Andy's Glasses

Part 2.

We must have walked 10 miles today. Possibly more. All of it simply fabulous in the glorious Russian sunshine, Sunshine. We started with a ‘free walking tour’ which we always take in all cities we visit. Because they’re so much better than proper, pay-as-you-go tours because you only pay the guide what you reckon he/she was worth. And if they’re shit, then that’s all they’re gonna get. But if they’re good, you pay them in appreciation. So they always do it better. As did Anna today. And we learned more about Alexander the Great, Peter the Great, Catharina the Great. So I deduced that to be ‘The Great’ then you just call yourself that and let people argue the toss if they don’t think it a worthy title. Go on, criticise me, ya peasant serf, and starve for a year, see if I give a damn in my caviar baths with champagne showers. And some were good and some were bad but all got normally murdered by enemies (if they were bad) or by baddies (if they were good). Because the aristocrats didn’t want too much reform, too much leniency, they were all doing just fiiiiiiiiiiiiiine, thank you very much, and if 99.9% of the population were hungry and homeless, that was no skin off my powdered, pampered, perfumed nose. Piss off.

Thus the revolution. Had to happen. Been building up for centuries and then, in 1917, ka-boom, the inevitable became the new order. Marx, Lenin, Corbyn, all taking control of the land in the name of The People.

In the 1920s the communists were still making excuses as to why the vast majority of people in the country were still living on grass and air, so instead of regular meals or steady, paying jobs, they gave them really amazing tube stations. You can imagine the relief of some starving peasant out in the wilds of Siberia when he learned that St Petersburg now had superb art nouveau stations to rival those in Moscow. Like the one pictured here. Marble columns, beautiful flamboyant chandeliers, how could the good citizens not just love it?

The Russians today are living in ‘post-communism’. And our guide yesterday was passionate about her country. And its ‘freedoms’, which are, compared to the past, pretty vast. And she said what all Russians feel about Putin, that they live well under his leadership. Politics, poisoning and persecution of political foes come way second to food, house, car, health, education. So do they ‘love’ him? Irrelevant. Do they think they would live better under alternative rule? Never. And they all remember hunger and dark days. Only here could Putin represent ‘the light’, but he does, and they love him for it.

They still reserve the right to be rude and miserable though. Or we wouldn’t know they were Russians, would we?

Happy Monday

A The Great
xxxx

So a geezer called, modestly, ‘Peter the Great’, built himself a city. As ya do. If you’re a Tsar and own, quite literally, the entire fucking world. Bit like Putin today, but with less hypocrisy. Because Peter wasn’t a ‘communist’, wasn’t a ‘man of the people’, he was a god. From each, according to their ability, to… Me. That was his version of the famous Marxist mantra. So Peter built St Petersburg. And he built it proper.

It is simply the most beautiful city you’ve ever been in. Even if you haven’t been in it, that’s what it is. Everything is simply fucking massive. Every building a palace, every church a cathedral, every every bigger than anyone else’s. The roads are immense avenues, the parks are gorgeous, the canals and rivers wonderful and it smells a whole lot better than Venice. And the food is wonderful here too. They’ve moved on from ‘cabbage’ to all manner of wonders and the cafes and coffee shops are fantastic. Everything here is low-level. They still only build up to 4 stories high and only in the same basic style. Which I’ll call… St Petersburg style because I lack imagination and knowledge. Only the building known as ‘The Big House’ locally, or officially as the KGB local office is a bit higher. Take a really brave planning department jobsworth to argue that with them.

So in between Peter the Great and Starbucks a lot happened, which I’ve missed out. So I’ll fill you in quickly. There were 27, possibly 12, maybe 15 Tsars and Tsarinas (no glass ceiling in pre-revolutionary Russia; women could be Tsar and everyone else was exploited mercilessly but equally, men and women. The rest of the world took 300 years to catch up) From Peter to the last one, Nicholas the 2nd. Nicholas was the one who lost his job to the revolution in 1917 when Animal Farm happened. There were at least 1 other Nicholas, an Elizabeth, no Harrys but Alexanders and Anastasias and lots of Tsars. They all murdered predecessors, killed their grandparents, had children put to death, the usual aristocratic shit in pre-industrial Europe. Not very nice, but people generally don’t act very nicely when all the wealth beyond 15 imaginations is at stake.

Today its lovely. Yet is filled with Russians. Who are generally viewed as being rather cold, hard, arrogant, aggressive, nasty people. And on my second day I can honestly say that they’ve done nothing to even try to dispel that stereotype. Which actually makes it more fun. Can you make a Russian smile? I’m trying. Even when they do smile its a ‘lips-only’ kind of deal. The rest is still frowning. And that’s on glorious sunny days. As we approach ‘white nights’ and doesn’t get dark till 10.30 or 11. Can you imagine the misery in winter??

Happy Sunday. Meg & Harry are still married.

A xxxx

This was my third night camped out in Windsor. At least it hasn’t rained. Its been just fantastic, sitting on my folding chair on a really nice bit of pavement, outside Greggs bakery who provide me with all (the carbs and sugar) I need. The atmosphere is wonderful, almost ‘electric’ as our crowd of union-jack draped, Queen-mask wearing flag wavers all ask each other what, exactly, we’re doing here and what the fuck were we thinking?? 3 days of my life that I’ll never get back. The boredom, when the news cameras aren’t telling us to cheer and look happy, the morons you have to talk to telling you their stories of how long they queued up (5 days) to sign the Diana memorial book and how at the last Royal wedding they actually saw a sideways glance, between 90,000 moving heads, of Pippa’s arse as it wiggled up the stairs!! But then last night it was all suddenly worth it. Worth all the cynicism, all the ennui, of that terrible feeling of nihilistic existential worthlessness, when Wills and Harry came and walked, quite literally, within 173 yards of where I was standing up screaming at the top of my voice. It was just amazing. Spectacular. Made life worthwhile once more. So I put my glasses on and realised I’d actually been looking the wrong way at some security guards. And then I did actually see them, in the flesh. And they looked… errr… they looked totally different than they do on the tv. Somehow… more… real, less… less televised.

I love a royal wedding. It makes me realise just how important I am in this great monarchy…

Woah!!! Just had a terrible dream. Awful. Fell asleep here at Terminal 5 waiting for the flight to St Petersburg and really thought I was waiting for The Wedding. Nightmare. My ‘who killed JR?’ moment in history. Never mind, I’m going to Russia where they’ll probably have a different take on today’s nuptials. If only I spoke Russian I might get their doubtless barbed and nasty commentary on a. a monarchy, b. Britain, c. something so wonderfully undemocratic in the very homeland of democracy itself.

Putin isn’t like the Queen. He’s much much richer. As any good communist should be. Richer than 10 Methuselahs, 17 Abramoviches or 4753 Manchester City players. And he’s a ‘real man’, all that bare-chested horsemanship and martial-arty baldness. A man you really have to admire. Mainly because if you don’t he will just have you killed. Simple as that.

But am I nervous? Nah. Don’t really do ‘nervous’ about foreign lands. But I do about long queues at passport control at hostile airports manned by humourless automatons trained to hate everyone from everywhere.

Enjoy the wedding,

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

I genuinely worry about the people you see walking down the street glued to their phones. No matter how inappropriate the setting; busy central London tube station in the rush hour, travellers moving in all directions at once, and there’s a ‘tosser’ staring at his stupid fucking screen with a set of studio-quality speakers attached to both ears, expecting everyone to avoid his oblivious presence. And why I worry about them is because I really would like to kill them. But we know that. I have a thing about them. Selfish individuals so obsessed with their online presence that they forget their actual reality. Tossers. We all know them. Some of you ARE them! (You know who you are). But what about the next generation?

And here I have conducted an extensive (1 person), longitudinal (almost 14 month), rather obsessive study on the subject. The official title of the research is: An investigation into the post-natal effects of digitalisation on the development and wellbeing of neo-nates. The unofficial title is ‘Lila’.

Her mum was (and remains) a bit obsessive about many thinks concerning her babe. My babe. And one of her (many) ‘things’ was that Lila sees no tv. Other than occasionally football when Lila’s dad and me turn it on and hide the remote. This is a good thing. Let the child ‘read’. Or chew books, rather than screens. Let her play with good things rather than learn to veg out in front of a screen.

But somewhere down the line it all went pear shaped. As all best intentions generally do. At some point, when things were ‘down’ (all mum’s know such moments, dads too), Lila was shown a video clip on Mum’s phone. A Disney clip. From the movie ‘Frozen’. And Lila, who had generally ignored the tv when it was on after about 20 seconds, was transfixed. Crying for more. Ok, she bashes whatever screen she’s looking at until all the windows shut down or accidentally fires up the Uber app and orders a taxi to go to the Czech republic, but the thing is SHE KNOWS WHAT TO DO. And now, at 14 months, she knows not to touch it too much or her song vanishes.

And she’s learned that in a very short time. To the extent that mum & dad now have to ensure there are no phones or ipads around when Lila wakes up or that’s all she wants. In their absence Lila plays with anything, loves her books and acts like a ‘normal’, pre-techno baby. But if she see’s even a dead screen, she wants Frozen. To which she talks, rocks back and forth, dances and loves it so much that it takes all my energy and commitment not to just play it end-to-end for a whole day.

14 months old. What hope is there?

Off to Russia tomorrow. OMG! Its arrived. Or we’ll arrive. I’ve gone on the government website and will follow their advice. Turn up as a great fat man with tatoos, swear and shout and sing as if blind drunk and ensure I have a Cross of St George flag draped round my shoulders at all times. What could possibly go wrong?

Happy Friday

A xxxx

When does someone who is ‘not an antisemite’ become an antisemite? Interesting question. Took me ten minutes to sort out the wording. But the answer, even though you’d think it should be some event or duration, is in fact ‘Jeremy Corbyn’. And here’s why.

The Russians tried to murder a couple of people in Salisbury. Ok, no-one saw the poison in an envelope marked “if undelivered please return to the Kremlin” but really you didn’t need to. Everyone simply ‘knew’. Except Jeremy Corbyn. Who refused to make any assumptions, needed the full ‘due process’ and inquiries and investigations before he’d commit himself to make any remarks against (Mother) Russia or place blame or demand sanctions.

Fast forward just one little month and Syria attacks its ‘rebels’ in an horrendous gas attack. The worst of chemical weapons, chlorine, liberally used on a civilian population. Aided and abetted by Russia, obviously, they love a good poisoning. The world condemned the action and issued threats against Syria. The world except Jeremy Corbyn. “We don’t know for sure it was the Syrians” he said. We need proof. We need investigations, blah, blah, fucking blah.

On Monday 67 people were killed by Israeli soldiers on the Gaza border. And the first one to condemn the act almost immediately was… Jeremy Corbyn! Not only demanding condemnation from the international community but also ACTION! Jeremy Corbyn, the world’s most inactive, prevaricating, equivocating, fence-sitting, inquiry-demanding, pedantic, sure-of-all-the-facts-ingly annoying person of all time, cuts the crap for once and makes an instant stand.

I never mind criticism of Israel. Its more than allowed, its to be encouraged. As with all proper democracies, freedom of speech, freedom to disagree is essential. But when its wrong is when Israel is treated differently from others doing allegedly horrible things. When the virtues of considering all sides of the situation are suddenly, uniquely ignored. Palestinians got shot. We know that. Yet there was emphatically a context in which this occurred. One that Jeremy either chose not to consider or decided unilaterally was irrelevant. Or maybe because, as he has stated, ‘Hamas are HIS friends’. As, coincidentally, are shit-loads of other all-out, no-holds-barred antisemites.

Happy Liladay (started with all guns blazing at 5.45, bless…)

A xxxx

The situation in Israel is getting bleaker by the day. They opened the new American Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday and there were ‘protests’ by Palestinians. Those in the West Bank marched, held signs, shouted comments and generally, protested. Which they have every right to do in a democracy.

What happened in Gaza was different. These ‘protesters’ didn’t have banners and songs, they had slingshots, guns, molotov cocktails, rocks. And more importantly they carried with them the ultimate jihadi ideology. They were not only prepared to die for their cause but happy for anyone else to die too. And die, alas, they did.

There was a dead baby on the news last night. It was awful. She’d had a weak heart apparently and the tear gas from the Israelis caused her death. Which is terrible. But there is one question that the BBC didn’t think to ask:

WHAT THE FUCK WAS A BABY DOING IN WHAT EVERYONE KNEW WAS DESTINED TO BE A WAR-ZONE??? As it has been most days for the past few months.

I would have arrested the mother for gross negligence at best, for cynical exploitation at worst.

This was not a shopping mall. A school, a playground or a hospital. This is a desolate strip of land that is the border between Gaza and Israel. So the poor child was taken there and fulfilled her sweet little naive destiny of becoming the poster-corpse for Hamas. Sacrificed by her parents to become a PR campaign which has been bought at great expense by the BBC and most other media purveyors.

So as the world, including Theresa May, lambasts Israel for the deaths on Monday, there’s other questions that really need to be asked to put this in context.

If the population of Wales all joined ISIS and were intent on the destruction of England and death to all Englishmen, as sworn in their charter, would we open the gates and let them in with open arms? Particularly if they’d spent the last decade firing missiles at us and building tunnels to come over and kill people?

Hamas are ISIS. Hamas were ISIS long before ISIS even existed. They invented the suicide bomber. They used kids to do it. They set up missile launch sites in hospitals and school playgrounds to maximise the impact of any retaliatory strikes. But worst of all, they poison the minds of the normal people, sell them an ideology of death. Quite literally so as the families of suicide bombers are well ‘compensated’ financially by them. The same ideology that ISIS use when sending in entire families of suicide bombers to churches in Indonesia this weekend. Mum, dad and all the kids (young as 8), strapped into bombs and ‘happy’ to die for the cause.

So yes, I mourn the deaths of these poor, misguided, misled people, I mourn all death. But try to keep in mind just with whom Israel has to deal as it tries to protect its people.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Remember my name. I wanna live foreverrrrrr…

Do you want to live forever? I’m not sure if it was turning 60 wot done it but I find myself far more interested in articles and debates about assisted dying than I am about ‘living 30 years longer!’ Because who wants to live as a cabbage? With non-functioning limbs, heart-failure and no memory? At the first mention of ‘changing my nappy’ I’m fucking out of here, I can tell you. And despite the range of euthanasia discussions, I reckon, roughly, (very, very, VERY roughly) that 90% of people are in favour of just having the choice to choose when they go. A minister visited an elderly care home, non-dementia, and 49 out of 50 of the people living there were in favour. Just normal people. Its only that the government are making it such a mine-field that prevents there being a Dignitas centre in every Sainsburys. Of course the church and the Irish make a big fuss about all things that aren’t expressed literally in the bible, but normal people are all in favour. As long as ‘safeguards’ are in place for the ‘vulnerable’. Whatever the fuck that actually means. Because any system that is in place will unquestionably demand that the state of mind of the murderee be established by certain criteria. So where’s the problem?

But it doesn’t matter now anyway as we’re never gonna die. A professor at Harvard has come with a modestly named product: Rejuvenate Bio, which makes dogs, generally, Beagles, specifically, live longer!!! How he’s established this when he only did the trial last year I don’t exactly know. But that’s only because I’m not a scientist. But live longer they will. And now, having not even let the puncture wound from the injections on the poor doggies heal, he wants to extend the trials to humans too. See if we start sniffing each others arses and pissing on trees. Ok, that was crass. Because the drug, a genetic kind of deal, prevents heart failure and muscle wastage. Allegedly. And he reckons it will let us live to 130. Unfortunately we’ll all be dead by the time this claim is actually proven, obviously.

And losing your memory is no longer a problem anyway. Particularly if you happen to be a sea slug. They injected (they do a lot of that in America) these poor, rudimentary creatures with cells from other creatures which had been ‘trained’ in electric aversion stimuli (shine a light and follow it with an electric shock and pretty damn soon you freak out when you see that light; I tried it myself…). And the sea slugs, who’d never ‘seen that light’ freaked out as if they had. Wow. As if some part of memory of one animal can be transferred, in just the cellular make-up, to another. So if you injected me with some of Stephen Hawking’s cells I’d ‘remember’ the grand unified theory of everything! Or I’d just sit in a chair dribbling.

I love science. But I really love scientific claims. And I want to know how making some poor marine low-life freak out to unnecessary stimuli is going to help MEEEEE.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

That’s it then. Its over. Football’s finished for another ‘year’. Manchester City won the league. In case you missed that. Happened (really) in November but to please the statisticians they weren’t awarded the title officially til last month. There was no question in anyone’s mind.

Lots of questions about neighbouring Manchester United though. Like ‘how the fuck could they come second when they played shit all year, scraped past a few unworthies and struggled with form, with players, certainly with their manager, all season?’ But that’s how it goes.

The battle for fourth and with it the final Champions League place went to… Liverpool!!!! (Cheers, applause, whooping and shouting but probably not in West London). So Chelsea missed out and landed in 5th. No cups, no champions league slot, probably no manager (again). Shame.

Arsenal don’t get a mention because I’m only discussing the top teams.

And then there’s third place. Secured yesterday with a ridiculous, if not to say ‘thrilling’ win over Leicester at Wembley. 5-4 was the final score after being 3-1 down then settling at 4-all before Harry Kane (who else??) hit the winner. Brilliant end to the season, yippee-yi-yaay.

And Leicester are making those noises about managerial change. Again. Because they finished 9th in the league and that is, quite frankly, awful. Apparently.

So everyone wants to win the league but it is, in case you missed that too, rather difficult since funding changed to allow laundered money from overseas gangsters to flood into our national game. So most teams are happy/content to finish ‘top half’ or even to just survive another year to enjoy the riches of Premiership tv money. Not Leicester.

They came up just a few years ago. They had such a poor first season that they were the bookies favourites to get relegated in the next, their second year. But instead they won the title. Which was brilliant, which was inspiring, which was simply magnificent and was a totally freak event. It was a flash of lightening lighting your barbecue. It was a lottery win. It was spinning ‘heads’ 100 times in a row. But win the league they did. And were so pleased that early the next season they sacked the manager responsible for that victory (though I think God played possibly a bigger part than Claudio Ranieri). Because they weren’t by then playing well ‘enough’. They’d slipped to shoddy mid-table and going nowhere. The next manager was sacked after a few months as the team still hadn’t won any more silverware, even though it was only March.

And now after a very up-and-down season they finished 9th and there’s talk of sacking another manager.

Because for some reason, no-one at Leicester views their immense achievement as the weird oddity that it was. They see it as their place in the grand scheme. No-one there seems to accept the reality that even with a few exceptionally gifted players Leicester are a very mediocre team. Yet the powers there keep measuring things against their league win. As if it is now their right. And their rightful place. It can only end in tears. Probably Gary Linneker’s.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

The timing was perfect. I was always arguing with Debi about ‘her fucking boyfriend!!’ and she moaned similarly with me. Which seems fair but only from my side of things. Susan was bemoaning lack of quality time, though she didn’t say if that was ‘good quality’ or ‘shit quality’, just the time, and Ivani kept asking why I hadn’t seen her yet? And my parents were coming over, for a holiday but also to actually see their ‘baby’ who’d been absent for about 6 months from their lives. So I decided, in a benchmark decision that essentially painted the rest of my life, to run away. With my parents, to Palm Springs, picking up Ivani on the way, as Redlands University is quite near. In that American way that it ‘should’ be really near but is in fact 18 hours of hard driving away. And a fab weekend it was too, as Palm Springs is always fab.

And it would seem that this semi-pornographic Utopian dream that I was engaged in was all there was to life in California for me in 1982. Well it wasn’t. There was drink and drugs and partying too. Oh, and work. Just a little to break up the… monotony? And to pay for the lifestyle.

Spurs had won the FA Cup, again, and although I watched the first and really boring, drawn match, it was about 6 in the morning so I wasn’t singing as loudly as I had been when at Wembley the previous year. And Britain went to war with Argentina, well, Maggie did, and I was kind’a only peripherally aware of it. In America the news about Iowa corn, Florida oranges, Chicago rapists, will always take precedence over anything ‘outside’. And true, I wasn’t such a great newshound as I am now so the whole Falklands thing was kind’a outside my immediate sphere. I walked into a record store in Encino one day, just to cruise round, wearing a pair of jeans (I know you’re keen to visualise) and my Elvis Costello t-shirt, ‘a tour to Trust’, which I’d bought at the Hammersmith Odeon concert when the Trust album was released. And I walked into… Elvis Costello. I looked at his face, I looked down at the same thing on my t-shirt, back to him, he smiled, I smiled, a million words were silently exchanged, most of them from me saying ‘I’ll ALWAYS love you!!!’ and we passed. Ships in the night. And to celebrate I bought Combat Rock by the Clash. To this day I don’t think there’s ever been a more totally, every-single-fucking-track, brilliant album ever made.

And then as summer gave way to… errrr… more summer, its the only season you get in southern California, things started to wind down. Ivani went back to Brazil, Debi moved out to Santa Monica but we were still some kind’a weird undefined item that seemed so easy over there at that time, as was happening with Susan too. And then Steve and Joey, the New York ‘hit-men’ were called back to their home City by work. So as we wondered how the death rate in the Big Apple was about to turn northwards, they invited us, on the eve of their departure, to a big ‘reveal’. To know the truth. To unlock the always-locked extra bedroom!! Holy shit. Would it be safe??

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

I have a hedge. Its a lovely hedge. Its made from beech trees. Which, unlike the more normal privet hedges, are deciduous.

You bored yet? Gardening?? I’ve never written gardening before because… because… because I haven’t. But its fascinating? exciting? scintillating? erotic? well, its about gardens an’ shit, innit? And you have to have something to do when the football season ends on Sunday.

So my hedge is made of little trees, which shed their leaves every October, all over the fucking everything, as if they don’t have a care. And then, for 7 months the hedge is a bunch of dead-looking twigs and branches. Which is fine. Its winter. Ok, and a bit of spring but as spring never really sprung here til last week, I’m happy with the feeling of bleakness that the bare, bald, brown hedge provides.

Then in May something weird happens. Something spooky, spiritual, almost, when a few leaves appear. Then a few more. And then, all over the space of about 10 days, it turns green. But not just, like ‘a bit green’, no. It turns FUCKING GREEN!!! with 3 exclamation marks. And vibrant and fluffy and soft and it says ‘SUMMER’S HERE!’ and just looks gorgeous. And that happened yesterday, so I thought I’d share.

And now we enter the fabulous 10-day period of wonderment and delight, every time we come home and see all that greenness and life and vitality. After that two things happen. Firstly it gets covered in greenfly and whitefly, no matter how much toxic shit and carcinogenic, fox-killing, bird-eating poison we spray on it. And secondly, the bitch from Barnet council phones me and tells me that the hedge is overhanging the pavement and needs to be ‘seriously!’ cut back.

‘FUCK OFF BITCH!’ I say to her. But only internally as its no way to start a negotiation. The hedge is fine, I say, its gorgeous, leave it alone and go fill in some potholes which are a genuine plague. Overhanging hedges don’t ruin cars, potholes do. She sends me photos. Seriously, emails them over with all quantified measurements of terminal overhangingness and projections from our property onto public land!! and shit. My normal argument is ‘but it looks lovely’. The ratbag doesn’t care. Nor just she seem to care about the dozens of hedges nearby which you have to avoid by stepping into the road. I don’t care about those either, they’re just hedges.

Its written into our house deeds that our house, like all others in the conservation area, has to have a hedge. Just as Dame Henrietta Barnet built it a hundred years ago. She never mentioned overhanging the pavement by 42cms being a crime. (If only it was just 42cms). So we prune it back about 6 inches and I sent her photos. Which have been edited, photoshopped and prove that ‘the camera does lie’ and that’s it for another year.

I await her phone call. I’m reading on how to train white and greenfly to attack.

Happy green-fingered Friday

A xxxx