Andy's Glasses

Churchill once described Russia as ‘a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma’. I thought he was talking about China. Googled it to find the quote and learned it was Russia. Bummer. Churchill also once famously retorted to a woman at a dinner party when she said to him ‘Sir, you are drunk!’, by saying ‘yes, madam, and you’re ugly, but in the morning I’ll be sober’. You gotta love Churchill.

But getting back to China (?), they’re holding their five-yearly national congress of the communist party. Not quite as big as the 10-yearly National Assembly or whatever they call it, with just 2280 delegates at this one. All smartly dressed (compulsory), full dress military uniforms (compulsory) and all in receipt of a hard copy of the three-and-a-half-hour President’s speech so they can study it as he delivers it. And study it they do, making notes in the margins like a bunch of schoolkids in history class. If you yawn or fall asleep you’ll be taken out and never seen again. That’s democracy in China. Ruled by one man with the power of all the gods combined. Who set in motion the process to extend his 10 year tenure, which ends in 2023, longer. Much longer.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Not Churchill, different old geezer, not as funny).

And the Harvey Weinstein ‘thing’ is all about power. And its chronic and sustained abuse. Its not about sex, per se, but about feeling you can live out your fantasies just because you can get away with it. Getting caught with your fingers in someone else’s cookie-jar. 47 times.

But you can’t help wondering when this, the biggest story for decades in Hollywood, and looking certain to get much bigger as doubtless other ‘big players’ will become accused and the entire ‘casting couch’ culture suddenly put in the spotlight with whistle-blowers (among other things) queuing up in the wings, you have to wonder how Donald Trump feels when he reads (or probably has people read it to him) every day the story unfolding. Because its his story too. He must be squirming every time he hears the name Weinstein mentioned.

Though whereas Weinstein has effectively lost his job, his company is being boycotted by all and sundry, he’s a national disgrace and may end up in prison, Trump’s punishment was to be elected president. Unsurprisingly, the White House has made no comment whatsoever so far on the scandal.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

That vile place, Piccadilly Circus, is famous for its billboards. Always has been. Because 23 million tourists mill around there all day every day and night, you can’t actually get in there now if you’re a uk passport holder. Sorry, them’s the rules. But we don’t wish to go there anyway, its horrible. They can keep Eros. When they replace him with Harry Kane I’ll think about returning.

But due its rather large footfall, Piccadilly Circus has become a evolutionary history of the billboard, pretty much in my lifetime. They used to have massive posters, with lights shining on them. Then they went to screens with stationary images. Then flashing images, changing every so many seconds. Which morphed into full-fledged big screen technology with moving images, changing messages, all kinds of display wizardry. But now they’re become ‘interactive’. But not ‘interactive’ like you get to have a go as well, or you can push some buttons, no. This is more devious, sinister, surreptitious type interactive.

They have installed cameras which scan the crowd and work out the changing demographic and control the advertising content accordingly. So if a bus full of pensioners from Grimsby arrive, the ads would be for… things they like and need. Wheelchairs. Nursing homes. Soft food that doesn’t require too much in the way of teeth. Surgical supports. Then they get displaced by 17 coaches from Tokyo and the ads change to those for cameras, pizzas (Japanese love pizza), sex-bots, ladyboys, all the things culturally and age specific to their demographic. Football fans get beer ads with lots of lovely, semi-naked white women on them. Nothing ‘gay’ like clothes or body products.

The next step, surely, is to ‘reach out’ to the phones of those collected in the square and quickly search their browsing history and present up-to-the-minute relevant ads. Bit of a problem with school trips because they’d have to advertise porn sites but this is obviously the way its headed.

Just a quick mention of last night. At the Bernabau. In Madrid. 1-all draw. Which is, for Spurs, simply MASSSSSSIVE. To go to that temple of Madridista Magic and not lose 4-0 is a victory. To come away with a draw (only the 3rd team to do so in the Champions League in the last 24 home matches there) is the stuff of dreams. And despite the Times printing the group table wrongly, with Real at the top, Spurs in fact top the group due to higher number of away goals.

Pinch me.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

What is athletics? What constitutes a ‘sporting activity’. There are probably clearly defined parameters, but who can be bothered with all that. So generally, what happens in the Olympics decides what are ‘sports’. So skateboarding is now a ‘sport’, snow-boarding, mountain biking, various things done with a horse, not in ‘the French way’, dancing (on ice), beach volleyball (praise be) and all kinds of runnin’, throwin’, liftin’, heavin’, hurlin’ and fightin’. Basically, all you need is a method of quantifying it. An objective measure of scoring based on proper criteria. And so now, due to the efforts of one woman to do exactly that and work out a scoring system, we may well see pole dancing at the next Olympic Games. Which I think is absolutely right and correct. I would take it further and include pole dancing in an entire section based on ‘prostitution and the sex industry’. Stripping. Kerb-crawling. Sliding 20-pound notes into underwear (lightweight and middleweight only). It would legitimise the ‘oldest profession’ and increase the viewing 10-fold. A win-win. Shame Peter Stringfellow is not around to witness it.

And whilst we’re contemplating ‘changes’, they want to put a time-limit on peerages. You can be a ‘Lord’ but only for 15 years, then we have to kill you. Ok, then you ‘retire’. No more crusty old seniles pitching up for 10 minutes to claim their 300 quid a day and then buggering off to the bookies for the afternoon. Or worse still, staying there for 3 weeks (that adds up to £4,500) until someone realises they actually died on day 2 but no-one noticed.

The House of Lords is a vital part of our democratic process. A ‘check’ on Parliament. That’s its role. But now it has 800 members, second in size as a legislative chamber only to the People’s Congress of China. And as that one is a total farce anyway, I think we can claim ‘the biggest in the world which actually does stuff’. To stress the point, Andrew Lloyd Webber (notice no hyphen? he had to ditch that to become ennobled, rule number 354/3296/bqv43.7: ‘no fuckin’ hyphenated tossers allowed’) has resigned his peerage. Has no time to sit as a Tory peer as he has for 15 years because he wants to bring Cats back on the stage for the 17th time. Well, too busy was what he said, but we all know.

Basically; I’m ready. For a Lordship. Ditch the old useless ones and get some young blood in. We’ll sort it out.

Happy Tuesday

(Lord?) A xxxx

This was a very special weekend. Partly due to being in the biblical, spiritual homeland of all the world’s major Western religions and simply feeling that… godly fucking vibe, just permeating through your very fibre. Partly due to being on holiday, relaxed, fab experiences, hot and sunny. Yet mainly, really, attributable to a far more lofty cause. Spurs won a home game. I don’t even know if it was a good game, a worthy result, a ‘well-earned’ three points. Don’t give a shit about any of that. We played at Wembley and we won. That’s a first for this season, broken the duck, shattered the curse, re-written the book, whatever. Now we can think about winning properly. Away from home we ease to 4-0 wins, at home we struggle and just cling on to 1-0, but I JUST DON’T CARE.

What I do really care about is Crystal Palace. Poor lowly Palace, rooted to the bottom of the table with just a row of zeroes except for the ‘goals conceded’ column. No wins, no draws, no goals scored… just shit. What they needed, to break this duckiest of all imaginable ducks, was to be given a team to play who could possibly be even more shitty than they were. And that’s why God (who lives just round the corner here) invented Chelsea. As a gift for Crystal Palace to alleviate their plight. The 3 points they get for beating Chelsea is insufficient to lift them off the foot of the league, but its a start.

And in case the weekend hadn’t been good enough by then, holy moly, there was even more good things to come. Arsenal went to Watford. A team I like (Watford, not Arsenal, doh, obvs) but who generally don’t excel at the top level. Though this year they’ve been punching well above their weight. Surely it couldn’t last? Arsenal? They’re a (fairly) top team! (Normally) Play in the Champions League!! Have a host of top (under-performing, want-away, injured, brain-damaged) players who can win a game in 3 seconds! Surely Watford couldn’t hope to win against such a team. Surely??

And yet. And yet the Red Sea parted once. The fourth plane missed the Pentagon. Horrible rapist-types like Donald Trump or Harvey Weinstein DO become accountable for their past actions, and Watford can and do beat Arsenal.

Ok, West Ham didn’t lose so even HE didn’t get it all right, but all in all, a very very productive weekend. And all I had to do was lie in the sun and float on the Dead Sea. Glad to have had such a valuable contribution.

Happy Monday (from departure lounge, Ben Gurion Airport)

A xxxx

So I have a MASSSSSIVE problem. Simply massive. Its 30 degrees here at the Dead Sea, having cooled down since the day’s activities. And now, 2 hours ahead of British Summer Time, the football’s on. Not, like, on tv, no, bloody savages round here wouldn’t be so bloody cooperative as to do that, would they??? No, I have to go to the BBC web-page and keep refreshing it. And the problem is: the wifi coverage in the pool area is simply awful. But this is where I want to be. Rather than sitting in the super wi-fi reception area like a sad and sorry bastard. I’ve told Mel, if she was a proper wife, she’d sit in reception and run back here, very quickly, every time Palace score against Chelsea, Man City score yet another against Stoke or, obviously, should Spurs score against Bournemouth. For some reason her love for me is insufficient for her to do that. And I don’t have a butler here either. This is just AWFUL!!!

Meanwhile, first world problems aside, I love it here. Haven’t been down here since 1974 but when you’re considering its all about geological time, those 43 years represent half a milli-second. The dead sea is in fact losing 1 metre of depth every year but there’s not a lot I can do about that really. The odd thing is, it doesn’t look real. Because its massive yet the surface doesn’t move. The water, the saltiest in the world, is thick and viscous and there’s no waves or tides because… because there aren’t. So it just sits there looking majestic. And a bit surreal. With Jordan on the other side.

The ‘dead sea cosmetics’ company, Ahava, have been greatly affected by the assholes of the world who have adopted the ‘BDS’ against Israel, banning products made by Israeli companies on the West Bank. So Ahava have no choice but to move their factory out of the West Bank and into Israel. Right here in fact. Which will cause the loss of hundreds of Palestinians’ jobs. How does that benefit them, exactly? They become unemployed so a bunch of pseudo-lefty, right-on, middle-class history professors at SOAS can feel smug in their anti-semitic zeal. That’s fair.

This hotel employs refugees from Eritrea, Sudan and Yemen. The chamber-maids are local Bedouin women. The front desk staff are Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese. But you’ll never hear of such things on the BBC.

Right, back to the football. Nil, nil at half time? How is that even possible???

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

We’re at the Dead Sea. The lowest point in the world. That’s relative to sea level. If it was the lowest point from a moral standpoint then I’d be in Las Vegas. But I’m not, I’m here in the Holy Land looking at the amazing salt lake in the middle of a desert. It was a 2 hour drive from Netanya in north-Central Israel. And you go down towards Jerusalem and then follow the West Bank all the way down. And we saw a bit of ‘the Wall’, that most contentious of things. And it looked pretty much… like a wall. Then we hung a left (following Waze, of course, like an Uber driver; blindly, naively and unknowingly placing all my faith in an app on my phone) and drove into Palestine. Oh. Palestine. Ok. Or not? I’ve driven through Arab villages before, they’re all over Israel and they’re fine. But the occupied West Bank? Actual, for’real Palestine? Ok, its the Fateh bit rather than the Hamas bit but still. We saw the wall again. But this time from the inside, I cunningly worked out. As it was on the other side of the car and we were still heading south. And from this side, the Wall looked… like a wall. And then we drove round and back to Israel, according the wishes of the god, Waze.

I won’t lie and claim I felt persecuted, repressed, empathy with the plight of the poor Palestinians, I can’t really state that I was even nervous. Mainly because at no time was I ever sure precisely where I was. We didn’t see crowds of stone-throwing youths, groups of shooting soldiers, ululating women beating their chests, tanks screaming backwards with turrets swirling. Nothing. But I reserve the right to claim heroic status, just… because.

We’re staying in a place called Ein Gedi. Its an oasis. Nothing to do (thankfully) with either Gallagher brother, nor any kind of arrogant Mancunians at all. A natural oasis in the desert filled with waterfalls and little freshwater lakes you can swim in and trees and green and all manner of un-desert-like stuff. And its hot here. Hellish hot. As you’d kind’a expect. Because on the drive down you leave Europe and you enter the middle-east for real. Sand and dunes and camels and searing heat, its an incredible and quite sudden transformation. Mainly because all of Israel used to look like this bit until they Europeanised the northern bit extensively.

But this is the real, biblical Palestine/Israel/Canaan of old. Down here was Sodom & Gamorrah. Which, apparently, made Las Vegas seem like Rome. Jesus probably walked round here at some point. So the place is now full of Christians. Proper, guitar-playing, hymn-singing ones making a pilgrimage. Many of them (the Germans) actually putting the ‘grim’ into pilgrimage.

So forgive me (Lila) for I have sinned. Not forsaken you, that would never happen, but just thought for once a photo for purely explanatory purposes was called for. And I look fucking gorgeous.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

Ok, so I haven’t written to you for a few days, didn’t phone, never called…

I’M ON ‘OLLLIDAY!!! ‘AVIN’ A REST!!!! ISS’ALLOWED!!!

Right, so having used up my years’ supply of exclamation marks in one (poorly constructed, verbless, grammatically evil) sentence, I’ll tell you why.

Because I’m ‘busy’. Really busy. Not in the normal sense of being in any way productive or a useful member of society or even a moderately helpful individual. None’a that. Just ‘busy’. When I’m not eating (which already reduces the available time by about 60%) I have duties to perform. Beaches to be sat upon. Rays to be caught. Granddaughters to be checked upon. And, for staying with my (very) old mate who’s lived in France for 25 years, there’s catching up to do, conversations to be had, reminiscences to be remembered or fictionally re-created, things to be done.

All the while whilst enjoying all that Israel has to offer a poor tourist. Most of which is by making him (or her, its certainly equal opportunity) much poorer than he was when he arrived. Not their fault. I blame Nigel fucking Farage. Because the pound has plummeted against the dollar (on which Israel’s economy is based) and the Euro, which is also important, our British coin of the realm is sodding worthless anywhere south of Dover. So the car park we’ve always used in Tel Aviv still costs the same 20 Shekels (NIS) that it did 10 years ago. And then it was ‘3 quid well spent’. Now its ‘good value for a fiver’. Even though strictly its £5.40. Food’s gone up. Wine has moved its price from ‘och’ to ‘vey’. All cos of the pound, cos of Europe, cos of Brexit, cos of Nige.

‘Historic sex offences’ were really trendy in the UK a few years ago, but really only a few late-coming losers like Ted Heath are still trying to get on the bandwagon. But over in the States, always a few years off-trend, Harvey Weinstein is having a pretty bad time of things. First Ashley Judd (oh but she was sooooo exquisite, back in the day) tells tales of how that nice Harvey (who I’m quite sure is every bit as lovely as a person as his appearance would suggest) made seriously inappropriate suggestions to her in a hotel room, using his not negligible weight, both physical and professional, to threaten her into actions that might have upset her and thrilled him. Then everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Cara Delevine have suddenly had ‘total recall’ moments making similar claims against the poor man.

Perhaps, like with footballer-chasing tarts, these women are just publicity-seeking honey-trap babes out for a quick ‘kiss’n’tell’ with the National Inquirer. Then you realise they’re superstars in their own right, needing neither the money nor the publicity, so perhaps there’s something in it after all? All Harvey really did was use his position as head of the casting couch to cajole a few women into sexual favours on the implied promise of film stardom. Is that such a crime?

Yes. I suppose it is. And when you look as ‘fetching’ as Harvey, he’s likely to get 10 years.

Happy Wednesday/Simchas Torah

A xxxx

Israel is a confusing and unpredictable place. That’s why its in the middle east. Because it spans the civility and politeness of Europe (errrr… Bosnia, Catalonia, Spanish Civil War, The War to end all Wars, and the one that followed it…), yeah, civilised. And the far east, those savage orientals who murder with swords, eat funny things and make copy Gucci handbags. Thus the middle east. In the middle of… pretty much the sublime and the ridiculous, but I’m not saying which is which. And the middle east is a big place. Massive. 47,346.9 cubic hecti-acres of bigness. (Don’t quote me on that one, but really don’t). And in all that vastness, there is but a weeny little stip of land, between the Mediterranean on its west coast and the RedSea on its southern easterly coast. And that teeny bit of land peopled by the most peaceful, bookish and yet persecuted people on the planet, has always (well, since 1948, when it became ‘official’)`been a bit of a problem. An enfant terrible in the vast masses of the combined Arab Nations.

And yet the food is so fabulous. That in itself should be a cause for love, for inclusion, to some form of acceptance. Israel is pretty much summed up, you could say, by Yotam Otalenghi. He’s a chef, a brilliant chef. A brilliant Israeli chef who is gay. And whose partner is a Palestinian. But this is all fine here, and even in Britain where he’s actually much bigger than he is here. Yet anywhere else in that vast expanse of ‘the middle east’, Otalenghi wouldn’t even be allowed in, because they don’t allow Israelis into almost all the Arab nations. And if they did let him in, it would only be to execute him for his homosexuality. Yet here its cool. All is well. Because the bit they never tell you on the news, in between the ‘apartheid’ bollocks and the ‘nazi’ accusations of total fucking ignorance, is that in Israel Jews and Arabs coexist everywhere in happy, harmonious equality. Burkinis are not banned in Israel. They’re just part of the scenery on every beach. Arabs live here, work here, vote here, join the army here, play in the national football team.

But they rarely mention that. They prefer to focus on Gaza. In which there are thousands of Palestinians who used to work in Israel, who still go to hospitals in Israel, but who can’t now ‘cross the wall’. Because unfortunately, their little land-strip is ruled by an organisation who have in its charter ‘the destruction of Israel and the death to all its Jews’. And these are not mere words for Hamas. These words incite action. Hamas are just ISIS spelt differently. Same ideals, same ideology, same methods. So in response to the years of bombing and suicide attacks and shootings and stabbings of Israeli citizens (not soldiers, just civilians), in response to that they built a wall. And the attacks dropped by over 90%. And its cruel and its tragic and its an awful thing to do to the large proportion of Gazans who are truly innocent. But if we, in London, or Manchester, or Brussels, or Paris, could build a wall that would ensure our citizens safety from terrorist attacks with such effect, would we not do it?

And you have to wonder why otherwise all the arabs would choose to stay in Israel. When most are Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians and north Africans. The answer to which is that here they live in a free and liberal democracy. The only one in the entire ‘middle east’. Where their children are educated at state expense, where the hospitals, some of the finest in the world, will treat them on their Nationalised Health system and where they can live in peace, pray to whoever they wish, integrate as much as they want to. And eat some really amazing food.

Sorry to rant after such a long pause, but every time I come here I get such a fantastically strong positive vibe that I re-wind every relevant news report for the last 6 months and think, once again: why would people spout such crap so consistently about such an amazing place that they’ve obviously never visited.

Now I’m going to the beach and I’m going to eat lots of things.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Well did’ja hear? Americans are looking at gun regulations! Not just Americans, but even… Republicans!!! And not even just, kind’a ‘normal’ republicans but even the NRA!!! The all-powerful National Rifle Association, mouthpiece of right wing, second amendment, right to bear arms obsessives have actually said that something needs to be done, in the wake of the latest mass slaughter of the innocents in Las Vegas. Normally, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But this ‘event’ got out. Meanwhile, in the 3 days since the Vegas massacre of 59 people, 87 other Americans have died in random gun crimes throughout the country. But they don’t really count. Probably because most barely make the newspapers.

The NRA could have said that more stringent questions need to be answered before selling guns. But that would affect gun sales. They could have had some limit on buying bullets. Hmmmm, that too affects the ‘bottom line’. So they’ve instead all come out demanding a ban on ‘bump-stocks’. WTF?

A stock is the bit at the back of a rifle that sits against your shoulder. Or against your hip if you’re Arnold Schwartzenegger. Its the butt of the gun. And some clever psychopath designed a special one, called a bump-stock. Because in America you can legally buy any fucking gun imaginable. Massive monster canons, 3-mile range sniper rifles, whatever ya want. As long as its not ‘automatic’. Automatic means its a machine gun. Pull the trigger and the bullets fire until you take your finger off. That’s automatic. And illegal over there. Semi-automatic is when you get just one bullet for every trigger pull. And hence slows down the number of schoolchildren, concert-goers or church devotees you can kill in any given time period.

A bump stock takes a semi-automatic rifle and makes it into a fully automatic machine gun. You could actually hear it in the videos of the Vegas killing. Not the 20 rounds-a-second type Kalashnikov ‘spray’ but the constant, regular ‘tat-tat-tat’ of rapid fire. That was the bump stock wot did it. Turning a ‘perfectly innocent’ thing, like an assault rifle, into something that can commit mass murder. Without that bump-stock, its just a soft cuddly thing. Like a Barbie doll. So we need to ban them.

Perfect. Won’t affect any sales of guns or bullets and will appease the world and those horrible Democrats. Shows that ‘America cares and listens’. This is emphatically NOT just some pathetic attempt at token gesturism.

Yesterday, gun shops sold out completely of bump-stocks.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

Say what you like about Boris, and most of it will be expletive, doubtless, but at least he knows how to speak in public. How to put on a show. Ok, he’s a back-stabbing, lying, cheating, egotistical narcissist who would murder his own mother to move half a rung up the career ladder, but he has ‘charisma’. And that, in the political world, is hard currency. Because in that world, appearance is sadly way more important than substance. Its wrong but that’s how it works. We live in a world full of tossers who shout loud to let us know they’re important. Well, not so much live in it as watch it. So when Philip Hammond and Jeremy Hunt stand there to address the Conference, there is lots of substance. But the delivery is so tragically dull that no-one hears it or heeds it. There is no emotion, there is no passion, its cold and sterile and factual and as rousing as a 0-0 draw at the Emirates. Watching the Tories speak makes you realise why they had to invent recreational drugs. Then up steps Boris and is immediately a ‘wow!’ due to what has preceded him. Ruth Davidson knows how to speak too. And today we’ll see how ‘rousing’ the Prime Minister can be. (Shudder).

Any political party, as we now know, needs to engage the youth and cater to the aged. Not always that easy to reconcile. University money or care homes? Can we have both? At least the young can walk to the polling stations, I suppose. Yet its the old that generally vote. Ruth Davidson can engage the young voters. I’m not sure Theresa May can. How the fuck Jeremy Sodding Corbyn can do it I really don’t know.

Busy week. We have the Aussies coming round tonight for dinner before they fly off back to Sydney. Then tomorrow the Canadians are coming over to stay the night, which is fab cos we see them even less than we do the Aussies. Then Saturday we’re going to Israel to stay with my oldest mate who has just moved there from France where he’s been holed up for the last 26 years. Fortunately its the ‘international break’ (how appropriate) so there’s no proper football around now. Otherwise we’d be missing all our friends due to ‘important events’. I mean, you can always make new friends, but if Spurs were playing Burnley…

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx