Andy's Glasses

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

When Spurs lost to West Brom on Saturday I cried. Metaphorically, literally, copiously, voluminously, uncontrollably, desperately, depressingly. In sheer frustration, despair, anguish, anxiety, despondency and because I was really fucking pissed off. We’d managed to lose a game, seconds before the final whistle, to the worst team in the country (at the time) and in doing so were once again plunged into that horrendous end of season ‘champions league panic’. I do realise this is football’s version of a ‘first world problem’ in that there are about 14 teams who’d take 5th, or 6th, even 16th place with great thanks and a sigh of relief. But I’m not talking about Arsenal.

We just needed to win and we were sitting pretty. But we lost, which made it nasty and slippery and tested my confidence in my new-found ability to only ‘look upwards’ when all I could see was Chelsea just over my shoulder creeping up. Because only two out of Spurs, Liverpool and Chelsea can get into the top 4 slots. And we’d had our name written large on one of them, until Saturday. And then on Sunday when Chelsea beat Liverpool I should have been happy. Because Liverpool (looking up) were ours for the taking. But if I succumbed to the briefest of downward glances I saw those bastards at Chelsea just over my left shoulder (too painful to look over my right one).

So two matches left to play, the first of which was Newcastle last night at Wembley. And we cruised to an agonising, painfully woe-stricken, awkward and clumsy victory. And probably one which never tasted sweeter. Lila’s mum and dad went, abandoning their baby at our house. And her dad messaged me that ‘we limped home’. But I’ll take it. And sing and fucking dance for a week. Because with Chelsea just drawing with Huddersfield (thus taking them out of relegation danger) we have a Euro slot guaranteed. Set in stone. Liverpool and Chelsea be damned. They can do what they want on the final day, I’m looking up. Because if we win we go third. I’m happy with 4th but want 3rd, just because.

Up, down, up down, shake it all about. I just don’t care any more.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

I find myself suddenly in the unique and somewhat uncomfortable position of agreeing with Donald J Trump. He of the world’s largest signature, most flamboyant combover and (usually) the most moronic comments. But this was no tweeted soundbyte. This was no twice-repeated and thus thrice-meaningless phrase. This was a speech. With whole words and sentences in joined-up writing. And what he said was, when distilled down to its true and inner meaning: “I don’t fucking trust Eye-rannn!!” And thus he scuppered ‘the deal’. A word I’m growing to hate more with every day of his presidency.

The ‘deal’ hatched by Obama and a few Euro-nations involved promises from Iran about the extent and uses of its nuclear stockpile. Which had to be closely monitored. To ensure that it was used for powering the nation’s tvs and plug-in cars, and emphatically NOT for nuclear weapons. And if Iran promised this then the rest of the world would lift trade sanctions on that country. Which translates as ‘buying its oil once more’. Which we now do. Shit-loads of it. 8 times more than we did before the sanctions were lifted.

So Iran gets its nuclear POWER, and it gets to earn lots of money in exported oil. And what do we get? Ahhhhh, according to nobel-winner Barak Obama, we get ‘world peace’. Nothing more noble than that. Because if Iran has no nuclear weapons then we all sleep better at night. Oh, and cheaper oil, which is of massive benefit to any and all post-industrial nations.

But the inspectors in the Iranian nuclear facilities haven’t been able to inspect as they’d like. They’re only allowed in certain places. Not the ones where they make the warheads- ooops!!! Where they make nuclear power stuff that’s a bit more secret than the usual ‘plug-and-play’ type, so you’re not allowed in there.

But world peace is indeed the highest aspiration. And we must look at how Iran is now passionately involved in its pursuit. By running a 5-year proxy war in Yemen with the Saudis, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis. That’s fairly peaceful. Then there’s Syria where Iran’s airforce and military support Assad in his systematic murder of anyone and everyone who looks like they might be a ‘rebel’. Iran sends its Shia Militias everywhere to fight. Then it sponsors Hamas and Hezbollah with both arms and finances, that they might both attack Israel with greater potency, the nation Iran has sworn to ‘destroy’. And then there’s the possibility that if it is shown that Iran is nuclear then its most hated enemies in Saudi Arabia will go the same route. That’ll be peaceful.

So the question comes down to: do you trust Iran? Its simple. Trump doesn’t. I doesn’t(?) No-one really doesn’t. Thus Trump is… errrr… (this is hard)… Trump is… RIGHT!

Peaceful Wednesday

A xxxx

We’re a nation plagued by weather. And surprised by all of it. We’re all familiar with British Rail’s definition of ‘the wrong kind of snow’ (white, falls from the sky, cold, bit wet…) and particular types of rain (the eskimos have 100 words for snow, even the ones who don’t work for Eskimo Rail; we have 736 words for rain) which cause massive upset to our entire national infrastructure. But heat? HEAT??? That one really throws us. And produces several interesting evolutionary responses. The first being to jump into the car with all the family and head out on massively clogged roads, to the mating grounds and spawning sites of generations of antecedents. Like salmon swimming up the waterfalls, the legions of great unwashed flock to Southend and Brighton, to Lyme Regis and Clacton-upon-Sea. Where they adhere to the ancient, innate rituals. Like never being more than 4 inches in any direction away from another family. 700,000 people on 39 yards of beach. Its a collective thing, much like wilderbeasts in the veldt. Security in numbers. So you start the day nose-to-tail on the A12 or the A36 or whatever, and then, 14 hours later, when you’ve actually arrived AND found somewhere to park, you finally lie on the beach. With your head just touching the overhanging stomach of the 19-stone binkinied ‘babe’ on the adjoining towel. Heaven.

I just won’t do ‘traffic’ on bank holidays. Never. So instead Mel & I went for lunch in a fairly local park. Where they have an allegedly wonderful cafe. And as it was not only a bank holiday but the nicest, sunniest, most beautifully stunning bank holiday everrrrrrr, we figured no-one else would be there and we’d have the place to ourselves. The good news was that we did get a table. There must be 100 tables because its a fucking park so they just bring more tables out. No shortage of space. But, as I stood in the queue to order and pay for lunch, I learned that there was in fact a shortage of food. The owner, lovely if totally stressed-out Israeli dude, told me that not only had his staff been flat out since 8.30 that morning (it was by then about 3pm), but that they’d had to send out for more of virtually everything. So we’re ‘on a break’ so they don’t die. Come back in 15. Grrrrr…

And yet even I, the most impatient man God ever made (and he in fact made me himself), thought: ‘WTF?’ I’m in a gorgeous park, I have shade, I have sun, I’ve just got drinks (which hadn’t run out), just wait. And we did. And lunch was wonderful, eventually, almost dinner really.

I asked the owner if he kind’a, would’a, could’a, should’a, possibly bought more food, knowing, as we all did, that the weekend was to be sunny and hot? That he might be a tad busier than on a normal damp, grey tuesday in Feb? But he doesn’t trust weather forecasts. Hmmm…

Happy back-to-work Tuesday

A xxxx

Donald Trump is a plonker, we all know that. An orange one. And he talks in phrases, which he repeats. So he doesn’t forget what he’s just said, in case it was important, which it invariably wasn’t. He can’t handle whole sentences and so entire concepts are quite frankly beyond his capability. Which all put together has an almost Forest Gumpian feel to it, or ‘Being There’, where subnormal people reach great heights by saying very little into which everyone else reads profound wonderment.

Our Donald was addressing the NRA, the most powerful organisation in America, including Congress and the Senate, so it would seem to an outsider. And because it was the NRA his previous stance of ‘we must protect our children’ changed to ‘guns are more important than fuckin kids’ in the flash of a sponsorship donation. What’s a few dead teenagers compared to our constitutional right to shoot who the hell we want? And to illustrate his point he chose Britain. London, in fact. Which he already has issues with because we conned him out of his Embassy’s fuck-off site in Grosvenor Square and stitched him up with a disused warehouse in Vauxhall in exchange… and a billion quid. He likes a ‘good deal’. Well, (for us) this was a dream deal.

So Donald conjures up an imaginary, nameless hospital in London, ‘right in the centre’, in which there are so many knife victims that the corridors flow with blood. Its like a ‘war zone’. And England has the strictest gun control of anywhere!!!!

I just don’t know what point the man is trying to make. I can’t see any sense in this comparison. Is he saying that we need guns in Britain to protect us from knives? Or so that our killers can use guns instead, making them much more efficient and producing less blood to mop up? Or that increasing gun control in the US would just lead to more knife crime?

I have no idea. Its just an ill-conceived (and obviously totally fictionalised) story that the great man feels justifies the virtual ‘no-control’ policy on guns in America and the best reason for it to continue, unchecked. I’m sure the collective inbred retards of the NRA gave him a standing ovation for his stunning illustration.

So their answer remains consistent. If kids have guns, give teachers bigger guns. Faster guns, more powerful guns. I know an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she didn’t just swallow a cruise missile and end it right there.

Happy Bank Holiday, sunny Monday

A xxxx

Just the last word on the local elections. Which were, apparently, all over England. None of the bits that don’t count, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, just us. And more specifically in London, where Labour did shit. Because Labour’s eventual plans for London, should they ever (god forbid a thousand times) come to power in what will be known henceforth as ‘departure day’, they will either nationalise the City of London, or impose such stringent taxes upon it that it will just move somewhere else. Labour simply hates the entire concept of The City. Even though it produces half the country’s wealth at least and generates more in taxes. But that is McDonnell’s dream; to bring down capitalism. Replace it, as they did in North Korea, with starvation.

And how good does the sunshine feel? Turning up for tennis yesterday it was warm, bright, cloudless, wind-free and I thought ‘WTF??? I can’t play like this. Where’s the rain, frost, ice, hurricanes??’ But it was ok. Almost like it was invented as some kind of ‘summer game’? News to me.

Today too, waking up to all that sunshine. I’m so glad that I didn’t become a vegan yesterday. Mainly because its always struck me as a dull and desperate thing to do, more suited to the wintry grey world lacking in colour and happiness. But I was tempted. I mean, so many people are vegan-ing out these days, maybe its time for some industrial quantities of tofu in my life. Not just for making the soles of my vegan tennis shoes but actually eating it. So to test the theory we went to a restaurant last night that only sells meat. To see just how horrible, how cruel, heartless (mainly because we didn’t eat any hearts, even though I quite like them), and brutal the world of the carnivore can be. Although I’ve lived in that world for nearly 62 years. Probably didn’t eat too much meat for the first week or so, therefore I have ‘form’ as a vegan, though not sure about the ‘non-dairy’ bit relating to breast-feeding.

And the Turkish restaurant brought us the ‘almost-vegan’ option. An immense platter of barbecued meat. The ‘almost’ comes about because there was rice and salad on the plate too. A little. Just for counterbalance to stop the plate falling over under the immense weight of the meat. And it was wonderful. And I can honestly attest that no animals whatsoever suffered in any way at all whilst pigging out for an hour on all that flesh.

I’ll put the tofu back in the freezer.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx