Andy's Glasses

Ok, I haven’t watched one movie since this insanity started. Try to avoid watching things on tv because that’s how you die. Internally if not externally. Binge-watching 17 hours of Songs of Praise, just ain’t my thing. And although, according to everyone; everything on Netflix is ‘just brilliant!!!!’ it’s generally one person tells you their fave, the next person tells you theirs, and so on, but the faves rarely coincide. So you have to watch everything they have. 22 million years of collective series. Just so you don’t miss the ‘one’ which ‘you just MUST see’.

I did watch a bit of ‘how to tame a dragon’, which I’ve seen before and is a truly brilliant animation, clever and funny and cute. But I have two ‘lists’ of movies. One is the films ‘I’ve seen’, which means on a cinema screen. Tvs don’t count, however big they might be, in-flight movies don’t count because you wouldn’t want turbulence whilst watching Touching the Void, f’rinstance. And pilot announcements always seem to come when the dagger is poised over his heart/their lips are about to touch/the dog is just going to take a dump on the neighbour’s lawn/the car is at the cliff edge, and that upsets me. I don’t want Keanu Reeves bullet-time interrupted because there’s a special offer on Clinique fucking make-up. So when I ‘watch’ a movie it has to be the full extra-large, sweet popcorn experience.

But that frees up that movie for repeated watches on tv later on. I’m not saying this makes any sense to anyone, I’m just saying. My rules. We all have our own. And once ‘liberated’ then I can watch that movie any time, in any bits and pieces I may catch, to my heart’s content.

And my heart is never as content as when I’m channel-flicking (yes, I AM that annoying ‘man’, as apparently no-one with a Y-chromosome has ever done it) and come across Terminator 2. Even 1. Or Kill Bill. Any number. Anything by Tarantino. A Knight’s Tale. Don’t ask why, I just love that movie. Possibly having a mediaeval square dance to Bowie’s Golden Years is the reason, I don’t know. Batman movies. Love them all. Anything with Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro or Wonderwoman. Just because.

This week they showed Fatal Attraction. I couldn’t be bothered to watch it. When it came out we went to the ABC in Golders Green (now deceased, long before coronavirus) and were sitting in the ante-room before the 8.30 show, waiting for the last people to come out. I got bored. The world’s most impatient person is not a badge I wear lightly. And wandered. And opened a door. To be facing the screen. Just as Glen Close rose out of the bath, dagger in hand, at the very end. The absolute AHHHH!!!!! moment of the entire fucking film. Which I’d seen ten minutes before my showing began. I’ve always been ahead of my time.

But those movies are just the ones I love to see in bits. My proper ‘all time faves’ are different. Because I have my movie-snob image to consider so I’d have to include at least 4 subtitled films in any top ten. Preferably made originally in Uzbekistan, Zaire or Madagascar.

Happy Day-which-seems-like-all-the-others

A xxxx

It’s life, Jim. Yet an alien, bizarre, obscure kind of half-life in which ‘lunch’ becomes the main feature of the week, followed closely (ok, and dinner) by ‘the allotted exercise period’. The police have new powers in which ‘being somewhere’ is now possibly a crime, depending on the mood of the particular officer in question. And whilst people have been banging on for weeks about infringements on our liberty, I’ve been reminding everyone that ITS A FUCKING VIRUS, POTENTIALLY A KILLING ONE, DON’T BE A NOB!!!! But the changes are coming fast and furious as the plague escalates. And so laws can’t actually be passed quickly enough. Therefore the government make suggestions, albeit very strongly worded ones, and leave it to the police to interpret and implement them ‘as they see fit’. Ergo; we are living in a police state.

Yet even more importantly, there’s no football. Leading to the most interesting question (other than ‘WHERE ARE MY FUCKING CORONAVIRUS TEST KITS????’) of all, which is how the immense and massively extensive gravy-train that is ‘football’ going to cope and/or survive being hacked off, quite literally, right at its wallet.

People are cancelling their Sky sports packages, with Sky worried that they won’t put them back on afterwards. Assuming there is an ‘afterwards’ (that’s gloomy). So they won’t be paying the clubs for tv rights. And the clubs have immense wage bills. Truly immense. So Daniel Levy, the most financially conscious and careful of all Premier chair-people, has stated that as all the 550 non-playing staff at Spurs are ‘on furlough’ and thus will receive only 80% of their salaries, what do you do about the players?

An office worker there may get 35k a year. But for now that reduces to 28k. Whereas virtually all players get in excess of 60k a WEEK. So how bad for the people who basically keep the club running, if the players don’t take a cut that they can afford to the point of barely noticing, to keep them in line with those who will now struggle with rent or mortgages or car payments?

They reckon that the current situation may now create a massive reassessment of all the (stupid, ridiculous, outrageous) money in football and cause a total restructuring. Which will be one great thing to emerge from the current shit-storm.

Lila is 3 today. She is an April no-one’s fool. And every one of those 1000-odd days has been a thing of wonder. Not that I’m in any way obsessed or obsessive. It’s just what it is. Happy birthday to my favourite granddaughter on any world.

A xxxx

Well rules are meant to be broken, right? So my rule about not mentioning the c-word(s, as we have both Coronavirus AND Covid 19; we are twice blessed with fucking c-words) has to go out of the window. Because people are doing it wrong and it needs to be righted. Organised. Sorted. Protocols need to be in place. And adhered to. Boris used to tell us such things but was so good at it that he contracted the virus. Tosser. But as he had to chair meetings and talk to groups of people all day every day, it was inevitable really that he succumb. Which is why Carrie No-Fool-She had already taken off with unborn babe to some part of the unknown countryside to isolate and gestate simultaneously, well away from Number 10.

And the rules we shouldn’t break are the social distancing things. They are important. If I don’t know you and even if I do, I will assume you are a disease-ridden plague spreading motherfucker. Which is why I will smile nicely as we pass on the street, keeping the minimum of 2 metres (preferably 20). And for those who forget this basic principle upon which the lives of our 60 million people ALL depend, I’ve reduced the rules to something really easy, really simple, really… unambiguous. This is the rule:

JUST FUCK OFF!!!!

If you are on ‘my’ pavement coming towards me; JUST FUCK OFF!!!
If we are in the supermarket and I want to come down ‘your’ isle, JUST FUCK OFF!!!
If we are nearby on the heath, JUST FUCK OFF!!!
If you’re ambling along in phone zombie mode not looking out for others and oblivious to what ‘2 metres’ means, JUST FUCK OFF!!!

We should all carry 2-metre sticks and swing them constantly in a horizontal arc around us. And for the phone zombies, make it a really big heavy stick. That was Rachie’s idea yesterday after the 25th heath walker decided that following their doggy was way more important than infecting innocent people and the 2 metre rule is only for people without dogs. The easy solution to this is to kill any dog who comes within the required degree of separation. Sounds harsh but desperate times necessitate desperate measure.

Just back from Waitrose. Surprisingly calm, easy, almost 2-metre-ish but with only about 6 people at any time in there, avoidance is easy, and enhances your daily step-count as you run round 3 isles to end up where you were before.

Ok, happy Monday

Paranoid of NW11
xxxx

So yesterday’s lesson was about the perfect ALBUM. Obviously, the only person who learned anything, and took vigorous notes, was me. Because music is almost the most personal thing ever. One man’s Bridge over Troubled Water is another man’s Tie a Yellow Ribbon. As they say. One man’s Iron Man is another man’s Summer Holiday. Whatever.

So my lovely friend Sparkle (that IS his real name before you think all my friends are given pet names based on household cleaning products) sent me a list of tracks, singles and songs which floated his own personal boat across the Atlantic and beyond. But there’s just too many to list every single song that is wonderful. However, I must thank Sparkle for reminding me of Steely Dan. How could I ever forget my introduction to that fantastic ensemble.

I was 17/18 and went to work for the summer holidays selling double glazing. Yes, I was THAT MAN. So on the Monday morning I pitched up at the crack of about 11.30 to ‘the office’. In Ilford. Tiny little space at the front of the factory. Where payments were made, but not for me because you got paid for the week just completed, commission only. And we, the newbies, the lowlies, the unworthies, were to be ‘picked’ by the proper salesmen, to canvass for them. To knock on doors and get them leads from which, if sales were made, contracts signed, we’d all get paid. And generally, for the work involved, its safe to say we got paid much too much. But… like… that was the point, no?

So the widest of wide-boy flash Harries picked me. I felt like a hooker in a particularly downmarket brothel. And Gary (most of them were Gary, made it easier) took me in tow, to canvass for him and ‘learn the required skill set and technical knowledge’ to become… a ‘closer!!!’ The salesman. Those skills being the ability to dissociate yourself from any kind of moral or ethical constraints for the next 5 days. And to say the words: ‘don’t worry about that, just sign here and fill in your bank details’.

We walked outside and he opened the door of his brand new, French blue, Triumph TR6. Gary was 19, been selling double glazing for about a year and the car was ‘bought’, no hp, leases weren’t invented back then. We had two stops to make, always, without fail, every Monday. First to the bank to cash the cheque he’d just received. And then to the local drug dealer to buy half an ounce of whatever was on offer. Then we hit the road. Gary unwrapped his latest tape cassette and stuck it in the stereo system.

Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan. And as we headed down the M4, that music seeped into my head and has never left. Every track sensational. Even without the dope. Every guitar strum, drum beat, every riff simply mind-blowing. Even ‘With a Gun’.

And as the years progressed and Can’t Buy a Thrill came out, and Countdown to Ecstasy and Aja and many others, they became something of an obsession. Shattered only, for me, when Donald Fagan’s solo album The Nightfly came out and for some reason, although massively Steely Dan in almost every way, it sounded like elevator muzak. Yet the rest of the albums remain magnificent to this day.

Happy memories

A xxxx

Three songs I hate: Bohemian Rhapsody, I’m not in love (10cc), If you leave me now (Chicago). They all suffer from chronic radio overkill ‘back in the day’. And however good the most iconic of Queen songs is, and it really really is, it just got tired after 226 airings a day. For 3 months. It spread faster than coronavirus and for (hopefully) twice as long. The other two were played to death too and lacked the ‘that’s interesting’ factor of the Queen hit. And they were slushy. Nauseatingly, sickly, sacchariney, broken-heartedly slushy. Gimme a fuckin’ break.

Yet before you think me an some heartless, un-romantic love-a-phobe, or someone so mired in ‘his’ own musical genre(s) that there’s no consideration for anything outside my own narrow criteria, let me dispel that theory with three words: I love Jolene.

There, I’ve said it. Broken the taboo. Come out the closet. Crossed the line. Credibility shot to shit. Not only did I love, and still do, a country and western song, I loved a country and western song about a broken-hearted woman. Ok, its one of the few Nashville offerings in which a dog doesn’t die but otherwise, it ticks all the good ole boy, yeee-haaaw, confederate flag-waving bollocks that they all have in common. But it gets worse. I love Miley Cirus version in the ‘backyard sessions’. I even love the Petersons bluegrass take on Dolly’s finest.

And whilst I’m in the confessional, I have sinned further. I love a love song. Obviously not all, some are just bollocks, but others send shivers down everywhere. Anything by Adele. Most things by Whitney Houston. I believe (when I fall in love) by Stevie Wonder. And possibly best of all, Alison by Elvis Costello. I know this world is killing you. Holy shit. Let me just mop my keyboard before continuing. And I used the photo of that very album today as an homage to one of my all time favourite composer/performers. And possibly the album of his that I love the most. His first, obvs. Though Punch the Clock has such a host of memories attached to it that it too ranks very high on any list I may choose to make.

Yet a ‘perfect album’ is one in which every single track is a wonderful. You never have to fast forward/skip. You just leave and wallow. Combat Rock by the Clash. Cafe Bleu by Style Council. Hunky Dory. Even (and this is both well obscure and approved by the brother) Split by the Groundhogs. The Beatles White album. Sargent Peppers. Blood on the Tracks. And Little Creatures by the Talking Heads because it spoke to me when David Byrne had a little baby, and so did I. Reluctantly I’d have to add either of Oasis’ first 2 albums, the ‘reluctant’ because they’re such horrible people. And the soundtrack from the Sound of Music.

Joking about the last one. Honestly. I for one wanted the Nazis to gun Julie Andrews down as she gambolled across those fucking hills. I willed it to happen. More disappointment.

Let me know if I’ve forgotten anything.

Happy Saturday. Don’t feel like a Saturday, but trust me.

A xxxx

So some music you’re predisposed to like. Your first look at this album cover, the first from Roxy Music, and if you were a teenager of the (predominantly) male variety, you just HAD to love it. There was no option. Because the picture was suddenly essential in your life. Lots of music covers featured pretty girls, stunning girls, lovely girls, slutty girls. But this one was different. Fragile. Vulnerable. She needed MY help. In so many ways. But then I heard the music. And it was game-changing. Life-affirming. Gravity defying. It was just so damned different. No choruses, no verses, no nuffink. Just amazing music that had its own time, its own pace and its own rules. Which were: no rules.

A bunch of overly-posey art-college tossers who you just wanted to punch. Until they started playing. And then it all changed. And you could forgive Bryan Ferry’s ridiculous clothes. Andy Mackay’s hairstyle, Brian Eno… for just being Brian Eno.

I still play this album, like, a lot. Only the first half really, if I’m honest, but that’s enough to show the width, height, length and breadth of the wonderful Roxy Music at their earliest, their most ‘raw’, their most uninhibited.

But if you want albums which have TWO brilliant sides, like, virtually every track a wonder, there was always David Bowie. Another art-school reject who just went his own way. Then went her own way. Then his own way again. And again, its the early albums that won me over. The Man Who Sold the World. Ziggy Stardust. Hunky Dory. Yes, Aladdin Sane is brilliant but I just like the early stuff, uncontaminated by the commercial pressures. I went to see Bowie in 1973 at the Romford Odeon. Just before he killed off Ziggy FOR-E-VERRRRR!!! And it blew my tiny little 17 year-old mind.

My brother hated all of that music, but by then I was more my own person and although he actually vomited when I brought my first Motown LP into the house, even he had to admit that Stevie Wonder was someone pretty special. Which he remained all the way until Ebony & Ivory came out. And ‘happy birthday’. But the early albums, once again, were magnificent. Every track brilliant and unique, every instrument played by the man himself.

And the brother just kept on buying Black Sabbath. Uriah Heap. Led Zeppelin. We converged on Cream because they were rock enough for him, jazz enough for me. But I drew the line at Deep Purple. The problem was, he was a guitarist too, and a pretty good one. So when I put something on the stereo that he didn’t like, he’d just plug his turntable into his Orange stage amp and blow the fucking house down. Our parents loved it when that happened…

Ahhh, nostalgia. Induced by a virus. Indirectly. So far. Tomorrow, for any young people reading this, I’ll supply a glossary for words like ‘stereo’, ‘LP’ and ‘album’. For the rest, you’ll remember the first time you actually heard real ‘stereo’, which for me was Sargent Pepper’s, on headphones through an amp my brother made. He was good at that shit, just not the best musical editor.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

So you have your ‘favourite tunes’ and your ‘best album everrrrr!s’ and presume that the way the bass lines syncopate with the drums, or the effect of the harmonies, or the magnificence of the musical score… blah, blah, blah. You assume that if you really LOVE a song, its because there’s something intrinsic about that specific piece of music that is unique. And its true. But what’s also unique is the ‘other things’. The environment in which you first/most/sometimes heard it. The person you heard it with. Or the associations you make with it. Those are the things which elevate a mere ‘brilliant’ song to something from the Gods. Other than perhaps Adele’s ‘someone like you’ which starts in heaven and goes ever north with every play.

California Dreamin’ (you can add the ‘g’ if you wish, I don’t care) by the Mamas and Papas is one of my all time faves. It is still as brilliant as ever. Simple. Tuneful. Fab harmonies and if you watch the old videos on YouTube, amazing hair styles. But to me it is all about the Kennedy assassination. That’s what instantly springs to mind when I hear it. Which is rather odd as Kennedy died 4 years before the song was aired and did so in Texas, rather than California. But other than those 2 little details, its rather spooky! Don’t‘cha think? And I was too young to actually remember my own, personal ‘Kennedy moment’, but everyone remembers exactly what they were doing when they first heard California Dreamin.

I liked Simon & Garfunkel. Didn’t lurve them, as I now do, because my older brother was Mr Rock. Serious ROCK! Hard fucking rock. Metal. Only in music are rock and metal the same thing, in science there’s a different interpretation. But the bruv poisoned me away from anything involving acoustic guitars. Harmonies were not allowed unless performed by matching Stratocasters played through fuzz-boxes. But my appreciation of S&G grew, as it should do. As it has to for anyone into the amazing voice of Art Garfunkel singing the words of the best lyricist ever. And the harmonies. Yet the first song that grabbed me by the testicles and ripped them upwards, via my heart, through to my entire central nervous system, was Paul Simon’s ‘solo’ track, Mother & Child Reunion. Because of the music? Basic reggae-esque riff? The words? Or because I went on a ‘dream date’ with Diane, when I was about 15 and me and everyone else was madly in love with her. I pulled out all the stops and we went to Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning. I was always a bit flash. Every third stall seemed to be selling records and every single one of them was playing that song. And I was given false hope on that strange and mournful day. That girls would be as fab as they looked. We lasted about 3 weeks. A ‘serious relationship’ when you’re 15. And that song was the glue that (almost) held us together.

More tracks to follow. Refuse to succumb to more tales of civil liberty deprivation and restrictions of daily life.

Really Happy Thursday

A xxxx

I’ve scrapped my last diary. Started again. Hoping this one’s better than the last. And really, who cares or even remembers when the first Chinaman who ate that iffy bat, well past its sell-by, succumbed to the Chaina-virus? It’s a bit irrelevant. So although we went into ‘lockdown’ yesterday, I went into work, just to finalise things a bit, making this, for me, Day 1. Home, and here I’ll stay.

Yesterday I decided not to take the tube into town. Because Transport for London, in their infinite wisdom decided to put on a ‘special service’. Which is a euphemism for ‘not a very good service’. One train every 10 minutes or so. On Monday the tube was fine. Very few people on regular tubes. But with Sadiq Khan’s ‘special service’ they were forcing the people on with crow bars. Funny that; the less trains you run the more people are on them. Who’d’a known? So much for ‘social separation’ when you’re chewing the next strap-hanger’s ear-lobe.

So I did something that proved how unbelievably out of the ordinary these times are, and drove in to the City. There was no traffic. It was wonderful. Other than a few Islington Literalists. They’re the people who actually believe that London’s most loony borough’s blanket ‘20mph!!!!’ speed limit actually has to be taken seriously. Tossers. Then I found the true pot of gold at the end of any imaginary, fantasy-world rainbow, a place to park, for free. Which doesn’t in fact exist anywhere in the Square Mile, but if you know the right people (car park attendants are much more useful than company CEOs), it can happen. Not like the car park in question was in any way ‘busy’.

So we went for an early walk today in the gorgeous sunshine. Long walk, round the Heath. Avoiding people like… well, like the plague, which it kind’a is. We went early for our allotted ‘one exercise per day’ because of Rachie who, banned from Berlin and thus isolating with us, is part of our household unit once more so we’re allowed to share all diseases. And she starts work at 9. On the couch, but that’s her workstation. For her morning ‘meeting’ with all the ‘Germans’. Most of whom aren’t German at all and never have been. And most of whom are now in London, Stockholm, Montreal, Istanbul or wherever.

Then I went to my tai chi class. (Shock! Horror!! Sinner!!! SPREADER!!!!) Which took place in my kitchen. On my iPad. And was brilliant. We hook up on Zoom twice a day and fight the good fight. Not against each other, we can no longer do that without facing arrest, but against boredom, against stiffness, against everything that is bad. And yeah, Lila did a class too. But doing yoga when you’re (nearly) 3 is such a cheat.

Happy isolation

A xxxx

If I see one more tv newsman/woman/thing showing me a high road and telling me how ‘it’s usually teaming with drinkers, ravers, restauranties, rapists, muggers, flashers and old women carrying logs, but NOW, its fucking EMP-TEEEEEE!!!!’ I shall walk into the BBC newsroom and cough over everybody. This ‘street’ could be Broadway in New York, might be Oxford Street, Leicester Square, some… errrr… very busy street in Manchester, or even High Street Uppingham (Rutland), its the same story. Usually you can’t move for bodies rubbing up against each other and young girls vomiting into passing Ubers, but today you could play an 11-a-side football match in the middle of the street for 90 minutes (plus extra time, plus even more extra time for VAR) and no-one would disturb you nor complain. Other than football is banned. Unless you can maintain 2 metres of separation. Which makes defending corners very difficult indeed.

The world has shut down and we are in a Stephen King story. I would say ‘and not a good one’ but he’s never written a ‘good’ one in that sense. It’s not what he does. And he doesn’t do it better than any other living (or dead, or undead, zombified, vampired, back-to-life, re-born, hacked-out-of-her-own-grave, demonic or just plain ‘clown’) writer. But he loves a dystopian netherworld where ‘nothing is the same’. And that’s my world. And yours. And everyone you know’s.

Went for a walk yesterday, as we do, but now everyone’s doing it. Almost as if people are desperate for something to do! In the lovely sunshine. And as we approached people, they crossed the road. With their masks. After the 17 such incidents in 300 yards I asked Mel if I smelt. Which apparently I did, having not showered since tennis in the morning. And before you call the virus-police, tennis is allowed. You stand miles away from the other geezer and only hug at the end. Oops. No hugging. Which left Spurs Paul in tears when he realised, but I have rules. Just possibly not as many as most. And seeing Lila and Joey on the other side of the wire fence is almost more painful than not seeing them at all, but they’re ‘isolating’ cos of little Joey’s cough. And I’m old, therefore at risk. I was promoted yesterday when they shifted the DANGER!!! group from 70 to 60. Holy shit.

I went to drop some things round to my 95-year-very-old dad. No hug, no kisses, didn’t even stop for a cuppa to keep him company. Deemed ‘too dangerous!!!’ by the virus police.

And then, the worst thing of all… they closed Toulouse Cafe. MY cafe. The virtual hub of life in our little patch of the world. Where everyone knows everyone and dogs are welcome. Even the dogs can’t get in now for their little water bowls.

But heh! There’s always Netflix! And if you’re bored with that, Amazon Prime! Disney! Sky!!! Recordings of old Spurs victories (ok, very old recordings). There’s so much to be thankful for.

Not coping well.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

Pre-lockdown.

There have been scenes all over the country beautifully depicting our charming nation’s love of the toilet roll. Beyond love. Obsession. People are dropping to their knees and hugging it. As did Joey when his latest batch arrived from Ocado. Even though he doesn’t actually use the stuff himself, his natural empathy for everyone else caused this outpouring of emotion and attachment. A beautiful metaphor for the (sad and sorry, stupid and moronic, panic-buying, supermarket-depleting, irrational, pathological, pre-infected) wonderful people of our fine nation.

In Italy there’s been no panic-buying and no shortages of anything. Except old people. Got a bit of a shortage of them now. And they’re ‘ahead’ of us in this silly game we’re currently, globally, ‘enjoying’.

But to call it ‘the only game in town’ is in fact an understatement of immense proportions. The only game in the town they shut down, is perhaps more accurate. Because its happening. To my beloved City. Tube stations closing today, schools all shutting nationally tomorrow, it is reckoned that we’ll be in ‘lockdown’ by the weekend.

If only we knew what, precisely, that meant. Does it mean we can’t leave our homes at all? Only for ‘essential’ things. In which case, what is essential? Getting out and about is pretty essential for me, drinking coffee made by a ‘barista’, letting car tyres down, all pretty essential. And how will Mel cope? Locked in with the world’s most annoying person? We also have the younger daughter with us as she came home for a week and is now locked out of Berlin for the foreseeable future. So we’ll be ‘locked down’ together. Ahhhhhh. And I need to see Lila and Joey. Badly. Though we can sneak there under cover of dark.

I want soldiers on the streets. With guns. I want martial law. I want… life back. And by ‘life’, I obviously mean ‘football’.

Stiff upper lips. Just don’t let anyone else touch them.

Happy Doomsday

A xxxx