Andy's Glasses

Are you a wazer? Oh, you’re not, don’t know what it is, haven’t heard…

Then I don’t know upon which planet you reside. If you’ve even taken an Uber, anywhere, you’ve been a kind of wazer-by-proxi because Waze is the navigation system used by Uber. And by me. Because its live and interactive and asks you things like “is there a speed camera coming up in 200 yards?” or “traffic jam reported ahead: confirm/not” or even “would you pick me up 2 pints of semi-skimmed from the 7/11 coming up on your left in 100 yards… 90… 80…”

Waze knows everything. And because it likes to think of itself as some kind of ‘club’, all users are called ‘wazers’. I know, its a bit on the wanky side, but they must have their reasons.

So it avoids traffic. By being very very creative with the routes chosen. Which are always different no matter how many times you use the same start and destination points.

Well I’ve never before been to my cousin’s new home. Mainly because its in South London and, other than Bermondsey Market, the South Bank and (when bloody required) St Thomas’ Hospital, I just don’t do south London. What’s the point? There’s nothing there once you’ve left the proximity of the river (where all those named places sit). But to get from an NW to an SE postcode, I needed waze.

And it took me there. Not the way I maybe would have gone but that’s because there was bad traffic on the North Circular so instead we went via the back alleys and side streets of Islington and Hackney. You know you’re using Waze when you spend half of a long journey going over speed bumps. But no traffic. That’s the quid pro quo. And worth every bounce. We went through the Blackwall Tunnel and… came out the other side. A few turns and we were drinking South London’s version of tea. Which is like ours but…

Coming home, just a few hours later, we headed away from the Tunnel. Oh. But you don’t argue with waze, that’s part of the deal. You know ‘in God we trust’, well same deal with waze but with more immediate results.

Which is how, 10 minutes later, we arrived in the queue to get on the Woolwich Ferry. That mythical ship that sails across my river, has done for centuries and yet I’ve never before set eyes upon, let alone set a car upon. And, ok, its not exactly a tourist attraction. Its not really even a boat. Just a ‘thing’ that floats in very ugly manner on the water with about 40 cars on its back. You don’t get out and feel the smog in your hair, there’s no cafe because the journey takes about 3 minutes and they’ve probably picked the most industrial and horrible part of the River to cross. But it works. Ahhhhh, back in the north. Terror Firma. Because it oh so much nicer to come home.

Ticked that off my ‘to-do list’ then.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

So Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron fall in love and refuse to be physically separated ever again, “je t’aime, Don-ald”, “lovin’ you too, Manu”, (hugs, kisses, tongues, holding hands, stroking thighs…) where’s the fucking sick-bag???

Then follows the inevitable cheap, far-eastern rip-off copy as Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in get overly pally on the north/south border in Korea. And although somewhat derivative, this bromance is in fact way more significant in geo-political terms, if not relating to peace emerging in one very highly inflamed region of our planet. Possibly.

Because you mustn’t start counting your chicken chou meins before they’re wokked, there are precedents for apparent accords between South Korea and the reigning Kim. Lots of precedents. Which last, on average, about 10 minutes before hostility and aggression breaks out once more.

Trump has already, with feigned modesty, decided to accept full credit for this olive branch from the world’s most hostile nation to its neighbours. But Trump would. Yet I think that the main significance is that the man in charge of North Korea is in possession of the one and only fat belly in his nation. Because everyone else there is starving. And personally I think this striving for ‘peace with our brothers and neighbours to the South’ is out of sheer economic desperation and necessity.

JEREMY CORBYN/JOHN MCDONNELL TAKE CAREFUL NOTE OF THE FOLLOWING!

North Korea has a population of 25 million (yes, who all look, pretty much the same). South Korea has double, 50 mil. Who also all look remarkably similar. North Korea, which is run as set up by Kim the grandfather, on a Leninist-Marxist model, has a GDP of $40billion a year. Whereas free market friend-of-the-west and manufacturer-of-my-phone-and-tv South Korea generates $2.17TRILLION a year. 500 times more. Though this in part is due to the massive military and army expenditure that the paranoid little Elvis-impersonator feels he has to maintain and that he possibly wouldn’t need if he was allied to the south.

But its the money. North Korea is cut off financially from the whole world except for China. Though granted, China is a pretty big ‘except’. And Kim’s land is all but bankrupt. It can’t feed its people, it can’t trade meaningfully and it struggles to produce anything worthwhile as you can’t market ‘hatred’ and ‘fear’ in world trade. So aligning with its brothers (and they really are, historically and totally) to the south would open up, quite literally, the whole world to them.

So yes, Trump may have been a bit of a catalyst in the game of big talk, but it may have just precipitated Kim’s realisation that the answer to so many of his problems sits so much closer to home.

Peaceful Saturday

A xxxx

In a move that will be very popular with vegetarians and will positively thrill the vegan fraternity no end, scientists in America have ‘re-animated’ the brains from beheaded pigs. Ok, before the anti-vivisectionists jump in, though most will probably fit snugly into one of the above groups of generally tree-huggy types anyway, these were heads from an abattoir. Not that such an issue will give comfort that the remainder of the animal is destined to become tomorrow’s bacon sandwich.

So they took the heads, immersed them in blood which, when warmed to the correct temperature (I’m not telling what that temperature is otherwise you’ll all be doing it at home), circulation in Piggy’s brain was restored and there were signs of neurological ‘activity’. Probably worrying about drowning in a pool of blood. Or thinking the piggy version of WTF??? Not sure what level of ‘thinking’ pigs ever do, hence the term ‘pig-ignorant’ and the fact that I’ve never seen one on University Challenge. Only a few Oxbridge post-grads who act like it.

So the scientist in me thinks ‘that’s amazing!’ The meat-eater thinks ‘I like bacon’ and the crusader for animal rights… doesn’t really give a shit because the animal was dead anyway. Or, more dead, perhaps. I just can’t see how this ‘research’ gains anything.

Ok, so you have a failing body with a functional brain, like a Stephen Hawking type scenario, when taken to extreme. Could this study lead the way to removing that brain and putting it inside another body? A better one? In which case, the donor would have to be someone in perfect physical condition but… with a dead brain? Or a decapitation victim but then you’d have to sew on the whole head (we’re talking human heads by now, obviously) and that’s beyond science at the time of writing this.

Or you could go to any gym and find some moronic, muscle-bound narcissist with the body of a god and the brain of a footballer and just steel him and replace his brain with something more functional, more useful.

There is a precedent for all of this. Its in the film The Man with Two Brains which is so accurate as to be almost a documentary. And is also the best film ever. One of 27 to carry that title in my mind.

Hey teacher, leave us pigs alone!

Happy Friday

Anne Uumellmahaye xxxx

This is (probably) positively (maybe), definitely (ish), my absolute (relatively) last (or thereabouts) post about anti-semitism in the Labour party. Not because its stopped with a massive bang as their esteemed leader banished it unambiguously from their midst, but because he hasn’t. And therefore it goes on and on and I don’t like repetition. I don’t like repetition. (As Trump would probably say it.)

Corbyn wrote a fairly decent SOUNDING apology in the Evening Standard on Monday. Sorry for offence caused, don’t know where its come from, horrible, can’t stand any form of racism, blah, blah, blah, and please vote Labour in next month’s local elections.

Words.

Though at least, and definitely a first, he actually did admit that there was something of a problem there. Ahhh, that’s a start, then let’s solve it.

Right, so along come two men called Jonathan to meet him. The leaders of 2 big and powerful Jewish groups. And they asked Jeremy to rebuild the ‘trust’. And there was trust. Before Corbyn there was always a strong link between jews and Labour. Stemming from the vast number of pre-and-post-war Jews adopting communism as being as far away from naziism as you could possibly get. But that trust is well and truly… errr… ‘fucked’ I think is the appropriate term here, by recent horrors not just in Labour but in each and every fringe leftish organisation who give Jezza his main and constant support. And who aren’t restricted by the need to get anyone to vote for them so they can really let rip. They can release their inner holocaust-deniers, paint their malicious jew-banker caricatures and give platforms to any rabid anti-zionist who preaches the destruction of not just Israel but all Jews.

But Jezza admits this may actually be a problem.

As one of the Jonathans pointed out: if he were to speak of this anti-semitism in the passionate tones he uses for Windrush, for Grenfell Tower, for all sorts of virtually everything, that would be a start.

They asked for several things. Adopting the definition of anti-semitism used by parliament and the courts. Hmmm, no, not sure we could do that. Ok, then how about preventing your members from sharing any platform with known anti-semites? Well, I couldn’t offer that guarantee. And so it went on. He agreed not one of their terms.

So Jeremy Corbyn is really really REALLY sorry (that he might have lost a few minority votes in Barnet) but is not actually prepared to take any meaningful action whatsoever about the evil in his party from inside and out. Nor, more importantly, address the fundamental question in my mind: why is there so much anti-semitism in the far left? Where did it start?

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Its funny. I never think about Canada even though its fucking humungously massive and large. It just kind of sits there, right above Trumpsville, minding its own business and being… well… being Canadian. Its a nice place, a sweet place, clean, affluent, pretty and freezing cold for 11.5 months a year. I keep me mate Dave there, just in case anything happens, but it never does. Until this week. Then its suddenly, its like they’ve taken out a PR campaign and its all you see.

Firstly there was that awful van attack in Toronto killing 10 people and injuring loads more. Which, rather than being a boring, zeitgeisty ISIS kind of deal is looking more like it was a specific attack on women. Something we can all understand to a degree. (Can I say that? Can I think that even?? Too late, I’ve done it now). The driver, called Alek, is part of some online group called ‘incels’ which is an abbreviation of ‘involuntarily celibate’, which in turn is posh speak for ‘can’t get laid’. So faced with the choice of becoming a rapist or a mass murderer, Alek obviously took the latter path. Common sense dictated so. I despair.

Then at the University of Toronto there’s more trouble brewing, with more women! Probably all those who refused to have sex with poor Alek.

In an effort to try and dispel stereotypes of ‘women in science’ as being geeky, nerdy, bit ugly, probably slightly greasy, unwashed and wearing protective eyewear when they go out for dinner, a rather fit and lovely science babe, a PhD student, started posting selfies showing how gorgeous a, basically, gorgeous girl can look, even when in a lab, wearing a white coat, doing sums on a blackboard, all kinds of wonderfully sciency, Steven Hawkingy type things. So a fellow student commented that really, rather than showing how these girls (because it inevitably spread) look pretty and smiley, shouldn’t they be better engaged trying to reduce the gender inequality in the scientific world. Which is currently massive. I’m gonna guess at 73%, just because those ‘gap’ statistics are always so stupid as to be totally meaningless. But the sad truth is probably that a few more people are going to take the trouble to look at a photo of a pretty girl than are going to read in-depth analyses of sexism in the scientific workplace. Sadly.

Then lastly, to round of Canada week perfectly, Lila was wearing her brand new Canadian baby-gro, with maple leaves and everything.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

I’ve just been shopping. I love shopping. Though that depends on how you define it.

The shopping I love and just enjoyed was done at the Amazon shop in my own kitchen. I needed tennis balls… sorted, new tennis shoes… done and dusted. Be here tomorrow. And I only really have time for that because my shoulder was so bad yesterday that even I, in an uncharacteristic moment of sensibility, cancelled playing today. When, ironically, the shoulder(/arm/neck) feels much better.

Then we have a lunch up in town on Portman Square for Mel’s aunt’s 80th birthday. Lots of people going but most importantly Lila will be there. That’ll be worth the price of admission on its own. And because (apparently) I need a new suit and we’ll be in town anyway, Mel is intending to drag me screaming to that other kind of ‘shopping’. The kind that involves shops. Which I absolutely fucking hate. Don’t know why. When I was 18 I loved going shopping but unfortunately didn’t have the funds to buy much. Now I can afford to shop but just hate the process. Why do I need a new suit anyway, I have lots of suits. Considering I rarely wear them and a couple are fairly ‘new’ at no more than 7 years old or so. This has ‘disaster’ written all over it.

Bit like last night’s Cup semi-final. Awful result. And now Pochettino is talking in vague, Argentinian, Spanish terms (which accounts for the general vagueness about most of his comments) about how he may not be leading the club forwards. Holy shit! He can’t go. We love him and he’s ours forever.

I went for comfort after the match to the Hampstead theatre. Saw something called ‘Caroline, or Change’. And its a musical and its quite brilliant. Fantastic cast, amazing production, incredible voices and really really funny. Yet fairly serious at the same time. A total ‘wow’. And headed for the West End soon. At which point it changes from 30 quid a ticket to 130 quid. So go see it now.

Why are you still reading this when you should be booking?

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

If you bought a wonderful, state-of-the-art car 22 years ago, it would have been a revelation. Then, 5 years later you’d notice that other people’s cars suddenly had different bits. More computerised, less mechanical, more sophisticated. After 10 years it would be decidedly ‘old hat’ but still lovely and doubtless wonderful. Give it another 5 years and everyone has sat-nav, computerised everything, USB ports, a sound system that just sucks the songs you want to hear out of your brain and all the space age technology you could ever want but never actually realised you did want.

As an Arsene Wenger analogy that’s quite fair. I consciously avoided the labrador puppy model, which after 22 years is blind, diabetic, incontinent and in pain and really needs to be put down FOR MERCY’S SAKE!!! I avoided that one because it may be more accurate, more representative, its a bit disrespectful. Hmmm…

Wenger arrived at Highbury and inherited a fairly decent football team. And then proceeded to single-handedly take all the fun out of footballers’ lives. He is exalted as a revolutionary, well so was Lenin.

The team would turn up for training, eventually, and enjoy a great big fry-up. Because it is definitely the best cure for the inevitable hangover, or to bring you down from a serious coke-buzz. Then, before the gym work started in earnest, there would be half an hour of bookie time, when the players could get all their bets down for the afternoon’s events, arrange a few judicious yet highly profitable handballs for Saturday, basically, taking care of business.

And Wenger stopped all that. Rather than coming up with some healthy-eating hangover cure he decided instead to ban the players from drinking. I mean, come on, is that right? Was that in anyone’s best interest? The gambling had to stop too. Recreational drugs were probably totally out of the question. Because he was Mr Straight. Or however that translates into French. Monsieur Straight.

So what did all that killjoying actually achieve? When you really look at it? Ok, it produced the most fit, strong and energised group of players that football had ever seen. They ate well, trained well, banned all the ‘good’ things, won everything, played the football of dreams and basically became the model of envy for every decent football team in Europe. Wenger changed the game, but totally. Nothing superficial or sticking plasterish about his methods. They were Gestalt. He addressed every facet of the players lives. Starting with their minds, then their waistlines then their feet. And consequently Arsenal won the league 3 times, twice in ‘double’ seasons and capped it all with the only ever unbeaten season.

Then it went downhill.

Because football is not ever a ‘revolution’ but an evolution. Wenger just represented a Jurassic explosion in the beautiful game with lots of changes all at once. But then his branch on the evolutionary tree stopped growing. He stuck with the 1997 plan and refused to budge. Even as others used his methods and then improved them. Like Maggie Thatcher, he was not for turning.

But I come to praise Wenger, not to bury him. Because he was a genius. Not a word I band about in any context. Then his inherent stubbornness? Frenchness? stopped him from embracing the changes necessary to keep his genius alive.

Au revoir Arsene

A xxxx

Yesterday was the hottest April day EVERRRR. Well, since 1949. So long ago that anyone who was actually alive then doesn’t have the memory to remember yesterday, let alone 69 years ago. So for all intents and purposes, yesterday is the new record day. And hot it was. Today’s gonna be hot too. And Saturday and Sunday.

And Sunday is the London Marathon day. And will be the hottest one everrrrr. 40,000 runners doing their 26 (and a bit) miles in the searing heat. And its city heat, which is never that lovely, always a bit damp and stuffy. Of those 40,000, 24 are serious athletes. Mo Farrah and that kind of person. 193 are competitive amateurs, run for athletic clubs, fancy themselves a bit. After that they get older and frailer and progressively slower and are the people who wake up every day with aching backs and sore limbs and take too much ibuprofen but love the running or are too competitive to quit. That takes care of the first 20,000. The other 20,000 are doing it for charity. And run in fancy dress.

I could never run a marathon. I can barely run for the bus. Without falling over… and I’m actually in total awe of those who do. Because it takes a level of discipline that I simply don’t have. Plus, I don’t like running really, only on the tennis court where it comes in spurts of wondrous energy. I don’t like the seemingly endless repetitive sports like swimming, running, biking for 35 miles on a Sunday morning. I like sports that involve trash talk and insulting competitors. Which is probably why I loved playing football so much. Maybe I don’t like the idea of spending 4 hours (phah! in yer dreams!!), ok, spending 9 hours in my own solitary company?

So the fancy dressers impress us every year. Because not only are they going to run a frikkin marathon, they’re going to do it as a pantomime horse with their mate Billy. Or as a pregnant camel, shlepping round about 50 lbs of humps and bumps. On stilts. Dressed as a fully functional tank with rotating cannon. Two people strapped together running it ‘3-legged’ (like running 26 miles unencumbered is just too easy). On stilts. Pushing wheelchairs. There’s no limits.

But this year they are advising people to ditch the fancy dress for fear of dehydration. And… er… possible death. No-one wants to go to work Monday morning to find the streets littered with bodies. It’ll be like 1665 all over again. The great Plague, in case you’d forgotten.

Yet the marathon without those people will not be true to its ethos. And you simply know that anyone daft enough to run that far with that much impediment ain’t gonna cancel because of a bit of sunshine.

Good luck to them all.

Happy sunny days. Cos they ain’t gonna last.

A xxxx

Spurs are playing Manchester United on Saturday in the FA Cup semi-final. The cup we care about… sometimes, don’t care about… often, but that becomes a really big thing when you reach the later stages and there’s a chance you might win it. Like every other domestic cup in Europe, it has been seriously ‘downgraded’ since the introduction of the Champions League which remains the holy grail for clubs, both in terms of prestige and certainly in remuneration. For the FA Cup they give you 50 quid, the champions league is worth 76 million just for a first round playoff match against a bunch of Norwegian fishermen. Or something like that. But Cup matches, however trivialised they become, pick up their own momentum in their latter stages. At the sharp end.

I went to the semi-final last year, when we lost to Chelsea but really, really should have won. Had a wonderful day out with Tory-boy in the Wembley sunshine. Same Wembley as this year but obviously will feel different because we’ve played all our home games there in between. I had lunch with Ledley King. My ‘dream date’. Had a chat with Ossie Ardiles. Ahhhhhh… then we fucking lost.

And really, it hasn’t been that great a week so far, footballing-wise. We lost to Man City last Saturday (in case you missed that), then last night we drew at Brighton. Which bothers me solely because we have a nice little ‘cushion’ against Chelsea and every point dropped erodes that slightly. Today’s ‘cushion’ is tomorrow’s ‘panic!!’ So beating Man United will be a massive boost to our confidence (players’ and, more importantly, fans’).

The good news is that Jose Morinho, the esteemed (in his ‘special’ mind) manager of that famous football club, appears to be going into his usual meltdown. Or ‘doing a Morinho’ as its known. When a manager tells the press all the shit about his players and bemoaning their lack of Morinho-ness. When other (I’m not saying ‘better’) managers would be having quiet conversations with a paternalistic arm round the shoulders of the errant superstars, Jose phones the Sun instead.

Paul Pogba, all 89 million pounds worth of him, is ‘possibly leaving this summer’. Anthony Martial is so unhappy with his lack of play that he wants to go to Juventus. Others are on the ‘unwanted’ list. Its a repeating story. Morinho cleverly unloaded some dead wood when he was at Chelsea. Mo Salah was shown the door, Kevin de Bruyne, Lukaku. All seen by Jose as shit. All now world class superstars, the first 2 the undisputed kings of the league this season. Because Jose only wants Christiano Ronaldo. Someone perfect and unfaltering. He’s not prepared to do the work and actually improve players, the way, f’rinstance, Pochettino has done at Spurs. And all good managers do. Jose doesn’t have the patience. Nor the eye for sublime talent that must have been at least evident in both de Bruyne and Salah. (Never been 100% convinced about Lukaku).

So he is now making every effort to destabilise his team. Before Saturday. Maybe he’s a closet Spurs fan. We shall have to see.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

In the ‘dark old days’, if you wanted some butter, you took your glass, or pottery or earthenware dish to the shop or the dairy and they stuck half-a-pound of their finest in it and you went home. That wasn’t called ‘recycling’ back then, it was just called ‘shopping’. Similarly you either took your jug to be filled with milk or they brought it to you in glass bottles. Which you returned empty and they sterilised and used again. But the world was in a rush, became busier and much more affluent once everyone had stopped attacking each other for years on end with heavy artillery and bombs dropped from planes. So they invented ‘convenience’. Which was a combined euphemism for ‘disposable’ and ‘plastic’. Consumers demanded things easy to buy, relatively clean and the manufacturers decided that sterile plastics were so cheap and easy to make that after 1973 the entire contents of the entire planet would be entirely contained, covered, delivered and stored, entirely in plastics. What could possibly go wrong?

In fact it all worked swimmingly. Until water was invented in 1989 by Evian. Previously you just drank water out of cups at the kitchen sink. But then someone decided that water was not just for mealtimes, not even for merely quenching thirst. No. It was something that had to be consumed, or seen to be consumed, at all times. If you weren’t carrying your little bottle of water along the streets you were either a sad fat bastard or a tramp. Who carried cider. In tin cans. Water consumption increased from 1.2 litres per person per day, in 1971 to 15.9 gallons in 2007. They had to build more toilets to meet the increasing, obsessive demands of a world telling us to ‘drink, drink, drink!!!’

And it all came in little plastic bottles. Unrecyclable and toxic. Which has now reached the point that every hamburger, every fish finger, every frikkin mushroom will soon have to include ‘PET’ in its list of constituent ingredients. Because PolyEthylene Terephthalate is in absolutely fucking everything ‘organic’. The stuff of our beloved water bottles is clogging up the oceans, ruining the countryside, filling every little space. Where it breaks down into micro-bits and enters the food chain. Nice. You want full milk? Semi-skimmed? Or double plastic?? It is everywhere. Which is why I have never bought a bottle of water. For myself. Ok, for my family I’ve bought 956 tons of the stuff over the years. And I regret every one.

Everything is now plastic. Look at Lila’s world.

But we’re saved. Because they’ve found an enzyme which actually breaks down PET, that most evil and ruinous substance. It ‘eats’ it. And in doing so it breaks it down into its original constituent parts which are totally reusable. But what if it gets fed up with eating plastic and morphs into a new enzyme that eats people!?!?!? I’m just sayin’.

This enzyme just evolved, in a plastics plant in Japan. Now they’re working on it to make it a bit faster, a bit more potent. But just shows. Evolution is much cleverer than people. Particularly those people who toss used water bottles out of car windows, onto beaches, in rivers. You know who you are.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx