Andy's Glasses

Ok, I miss Lila. I would. She’s special. And I would be missing the football, but its internationals and I really don’t care about them one little jot. Although if I’d have known Israel were playing Scotland on Thursday I might have been tempted to go to Haifa and watch. It’s only an hour away. But I didn’t in fact realise it until Friday morning which, even here, is a bit on the too late side. I also missed ‘the (very very other) royal wedding’. In which an unknown royal married a completely unknown un-royal and they rode off down Windsor Park in a carriage.

I also missed Celebrity Silly Dancers so would normally have no clue (nor even vague interest) in ‘the reaction of the audience to ‘that kiss’’, except it was on the front page of the Sunday Times. I mean; WHO CARES???? Someone must, but who, exactly, is bothered that some Eastern-Euro-dancing-babe was caught kissing an L-list celeb when (probably) one or other of them may or may not have been married to another at the time of the kissage.

What I’ve also blessedly missed has been all the latest Brexit discussions. I look at the paper every day and I think; Brexit… hmmm… Theresa May… David Davis… hmmm… customs unions, trade deals, hard borders… NOOOOO!!!! And I turn the page. Digitally, obvs, cos I only have it on the iPad here. I simply can’t bear it any longer. Reading about Brexit is like Arsenal’s ‘invincibles’ season; really horrible and gives you a headache and makes you want to cry.

But David Davis is trying to unseat Theresa. Boris is waiting. All kinds of Tory ne’er do-wells are loitering in the wings. In that ‘support Theresa fully’ way that means they’d kill her in a second if they could do so without getting caught. And in another room sits Le Corbyn. Doing nothing, saying very little and just biding his time before getting his opportunity to join us with Russia, murdering the monarchy, removing the word ‘democracy’ from our constitution and installing Momentum as the Red Army/KGB.

Make it go away.

Happy Last day of holiday

A xxxx

They’re having a competition for jet pack, errr, people. Those who ‘fly’ around the place, almost like Iron Man but without the extreme levels of sophistication that only the truly talented, like the CGI dudes at major film studios, can really achieve. Robert Downey accelerates up past the ozone layer in 4 seconds whereas these guys sort of drift about 12 feet into the air in a more wobbly, drifty kind of manner.

And I want one. Or want to be one. I want a jet-pack. It’s probably all I’ve ever really wanted. Other than (please complete standard and very very long list here of all ‘normal’ things, all ‘mortal’ things). I told Mel that I need a jet-pack. Right, she said, you‘ve always wanted to be Superman. As if that’s a bad thing. But if I was Superman, I informed her, lovingly, I wouldn’t need a FUCKING JET-PACK!!!

But as its too late for me to be born on the planet Krypton and sent as a baby in a mini-baby-type-Lila-size space ship for planet Earth, Iron Man it’ll have to be. And he can only fly with assistance. So I need a jet-pack. Simple.

In case I haven’t mentioned, I love Israel. And its hot here, and we’re on the beach, which is miles long and clean and beautiful. But then Saturday comes and it all goes to shit. Because they let the Israelis out. For the sabbath. It’s ‘their Sunday’. Issa biblical thing, innit. Observe the sabbath to keep it holy. And ‘holy’ in the modern Israeli definition is thus: find a beach, preferably where Andy is enjoying peace and quiet, invade it in your thousands, shout and scream, bring the kids and hit very loud balls with bats for hours on end.

The beach gets busy. The poolside gets busy. It all gets busy. But its still wonderful. Just in a noisier, crowdier way.

Suffering Saturday (I really expect no sympathy whatsoever)

A xxxx

Man plans, God laughs, what does EasyJet do?

The errant daughter, the one that we banished to Germany because she’s deemed too evil to live in Britain, flew over to join us today, from Berlin. I was tracking the flight on the EasyJet system, which is in fact quite impressive and genuinely ‘live’. You press on the right little plane on the big map and it tells you how fast its going, the altitude, a whole host of irrelevant and meaningless numerical data. Fascinating. Most important is: ‘arrival time: 1.24pm’. Then it changed. ‘Your flight is no longer in the air’. Oh, ok. One hour into a 3 hour flight and its… its… WHERE THE FUCK IS IT????

It’s landed in Budapest, is where it is. Sick person on board. Had to emergency land for medical attention. Here’s the funny thing. He was dead ill when he boarded the plane. In a wheelchair, with a serious heart condition, nurse in tow, the patient the colour of lime jelly on a grey pavement. And he was ill! On the plane!!! Who could have predicted that??? Tossers. They shouldn’t have flown him in the first place.

Anyway, enough about him. He’s probably very happy in a Hungarian hospital. I wish him well.

So with just a mere 2 hour delay, the plane arrived about half past 3. But the good thing was; we didn’t leave for the airport until the new, re-scheduled arrival time so that was all good. And the babe arrived. Which was, quite frankly, wonderful. How long that feeling will last is best not to ask.

And after a brief lunch we enjoyed the last of the day’s sunshine.

I love this place.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

A third of under-25s in Britain do not drink alcohol. Not a drop. The rest address the whole ‘getting pissed’ thing with a disinterest verging on the plainly sensible. It’s almost as if they view binge-drinking, throwing up in Ubers, falling over drunk and waking up in the kerbside as some kind of bad thing.

What are the 16-25 year olds going to do in the park at night? To wash down the drugs with? How are they going to explain dancing like a total nob-end when they’re sober? Sexual inadequacy will have no excuse other than sexual inadequacy. Drunken fumblings (not like Kavanaugh, normal ones) will just become fumblings of a more pathetic, inexperienced and clueless nature. Or just plain ‘sexual assault’. The kids will no longer have a reason to pick a fight with the biggest guy in the pub. What will they do at football matches? Rush down at halftime for a bottle of Evian?

The whole fabric of the ‘British way of life’ is being compromised by these selfish, egotistical young people who consider themselves too sophisticated and enlightened to follow the traditions of their cultural heritage. Of drunkenness. At every opportunity. In excess. Which has always been moderated by an ethos of ‘until its all gone’. Then you steal someone else’s and the fights start. How could these youth not want to embrace that??

Ok, that’s a little extreme. Sobriety can only be a good thing. Apparently. Just doesn’t feel that way once the first Scotch of a Friday night has settled itself warmly in your brain. Abstinence may make the heart grow stronger (and protect you from cancers, liver disease, blood issues and a whole host of baddies) but there’s a little bit of me that actually mourns this new information.

I like the fact that teens don’t listen to their parents. I like they fact that they question everything and demand empirical experience before making judgments. That they try alternatives before adhering to some set of normalising rules. I am aware that there is a difference between ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘thinking smashed out-yer-box’ but both are expressions of expansive minds. Just ones that are expanding in slightly different directions. Possibly a yin and yang thing.

Ok, I just fear the word ‘abstinence’ like I fear the word ‘censorship’ and the word ‘don’t!’

I need a beer.

Happy Wednesday from the Promised Land

A xxxx

It had to happen. Man can only work, play, tour, run around like a headless chickens, baby-care for so long and then he (or in fact she, not in reference to any impending trans events coming soon in my life, but because women can get tired too) needs to rest. So we went to Russia in May but it wasn’t restful. Avoiding the KGB alone is exhausting before you’ve even started the normal tourist shtick. We went to Rome for a wedding and ran round like mad things so as not to miss any church, temple, Pope or any of the ‘must sees’ in the Eternal City. So we needed to rest. Just rest. And sun. We always need that. And when I say ‘we’, of course I mean ‘she’.

So we’re in Israel. The land of my people. And, unfortunately, as history has shown and continues to show, the land of lots of other’s people too. Or, in fact, possibly fortunately. Because the Arabs who live here, in Israel, are lovely, friendly, work in the supermarket we went to last night and emphatically add to the multi-culturalism of the place. So just for one single ‘bang on the drum’, the peaceful Arabs who live here, who’ve always lived here, are an important and necessary and totally included part of ‘Israel’. It’s only those who live under the Hamas spell and therefore train 8 year-olds to murder innocent civilians, who represent a problem for which walls get built and shit takes place.

Meanwhile, I’m going to lie in the sun and think of England. Or possibly Lila. Maybe Spurs. But its only for a week so I better think quickly.

And its only a 5 hour flight. Which manages to take an entire fucking day. We left home at 4.30 in the morning and arrived, local time, 6 o’clock in the evening. That ain’t right.

But at least I didn’t miss any football. That was all played on the weekend. And Spurs won. Which was fantastic, in a really, totally, absolutely un-fantastic way. We went 1-0 up (against frikkin, lowly) Cardiff after 10 minutes and… and… and that’s how it stayed. Love the 3 points but a bit worried about the total display. Arsenal saw off Fulham in some style, Liverpool and Man City couldn’t breach each other’s defences Chelsea won easily.

But Manchester United were something else. I watched the first half and was thrilled that lowly, can’t-buy-a-win Newcastle ended up 2-0 to the good. Shame, for them, that they had to play the second half. Which the Mancs won 3-0. Making a final score of… whatever. Too early for maths. Morinho exploded at the press telling them ‘fuck off you sons of whores’. There’s an inquiry. Though only by linguists as he used Portuguese to say it. Yet even with the win, you have to feel Jose is on borrowed time. Yes, he managed to rally the team of massively over-priced mega-stars to beat the team second from bottom in the league, but it really shouldn’t be that hard. They really shouldn’t have been so terrible in the opening 45. Or, as say in Israel: all good fun.

Happy holidays

A xxxx

…young and sweet only 17… that was me. In 1973. I was… the Dancing Queen! And I revisited 1973 last night for a friend’s 60th birthday party. It (thank fucking Christ) wasn’t fancy dress, but musically it was as as 1970s as a pair of ‘loon pants’, platform shoes and LSD. And thus was nostalgic. Even though a lot of what was played was what I’d have then (and, possibly now) described as ‘shit’. The DJ, obviously given parameters way too flexible for my own rather selective taste, went just a touch too far down the pop trail with T-Rex, crossed the line with Sheena fucking Easton and went way into the red zone with ‘I’m in the mood for dancing’. The worst song ever made. Because its banal, repetitive, stupid, screechy and you can’t not dance to it. If you’re in such a mood. Therefore you have to hate the song for its cynically commercialised awfulness, whilst you try not to move to its rhythms.

And thereby hangs my own personal crisis. Well it was ‘back in the day’, now I don’t give a shit what people think. Which you’d know if you’d seen me dance. But back then my world was divided into the music I LISTEN to, which had to be of certain types, had to show musical integrity, had to be unusual, obscure and so far beyond ‘not commercial’ as to be almost unlistenable to. Sort of like Pink Floyd. Except I didn’t like them very much. And I liked rock. Hard, heavy, proper rock. Not glam rock, not hair rock, not bunches of American pretty boy pretenders, I wanted rock like wot they made in Birmingham. And even folk wot they made in Newcastle. But I also loved Bowie and Lou Reed and Talking Heads and pretty much anything that came out of New York.

But the other side of the great divide was what I liked to dance to. Because that was so different. I didn’t want to take acid and spend 4 hours shaking my head around to music that was otherwise beyond bodily expression. I wanted funk music. Not pseudo funk, not ‘pop with a funky beat’, I wanted the real deal. I wanted… ‘imports!!!’ No such thing now, music is totally internationalised and available to eat before Taylor Swift has strummed the last chord in the studio. But back then music was very much defined along national lines and only came in… hard copy. Called ‘records’. That you had to buy (download). And lots of records deemed unlikely to sell in vast numbers simply didn’t arrive on these shores. So you had to go to specialist record stores or proper nightclubs (even if you were just a few years shy of legal entry) to hear them. And to dance to them. So I went to a place called ‘Countdown’, a little club in the West End, and ‘Funky Nassau’ (then an import, only released in Britain about 3 years later) changed my life. Forever!! Ish. Hardcore dance tracks that had the added kudos of being unheard of by most people. The music snob’s dream.

I’m still a terrible music snob but I’ll dance to almost anything. With sufficient volume and sufficient alcohol.

Happy nostalgia

A xxxx

The front page headline on last night’s evening standard read: “royal invite for NHS Doc who helped princess walk tall”. I mean it didn’t have any !!!!! after it but it could well have done. And we still would have had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. But of course (???) its about Princess Eugenie who is getting married next weekend. Of course. We’re all excited and riveted and really NEED to know that the surgeon who sorted out her dodgy back, aged 12, gets an invite to the ‘Royal Wedding’ of the… month. Not of the year, Harry and Meg already done dat. Relegating this one to the top of everyone’s ‘who cares?’ pile.

I kind’a knew Eugenie was getting married, there was an article a while back about the BBC stating that they wouldn’t be filming it. Errrr… there’s a ‘Gardener’s World’ special about Japanese knotweed scheduled. Hmmm… we’re showing a compilation of out-takes from Celebrities on skates doing silly things. It clashes with the football. Anything, just NOT EUGENIE’S FUCKING WEDDING!

But why? She’s a royal, ain’ she? She’s a granddaughter of the Queen. Just like Harry. But a gel. Even got the ginger hair. The only difference is; no-one cares about her. Nor about her mother. The ‘saintly’ Sarah. Fergie, as she was known. Before she became a financial whore. Even Prince Andrew was shamed in various get-richer schemes and dodgy deals, making promises about his connections and influence. The whole family is a bit on the sorry side.

Why that was a front page headline on the day we almost started a war with Russia I’ll never know.

Meanwhile, back in Australia, they’ve shown once again why that is the land that God not only deserted but put there simply as a punishment. Which is why he loaded it with all of the most toxic, deadly, venomous and evil creatures not found anywhere else on His planet. They have the most deadly jelly-fish (kill ya dead from 100 yards away), the most dangerous spider, the most wicked snakes, the sharks are fucking everywhere and the drivers are terrible. But we know all that.

What we didn’t know was that they also have the most deadly sea snakes too. Who’d’a guessed? So when there’s no shark warnings and you go for a paddle in the shark-netted area, just to be safe, and think that it must be the best place in all of Australia as all those land killing creatures can’t follow you, you get bitten by a sea snake and, like the British kid the other day, you fucking DIE!

We’re going to Australia at Christmas. I’m not getting out of the car. After checking for spiders first, obviously.

Happy horrible pissing-down Saturday

A xxxx

The wonderful thing about Russians is that Russians are wonderful things. Sorry, that was ‘tiggers’ but I’m sure Pooh Bear will forgive for me borrowing his phrase. Because Russians are wonderful, never think otherwise. They drug their entire athletics team, orders coming right from the Kremlin, which has its own doping department, an under-secretary for performance enhancement and a pharmacy. They send agents to Salisbury to murder enemies of the state with chemical weapons. They hack the entire planet, from American elections to Brexit votes. Their Ministry of Hacking is now the biggest building in Moscow. Certainly with the most aerials. And the most nerds.

But all the espionage, the subterfuge, the cheating, the murders and other dastardly deeds are nothing compared to the Russia’s biggest agency of all. The Department for Denial. You’d think it would be just one man. Sergei. Who sits there with a rubber stamp which says (backwards, obviously, cos its a stamp, and probably in Russian): DAT IS A LIE!!!!! He has others which say ‘WE DID NOT DO DAT!’ and another, using google translate after they borrowed it from Trump: ‘FAKE NEWS!!’

But in fact those Russians have elevated the previously innocuous art of denial to levels never before plumbed. Maybe that should be ‘depths’. Whatever. And written across the gateway to the Agency for Denial is the legend: WE KNOW NO SHAME.

Because quite frankly, its become an embarrassment. You can say that two murderous spies were ‘just tourists’ all you want, however laughable it appears, but when they turn out to be ex-high ranking military, now presumed KGB (you can change the acronym all you like, the intention and the methodology remain constant. NKVD, GRU, yeah, really), those denials get a bit limp. But still continue.

So now we have the Fab Four. They went to Amsterdam just after the Skripal ‘event’ and hacked into the Office for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons by using a rented car stuffed with hacking shit. All manner of cloak-and-daggery were in there, of the modern, cyber variety. All four are KGB, all travelling on sequential diplomatic passports and all caught totally red-handed (what other colour could it be?) in mid-hack, with all 12 phones (12?) and lap-tops and equipment packed with incriminating shit, what can Russia do?

Deny. That’s what it can do. Accuse the world of being ‘spy-obsessed’ and feed their own population its usual state-controlled pack of lies.

Putin, himself ex-KGB (isn’t everyone?), will be really embarrassed by this. Not for the ‘mea culpa’ effect but for the sheer incompetence of the exponents. If the Fab Four aren’t already dead, their futures look bleak.

Another interesting question is why we’re only just hearing about this now, when the arrests were made 6 months ago. Hmmm…

Your in denial

A xxxx

Who is the greatest footballer in the world? Simple question; its either Messi or Ronaldo. Though really, the voting is pretty much over. Ronaldo is a brilliant footballer but is seldom named alongside the Peles and Maradonas and Cruyffs in ‘best player ever’ context. Whereas Messi is.

But all is not well and lovely in the lives of these 2 megastars of immense mega-ness and super-stardom. A girl has named Ronaldo as her sexual abuser and rapist 10 years ago. He took her to a hotel room and ‘allegedly’ didn’t heed her shouts of NO! Though he is Portuguese and maybe didn’t understand the language. She was raped. Allegedly. Ronaldo denies all such actions and is shocked and saddened by the horrific nature of that type of crime. I almost believed him, on the basis that I’ve always reckoned he’s gay. But that may just be my own misunderstanding. So they’re now investigating this historic crime. And it shed light on the fact that the young lady in question was given the sum of $375,000 and an injunction to keep Shtum. Which, I grant you, is a slightly odd thing for a totally innocent man to do, but we don’t question. Especially as its only about 4 days wages for Christiano.

Messi too is no innocent. He too is guilty of a sustained and continuous assault in Wembley last night, and what you’d have to call the ‘rape’ of a perfectly good football team. What other term could be chosen to describe being royally fucked, totally against your will, despite repeated and constant protestations to STOP!??

Those who were at Wembley last night to witness this abuse against the team they all love, oddly feel privileged to have been there. Watching a man (no longer a ‘boy’ he’s 31 now, even though he still looks 12, plus the tattoos) at the very top of his game. And to put that in context, ‘his game’ has always been 10 times better than anyone else’s so he has a very high baseline.

I wasn’t there. I was watching another little person. Even smaller than Messi. And she was asleep anyway, I just like watching.

Since 1970 I’ve viewed Pele as the greatest player ever, probably the greatest that there ever could be. But every time I watch Messi I see that crown slipping his way.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Whenever I see one of those photos of ‘hunter’ sitting by dead prey holding his (or her, as animal murdering is definitely egalitarian and non-discriminatory) rifle, I feel a bit sick. And today there’s a photo in the paper of Mark Bristow doing just that. Mark and dead zebra. Mark and dead buffalo. Mark and dead leopard. Nice. Holding his gun and dressed in ‘camo’. Cool.

The issue is that Mark advises a ‘big cat’ conservation organisation on certain days of the week, then goes out shooting those big cats on others. That way there’s no conflict of interest. His argument (all THEIR arguments) is that by paying licensed people to shoot big game, he is in fact injecting much-needed cash into the animal conservation and anti-poaching system. And at $100k a big animal, its a lot of money. There’s also the ‘culls are needed to protect the whole environment’ argument, much favoured by fat white men with big rifles.

Yet all that, true as some of it might even be, is mere justification. It’s trying to find a reason that is socially acceptable to defend the indefensible. Those reasons are not WHY they do it. They’re just, in their mind, a context which allows them to do it. They’d do it anyway.

My concern is the minds of people who want to kill animals, just for ‘sport’. Though any definition of any sport involves some form of ‘competition’ and zebra vs high-powered, telescopic-sighted hunting gun at 1000 feet is simply not a competition. Why not use a fucking tank. Oh, because then the money shot (man and corpse) wouldn’t be so good with half an elephant’s brain distributed around the hunter’s feet.

I’d really like to know what motivates a (presumably) clever man, the CEO of a Footsie 100 company, to want to kill defenceless animals. I need to know where the pleasure comes from. If he fought elephants, hand to… errr… hand to trunk, then I could see both sport and some kind of warped reasoning. Fighting a lion with your bare hands; that’d separate the men from the conservationists. But at least I could understand that a bit.

If you have a child who kills insects and small animals on a regular basis, you have a problem. You have a potential psycho on your hands and you rush to a child psychologist for help. Because killing things just because you really want to is not in any way normal. ‘Game hunting’ is the same behaviour in rich, (always) white, adults.

Lock ‘em up.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx