Andy's Glasses

The long and short of it is: we need vaccinations. Loads of them. So that good, English people of a post-Brexit and not-at-all-European-whatsoever nature can enjoy the protection that it bestows upon us, both as individuals and more importantly, nationally. In a British way.

And now the Europeans want to screw it up. They want to restrict the amount of vaccines which are to be ‘exported’ from the EU, where both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer are made. Although the AZ one is manufactured all over the place, Pfizer’s one is made mainly in Belgium. Where production has been reduced as they expand their manufacturing plant. The ultimate supply chain irony.

The other issue is that although Ursula van der Whotsit and all those other Euro big wigs have made big promises about how many they intend to vaccinate, they haven’t even got around to approving the AZ vaccine for use yet. Oh, so its ok to test it on those poor Brits then, wait for any adverse reactions and then jump on board after its proven safe, not allowing it to be used themselves, but still moaning about not having enough. Euro-tossers.

So there is a minor discrepancy between the UK and Europe in terms of vaccinations.

Germany has vaccinated 14 people. France 212, Italy 17 and the rest don’t really matter. England has vaccinated 6.5million. I don’t see that as a ‘discrepancy’ as such, they’re just a bit slower over there. And if you don’t approve vaccines that will indeed limit the pace a bit. So basically, they’re a bunch of slackers and blaming us for hogging all the supplies. Which we may be but with very good justification.

Part of which is that we’re losing more people to the virus than any other country. Almost than every other country. Today we passed the 100,000 mark. Holeeee sheeeet.

The other part is that we’re much more important.

Yet it remains an interesting question: why did both Pfizer and AZeneca make promises for delivery that they can’t actually meet? Didn’t they know that making 300 million of anything is a logistical challenge? And that’s just what Europe ordered for phase 1.

I’m sure if we google it online we can all find the recipe for the vaccine and inject ourselves with a turkey baster. How hard can it be?

Happy Tuesday (ish)

A xxxx

Lisa Nandy, Labour motormouth northern spokesperson for everything, described Joe Biden as ‘woke’. Has she seen him? He’s more half asleep. Yet, of course, she means ‘woke’, the most stupid, nauseating word purloined by the militant PC brigade, who’ve also stolen the term ‘cancelled’ for those found wanting in the woke department. To the extent where it is simply moronic. And reminded me of a high quality purveyor of the way things should be.

Stephen Jay Gould is my favourite ever (and now sadly departed) non-fiction writer. He was averagely clever. Being only a professor of geology, palaeontology, evolution, history of science and philosophy of science at Harvard. He wrote essays for Science magazine which were then grouped together into books which were unapologetically not-dumbed down. But he didn’t need to dumb down. He was funny. And something of a polymath, bright enough to make everything accessible. So he would use for analogies things like baseball and Hershey bars (the only thing I ever disagreed with him about. Not that he’d have known).

And he believed in God. He didn’t spend his life praying but he was comfortable with some kind of divine presence. And although he spent a lot of time writing, for example about Darwin’s battle (both internal and external) with the church about presenting his theory of evolution, which attacked religious interpretation, he never stooped as low as a Richard Dawkins type who calls you stupid to believe in anything spiritual. He lived and worked under his own construct of NOMA. Non-Overlapping MagesteriA. Meaning that he won’t argue about the spiritual world because its not his domain. But similarly, religion shouldn’t quote the bible to try and refute scientific fact. Like evolution. That’s not their domain.

Yet best of all was when this New York liberal related various histories in the scientific world in which the ‘establishment’, like the Royal Society and other esteemed organisations, had published articles ‘proving’ that black people were lower down the evolutionary scale than white. Had smaller brains. And other such ‘scientific facts’ which a bunch of Victorian ‘scientists’ (all white, all rich) paraded before their colleagues.

Yet Gould’s position was always one of learning from the errors of the past. Moving forwards, as science should. He advocated that we should never judge the past by the values of the present. The eminent aristocrats of the Royal Society didn’t know ‘woke’, didn’t have ‘PC’, they were just victims of their society. Just like the justification used for some criminals now, but obviously a very different kind of ‘society’. They couldn’t know how ‘wrong’ they could be judged by standards not yet available to they.

Gould never advocated ‘cancelling’ pretty much all of scientific history because of racism, slave connections or anything else. Nor the removal of the statues and busts and portraits relating to it. That form of revisionism would have been abhorrent to him. As it should be to us.

Happy snowy Sunday

A xxxx

I think we need to talk about words. Not just any words but special words. Loaded words. Prejudicial words. Words that cause upset, depression, consternation and even constipation. Because words can be inflammatory. We know that. Sometimes that’s their purpose. Like Donald Trump before the Capitol invasion. Or Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”. David Bowie, ‘wham, bam, thank you maam’.

But the American government legislated that words such as ‘brother, sister, son, daughter, mother, father’ must be replaced with ‘sibling, child and parent’. So as to avoid… to avoid…

Well, its a gender issue. NOT, as you’ll have already deduced, an issue about sex. So we need firstly to define the difference between those two words. And its a big difference. That’s not me boasting, its just what it is. My sex is masculine, because I was born with a penis. I still have it. You can see it on Facebook, instagram or various blackmail sites. But my GENDER is whatever I choose to identify with. And I don’t think ‘Spurs fan’ counts as a gender. (Though ‘Arsenal fan’ in fact does. And not a very good one.) They mean, sexually identify. Or gender-ally identify maybe, must check that.

So you’re born with your sex defined by your organs but you later (or earlier) can choose your gender. That’s easy. Unless you choose your somewhat alternative gender a bit too early and then retain the right to sue all those you had sued to enable you to change, when you realise later that it was a mistake. As all those being sued again spent half a decade repeatedly trying to tell you.

But when you change wording, making it more ‘gendery’ rather than ‘sex-y’, it also has an impact on the tiny number of people who aren’t part of the ‘trans’ community. I know, they’re barely worth considering but as they almost now constitute a ‘persecuted minority’ we’re obliged to give them a footnote on the page which re-writes everybody’s lives.

Any man in America claiming to ‘identify’ as a woman can enter, by law, any woman’s toilet, shower room or partake in their sport. A rape victim can no longer request that the ‘sex’ of her post-trauma examining doctor be female, just that its ‘gender’ is female.

You see, talk is cheap, but words can be very very expensive. I’m glad I’ve got that off my chest (which will measure 36DD by next Wednesday).

Happy non-gender-specific-day-of-your-choice

A xxxx

I thought I’d seen it all. I thought the world had really reached a kind of ‘rock bottom’ normally reserved for wartime levels of ‘atrocious’, for acts of genocide, for apocalyptic meteorological phenomena, for tsunamis, even for Donald Trump. I thought nothing could surprise any longer. Until yesterday. 

When I saw a brand new Porsche. Plugged in!!!! Like ‘WHATTTT?’ I thought a family of gypsies were living in it and needed the power for their tv and washing machine. I thought all sorts of things. Including ‘why is that Porsche tied to a lamppost? Doesn’t it have an anti-theft device?’ And then I looked and saw the most dreaded letter in the history of all alphabets, emblazoned on the boot. The letter that makes grown men cry. That leaves superheroes, of a certain generation, beating themselves up with sticks and stones. The letter… “E”!!!!

It still looks like a Porsche. It probably still goes (almost) like a Porsche. But it sounds like… it sounds like… like a Tesla. It sounds like my car when its switched off. The sound of nothing. Simon and Garfunkel would turn in their graves. Except they’re both alive and well. 

The University of York has always had pretensions of grandeur. All of the City of York has really. Whereas the reality is that its just another almost industrial town in the nation’s northern floodplain. The bit of  the country we sacrifice willingly to the Gods of the weather so that London may stay dry and secure. Anyway, now York Uni has decided to make ‘a statement’. And a statement worthy of its pretentions. It is going to abolish one of its usual images. The classic ‘3 monkeys’ image (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil), used to symbolise intelligence and part of the university’s long-term iconography on printed matter and digital media. No fucking more! Enough of that shit; it is (according to the very clever people in York)… racist!!!

How can 3 monkeys be racist? Monkeys are all brown. I don’t get it. Furthermore, that image is Japanese and goes back centuries to represent cleverness and… brains and shit. Ahhhh, say the wise men of York (nothing like as wise as the monkeys obviously), anything to do with a monkey is ipso facto racist because racists use that animal in its tropes and racial abuse. Most modern racists wave Union Jack flags around but no-one’s banning that. Yet ask any minority person which intimidates them more: a 6 foot 5 skinhead with a swastika tatooed on his face waving round a Union Jack, or a monkey eating nuts, go on, ask him. 

I have never considered the 3 monkeys image… well, anything other than the 3 wise monkeys. Were they part of the slave trade? Were they alt-right monkeys? Trump supporting primates? York University is, I fear, suffering from premature woke-imagination. They’ve taken a sign of intelligence to make themselves look stupid. 

Happy Friday

A xxxx

In 1762, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich (no spoilers here) invented the doner kebab. The legend goes that he was such a compulsive gambler that he wouldn’t leave the tables to eat and demanded, as Earl’s do, that food be brought that he could eat with his hands. Well, preferably with one hand so he could do gambly things with the other. Or scratch his nose. So he requested that someone put some roast beef between two slices of multi-grain, half-spelt, no added salt, reduced fat, sourdough… breads, and bring it to him. They couldn’t find a beef handy so went round the corner to the Turkish and grabbed him a doner instead. Or possibly went on a crusade to Turkey and got the real thing. In which case it would probably be 1773, allowing for traffic. Good ole Jonny Sandwich.

But I remain unconvinced. Bread was introduced to the world in about 8000BC. I checked. Ok, it wasn’t Hovis and it probably didn’t come in bags (bags weren’t invented until Lord Bag, another gambler, probably, put his winnings into… something, and defined it forevermore) but it was bread. And they’re telling me, and possibly you too, that it took a further 9762 years before anyone got the idea of, like, sort of, kind’a, putting something IN IT!!, before eating? So it should be called an Ug. After the cave dweller who first put the leg of a fresh killed stag inside his bread. Or, possibly, be called the Bin-Ug, as the cave in question was in Egypt.

And it seems even more wronger that the sandwich was named not after the person who made it but the person who, in desperation, just barked a few orders rudely. Like some proto-Gordon Ramsey. Without the expletives. (Lord Expletive, 1439 and the Duke of Fuck-Shit, 1527)

However, I love a sandwich. And wanted to share today’s with you. Not in the ‘break bread together’ meaning, I would kill you stone dead if you even touched any part of my lunch, but ‘sharing’ in the nice, soft, cuddly way. Because this one was worthy of sharing. This was my opus magnus and was even nicer than a stag’s leg in pitta. Because it contained: (from the bottom up), avocado, hummus, cheddar cheese, coleslaw, sliced pickled gherkin, sliced boiled egg, sliced tomato and chilli-mayonnaise. It was simply wonderful. I was going to make the ‘low calorie’ version, but when I took the slice of tomato out it went lop-sided, so I went ‘full fat’. Lots of people would find this a ‘mess’. Others would doubtless love the total taste ‘explosion’ that every mouthful provides. Even though actually getting it in the mouth is not easy. Lila’s mummy would be gagging just reading the ingredients. She’s like that. Others should replicate. It’s worth the effort. But you need a fabulous roll to do it justice. And then send me 50p because I’ve patented it. And I’ll know.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

We watched a movie last night. I think probably our first since… since… since The Pandemic!!! started last March. Well, if there were others, they’re so notable they’re forgotten. I’d like to have my own cinema. Not a ‘home cinema’ but, like, The Electric in Notting Hill, or The Phoenix in East Finchley, big, proper, Art Deco, loads of seats. Because they have popcorn machines.

Anyway, as I couldn’t find a cinema to buy in time, (though its probably an easy thing to acquire at the moment) we had to improvise and watch it on the tv. And we watched…
One night in Miami. Because it has been raved about. A wonderfully conceived fictional account of an interesting ‘could have happened’ event in 1964.

Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston to become ‘the’ Heavyweight Champeeeen of the (whole) World. There was only one champion back then, now there are 17. And note, Cassius Clay rather than Mohammad Ali, which only happened later. That fight was held in Miami. And on the night Clay won, he met up with three friends at a motel. The friends were Malcolm X, the civil rights campaigner who took the ‘non’ out of ‘non-violent protest’, Sam Cooke, The soul legend and Jim Brown, the American Football star who later became an actor.

In 1964 a massive part of America was still ‘segregated’ (think ‘apartheid’ but with burning crosses) so the motel, in Malcolm X’s room, was just a sleazy dive, because black people weren’t allowed to stay in ‘white’ hotels. Today they can, obviously, but in the South, only if the room’s booked by a white person for them. Otherwise the hotel is ‘full’.

And the four guys are totally brilliant. The acting is wonderful. And after a fabulous beginning, to ‘set the stage’, when Clay first beats (our very own) ‘enery Cooper at Wembley, Jim Brown goes to visit Beau Bridges (some footballing upper echelon type of non-specified variety) and (no spoilers), the end of that scene blows your fucking head off. And sums up the ‘age’ totally, so you know where the film wants to take you.

But then instead of taking you there using Waze-for-movie-directors, the quickest, neatest, directest, but not necessarily most comfortable route, instead it opts for the ‘I’m sure its around here somewhere’ method.

This may just be a reflection of watching it in my lounge. Whilst doing a rather challenging Samurai Sudoku, checking my phone, stretching out my hamstrings and deciding whether to have tea or open the 4th bottle of wine.

Mel thought it was too long. She thinks every film is too long. She finds the BBC weather too long.

I was expecting Mississippi Burning meets Rocky with a soundtrack by Marvin Gaye. Instead I was treated to an acting masterclass in a somewhat circuitous mode.

Happy Sunday. Today they’re ‘screening’ Sheffield United vs Spurs AND Liverpool against Manchester United in a double billing at the box office.

A xxxx

The thing I like about football is winning. The thing I hate, loathe, detest, get sickened by, and become maddened by, in football, is not winning. Particularly against teams we ‘should beat’. Ok, there’s no guarantees in life or football. Anyone doubting the wisdom of that truism just think back to March, April, May…

So if wins were guaranteed, there’d be no point playing the matches. You could just award the points in absentia, crown the winners, avoid all that goal celbratory, Covid-risking touchy-feeliness and reduce injuries by 90%. The 10% because they’d still have to train. And then only play the ‘close’ matches. Like Liverpool vs Man United on Sunday. Like the Chelsea Man City type matches. Too close to call. So therefore, Spurs vs anyone.

We trounced Man City then drew with Newcastle. We thrashed Southampton then lost to Everton. We mullered Leeds and then… and then… and then FUCKING DIDN’T BEAT FULHAM. On Wednesday night. It was a horror show. We played well, scored a totally brilliant goal, simply taking of breath type goal, 3 players, 65 yards, 3 touches, about 5 seconds. So good a goal that we immediately ‘put the brakes on’. Ok, that’ll do. Shut up shop. We’ve done enough. It’s only Fulham. They won’t score.

The Morinho method. Which is so great that we’ve drawn or lost half a dozen matches because we don’t keep on pressing to close the game up. Or we do, but only half the matches. Alas its the other half that kill.

The second half of the game brought on a different Fulham. Who were fantastic. Attacking brilliantly. To which our inevitable reply was: bring it on. Wave after wave until the equaliser became inevitable. And by the time they scored it we’d forgotten how to mount an attack, it had been so long. So can consider ourselves lucky not to lose the game altogether as Fulham pressed on after scoring knowing that there was only going to be one winner, and it weren’t us. The draw was a kind of victory. For both teams.

I’d like to think lessons have been learned. But I fear not.

If there’s one team even more a ‘sure thing’ than Fulham, it is poor, one-win, hapless, Sheffield United. Who we play on Sunday.

God help us.

A xxxx

Today, I was attacked. Not like, at tai chi, when we do it with swords or knives, planks of wood, lumps of concrete, done nicely, friendly, no. This bastard came at me with a fucking needle!!! Attached to a  syringe!!! Filled with… LIQUID!!! Bastard!!! Doesn’t he know I’m a lifelong needlephobe? 

But as the liquid in question was the Pfizer-Biontech Covid Vaccine for  Old People and Opticians, I bore him no malice, nor went into self-defence, BREAK THE FUCKING ARM, mode. And suprisingly (I’ve been surprised like this with every injection since 1962) it didn’t hurt. In fact I couldn’t feel it and thought for one moment I’d been conned out of my due. 

So now I’m safe. I’m cured. I’m allowed out. I can party like its 1999. I can return to football. Play tennis. Go pole dancing.

Because Covid doesn’t just rule our lives, it actually alters our perception.

I have a grandson called Joey. You may have missed that. The world’s smallest, and definitely most beautiful, bulldozer. And on Sunday, it was noticed, in between destroying a few walls and taking the back off the tv, that Joey was ‘warm’. He had… a temperature!!! Yeah, I know, everything has a temperature, this is just an expression meaning ‘a HIGH temperature’. And we immediately entered ‘the protocols’. Which is this: panic, then PANIC, then FUCKING PAAAANNNNIIIICCCC!!!! for all you’re worth. We were banned from visiting, for our own protection. Joey immediately entered lockdown, quarantine, isolation and his own ‘bubble of destruction’ which is just him and George. George? Yeah, Peppa Pig’s brother, do try and keep up. Ok, mummy and daddy were allowed in, just to avoid starvation, dehydration and hygiene issues, and Lila, obviously, or they’d have no-one to fight with. And after 24 hours of this, it was realised that little Joey was sprouting a new tooth. Not a new virus. And even though he’d been pointing at his mouth and crying, this had been duly ignored. Not JUST because of terrible parenting, not JUST because of a total lack of understanding of babies and their developmental health, but because we have all been ‘shielded’ from seeing the wood from the trees.

Well no more!! Covid? I’m over it. Totally. 

Happy Liberation Day

A xxxx

Brilliant! I’ve just learned that Steps, the millennial errr… well… not quite ‘super’ group, more… sort of… like… oh yeah, total waste of space, time and AIR!!!, are having a retrospective type thing to ‘get people moving in Lockdown’. Because most people are totally unaware that sitting on a sofa for 16 hours eating chocolate biscuits and drinking extra-strong lager, all alone, in front of the tv, is not very good for you. So well done Steps! The band who, almost single-handedly, represented the demise of popular music from being a wonderful expression of creativity to the karaoke show they produced. With hand movements. In case you don’t feel inspired to just, kind of, dance. Music for the dancably challenged. Anyway, its brilliant!! And you just have to either go walking to the soundtrack of their ‘what the future holds’, or you dance to it, (they show you the moves, obviously, wouldn’t be proper music otherwise) and then put it on tik-Tok so everyone can hate you, revile you and make your life more of a misery than it already is. Brilliant! Love Steps. And it raises money for charity too.

But I want to talk about ‘romance’. Not, like in the Mills & Boon type way, not, sort of Mr Darcy in a threesome with several Bronte sisters, not ‘proper’ romance, but ‘the romance of the Cup’. The FA Cup. You can barely mention that esteemed competition, the oldest national football competition IN THE WORLD!!!, without some tattooed Millwall thug bursting into tears, the Shed End at Chelsea wellling up or Mesut Özil crying into his millions. It’s the ‘romance’. Innit.

And that comes from BIG teams playing ‘minnows’. That only happens in the cup. When Premiership high flyers play non-league amateurs. And that’s where the romance comes in. You don’t get it when Everton play Leicester. You get it when Liverpool play Dagenham & Redbridge. When Manchester United play Yeovil Town. And you get it when Leeds play Crawley.

Because the ‘romantic’ bit is that these lowly teams can actually win. And, on very rare occasions, they do so. Man United, Arsenal, Newcastle, have all been the giant victims of the giantkilling over the decades.

But I’d just like to say, there is NO romance in losing. For little teams there can be nobility, valiant attempts, brilliant opposition, to the inevitable which brings them no shame. For the big clubs who fail to beat the underdogs there is plenty of shame. And a distinct lack of romance as even Leeds players’ wives probably would’t talk to them after Crawley thrashed them on Sunday.

Lowly Marine FC who played Spurs on the same day made £400,000 from the day. Probably enough to keep them going for 5 years. Or they could have Kevin De Bruyne for a week.

There is no place for romance in football. Unless you can count it, put it in the bank, and keep you afloat.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Ok, so having slagged off lateral flow tests yesterday, I thought I’d better take one. For YOU. Because I’m prepared to lay myself on the line in the interests of my people! Ok, not so much lay on a line as shove a stick up my nose. Quite a long stick in my case, obviously.

Mel & I both received ‘lateral flow kits’ from the NHS, to test our staff weekly. Because we are front line… whatever. And today’s photo is of our results. Mel’s is on the right and shows, quite clearly, that the test was negative. Mine’s on the left and shows that I’m pregnant. Unless I read it wrongly. Yes, I’m going to have a baby and I’m going to call it Covid.

There’s been big issues about ‘procurement’ during this crisis. Basically, companies who would normally making, say, beer glasses, which no-one is now allowed to use, so the machinery is modified to bang out PPE instead. Beer glass… sterile, safe, secure masks to British Standards… what difference. A thing is a thing, right? Just make ‘em.

Which is why there are lots of court cases currently underway about government PPE contracts by companies making absolute rubbish and selling it for 14 billion quid to Rishi Sunak. Who, let’s face it, would buy up Halloween masks if nothing else was available.

And so to lateral flow tests. Made by ‘Innova Medical Group Inc.’ And the thing is that they don’t actually claim to be that good. They just claim to be ‘ready in 20 to 30 minutes’ rather than the 2 days for the normal ‘swab test’. In the instructions it actually states that ‘If a positive signal appears, it should not be reported as positive’. Oh. And that ‘negative results are presumptive and do not preclude infection’. Ok, that covers most of it. Other than: then what is the test for, exactly?

But I don’t blame Innova Inc. I wanna know why our government firstly bought zillions of pounds worth of self-confessed fairly useless test kits and worse, is now putting massive stock in the results for using them in their asymptomatic testing. IT WON’T TELL US ANYTHING. I think I’ll revert to the coin toss method. I’ll sell pound coins to the government for a fiver each. 

Happy daze

A xxxx