Andy's Glasses

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

For the next part in my ongoing (to eternity) and very popular series “All statistics IS bollocks” (and apparently a lot of grammar is too, innit), I’d like to look at… well, statistics, obviously.

A new one came out today in the sports pages. And remember, in the beautiful game that none can watch live, there is Mega-giga-tetra-things of data produced and stored at each minute of every game. So the raw data is all there. That’s not the problem. The problem, as always, is with the chosen form of analysis.

Today it was ‘points won compared to goals per game conceded in that time’, and that time, for the purposes of this instance of numerical diarrhoea, was since November 28th. Just like that. Not ‘January 1st’ or ‘the start of the season’, but November 28th. 14 days after my dad’s 96th birthday, just so you know its not just a random date. Anyway, what the statistics said aren’t even worth discussing. The POINT (if there is one, and its generally something I really try to avoid) is that I don’t question the results that these numbers represent. Nor the validity of the data. Just the fact that, as always, a statistic was needed to conform to the desired narrative. So they found one. Or created one. As in: there must be some line of mathematics that can bolster my argument that Manchester United are performing better than anyone else. We’ve tried all the usual ones, like ‘are they top of the league?’ And ‘are they really yo-yo-ing around in form under a pretty clueless manager?’ But they didn’t work, so we had to be a little more creative. Well, Jonathan Northcroft of The Times: WHO FUCKING CARES???

Especially as we’re in mid-fucking-pandemic mode and are already saturated daily with meaningless numbers. I wish I was a statistician today, I’d live in a palace and drive a… Prius. Only because they’re really not very imaginative people.

So now we have over 60,000 new cases of covid EVERY DAY!!!! Over 1000 people die every day. Again, meaningless numbers unless you happen to be one of the latter. In which case, my condolences.

But ‘it’s not enough’. Matt Hancock (how do you spell: ‘tosser’?) and Boris (ditto) have decided that the only way to beat Coronavirus is to statistically bamboozle your way out of it. Drugs won’t work. Medicines useless. Statistics is the only sure way.

So we need more testing. Which is in fact the only sensible thing they could say. And quicker testing. Again, WE KNOW THAT AND HAVE SINCE MARCH; WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN???? So Hancock is recommending ‘asymptomatic lateral flow testing’ to allow workers, like me, safe passage on the empty tube trains. And this random mass testing was almost really successful in Liverpool. And when I say ‘almost’ it is because lateral flow tests are up to 50% inaccurate. 50. Per. Cent. It would be cheaper to send everyone in the country a one pound coin and have them toss it to see if they have the virus. That would produce exactly the same degree of reliability. 50%.

However, if you measure: covid cases per day resulting in hospital admission but not ending in death and divide it by the number of vaccines we’ll be administering per week by March 22nd, and add in the square root of Boris Johnson’s inside leg measurement (in millimetres), you get an outstanding result which should encourage everybody that we are, in fact, headed in the right direction.

Fuck. Me.

A xxxx

Look I don’t like to gloat, unless football’s involved, I’m not normally smug, unless I’m speaking to you or any other unworthy, and its not in my nature to be competitively celebratory. I’ve never previously had the opportunity to create vaccine envy.

But I’m getting the vaccine on Wednesday. What? How? Who? Where? Really???

Yes, really. A geezer will give it to me, behind the car park near Sainsbury’s, but its genuine, apparently, his mate Deano told me so, and he knows all about drugs, and its only £4,279, cash.

Joking. Though I think many such things are on offer. The ultimate ‘placebo’.

This is through the NHS. Because I am a ‘front line practitioner’ and risk life and limb every time I send some contact lenses remotely to Berwick-on-Tweed. When everyone was clapping on Thursday nights, I was bowing and thanking them for their support. Even though at that time I hardly realised I had anything to with the NHS.

Anyway, we had an email. For people such as Mel and me, we get on the vaccine list. Not, like, high on that list. Not even, medium. Barely low. Even at my age. But because of our work, and our NHS contracts, we get the honour to become the bottom feeders of the vaccine lists and await leftovers from Doctor’s vaccination clinics. And yesterday Mel got the call. We’re in. We’re on. We are chosen!!!

Mel said she felt like she’d won the lottery. I feel like I’ve got a golden coin in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Even though in normal times, the way to see me run faster than Usain Bolt is to produce a syringe.

Having the vaccine is wonderful. It means we can… well, we’re allowed to… errr… well, it means I can’t get Covid. Not guaranteed, but… better than not having it. It means I may not be able to transmit the disease… but they’re not sure. It should last… well they don’t really know. I can fly again!! I mean, on a plane. But no-one will let me land because I’m from London. And obviously we’ll be able to go to parties, eat lavish meals in restaurants and go back to the cinema. Oh. Sex with strangers is permissible, but only outside and only if they’re animals.

But with all that, or rather, with all those questions unanswered, I don’t fucking care. I’m getting vaccinated and I’m happy as can be. I just have to stay covid free for 5 days.

Yours (soon to be) with antibodies, hopefully

A xxxx

America is burning! Not, sort of, literally, they didn’t set any fires. That’s probably today. But metaphorically, the ‘home of democracy’ is under mob rule. The only problem being that the leader of that mob is, currently, the (once) elected president of that country. Normally civil insurgence occurs to overthrow a dastardly, vile, corrupt and evil leader. In this case he’s leading the charge. Inciting the masses. Inflaming the plebs. And unlike most ‘plebs’ in the world, America’s arrive carrying semi-automatic weapons, dressed in bullet-proofs, combat gear, with helmets, gas masks, the full… 9 yards… 9mm, the full metal jackets.

And this ‘flash mob’, has been on waiting since Election Day. Which is why they could arrive so quickly that they outnumbered all the police and security. In Washington DC. Where, I’m guessing, there’s rather a lot of such people.

The ‘average’ Trump supporter is some poor misguided wretch from Alabama. These were not average. These terrorists were emphatically ‘sub-normal’. And all ‘on standby’, as they have been since Hitler was overthrown. Right wing paramilitaries. America’s full of ‘em. They’re all unemployed and arrived with military precision, the confederate flags on their Chevy pick-ups blowing as one and grouping like a SWAT team (‘hut, hut, hut, hut, hut…’)

But Trump handled it so well. Having fired them all up, he waited til the Capitol was completely taken over and Joe Biden had implored him, on national tv, to call off the dogs before the army goes in and nukes ‘em. Waste of a good building that would be.

Narcissistic personalities inhabit their own reality. It’s not a matter of mere delusion for imbeciles like Trump. Theirs is the ONLY possible reality. And thus, poor Don has invented a fiction for himself in which he could only possibly have lost the election if it was unfair. And this he believes in the face of any trivial ‘facts’, like the opposition getting more votes in every state and his own party declaring ‘it wasn’t even close’.

The idiots who perpetrated yesterday’s madness are the same ‘alt-right’ he’s been courting since he invited the KKK grand poobah for tea before the election he won. And ‘alt-right’ is an anagram of ‘Black lives don’t matter’. If you’re a bit dyslexic.

I’d like to feel sorry for Trump. But yesterday he elevated himself from ‘total asshole’ to ‘totally dangerous, oblivious, deluded and moronic asshole with no care or understanding of the damage he inflicts’.

Happy Thursday, vive la revolucion!!!!

A xxxx

I don’t know if this is an extension of Tier 4, morphing into an official lockdown, or a different thing altogether, like, forget Tier 4, we’re over that and NOW we’re having a proper lockdown. Not like the last one, that was shit. Like the FIRST one. The proper one. Except for two important differences. They’re still playing football matches and places of worship are not closing. Which is essentially just one thing really. Football is the thing we worship, love, adore, exalt and praise (and spit, swear, abuse women, chant racism and drag knuckles, but that is NOT for this conversation!) so our ‘places of worship’ are a bit different to those mentioned in Coronavirus rule, number 42,782,075,881.23, but what does Boris know? In fact the only difference between today (last day of Tier 4) and tomorrow (first day of 3rd ‘lockdown’) is that I CAN’T PLAY TENNIS. Unless I’m ‘elite’, which many feel is a worthy term, or ‘disabled’, which even more might find appropriate. So as I don’t really do ‘that kind of worship’, all I have left is football.

But this is turning into the best season of all time. Because Christmas is now behind us and normally, we’re already looking at the Champions Elect as they smile smugly down the table from their 18-point ‘cushion’, defying other teams to challenge their unquestionable supremacy. But this season is different. No clear leaders. No cushions, no big ‘gaps’, just lots of teams all within just a few points of each other. And all way above Arsenal. I’m going to say that we now have a top 8. Ok, the 9th team in fact have the same number of points as the 8th but as that team is Chelsea, I’ve decided that it is my arbitrary fucking line and I’ll draw it where I fucking want!

But no fat lady is singing currently. And is unlikely to stoke up her voice for a long while. As every team seems to go through waves of form. Spurs were ‘unplayable’ for a good while. Then suddenly they became playable again. Hopefully that’s over with the fab win against Leeds on Saturday. Liverpool are still top, but not in any meaningful way after losing at Southampton last night. Who, in turn, enter that ‘elite’ top 8. Chelsea appear to be heading down whilst lowly Arsenal are temporarily heading in the opposite direction. Which is a shame because conversations involving Arsenal and relegation are my all time favourites. Manchester City are threatening but still aren’t quite as they have been previously. And Manchester United have shot up the table but hopefully will revert back to their former hapless form pretty soon. Leaving Spurs and Leicester to fight it out. I will mention Aston Villa because I have to, and now have done so, fulfilling all obligations.

But first, Brentford tonight. The Carabao Cup semi-final. Doesn’t get much bigger than that.

Happy Lockdown

A xxxx

Here’s a stunning headline, a real shocker: ‘Grease (the movie) is sexist!!’ HOLY SHIT!! Is it? I never realised. Though thinking about it, the movie is just about school kids. Ok, who are all white, the entire cast, who are either having sex with girls who, in the most part, are unwilling to participate, or they’re plotting some form of rape. There is no gay gang at that school. Nor a ‘trans’ one. Only the Trans Am, but that was a car. Poor Rizzo is shamed as a slut! for being so empowered in her own sexuality that she actually likes sex! With loads and loads of different people, sometimes at the same time. Total empowerment. And yet Sandy becomes a hero by dropping her church-going attire and slagging it up for the final scene? Sorry, I mean, ‘taking control of her feminism and powering up’, ish.

But people are actually complaining about all these things. Well, ok, I extended a few arguments for the sake of commentary, but they want the movie banned from tv. Grease. Fucking Grease. A film so harmless I actually always found it rather pathetic. And if it hadn’t featured Olivia Newton-John, I probably would never have watched it 4,274 times. (I actually had the above poster on my bedroom wall. My mum wouldn’t let me hang it in the lounge). And the passion with which ON-J sang ‘Country Roads’, with tears in her eyes, nostalgic for the West Virginia, ‘where she belongs’ was made all more real by her being an Aussie who’d never been to America. But when you look that good, no-one gives a shit. Ok, I didn’t give a shit. Love is love, right?

We must keep Grease, we should never let it become the cinematic equivalent of a Cecil Rhodes statue. We need our history otherwise when we arrive at a ‘better place’, we’ll have nothing to remind us of what it is better than.

And we’ve come a long way from Grease. Don’t get me started on Blazing Saddles!

We’ve come so far that now, football pundit, Karen Carney commented about Leeds United’s method of play, which some could say is, kind of, her job, and invoked the wrath of the entire county of Yorkshire. Starting with the team itself and then… ‘embellished’ by the ‘fans’ who have insulted, abused, and made the inevitable threats of rape, death, violence, whatever. And because she is a pundit? Or because she is a woman in a man’s world?

I find this type of attack disgusting. And probably, without irony, perpetrated by the same small minded, small-penis-ed individuals who wrote all the PC complaints about Grease. This is NOT what social media is for.

Until she picks on Spurs. Then the bitch is mine!!!

Happy confused Sunday

A xxxx

Back in October we booked an event. Do you remember October? Ahhh, those heady days of… well, pretty much like July, less anxious than April, not as hot as May and the word ‘variant’, although part of our language, wasn’t repeated 67 times on every news broadcast. Tiers were what dyslexics cried. It was the time when ‘things were looking up’. We’d reached… somewhere or other where, whilst it wasn’t exactly great, it wasn’t the current bollocks-state either. We were between waves. Like a becalmed surfer.

So after a family meeting (in bed, Sunday morning, me and ‘her’, with the culture section of the paper) we booked to go to Kew Gardens for a ‘winter light spectacular’ or some such. So far into the unknown future that it had to be fine, surely.

It’s tonight. January 2nd. 2021 (in case you missed that bit). Us. Kew Gardens. Lights. Nice.

Until you consider the logistical nitty-gritty. Not going on the train. Too many variants and scumbags. Even variants from nice, bourgoise well-to-dos. Those variants are so strong you can catch them by just looking through a window. R-number: 22. In medical terms: ‘well R-ed’.

So we’ll drive. Solved. And then socially distance from the other 14,000 people all crammed into the entrance area, fighting to spend 15 quid on a paper cup of ‘gluhwein’ because its the only alcohol on sale and we are a nation (probably a whole fucking world) of alcoholics now. The sedative of the masses. Hmmmm…

I was having doubts. Me. The most covid-unbothered person in… my family. But I’m not immune to the constant warnings, the everyday scare tactics and the sheer numbers thrust at us every day. Big numbers. Massive numbers. Plus an article in today’s Times about… Kew Gardens light show. Covid shitstorm. No social distancing, crowds thronging (however that might be done), people… being in places, others… standing with, errr, with intent! It’s a horror show!

So we held another family meeting at which only two words were spoken:

Fuck dat!!

And we cancelled. And I hate myself for doing that because going out anywhere legal is something so rare, but… but… but…

At least Spurs are 2-nil up against Leeds.

Not quite as happy a Saturday as it might have been

A xxxx

Although I ‘dabbled’ in horror movies when I was in my mid-teens, it was never my favourite genre. I didn’t mind the grisly deaths, it was just that they seemed to occur instead of a plot, rather than because of it. Or they all shared the same plot. Which all had that fatal flaw. The gorgeous young blonde just taking a shortcut through the woods. In pitch black on her own. Yeah, that’s gonna happen.

But then I was in California and Friday 13th part 3 (what! They didn’t kill enough people in the first two???) came out, I couldn’t resist the hype. It opened on Hollywood Boulevard at midnight on Friday 13th. I mean… I mean… Oh, and it was in 3-d, rather a rarity back then. Giving loads of special effects a higher billing than the already diminished and diluted plot-line, but sometimes… its written in the stars.

So out we ventured. I lived about 3 blocks from the Chinese ‘Theatre’ (what they call a cinema in America because they don’t use the full richness of the language they fucking stole). So with my flat-mate, Craig, and our two gels-of-the-moment, we actually walked to see the film. No-one walks in Southern California. Possibly being (I really don’t remember, but-) worse for a little alcohol? Definitely some unprescribed medication, various herbs and… errr… remedies. A pretty normal night out in 1982. Amazing we found the place. Even though we lived on Hollywood Boulevard itself.

Craig was an English guy, friend of a friend, and we shared living space. He was very good looking (we all were in our flat), dark and butch and… he wore an eye patch. I know, it was 1982, it was New Romantics, everyone wore a fucking eye patch. But his was real because a boating accident left him with terrible double vision which was, in time, to be operated upon. Meanwhile, eye patch. Like the entire queue lines of most of the clubs we went to.

The credits rolled, “FRIDAY THE 13th”, they proclaimed, then underneath appeared a tiny “3-d”. And as we all sat there with our silly red and green lensed specs on, that little ‘3-d’ started coming towards us. And growing. And speeding up. Until it was flying straight into the faces of about 18,000 people. Who all, as one, ducked under the seats. Instinctive reaction. Well, all except one person. Craig. Who just sat there with his eye patch and silly specs smiling at the screen, oblivious to the event and wondering what everyone was doing. Because if you take away one eye, even with silly specs on, you only get 1-d. He was 2 short of a full reaction. 2 short of a full appreciation.

I learned more about binocular vision and stereopsis that night than all those years wasted in lectures.

Happy 2021!!!

A xxxx

I used to be a ‘believer’. I had ‘faith’. But then we lost at Chelsea…

I also used to be a believer in that other thing, the God thing. Possibly til I was almost 9, maybe only 8 and then it all just got a bit illogical, a bit of a cop-out, a bit ‘out there’ for a young mind trying to make sense of a universe which was becoming ever more complex in a really wonderful way. And, with space travel, with massive scientific advancements, a world becoming more and more understood as an autonomous, living organism.

It seemed just too easy to attribute anything you didn’t know or couldn’t control to an unknown, unseen imaginary character. And then spend time actually praying into the unknown, when you could be kicking a football. Me and God parted ways at that point. Because there seemed no quid pro quo. You have to invest time and energy and effort into prayer and in return… your grandad died when he was 54. You learned of atrocities in war. Of the holocaust. Basically, shit happened. Loads of shit. And thus my proto-definition of ‘ominipotent and omniscient’ was the same as that of ‘total indifference’. I couldn’t see the point of having a God who could do ANYTHING!!! but chose to do nothing. Well, not so much ‘having’ a God like that, we don’t get to choose nor vote, but more, bothering with Him. Or Her.

And then Covid happened. In case you missed that. Epidemic? This year?? Like, all of it? Shitstorm?? Anyway, it happened. And once again, all the praying in the world produced less of a positive result than a £2.99 bottle of hand sanitiser. In fact, praying proved to be a massive problem. As the ‘true believers’, confident that they would be protected, by the same God who ‘protected’ them during the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition, the partition of India, Vietnam… that God, would protect them now. So they gathered, in the face of instruction, advice and finally directives, not to. And guess what? They got ill in disproportionate numbers, they died in droves, they suffered almost worst than the rest of us.

Leaving me with only one possible conclusion. God actually hates us.

The God I once believed in had a long white beard. And a yarmulke. Even though humans have to wear such a thing ‘in the presence of God’, so I can see the problem there. But ‘my’ God was old and he was Jewish. Spoke Yiddish. With a Polish accent. Like my grandmother. Was wise. And funny. He was actually Jackie Mason with a stick-on beard. Because that God ‘created us in his own image’. But which one of us? Was this God, like LGBTQIA (yeah, its been extended along with Tier 4 restrictions), or just, like, men and women? Men AND women?

And as atheists are fairly boring, particularly the Richard Hawkins type, evangelical ones, my new year’s resolution is to join a devil-worship cult and see what they have to say. See if they can get me a vaccination more quickly. Might take Joey and Lila with too.

Happy New Year to one and all,

May your test results remain negative and your masks stop fogging up your fucking specs.

A xxxx