Andy's Glasses

I feel that my somewhat irrational fear of going on a sea cruise may be justified by recent events in Norway. In the Fjiords which was the precise location of the trip, but ‘in the bar’ was where most of the travellers spent their days. And nights. And anytime in between.

We love to travel. We do travel. Lots. But never on a boat. Don’t do boats. Yeah, Mel gets sea sick, but there’s pills. But there’s just something about ‘cruising’ that just bothers me. In fact, there’s everything about cruising that just bothers me.

I don’t want to ‘dress for dinner’. I want me spag bol with me goolies dangling loose. Ok, maybe not. But I’d rather that than put on a penguin suit and sit at the captain’s table with a bunch of smug insurance salesmen from Indiana for whom this same horrible experience is ‘livin the dream’.

I don’t want to stop in a harbour and queue up with 5000 people for a ride to shore on a 10-man inflatable. Ok, some take more people but then you look like a bunch of ‘illegals’ from Liberia about to sink in the Med. And then to arrive ON SHORE!!!! But in either the harbour town, full of boats, sailors, bums, alkies, hookers and filth, or you end up in ‘the tourist nightmare’. St Mark’s Square. Cartagena. Rio. Where the locals cater for 100,000 cruisers every week, hike their prices, dust off their little, plaster-of-Paris Christ the Redeemer models and flog ‘em to the stupid at $35 a pop.

Then there’s the ‘entertainment’. Having a third rate Las Vegas reject band singing Tie a Yellow Ribbon at me is not something I’d pay money for. It’s actually an abuse of my human rights. As is being forced to eat 6 meals a day ‘because they’re free!!!!’ and you need to justify the cost of the trip.

Generally its the smugness of the average, sneering cruiser that really gets me. Who know all about the rankings of the different liners, different ships, different cabins, different class. From Kate Winslett to Leonardo. And how did that end up????

And then last week. When the P&O (very downmarket, apparently, not ‘proper, evening dress type’ cruising) ship in the Fjords degenerated into a mass brawl. Fuelled, possibly, by the 40 quid a day ‘unlimited booze’ option. And this didn’t appeal to the insurance bods from Indiana, this appealed to… Essex Man (among whom I once numbered, LONG before I became a north London snob). And indeed Essex Woman, who probably started the whole fight. Dress up, get faaaarkin’ legless (sea legless or otherwise) and have a faaarkin’ ruck!! Put that in your advert for Cruise Liner Luxury that they send me every week in the Sunday Times.

Happy Seafaring

A xxxx

Ok so I like my garden. Doesn’t mean I’m ‘green-fingered’, nor that I want to enter competitions, nor that I even like gardening. Yet a sense of pride (deadly sin alert) accompanies virtually anything you do in the garden. Which is why I’m selective as shit. Whilst Mel tends the flowerbeds, lovingly removing the weeds and turning the soil with little hand tools, I’m mowing the lawn. Because its noisy. And I like noise. And disturbance. And showing all those lazy fuckers who think Sunday afternoon is for a quiet nap the grim reality of living with neighbours. I took the silencer off my mower, bored out the cylinder, added 2 more carburettors and jacked up the back wheels. It’s really cool. Hmmmm. And I don’t mind using the shears. Clipping errant branches from overgrown bushes, of which we are blessed with loads. I like doing that because it is destructive. And I like destructive. They talk about ‘training plants’ but I’ve tried. Whip. Chair at arms length. Carrots. Biscuits and treats. Don’t work. They just grow. As if they don’t have a conscious thought in their dna. So a degree of brutality is required and that’s where me and my shears come in. I’m like the hit-man of the team. You want something killing? ‘Removed’?? Destroyed??? I’m yer man.

So at the back of the garden I noticed a ‘weed’. Of the incredibly big, very long, horribly prickly and very quick growing variety. They used to be known as ‘blackberry bushes’, which grow wild virtually everywhere. Now they’re called ‘suckers’ and we HATE THEM! They’re parasites. They grow in and around the other stuff and spread in a very big and fast way. Ok, you get 3 ripe blackberries once a year but it costs you having every other plant strangled and killed by these suburban variety of ‘aliens’. Bit like Ivy. Looks pretty as it creeps slowly up the house. Next thing its over every window, inside every drainpipe, covering the front door so you can’t get your key in. Another fucking parasite. The plant world is full of them.

So when I ‘tend my garden’ the persona I adopt is not Alan Titchmarsh, its not the old boy from Gardener’s World, or even Rachel de Thame (though I do think of her sometimes… just because). No. When I do gardening my persona, my ‘character’ is Vincent, the John Travolta role in Pulp Fiction. It’s Charles Bronson in The Mechanic. It’s Clint Eastwood in virtually every film he ever made. It’s Villanelle from Killing Eve, but in shorts and a dirty t-shirt. I AM KILLER!!! Ok, ‘garden killer’, but only the baddies. The ivy and the dandelions (got a special mediaeval type torture device which rips them out of the lawn) and the SUCKERS.

Yesterday I ripped out about 30 yards of ‘sucker’ that I’d previously not known was there, all hidden among the good bushes. But once I saw it… once I knew… the challenge was on. It was war. Man against… plant thing. It was brutal and there was only going to be one winner! Probably the one holding the shears with the ability to move. Not that I was unharmed in the process, but battle scars heal.

So a warning to any parasites looking at my garden with evil intent: DON’T FUCK WITH ME!!!

Happy brutal Monday

A xxxx

If Gareth Bale moves to China, so it said in today’s paper, he’ll be ‘giving up the dream he’s had since he was 21 of being as good as Ronaldo and Messi’. Which is odd really because most people have those very same dreams. When they’re 6 years old, maybe 7. Even most Welsh people have just enough wherewithal to realise by the time they’re 17, 18, 19, that they’re probably not really going to be quite that good. “Keep your personal goals realistic” is a mantra of the wellness fraternity. Thus aspirations to be ‘as good a footballer as Messi’ or ‘as well hung as a porn star’ or even ‘to be as blond as Boris’ simply aren’t realistic.

And I love Gareth Bale. Who knows just how good he really could have been. If he’d have stayed at Tottenham. Where he grew up, thrived and turned into a Superstar. Which went kind of ‘supernova’ at Real and is now headed towards the distinctly ‘black hole’ of stardom. Otherwise known as China.

Why can’t he go to China and reach his dream there? Of being the best ever?? Well, that’s because there’s no credibility in being a ‘star’ in China. Same as in America. You’re playing against the equivalent of the Dulux Paints 3rd Division (north) every week and if you can’t run rings round them then you’re barely worth the hundreds of millions of pounds they’re paying you. However, you can see why Gareth’s agents would be keen on him signing a 3-year contract worth 150 mil, because any percentage of any part of that runs to ‘shitloads’. But first Real have to agree to sell the player for whom they paid 100 million Euros. And the Chinese want him for nothing.

Real manager, Zinedine Zidane, possibly the fifth best footballer ever to play the beautiful game (depending on where you rank Cruyff) and head-butter extraordinaire (the quality of the occasion rather than the rather sad butt itself), is not so hot at negotiation. Having stated that Bale has no future in Madrid. Who now have a choice of pissing 85 million quid away or continue paying a ridiculously high salary to a man who spends all his days on the golf course. Zidane’s statement is the negotiating equivalent of saying ‘we’ll never have a no-deal Brexit’.

Real will probably let him go. Because they’ve only spent about 230 million quid this transfer window on new players so far and want to buy Paul Pogba for around 150. How Pogba could be worth more than Hazard is a mystery to anyone outside the Bernabau, but the Spaniards are just stupid with and about money. The club goes into receivership every other year and in between they spend half a billion quid on dodgy people like Pogba. Who can be the most brilliant player one week and your worst nightmare the next.

Meanwhile Arsenal spend another 75 million on a new winger. Having already spent about 27 on someone else and bought another who’s not even playing for them this year. Not bad for the announced “40 million budget”. Maybe its Boris doing their accounts using the ‘wishful thinking’ Sage package.

I’m just happy that there’s no news about Eriksen. So far.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

Rain is bad. Rain is wet. Rain stops you doing stuff. Like tennis, f’rinstance. And yet rain also has redeeming qualities. Like… like providing water. Who’d’a known that? Apparently the farmers like it too, but no idea why. What I do know is that for about the first day in about 6 weeks I won’t have to get the hose out and WATER THE FUCKING GARDEN. Because here’s the odd thing. In the winter, when it rains every single day, we have no flowers. They don’t, errr… flower in the winter. But in the summer when its hotter than hell, when its so hot that all records of previous hottest days actually burnt in the heat!!, in these summer, precipitation-free days, our garden is filled with all manner of beautiful flora. Which will all die in tragic and painful suffering if they don’t get water every day. Thus, me, hose, garden. And as I water them, I speak to the flowers. Apparently makes them grow better. I say: “if you had any fucking sense whatsoever, you stupid, moronic heap of petals on a stalk, you’d grow in the fucking winter time when its wet and rainy. Ya dipstick”. And if we haven’t got enough flowers, we always have to buy more. Loads more. And they need watering. So next time the government imposes a hosepipe ban, you’ll know that Mel (and me… I have to add that) have gone a bit mad in the bedding plant department and currently use half a local reservoir every night watering them.

Bizarrely, having written off tennis, I went to meet my mate for a coffee in lieu of, and it stopped raining. Drizzled a bit, but for an hour and a bit, tennis resumed as normal. Knew you’d be relieved to hear.

The Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam (no idea; I’m guessing ‘up north’ in general terms), has been urged to ‘take a few weeks off’ to resolve some mental issues after being accused of sexual harassment of a female employee. Who he bombarded with inappropriate, misogynistic and sexual messages. Which he, Jared O’Mara, put down to a ‘delusional episode’. He’s right. He was deluded into thinking he was so much better looking and such a nicer person that the babe in question (‘babe’ is a legal term in this context, not to be mistaken for the other ‘babe’ which is naughtier) might find him in any way attractive. Maybe he was ‘deluded’ into thinking she was Jewish. Which she isn’t, but that would then become far more appropriate within Labour Party guidelines and definitions. Jared O’Mara is basically a lewd and revolting specimen of Labour Partyhood and gives validity to my last campaign which was to only elect MPs from the south of the country. The important bit.

This is my house. You see lots of pretty fowlers, I see THINGS THAT NEED CONSTANT WATERING.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

You know what they say: go see a Chinese movie and an hour later you need another one. Something like that. But in fact its almost reaching the point that if you want to see a good movie you need to find only films that are banned in the People’s Republic. Otherwise what you’ll end up with some watered down Hollywoodised shit that is deemed fit for the most populous nation on the planet.

Because artistic expression be damned. Creative freedom: phah! A tale that needs to be told? Bollocks! What movies are always and pretty much have always been about is making money. Lots of it. And there is nowhere in the world that has more money (and more people spending it) than China. And so last year the Chinese overtook the Americans as the biggest spending cinema-goers on the planet.

Because all the time other nation’s people spend engaged in politics, going on marches, campaigning or generally being, kind’a, free and easy, the Chinese go to the movies. That’s all they’re allowed to do. Well, movies and football, as the Beast from the East spends more billions buying up the world’s most overpaid footballing has-beens, n’er-do-wells and other tattooed billionaires to provide them with a late-career pension boost.

Yet because China as now seen as the ‘must be shown’ place for movies (one and half billion of the little fuckers queuing up to see your brockbuster) that is a windfall worth a few tweaks to the script, the plot, the odds and sundries on show in the film. Your masterpiece can make 100 million at the US box office, BUT… with just a little manipulation, it can take another 100 mil in China too. It’s a no-brainier. As long as…

There is absolutely no mention in the film of Tibet, Taiwan or Tiananmen. Red lines. No pun intended. I’m guessing that a movie about the Huawei scandal would be pretty much a no-no. And possibly anyone slagging off Alexa in any meaningful way would render that flick unpassable. As would the current events in Hong Kong, I dare say.

By the time Top Gun made it to China the badge on the back of Tom Cruise’s flying jacket had been airbrushed to remove the Japanese and Taiwanese flags that had originally lived there. Otherwise it wouldn’t have made it past the censors.

Which is as fine as it is trivial. Who the fuck even noticed what was on the back of Tom’s jacket when Kelly McGillis was stuck to the front of it?

But it means that now movies will be made with ‘a view’. With one eye (probably the producer’s) on having absolutely nothing that might upset China.

Apparently what doesn’t upset China is any form of racism (other than against the Chinese, obvs). They love movies about Africans getting slaughtered. The more deaths and the more grotesque, the better for that nation’s film buffs. You simply can’t kill a black man in enough bizarre ways to please the average Chinaman. And they’re all ‘average’. By law.

So for purist movie snobs like me, fans of ‘independent cinema’ and all others pretty much up their own arses about film, any film approved by China must have been seriously compromised to achieve that approval.

I’m going to see Sleepless in Shanghai tomorrow. Then Gone with the Wi.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

London is hotter than the fires of hell. It’s official. Hell burned (Dante et al, 1256) at 106 degrees of Fahrenheits, and today it is 108. In between they invented Celciuses but they just confuse the issue. It’s so hot here that they reckon the roads will melt and the railway lines will buckle. Policemen will explode, teachers dehydrate and reduce to mere powder in 4.6 minutes of exposure, causing school caretakers to overheat as they sweep them all up. People are at peril. Unfortunately though, Westminster is air conditioned.

So Boris is setting out his grand ‘plan’ for the world, at the helm of which, he currently sits. That ‘world’ which is bordered by Vauxhall to the south, Trafalgar Square to the north and Buckingham palace to the West. The East doesn’t count.

But love him or hate him, Boris is a man on a mission. And that mission is Brexit. Yet much as I hate Brexit, if it has to be, and it does, then let’s do it and GET ON WITH LIVING.

Thus I must admire Boris’s first day. Because what he did was effectively take care of the ‘divisions in his party’ at least in the Cabinet. They are all of a mind. A Brexit mind. They’re all keen, driven and prepared to accept the dreaded ‘no-deal’. Because his predecessor’s paradigm of a ‘balanced debate’ got precisely nowhere in 3 years. Boris has loaded his table, getting rid of an unprecedented 17 former cabinet members in the process. The only solitary remainer in the team is Amber Rudd. Don’t know how that happened but if I was Carrie Symonds I might want to look a bit deeper at that.

So now its back to the heat. It’s Lila-day and the object is to keep her out of the sun and hydrated. Neither of which is easy because… because she’s Lila. Therefore, like her MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER she tends to adopt a contrary position to each and every suggestion or effort made by anyone over 2 years old.

Happy HEAT!!!! Because Britain is as prepared for this heat as it is for cold, rain, snow, dryness, wetness, moistness, autumness or Spring.

A xxxx

Well it finally happened. The new man for the job arrived. All the fuss, all the waiting, all the expectation and now…

Tanguy Ndombele plays for Spurs. Our only signing in nearly 2 years. And he came on last Sunday when we played a friendly in Singapore against Juventus. They of the Christiano Ronaldo fame. And Ndombele’s first touch was a wonderful pass to Lucas Moura which made a goal. That drew the score at 2-2 to set the scene for Harry Kane (who else?) to hit an injury time winner from the half way line. OMG.

And they want me to get excited about Boris?? After that?? And yet…

And yet I am a bit excited about Boris. Even though I didn’t want him to be our new PM at all. Though he does make me laugh. Not necessarily the most sought-after trait in a Prime Minister, I grant you, but it always makes him easier to watch. His humour is so dead-pan, so ‘dry’ that lots of people just don’t get him. Even BBC’s political whiner-in-chief, Laura Kuensberg don’t get him. And I’m 100% sure that Boris’s most British of British humour is completely lost on Donald Trump. Who is hailing Boris as the new Caesar. Or, in fact, stated that ‘they’re calling him Britain Trump’. As if that would even be a compliment.

Which they’re not. That’s ‘fake news’. From the world’s fakest fucker. I’ve heard no-one calling him ‘Britain Trump’. If we had it would probably be ‘Britain’s Trump’ but Donald don’t do grammar. And assumes that most political pundits wouldn’t know an apostrophe from an oil well in Texas.

But Boris has done the hard bit. He’s won. Now its the plain sailing years ahead. He just has to unify his party, unify parliament, implement Brexit by October 31st (the absolute essential; fail in that and he’s gone forever), create an economy that can survive all of that and beat off Jeremy Corbyn in a general election. There’s ‘little stuff’ as well, like the Irish backstop, like parliament never going to vote for the ‘no-deal’ Brexit he’s almost insisting on, and doing all that without committing a personal cock-up (and in Boris’s case this phrase must be literal as well as figurative) like he did when he went to Iran to ‘plead’ for poor Nazanin. The sort of cock-up that is almost inevitable for someone who is so constantly ‘off the cuff’ and often tragically unrehearsed or ill-informed. Make ‘em laugh first, worry about the facts later.

The only thing in Boris’ favour is that he is relentlessly positive. Which, after the Theresa May years (felt like about 50 years) of woe and misery, comes as something of a tonic. We can only pray that there is substance behind that positivity. Because its Boris we’re talking about here.

Happy New PM Day

A xxxx

I’ve always been a bit ‘sporty’. I like playing games and if a bat and/or ball are involved then so much the better. Unless its a golf bat, then you can keep it and I’ll go watch a box-set. And as a working definition of ‘sport’, if you don’t end up with sweaty bollocks then it ain’t one. Just a ‘working definition’, on a very personal level, which I appreciate won’t apply to everyone. Particularly women. But that’s their loss.

I also appreciate that there are ‘sports’ and there are ‘sports’. Some are solitary; runnin’, swimmin’, bikin’, and others are more directly competitive. I suppose boxing is the ultimate. Tennis pretty much up there too. Which makes them a bit more sociable. Or, in boxing’s case, antisocial. I suppose you could go for your 10 mile run with a mate, but by mile 6 neither of you would be capable of speech. Biking can be sociable as long as you don’t need eye contact which could be fatal.

It really comes down to what you like doing. I always preferred sports of the fast/frantic variety. Endurance stuff never really appealed. Still doesn’t. I lack the patience. And probably the fitness, stamina, endurance and ability.

But I think I want to do a triathlon. I was reading about it today, the upsurge, how ‘everyone’s doin it’. And I like that bit when they cross the finish line even though the preceding 6 hours of pain and agony I could probably live without. But I just need to up my levels. I already cycle every day, to the tube station. And back (8 hours later). That’s probably half a mile in total. I run after tennis balls for hours, I just need to focus it into a straight line with no balls for guidance. And I can swim. For minutes on end. Well, not so much ‘swim’ in any meaningful way, more ‘splash around cooling off after an intense sun-bathe’. I’ve even been known to do 10 lengths in one go!! Keeping Mel company (swimming is the most unsociable of all sports, unless disruption is your aim) but after that I give up the will to live and leave her to do just another 90 or so alone.

So how hard can it be? An IronMan. Swim a couple miles, cycle a hundred or so, then a full, 26-mile marathon. Phah! But I can’t afford it.

They reckon it cost over 5 grand a year to partake in a couple of marathons. They don’t generally have them at Golders Green Station or my local park. And you have to buy a special bike, special shoes… errrr… goggles be useful and a wet-suit. They have a triathlon at Alcatraz. The prison they built because it sits in waters so cold and so shark-infested that no-one ever managed the swim to the shore. I suppose that could actually make you swim a bit quicker. The thought of IMMINENT DEATH will do that to a man/woman/person/thing.

Or I could just play my tennis, chatting away, drinking coffee, trash talking, and stay in my comfort zone. And pocket the 5k. Hmmmm… I need to think about this.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

PS: note Joey’s Wimbledon kit. Bless. He’s gonna be better than Nadal. Who didn’t wear a tennis baby-gro til he was 7 months old!!! Hah!!

We’re on the verge of war. It’s just a matter of days. Boots on the ground. Full military… whatever. Total invasion syndrome. We did Iraq. We sorted Afghanistan, we dabbled in Syria and so logically as well as geographically, we need to fight the Iranians just so we can cross off that whole sector of the Middle East and start working on Libya, Tunisia and Somalia for when the weather gets colder in Europe and it’ll keep our troops warm in the winter.

Iran’s a worry. Always has been. Ever since the Clash (again?? twice in 2 days!!) Rocked the Casbah in about 1980, there’s been aggro there. But not like now. Not like today. When they’ve stolen two of our ships and won’t give them back. Unless we release the Iranian tanker we stole in Gibraltar the other week.

And it all comes down to Donald effin Trump.

We had an agreement with Iran about nuclear armaments and their lack of pursuit of such things in the interest of world peace. Because if Iran had nukes they’d immediately send one to Tel Aviv and another to Riyadh. So we had an ‘agreement’ that the nations of the world would not impose financial and trade sanctions against Iran if they stopped chasing the nuclear option. And the whole planet was happy. For the ten minutes until Trump unilaterally decided that Obama was wrong to sign that agreement so he pulled the US out and immediately imposed stringent constraints on Iran, totally fucking up their economy. At which point the Ayatollahs said that if there were sanctions against them, they might as well start enriching nuclear stuff again. And pestering foreign shipping sailing peacefully through the Gulf.

Thus by Trump acting in his own, ‘maverick’, naive and stupid way, he has single-handedly destabilised the region, the Ayatollahs and how Europe AND Britain should respond. Because Europe is under the impression that if Trump pulls out of the agreement, it somehow won’t affect the deal with us. As if there are two agreements, two scenarios, two Irans. Fuck me, one is more than enough.

And now its come to ‘this’!! Ships sailing in neutral waters attacked by Iranian terrorists/pirates. In response to us impounding an Iranian ship in Gibraltar suspected of taking oil to Syria, against the UN law.

Britain is guilty of having been unprepared for what the Iranians have been threatening, guilty of not having protection in the Gulf, guilty of letting Jeremy Hunt state that ‘a military option is off the table’ when it should be saved as the ultimate bluff to a nation that responds to not much else, and guilty of being stupid and trusting the Iranians in the first place.

Yet ‘war in the middle east’… how’d that work out last time? And the time before? And the time before? And…

Happy peaceful Sunday

A xxxx

Electric scooters?? Fucking death traps!! People die on them. Are they supposed to ride on the roads? Where they’re in the way and a nuisance, or on the pavements? Where they’re in the way and a nuisance?? We’ll show Bird what its all about.

Bird is the company who rent these things. These killer machines of misery and… death!! They’re from Los Angeles. Typical!! And they rent their electric scooters all over the world, with their company rising in ‘value’ to one billion dollars!!!! in less than their 2 years in existence. But NOT IN OUR COUNTRY, MATEY!!!! Because we’re not some godless, 3rd worldy place where you can just… just… just do things! No, this is England! This knife of Sheffield steel. (For Clash fans, everyone else feel free to ignore that remark).

And we have the solution. Because an act from 1998 bans such vehicles (?) from the roads, and now they’ve unearthed another act, this one from 1835, which bans such things from the pavements. SO WE FUCKING WIN!!!!! Keep your scooters away from these shores (not sure if there’s any antiquated, anachronistic law banning them from beaches, but I’m sure we can find one in the Bayeux tapestry or the doomsday book specifically mentioning rechargeable vehicular transportation.) Keep them to yourselves, in LA, Berlin, New York… all the… all the kind of cool places where they’re stupid and death-loving and… and… and prepared to embrace the novel, the unusual, the pretty useful and most importantly, the things people want to do, with an open mind and some kind of solution.

I hate the smugness and sneering satisfaction that politicians and the press use when they find such a ‘solution to a problem’, which is basically a legal framework to ban things. I don’t like banning anything. Even if they can be dangerous. Cars can be dangerous. Buses catch fire, people fall in front of trains, get knocked off pushbikes, die in plane crashes, get… errrr… hit by boats on Oxford Street. Travel is dangerous. In fact movement in any direction by any means can be dangerous. Add into that mix the massive overcrowding in all British cities and before the first tube train driver has even rolled his first joint of the day, getting around is precarious. Riddled with uncertainty and insecurity. Have you seen me cross a road? Holy shit, it even scares me.

Banning things just because they’re new and different and their place in society hasn’t been worked out yet is just the knee-jerk Daily Mailistic reaction to novelty. And novelty which can be useful and fun.

I’ve never been on an electric scooter. But I want the chance to do so. And if it seems dangerous then I won’t do it again. But it’ll be MY choice. Because in case anyone hasn’t noticed, getting around in London in particular is never easy. We need options. Not rejections by the jobsworth tossers in City Hall.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx