despise those men who have girlfriends, or fuck-buddies, or whatever, because its taking opportunities from them. So they turn their situation into one of passive acceptance and look for others to blame.

I’m aware that there are many people of fragile mental condition and undoubtedly Jake was one. But validating your depression by joining a ‘support group’ like incel sadly compounds the problem, aggravates it and provides the usual social media forums for sociopaths to encourage each other into violence.

What a sick world. Thank God for football.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Manchester City are the reigning champions of the Premier League. And we beat them. So why don’t they just award us the title now and be done with? Seems fair to me. Avoid all that ‘personal space’ problem that matches bring. 64,000 people screaming their lungs out simultaneously shouldn’t present any problems, should it?

Yesterday was somewhat predictable in that Manchester United won, rather convincingly against Leeds. Then Chelsea won comfortably and Liverpool beat other ‘new kids’, Norwich, in the evening with relative ease.

So that was 3 of the 4 ‘BIG’ teams off to flying starts. And Manchester City were the 4th. Though in reality, the first. As they won it last year.

And they came to Spurs in all their swagger, arrogance and, metaphorically, dripping with gold. As you do when you completely ignore the financial regulations that no-one ever imposes. So on their substitutes bench sat £350million worth of players. And on the pitch strode the swaggeriest, the drippiest, the horriblest of all; new kid Jack Grealish. The nation’s first 100 million pound man. He bought himself a new Alice band to celebrate.

Quite frankly, if I was Sheikh Mansoor I’d have wondered where about 92 million of that money had gone. That’s not to say that Spurs had it easy, oh no. Even if things are easy, or should be easy, Spurs will always find a way to increase the difficulty significantly. So the first 20 minutes were pretty hairy. Scary. And, in Grealish’s case, lairy.

But then Spurs eased themselves back in contention. With a combination of hard work, gritty determination and some truly appalling finishing by City. How they need Harry Kane…

And they need him now! Because all the talk and bullshit and uncertainty kills teams and ruins seasons. We’ve been there, done that and have numerous t-shirts, with ‘Bale’ on the back, with ‘Berbatov’, with ‘Modric’, we have enough.

Spurs became good. Almost dominant. Though not in terms of possession. No-one can out-possess a Pep Guardiola team. They can out-score them though and by a meagre single, solitary but wonderful goal, Spurs did just that. Son, so often the killer of Mancunian dreams, played assassin once more.

It took me 40 minutes to realise Dele Alli was playing. Such was the importance of his contribution. And Lucas Maura was simply magnificent for 90 minutes. Other than that, a brilliant job done. We beat the best. How difficult can the rest of the rabble possibly be?

Very very happy Sunday evening

A xxxx

Further to these preposterous allegations made against me in the New York courts, I would like to finally make a statement. Clear the air. Answer the critics. And other anti-royal bastards. I thought I’d already made my position very very clear on this entire matter in the Emily Maitlis interview. In which I stated, categorically and unambiguously, that I have no recollection of any of the times, dates, people, places or sundry items mentioned in the allegations. The only bits I can recall with any degree of certainty are the bits where I did absolutely nothing wrong, illegal, immoral or against the Highway Code. So to recap: whatever was said to occur, I either wasn’t there or don’t remember a thing if I was. That should cover most of it. I have a staff of people to organise my whereabout at any particular time. Though it is true, they don’t follow me into a bedroom. Nor a school playground. The photographs of Virginia Roberts with me are possibly genuine but I can’t remember those situations specifically, if at all. I simply can’t recall every time an underage girl was on my lap, that would be impossible.

People say I displayed ‘poor judgment’ in my loyalty to Jeffrey Epstein. Which may be the case. But just because he had already been found guilty of statutory rape doesn’t automatically make him a bad person. Though the fifteen subsequent charges for abusing, molesting, trafficking and raping, basically, children, may indeed have made him appear a little ‘bad’. But he was such a nice person. Decent. Other than when he was being indecent. Which allegedly did take up a lot of his time. So I maintained my friendship with him. Even child abusers need friends.

I hope that clears all this up and they will drop all charges from their fishing expedition of a civil court case. Otherwise Mummy will get very cross.

The new football season started last night. I know they’ve been playing lower league matches for at least a week but no-one cares about that. The Premiership started, its game on. And the game was on. At Brentford. Who, in their first top flight match in 74 years, were given a nice soft start to what will doubtless offer more ‘reality’ as the weeks progress. Nothing too challenging. The League decided to give them a team famous for being weak, misdirected, lightweight but pass the ball a lot so the home team could rest a bit between attacks, whilst watching the footballing equivalent of masturbation. It worked perfectly, Brentford won comfortably, claimed their 3 points (possibly the only 3 they’ll get til January) and Arsenal plunge to the bottom of the table. The perfect start to the season and Spurs haven’t kicked a ball yet.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

It’s finally happened. Lionel Messi, not just the world’s best footballer (sorry, Christiano, but he really is) but possibly the best footballer EVERRRRRR, has left his home forever. Leo was ‘born’ in Barcelona. Ok, not actually delivered into this world there but we really don’t care about the messy bits. He went there when a baby and now he’s really old, 34, they’ve kicked him out. Mercilessly. And he’s gone to the orphanage known as Paris St Germain. Like Oliver Twist before him, the ‘poor’ dude will have to survive on his own, at massive personal cost as his wages are cut severely. So severely that his weekly wage is now only about 40 times what the average worker earns in a year. It is positively heart-breaking. Ok, Oliver Twist didn’t generally use private jets much and probably didn’t stay at £17,000 a night hotels, but the parallels are otherwise staggering. Dickens must have been a Barca fan.

Barcelona have to divest themselves of their favourite child because they can no longer afford him. Which, in the world of football, is a wonderful breath of fresh sanity in a foggy soup of stale and corrupt madness. Spain actually imposes a ‘salary cap’ on teams. So even though the great Barcelona have debts of about half a billion (Euros, but pounds, dollars, all pretty much the same at that level), their player wage bill is currently 110% of the team’s total turnover. If it was anything but football they’d have put ‘bankrupt’ stickers all over Nou Camp and shut the doors forever. But this is football, so basic economics doesn’t work properly in that context. It’s like needing special physics at the sub-atomic level because gravity and mechanics just fail.

But Spain are at least making a fucking effort to stop the rot. And Messi at Barca, for about 2 million a WEEK, was deemed to much. Even cutting it in half was still problematic. So he’s gone to France. Where the footballing authorities are as toothless, testicle-free and ludicrous as they are here. And at PSG they have no limits to anything financial. As long as there’s money in the state of Qatar, Paris St Germain are doing fine. You can think of them as Manchester City in French. With both governed only by UEFA’s ‘financial fair play’ rules. Which has been shown time and again, are totally worthless.

Bienvenue a Paris, Leo

A xxxx

When did the world become so pedantic? So obsessive? So horribly, stupidly, ridiculously petty? And nothing provokes emotions more than food. So some idiotic blogger (they’re all fuckin’ eejuts, the lotto’v ‘em) or podcaster decided that ‘enough is enough!!!’, we’re no longer going to be allowed to use the word… ‘curry’.

But… but… but… curry’s food! Curry’s wonderful!!! Curry’s the best thing since sliced chapatti!!! Yes, but the word is… CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!!! What? How? When?

According to some babe in California, there is no such thing as curry. It’s a western, white construct designed to reduce the entire culinary output of a massive and diverse nation into a simple bowl of slop with chilli in it. Just for the record, I love that bowl of slop with a passion. But curry? That word??? Yet hang on, the word was introduced in the 1950s and 60s by South Asian immigrants who opened restaurants here. They GAVE us that word. It was a gift. In fact it was a total blessing, but the wokish assholes of today use no word with as much accusatory venom as ‘colonialism!!!!’ And according to this bimbo, ‘curry’ reeks of its colonial past. As well as garlic, herbs, capsicum, pepper and onions.

Jamie Oliver was accused of ‘cultural appropriatin’ when he made ‘jerk rice’. HOW DARE YOU!!! A WHITE MAN, NOT FROM JAMAICA!!!! Marks and Spencer were attacked for their ‘vegetable biryani wrap’. They were told ‘in India there is no such thing as vegetable biryani’. Yeah, but in Croydon there is, so just piss off.

It is not ‘cultural appropriation’ to take food ideas from different countries and mix them, include them, change them, to create new ideas, new tastes. It’s called ‘cookin’. It is the finest compliment you can pay.

My own food-history-line started in Poland. It was all about what you could eat quickly before the Cossacks came and beat you with sticks. And my grandmother, bless her soul, loved something she called (in Yiddish) ‘feece’. Otherwise known as ‘calves foot jelly’. It was revolting to look at, I never ever tasted it, but she adored it. Peasant food from Poland. But was making it in England ‘cultural appropriation’? No-one ever complained. Only the calf. About where his foot had gone.

So to the Californian-Indian accuser who wants us to ‘unlearn’ the word ‘curry’, I only have one word to say… possibly two words… one word split in two…

Tex-Mex!!! Eat that you pedantic bitch.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx