Andy's Glasses

It’s Lila’s birthday. Today. Why its not an official bank and public holiday, with street parties and processions, possibly a carnival, free parking everywhere, all speed cameras turned off for the day, speech by the Queen, 21-gun salute over the Tower at noon… I’ll just never know. In my mind its all that and more. But try telling that to the government!!

That’s why I’ve posted a pic from ‘when she was little’. Just so you remember where she started from. I know you care.

Her mummy and daddy made her a party yesterday. It was… messy. Loads of kids there, that was the problem. All eating stuff and spreading the joy around. And we had a-nentertainer. Times have changed. 25 years ago you called up Smartie Artie and they sent you ‘number 3’ or ‘number 7 is really good with 1-year-olds’ or basically, whichever one wasn’t locked up for child sex offences on that particular week. Because in a clown costume, most 50 year-old men look rather dubious. Now we had a babe. Safe. Nice. And she enthralled the children in one room so I could eat all their food in another. But again, times change.

Jelly and ice cream is the 2019 equivalent of offering a child heroin. Sugar is pretty much out of the equation altogether, so I s’posed I wouldn’t be getting a ‘party bag’ laden with Smarties and Buttons and Jelly Tots. Damn. How are these kids, these tiny tots, ever going to develop proper levels of obesity and type 2 diabetes if they’re not fed properly?

And then, once the nentertainer had packed up her shit and left a dozen two-year olds and various others to their own devices (read: ‘cake’), some of us just had a peek at the afternoon’s football. With cake, obvs.

Mistake. Big fucking mistake. Should have just sat there getting rid of the ‘wind the bobbin up’ ear worms another way. Could have been the wheels on the bus. But, for Spurs fans, the wheels fell off in the 90th minute, oddly at a time when we had parked our bus to defend a corner. Having, in the previous 10 minutes, had not one, not two, but THREE wonderful chances to take the lead. For Spurs. For England. For God. For LILA!!!! But all tragically squandered and then the indignity of catastrophic indignities, an own goal to finish off our chances. And hopes. And dreams. And virtually everything else worth living for except granddaughters.

Fortunately for Lila, kids can’t get officially depressed-by-football until they’re 5. Ask any psychologist. So at a mere ‘choo’ (as she so adorably says; whilst holding up 7 fingers to stress the point) she was blessedly spared our suffering. Rightly so. She has years to learn the joys of being a Spurs fan.

Happy Birthday to the most wonderful little person on the planet.

(Poppa-)A xxxx

We were ‘cancelled’ last night. That’s always a big bonus. A night in. Ahhhhhh. So I had a long bath, with Robert Harris. Finished ‘Munich’. Not his best. Then Mel went in the bath. A different one. A clean one. With bubbles and oils and candles and ohmmmm. And Kill Bill was on. But, like, both of them. Part 1 and part 2. The holy grail. And oddly I’d been talking to a mate just last week about their brilliance, only to learn he’d not seen either. Ever. Too violent. Which I immediately dispelled. No, its not, like, ‘real’ violence. It’s stylised. It’s cartoon violence. It’s Tarantino’s ultimate homage to Kung Fu movies and so although there quite a bit of bloodshed, its a million miles from ‘real’.

Then I watched it last night and realised that I’d lied. It is incredibly violent. Horribly violent. Awfully, mercilessly, relentlessly violent. And the fact that most of that violence is perpetrated by gorgeous, sweet-looking women doesn’t lessen it. It just makes it a bit more… exciting. Uma Thurman biting the tongue out of a would-be rapist is fairly violent, I grant you. But that mass samurai fight; Uma vs the entire population of Hong Kong, all armed with swords (Uma 42,649; Hong Kong nil) was so extreme that it was amusing, as she slashed and chopped and hacked and stabbed her way through all the men in suits. And women in suits.

At which point I had an image of Parliament. And how much fun you could have with a samurai sword in there. I’m not talking acts of murder or terrorism. Just justice. Cold, hard justice, I grant you, but justice. For the fucking shambolic catastrophe that we’re currently ‘enjoying’ over Brexit. Because I’ve reached the point where I hate them all. For making MY country a laughing stock on the world stage. We’re a fucking joke. But a really unfunny one.

Which has led to the current status quo, which is not rocking all over the world. We’re almost at the point where a general election is possibly the only solution. Not that it will solve the problem at all, whoever might win such a thing. But everyone has lost all confidence not just in the government but in Parliament in general.

And Jeremy Corbyn is 5 points up in the opinion polls. Which is the doomsday scenario.

Even worse, Spurs play Liverpool this afternoon, another crisis.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

It’s not that I’m some speed freak kind of insane Mad Maxian, Bullitt-driving, Vanishing Pointish Blues Brother, verging on the Thelma & Louise, but I just like fast cars and faster driving. I’m a victim of my age. (Always award yourself victim status to at least mitigate acting like a total nob, if not gaining sympathy for it.) Because I was born in 1956 and came of ‘age’ in about 1966. And that is just about the start of the world’s car insanity. When cars went from being ‘horseless carriages’, but not necessarily any faster for the lack of the nag, to being insanely vicious power-monsters that would eventually become almost extinct due to economic and environmental factors. Or ‘tree-huggers’ as the Green movement became. Another movement put together the symbols ‘V’ and ‘8’ and the world had changed.

Every movie I saw involved cowboys killing ‘Indians’, soldiers killing Germans or massively powerful cars racing each other across San Francisco, Chicago, Phoenix or Huddersfield. The ‘car chase’ was the standard almost obligatory scene in each and every heist movie, cop movie, love story (even the Graduate had Dustin racing his gorgeous Alpha Spyder around California) or even cooking program. Almost. And I loved them. Each car chase needing to have its own ‘unique selling point’ to avoid being generic. So French Connection was a different thing to Bullitt and the Blues Brothers decided ‘crash em all’ was the way to do it.

Other films were more unashamedly ‘the car’s the star’. TV too. I mean, who the fuck would ever watch The Dukes of Hazard if it wasn’t for the fantastic Dodge? Ok, and Daisy Duke. Vanishing point again used a Dodge and the whole thing was a drug-fuelled chase from Denver to California. A fab soundtrack, virtually drowned out by the supercharged 7 litre engine noise, an economy sized bottle of ‘speed’ and a driver with mental health issues. Movies get no better than that.

I also discovered a magazine called ‘Custom Car’. Which formed an indelible link in my pubescent mind between outrageous cars and beautiful, mainly semi-naked, women. The centre spreads (no pun) adorned the walls of my bedroom. Circumventing the usual rules on pornography on the basis of “noooooo, but look at the car!”

So per-lease, don’t tell me about cars that stop at the speed limit autonomically. Don’t give me, ‘black box technology’ so they can see if you had been speeding. Don’t give me all that obsessively nannifying ‘elf’n’safety bollocks, I just don’t want to know. I can’t. I’m a victim. GIVE ME CAR FUN!!!!!

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

Due to the unfairness of the working world, I had to miss my Liladay
activities yesterday, leaving Mel in sole charge of the gorgeous
little destroyer. She called me when I arrived at work, (Mel, not
Lila, though Lila did speak to me too), in a slight panic because of a
bit of a problem with the desktop computer at home. Which I could hear
over the phone. A deaf man could have heard it even without the phone.
“WARNING! ALERT!! THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM MICROSOFT!!! (ALARM, BELLS,
WHOOPING NOISES) YOUR SYSTEM HAS BEEN COMPROMISED!! ILLEGAL
ACTIVITY!!! DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER!!! WARNING!!!”

That had been going on for 20 minutes by the time we spoke. I
instructed her to turn it off. Make it go away. Because although I
haven’t experienced that exactly, I did once get a phone call from
(guessing) Mumbai, telling me they were Microsoft and could ‘prove
it!’ by telling me my unique computer number or some such bollocks,
and that my system has been compromised, blah, blah, death and
destruction, just make a payment and it’ll all go away. Unusually I
chose to swear at this man, rather than pay him. Can’t remember the
exact words, but they weren’t nice. Seemed to do the job though as my
reported ‘compromise’ managed to uncompromise itself without anything
happening.

I was curious at the ‘illegal activity’ bit really. Since when is
watching Mr Tumble on YouTube an ‘illegal activity’? It should be
because he’s so fucking inane and moronic and annoying, but I’m
confident that although Mr T might damage your mental health, its not
illegal to watch him. Especially when you’re 2. Or very nearly ‘choo’,
as ‘she’ says, in fact on Monday.

And yet these people continue to, basically, extort money with
threats. PAY US MONEY AND WE’LL CLEAR THE VIRUS!!! And that ‘virus’ is
in fact just them telling us we’ve got one and they can help. Its
exactly the same as the virus that was sent to all the hospitals last
year, pay up or your system is dead! And I can’t understand how these
people can’t be traced. I know computer addresses can be buried in
long, international trails but you can’t do that with money. Someone
is getting paid. As they always say in films/books/tv: follow da
money.

Its Lila’s inalienable right to watch Mr Tumble, even though I’d like
to torture him to death over a fire. And some bunch of profiteering
mercenaries should not be allowed to affect that. We need more police
on the streets. Bobbies on the beat. With truncheons. That’ll sort it.

Happy virus-free Friday

A xxxx

Ok, so parliament is ‘taking control of the Brexit process’, they voted so on Monday. First we (apparently) want to ‘take control of the borders’, now this. We like control. Therefore they set the agenda and the government can’t do nuffink about it. And they’re basically presenting options over different proposals for Brexiting nicely, or not nicely, or even not at all. They presented 17 options, from ‘no deal’ (rejected) to Brexit lite, Brexit strong, Brexit unfiltered, 24-year reserve, almost-Brexit, Labour-Brexit and Norway Plus. All were summarily rejected by the House because they can’t agree on anything to do with Europe. And even if they did agree, apparently they’re not binding if the government don’t like them. Its ALL such a waste of time (mine) and energy (mine) and money (mine). Personally I’d go for Norway Plus, simply because then we’d all have call each other by strange names like Nils and Magnus and Odvar and go round performing really strange and bizarre murders. On bridges. But our women would look good. Not that they don’t already, obviously, darling…

And yet ‘the deal’ may still get its last airing. Theresa’s deal which parliament has twice stated, loudly, unambiguously and unequivocally: ‘THAT’S SHIT THAT DEAL! SHIT!!’ may take another vote tomorrow. And if it gets approved, Theresa walks out of our lives forever. That’s the bait. Take my deal and I’m gone. (And you can sort out the fucking mess afterwards). The deal still won’t win. Because the Irish are refusing to speak the word ‘backstop’, they have eliminated it from their language. Which is a bit like our language but different. Yet the tories, even those who hate ‘the deal’, who’ve been so nastily, vehemently critical of ‘the deal’, tossers like Boris and Rees Mogg and whole bunch of other who also went to Eton and Oxbridge and have country piles and butlers, even they are prepared to vote for that deal this time round. Because if Theresa May goes then they can address their real, self-serving, personal advancement agendas. Its the ‘me first’ moment in politics. The country can go hang.

Shoot them all. Where’s Guy Fawkes when you really need him?

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Spurs new stadium? It’s shite, that is, fucking shite. All that corporate glitz and hi-tech wizardry and fucking Oyster card entry and beer that fills up from the bottom of the glass!!!! I mean, what’s that all abaart?? Ok so they can fill 10,000 glasses in 3 minutes, but what’s everyone else gonna drink? And a 65 metre long bar? The longest in Ingerlund?? Who needs that? I like queuing in ridiculously long lines for 46 minutes to get a pint of sub-standard warm piss. Otherwise I have to watch more football. And there’s not tunnels anymore. Tunnels to buy germ-infested food at half time, tunnels to enter the ground, all nicely decorated to make you feel you’re entering a high security prison. Institutional paint (chipped and stained), lots of chain-link fencing, herded up grotty old stairwells by sheepdogs (stewards). We need that. It gets us ‘into character’. We like a bitta rough.

But now? NOW?? It’s all bollocks. And expensive bollocks at that. A billion quid. Just so a bunch of Footsie company executives can take a pee in some poncy loo that even has toilet paper. Who needs that??? I liked the old toilets. Two toilets for 20,000 people is plenty. Walk-in, walk-out, piss on the way through to get back in the beer lines. Don’t even need to aim. Can’t do that in a 5-star stadium. Well you can but they’d throw you out. It’s an infringement of my civil liberties and human rights.

Spurs stadium is officially ‘the best in the world’. The Maracana might be more glamorous, the Nou Camp bigger, but White Hart Lane Nouveau is undoubtedly ‘the best’. And will be until someone else builds a new one. Because you learn from others and improve. It’s an evolution. The Emirates seemed great, at the time, but they found they’d fucked up the wall shape and created a place devoid of atmosphere. Then they made an even bigger mistake and filled it with a bunch of Arsenal fans.

The new stadium is simply magnificent. The biggest bar in the land, the biggest Spurs shop in the entire history of Spurs shops and the entire stadium is ‘cash free’. Which is a bit ironic considering its full of one-time East End wide boys but you can’t have everything. Just a bank card.

What’s more it is architecturally a thing of exquisite beauty. And will benefit what is basically the last inner London area that’s still a total dump. Regeneration is due and its now begun.

All we gotta do is win there.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

This’ll shock you. Men and women are different. Sorry; …are different!!!! Holy shit!!!! All those years of truly believing that the only difference between men and women was the level of opportunities and expectations and was really down to being given a dolly at age 1 instead of a plastic machine gun, and now they’re saying its not so. You can dress a boy in dresses, give him make-up and toy babies, even make him an Arsenal fan, but there’s still something innate (a word you can still legally use in this context, but only under extreme caution) that makes him a boy. Forget the fact that males and females have a totally different chromosomal make-up and hence are totally, genetically ‘different’, ignore (at your peril) that a man, generally speaking, has a nob, we have all been waiting for science to validate this ‘properly’. Men and women are different. It’s in their brains.

They scanned foetuses in utero in the second half of pregnancies. I mean, that’s in itself quite a feat. But they did it. And they found distinct differences in the development of male and female brains. Unfortunately, as with all physiologically based brain research, they don’t have a fucking clue what this actually means in the real world outside of an MRI picture. Although maybe MRI scans ARE the actually reality and where we live is just NOTHING!! Like The Matrix!!! In which case I’m not paying my council tax.

The boy foetuses got very excited when Match of the Day came on. Started really kicking off. And the girl babies were doing what looked like knitting in the womb. Strange.

But in fact speculation is all they can do. Because they still don’t really know how each bit of the brain works, more importantly, how the collective bits link and what results these differences might produce. But they ‘feel’ that girls may be more cautious by nature, boys ‘vulnerable and programmable’ (science speak for ‘stupid’).

Not sure you need a longitudinal study costing 72 million dollars to find that. Just go to any kids playground (I go WITH LILA, OK?) and you can see that with an alarming consistency.

Is it even fair though to assume such a non-binary, gender-inflexible, either/or paradigm in 2019? Hmmm…

Happy Monday, be careful out there (for the men), lighten up (for the women)

A xxxx

Theresa May is history. Though doubtless she’ll be consigned to the darkest depths of history along with Hitler, Stalin, various Kims, (Jong-Un, Jong-Il, Kardashian), Sadam Hussain, George Graham and Bruce Forsyth.

She’s going. Any minute now. There is simply no alternative. She has lost the plot. Shame she didn’t lose The Deal instead but that’s what happens after two-and-a-half years of 100% stress.

So now the entire cabinet is having its Julius Caesar moment and telling her if she don’t go then they’ll go. And with no government that means…

Probably more chaos than we currently have.

A million people marched yesterday for a ‘second vote’. I sympathise with them, would love not just a second vote but a total fucking ‘RESET’, but basically its wrong on so many levels. If it had been a horrible rainy day there’d have only been 200,000 people. We love a march and a demo here.

So I marched to a place called Crews Hill. Well, I drove there actually. Because its miles away and in the middle of nowhere. And we went there because of the garden centres. Now if you hate shopping, as I do, and, much as you love the garden, don’t really love the process, as I don’t, then a garden centre represents some kind of hell. But that would be a normal garden centre. Which they don’t have at Crews Hill. There they have garden centres the size of European principalities. They are simply massive. The one yesterday must have occupied about 10 acres. All indoors. That’s a lot of plants. Ok, it is very cheap there, quite amazing value. So you’re walking for 30 minutes to the geraniums and there are 42 million of the fuckers. Which Mel has to examine, every last one, before selecting. She’s very thorough. I was tearing out my spleen.

And thinking who will take over from Theresa May. Apparently David Lidington is the favourite. WHO??? Yes, the unofficial deputy PM, no-one knows about him, no preconceptions, no-one cares about him one way or the other so he can just step in, do what he can, take us (screaming and crying) out of Europe and then never be heard of again.

The list of applicants for the job of ‘interim’ is not long. It comes with ‘your career ends here’ caveat.

I’m gonna mow the lawn.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

Britain has very strict gun laws. I approve of any such laws which would prevent people such as me from owning a gun. Because I don’t need one. Though I would like one. In fact I’d like 3. A big one, a powerful one and a big, powerful one. But I’m not allowed. I could apply for special license but I don’t think that BECAUSE SO MANY DRIVERS NEED SHOOTING! is an acceptable reason, in the eyes of the law. Or because next time someone comes into the driveway to steal the covers from Mel’s door mirrors, I’M GONNA TAKE ‘EM OUT WITH AN AK47!!! Once again, even though such an action would have massive public support, particularly those of the public who’ve had door mirror covers nicked, it is deemed, legally, ‘excessive’. As is the price of replacement door mirror covers on a fucking Mini.

But gun laws are there to basically keep guns out of the hands of psychos and sociopaths. Who you never know are in such categories by merely asking if you have a criminal record and pay your council tax on time. In America its different. They have a constitutional ‘right to bare arms’ and thus you have to prove yourself unworthy to be refused a license. The opposite of any civilised country. Over there there is a right and only the really bad and dangerous have that right removed. In sensible countries like England and New Zealand you have to prove you have a right and a need before you can own a gun. And for some reason, ‘farmers need guns’. And as everyone in New Zealand is either a farmer or is related to one, because there’s nothing else to do there, they basically have no restrictions. Even over here there‘s an ‘all farmers get guns’ law. All you need is a tractor and that Colt 44 Magnum is yours.

Why do farmers need guns? Ok, some do, but those who grow rape seed? Corn? Wheat?? What ya gonna shoot? Beetles? A rampaging ant?

But ok, so farmers need guns, let’s let them all have a shotgun. Damage limitation. You wouldn’t want to get hit in the face from a shotgun blast but otherwise unless you’re six feet away, you’re probably not going to get killed by one. That doesn’t apply to clay pigeons.

So the manufacturers, ever open to a market opportunity and aware of how guns have a desirability that is inexplicable in normal society (excluding the USA then) they make super shotguns. They make pump action ones which can hold way more than 2 measly cartridges at a time. And now they make ‘semi-automatic’ ones, which fire up to ten at a time, and have widgets on the barrels to contain the usual ‘spread’ of the pellets, making them much more dangerous. Obviously much better for the farmers. Oh, and much better for the psychos too. Like the New Zealand Aussie nutter who cannot be named (like Voldemort), because that’s what he used. So we know they work.

They’re now banning ‘semi-automatics’ in New Zealand. They’ve never been legal here, other than those shotguns. Which probably require some new legislation.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

Those poor Scotland fans, as they said on the news, had to travel through six time zones to watch their pathetically awful football team lower their bar even further by losing to a team 80 places below them in the rankings. Never before have so many kilts travelled to Kazakhstan. A country whose national sport is bear baiting. Or wife-stoning. No idea what they do there actually, its one of those wonderful, spice-route, mystery lands of the just further than the Middle East but not quite far enough to be the Far one, type destinations.

Six time zones. But they didn’t encounter Lila-time. It’s kind of its own ‘zone’. Exists only in her gorgeous but time-confused head. So when she called out this morning at 5.30, well actually I didn’t hear. Mel had to kindly (grrrrrrr) tell me. Lila was calling out for ‘Pappa A-dy’. She doesn’t have a specific problem with ‘n’s but being a true Londoner she can put glottal stops in wherever the hell she likes. It’s her right. I told her she needs to go back to sleep. Or ‘sweep’ as she calls it. I never said she wasn’t adorable, just time-confused. It’s the middle of the (FAAAARKIN’!!!) night, darling, you need to sleep. (I NEED TO SLEEP!!) No avail. So I tried lying on a bed with her instead. And demonstrating unselfishly what ‘going back to sleep’ looks like. She lay there for 3 minutes, eyes wide open, looking at me. Then started talking. Then bouncing. Jumping. Laughing. At which point I gave up to the enormous tide of energy that was engulfing my feeble attempts to find a few minutes peace and quiet.

(Note to self: when Lila is a stroppy, moany, tantrum-filled teenager sleeping til 3 in the afternoon; go round and jump up and down on her bed demanding ‘nursy rhymes’ on her ah-pad.)

And now we have a really really short delay on Brexit. Just a few hours, in relative terms. But somewhere in the next four days Mrs May is going to have a eureka moment. She’ll just ‘see the way!’ And all her party will agree, the Irish will love it, Jeremy Corbyn will kiss the soles of her leopard-print Jimmy Choos and all the Europeans will be kicking themselves (though not quite as hard as I’d like to kick them) that they couldn’t see such a thing that’s so obvious, so elegant, so neat and the perfect solution. We’ll leave with everything we ever dreamed of, the EU will pay US 39 billion and 42,000 new jobs will be created as tax levels plummet and duties on goods are made illegal.

I think I’ve spent too long in Lila-land.

Happy Friday

A xxxx