Andy's Glasses

The problem with babies is that they are the absolute, total and constant definition of distraction. Even when they’re sleeping you have to keep checking that… they’re still ok, still breathing, haven’t grown wings, taken off, opened the window and gone to check out the neighbour’s tree. You just have to. So when they’re awake; the just DEMAND your attention. Merely by just… just being there. And ‘my baby’ is staying with us. So the demands are incessant. And here’s the problem. Lila was fitted with a hyperactive ‘heart-melting-gland’. It affects everyone she comes into contact with. I’d try medication but it needs to be tested on those lucky rats first. So this morning when I heard her, I was given permission by her mummy to ‘get her out of bed’. And there she was. A smiling little bundle of gorgeousness, squeaking and wriggling, wrapped in her sleep-blanket-thing. Which she would be because babies these days are zipped into them. To prevent escape. Not that our house is like Colditz but just because it says in the baby books that is what you do.

I could go on all day about Lila. How she rolls over. Spits out bits of banana. Smiles. Wees as soon as her nappy is off. But you’d probably get bored. Me? Getting pissed on by your granddaughter is an honour.

On the news last night was a report on Hurricane Irma. The one sent to punish Trump. After devastating half the Caribbean first. And its terrible. And there on the streets in Tampa was the BBC journalist. Name’s irrelevant. Because he’ll probably be dead before you read his words: “I’M HERE ON THE DESERTED STREETS WHERE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TOLD TO STAY INDOORS BECAUSE OF FLYING DEBRIS!!! LIKE TREES AND CARS AND BUILDINGS!!!” (you have to shout to be heard over the storm, even with a mike right on your lips). “YES ITS DANGEROUS AS FUCK OUT HERE BUT I’M HAPPY TO BE HERE TO JUSTIFY YOUR 170 QUID LICENSE FEE!!!”

The trees were so bent over that the top boughs touched the ground. Cadillacs were flying past upside-down. But the BBC dude had neither the fear nor the common sense to GET THE FUCK OUT’A THERE!!!! He’s the first of the new wave of ‘suicide reporters’. The ones that go the extra mile. That know no boundaries. Next week there’s the one in the tsunami, another one (obviously) is going to question Putin about the drug problem in Russian sports and the last reporter is spending a day with Chelsea fans whilst wearing a Spurs scarf.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

When you have to go on an ‘exotic’ trip with work, that’s generally something special. And when Lila’s daddy announced months ago that he was going away for a few days in September, it was all very exciting. Ahhhh, fabulous. A week in Mexico. Mexico??? Who knew then about Irma? Who knew his arrival would be heralded by the worst earthquake in centuries? Just to say: he wasn’t sent as some kind of punishment. It was supposed to be a nice thing, a good thing, a lovely thing.

But whatever thing it is, the upshot is, Lila and mummy are staying with us for the duration. So this morning we sat in bed to read the papers. As ya do. She’s very bright. Even Lila asked why we were reading total shite in the Mail when the Times was available? Because, darling Lila, you have to know what the shit-stirrers, the gossip-mongers, the lying scumbags are talking about. You need to keep your enemies close. Oh, and read the football.

Because when Spurs win we read all the reports. And when they really win well we read EVERYTHING. Ok, Arsenal won too. They beat a reportedly abysmal Bournemouth team 3-0. Whilst we beat a fairly abysmal but theoretically much better Everton team 3-0 as well. Theoretically? Yeah. Because Everton sold Lukaku for 75 mil they had a big spend up this summer. Bought in some new ‘stars’, grabbed a few old bargains (Rooney), and have every intention of being ‘contenders’ this year. Pretty much like they have every year, but with bigger outgoings.

Arsenal is not a happy place this year. Pretty much like last year. The Bournemouth game papered over a few cracks, but very superficially. They’ve never had much trouble beating poor teams. Its against stiffer opposition that their numerous frailties become more disastrous.

But Spurs are a bit different. Because, as everybody moaned, ‘we didn’t buy anyone’, we are pretty much the same team that’s played together for the last 2 seasons. Yet better. And what that continuity does is make the team much more fluent, much stronger, much more cohesive than teams that have spent vast amounts on players of great individual merit who may not be comfortable with each other.

We did buy Llorente, but chose not to play him yesterday, even late on. I don’t question Pochettino’s ways. Only God can do that. And he scored two yesterday. The first a bit of a fluke, the second a typical Kane goal. Welcome to September, Harry. But new defender Sanchez played and was apparently brilliant. Guessing a bit there but why not. We simply outplayed Everton right across the pitch. And that makes me happy.

Mexico has always been a bit of a ‘disaster magnet’. That was where the meteorite struck in the Jurassic period which resulted in the end of the dinosaurs. Acts of God. Odd that no-one ever says that about good things. Well, insurance companies don’t.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

I love Stephen King. Read everything he’s ever written. Except the Dark Tower series that they’ve now just made a movie out of. He’s written hundreds (almost) of books. All brilliant, all different. And if you think he is just about ‘horror’, then at least (The Shining) it is the best horror ever. But its not vehicles for horror. Stephen King writes about people. And their interactions. And bonding. Particularly over adversity. So his early books in particular all tend to feature kids, often quite the misfits, never the cheerleaders and quarterbacks, and the bonds that link them together. Which may, or may not, come back later to be re-… re-… to be re-whatever they were in the first place but better. And the true magic of the writer is these relationships. They’re easy, natural, uncomfortable at times (Carrie? though she was sadly the most solitary of outcasts, had trouble bonding) and life-affirming. The ‘horror’ is just the medium, the adversity that needs to be dealt with. Sometimes very darkly…

My favourite book? Its between It… and The Stand. Both of which are so vast (in scope as well as size) that they were made, decades ago, into totally awful tv mini-series. You can see them now sometimes, on Sci-Fi channel, or Dave, at about 3 in the morning. Don’t bother, they’re shit. And they’re mainly shit because they are weak distillations of an epic story. They take the story of a group of people, each of whom has his/her own remarkable story, who happen to be involved in something (obviously) horrible and dangerous, and then they film them as just the horrible and dangerous, without mentioning the people. Its like watching football where they’ve removed all the players. So you see the ball, but nothing else. Cos that’s the important bit, right?

King’s short stories have fared better on screen. The Shawshank Redemption is the best movie ever made. Yeah, its about an escape, yeah its a prison drama. But what it really is is the relationship between two men. Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. Because that’s what the book is really about. And Stand By Me was another brilliant short story (written as ‘The Body’) which translated into a fantastic film. Yeah, there’s a dead body but its the relationship between the four kids and their families and rivals that you’re engrossed in.

And all this because they’re releasing a movie of ‘It…’. The last time they did they it starred Jon-Boy Walton as the hero. So you know you’re in trouble from the opening credits. This time they’ve made the film 135 minutes long. Too long for most films (other than 7 Samurai) but stay-awake-able. But the book is 1000 pages long. Its about poor kids and abused kids and stuttering kids and… its about relationships and adversity and… all of the above except football. Naaah! Fuck dat! Just show ’em the dodgy clown and a few gory deaths, that’ll be fine. No time for all that other bollocks. Just make ’em jump and they’ll be happy.

Actually I’m not happy. Though its true, no-one needed to ask my permission nor advice before making the film. But the injustice is horrible. More grist-to-the-mill of the ‘Stephen King? He’s that horror bloke, inn’ee?’ brigade.

Happy Friday. Stay away from the drains.

A xxxx

Lots of schools have adopted a policy of allowing girls to not wear skirts. They can’t run round in their knickers but can wear trousers instead, should they wish. In the interest of ‘equality for all’. But now a school in Lewes (which Londoners would loosely call ‘up north’ even though its on the south coast) has banned girls from wearing skirts altogether. Because it might upset the transgender or gender uncertain kids to be forced into some form of sartorial commitment they’re not happy to make. And yet by catering to the tiny minority they are quite oblivious to upsetting those in far greater numbers who are more gender-contented. Girls like wearing skirts, apparently. And in one school that allowed girls to wear trousers, the boys reacted by turning up to school in skirts. The official ‘girls’ uniform skirts, but skirts nonetheless. And I love that. Firstly to show the ridiculousness of the situation and secondly because it would be prejudicial of the school to stop them. But forcing a gender neutrality on 11 year-old kids is really inappropriate. Confusing for them. So 99% of kids have to suffer confusion and mixed messages because of the possible 1% who might feel odd and who’ll doubtless feel odd whatever they’re wearing. Its like the next generations sanity is being sacrificed on the alter of political correctness.

Whereas wannabe Conservative party leader, Jacob Rees-Mogg has just lost the race that hasn’t really even started yet. Everyone’s favourite caricature of an upper-class twit, albeit quite a clever twit, has shot himself in both feet in the not-yet-contest to replace Theresa May. By confessing to being religious. Not just religious but Catholic. And not even just that but… devout!!!! Which itself is fine in multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-faceted Britain, but not the rather large baggage that accompanied such a confession. He don’t do abortion and he don’t do gay marriage. He’s of the ‘every sperm is sacred’ brigade, which is probably why he has 6 kids. But if the Pope don’t approve it, Jacob don’t do it. So he holds not merely views but absolute values that separate him from ‘normal people’. Views and values that we hadn’t seen in this nation since 1857. Until the Ulster Unionists came into the spotlight earlier this year that is. Because ‘radical’ Christians, be they of the Protestant or Catholic flavour, share these antiquated views, quite inappropriate in modern society.

Jacob has learned what I’ve always believed: politics and religion just don’t mix. Nor should they.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Jeremy Corbyn is a vegetarian. He would be. Tosser. Not that all vegetarians are tossers, but he undoubtedly is. He’d like to be a vegan but can’t ‘live without cheese’. British cheese, he stressed. Not to show his patriotism and brotherhood with British workers, but to show he is unquestionably a tosser. Vegetarian/vegan is like the difference between an agnostic and an atheist. I’d be a vegan too. If it wasn’t for my love of meat, fish, eggs, dairy and foie gras. In fact I don’t even like sushi but would eat it any day just to upset a vegan. Like raw fish, do ya? Ya nut-cruncher! I’m quite happy being a vegan after dinner. Nuts, fruit, pretzels, crisps and dairy-free (yeah, right) chocolate. Yet by the Corbyns of this world stating their claim of aspirational veganism, it puts it out there as something pure, something indeed aspirational, that we should all be like that in some kind of (probably communist) idealised world where chicken nuggets are illegal. Well I don’t want to live there.

And this division, vegetarian/vegan, is also analogous also to whether to drive a hybrid (vegetarian) or a plug-in (vegan) electric car. Sadly often coupled with an equivalent level of supercilious holier-than-thou-ness as in the food debate. As if what you drive makes you a better person. In which case I am the fucking devil personified. Though proudly so. In fact in most cases I appear to come out on some part of the ‘dark side’, hmmm…

Nissan are bringing out a bigger ‘Leaf’, their best-selling plug-in electric car. So it can go 40 miles further than the previous one, up the motorway before it runs out of charge and you call the tow truck. Now you won’t have to do that until about Sheffield, rather than Nottingham like the original. That’s progress, right?

And in fact it is. Much as I tease, electric cars are where its going, even I have to admit that. The problem becomes simple: how far can they go? Along with the massive ‘how long to charge them?’ and also ‘how much do they cost??’ Because the only company who can give you a decent range currently is Tesla. For which you pay a hefty premium. The cars are all fine for commuting but you do need those long trips ‘up north’. You do family holidays round Scotland. And to do that you’d need to spend 50 grand on a Tesla or take your Leaf and prepare the kids for really long layovers at service stations charging up.

The technology is still new. And advancing. Which is great. For my grandchildren. For their ‘cleaner world’. For me, I want to be buried next to my car. A big, hefty, gas-guzzling monster. Dinosaurs together.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Do you ever wish you were something else? A footballer? An onion? An aardvark? Or perhaps, a rat.

Rats get all the best drugs, long before humans do. Its always the same. Nothing short of discrimination. Just today I read in the paper that there are new drugs that will tackle disease and old-age frailty. They’ll take the cells which no longer function and clear them out and fire up the old ones to work better, reducing all manner of horribles that affect virtually every old person. And these drugs are ‘just a generation away’. WHICH IS TOO FUCKING LATE! I NEED ‘EM NOW!!!! Whereas old rats are getting them now. They use the phrase ‘in tests’ but we really know what they mean. The rats get the best stuff and if there’s anything left over it might trickle down to the humans. I wonder if the drugs will prevent paranoia and FOMO?

Yet its all for nothing if the entire world dies in nuclear armageddon. You wouldn’t want to be old (or probably young either) in a post-apocalyptic Stephen-King-ian world, the likes of which we’ve been seeing in movies since the Cold War. The Mad Maxes, Terminators, all these desperately cold versions of a world that’s fucked itself to death. Leaving just 93 humans on the whole planet. Though of those, 3 will be Indiana Jones type superheroes and 4 will be really stunning babes in shredded jeans.

And the absolute tragedy is that the fate of the world right now depends on the two most unstable, cartoon-character-like, paranoid nutters on the planet. Because despite the ‘fire and brimstone’ rhetoric spouting from Trump, he simply cannot ‘fire first’. Unless its non-nuclear and it wipes out every weapon North Korea possesses. And probably those of China too. Good luck with that. Attack by America is what Kim fears and is why he’s building his nuclear arsenal in the first place. And doing so at such massive cost that most of his country starves whilst his weaponry increases. Which is why North Korea’s only real ally, China, won’t impose trade sanctions because every North Korean will suffer. But the little fat nutter (Kim, not Trump, he’s the big fat nutter) is planning more and more ‘tests’ this week and next week, seemingly oblivious to the upset, the anger, the angst and the furore, even in the normally worthless United Nations. Where yesterday China said that the UN must strive for diplomatic solutions, not war or sanctions. Which is fucking ripe coming from the only nation capable of even attempting such a measure. “YOU DO IT!!!!” I shouted at the tv screen.

As Oscar Wilde said: the only thing worse than getting old is not getting old. And he didn’t even know Kim Jong-Un.

Happy Tuesday (happy?)

A xxxx

Everyone knows Einstein’s equation. He probably had more than one, maybe even four, but E=MC-squared (can’t do superscripts on an i-pad) must be the most famous equation in the world. Its on t-shirts, record covers, mugs, posters, everyone knows it. But most don’t bother to understand it. President Kim (funny little fat boy in North Korea) understands it perfectly. Energy = Mass x the square of the speed of light, which is the ‘c’ bit. You only need to know that light travels pretty damn quick. In fact it travels at almost 300million metres per second. That’s faster than Usain Bolt, faster than a Ferrari, faster than absolutely, literally, everything. So if you take that speed as a number, and multiply it by itself (‘squared’) the resultant number is verging on the infinite. Its fucking humungous. So the what Einstein’s equation tells us is that the energy you can get from even the tiniest, half a milligram, of matter, once you multiplied it by the ‘c-squared’, will become immense. If this was a general rule there’d be a problem. Eat half a Mars bar (mass) and the energy produced (calories are a measure of energy), would be in the zillions. We’d all be fatter than we even are now! But the equation only works for nuclear matter. Atomic particles. Its an expression of the massive energy levels produced by the tiniest of particles when you split them (fission) or force them together (fusion). And its dangerous shit.

So dangerous that its Kim Jong-un’s mission to build them and use them to threaten the world with. Robert Oppenheimer, who devised the processes which enabled ‘atomic bombs’ later killed himself, knowing that he couldn’t live with the shit-storm he’d innocently invented in a physics lab. A shit-storm which killed 200,000 Japanese when unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they were ‘atom bombs’, which is what we call fission bombs.

The bomb North Korea tested (the new euphemism for ‘threatened with’) on Saturday was a ‘hydrogen’ or fusion bomb. Which is why his little tester was about 12 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan in the war. Fusion is neater, more potent and you literally get more ‘bang for your buck’.

But there are other benefits. Atom bombs produce masses of nuclear fallout, the real, longer-term evil that rises in the ‘mushroom cloud’ and then contaminates everything for centuries. Whereas Kim’s hydrogen bomb is much more ‘environmentally friendly’. I’m just gonna let that one sit there for the full irony to sink in…

If the Green Party did bombs, they’d be hydrogen ones. Much cleaner, safer. (Safe? ISSA FUCKING BOMB!!!!!)

So North Korea now has proven nuclear capability and proven delivery systems. Not quite as efficient as Amazon but they’re getting there. And Trump can brag and puff out his chest all he likes, he’s not likely to strike first.

God help us all

Happy Monday

A xxxx

Wayne Rooney is a very naughty boy. Again. But as details emerge (even though in the Mail so its not like its automatically genuine or true), it gets more and more sordid. Or, ‘better and better’ as such a thing is known among the tattling classes.

Wayne was 3 times the alcohol limit when arrested driving the most un-footballing-superstar car ever; a Beetle convertible. In fact, not only is that not a footballers car, its never a man’s car. Ever. If a man has one of those he might as well go to Sainsburys wearing a tutu. But the car (obviously) wasn’t Wayne’s. He only owns Range Rovers, Bentleys, Lamborginis and monster Chevy pick-up trucks (note the plurals).

The Beetle belonged to a woman!!!! Wayne had been drinking (that’s generally how you get drunk and over the limit) for 10 hours, apparently. And had ‘chatted up’ the Beetle owner. And this is how he did it. (Read this is a whiny Scouse accent, perhaps slurring a little for the alcohol effect; its amazing she understood what he was saying at all). “I really like your breasts. What size are they? Love to get me hands on them”. Smooth bastard. How could any woman resist that Byronic prose? Sweet nothings be damned. ‘Get yer tits out!!’ wins every time. Well, it does up north where ‘sophistication’ is measured by whether you wash your hands when you leave the toilet. Or even put your dick back inside your trousers.

So the woman agreed to accompany Rooney when they left the club. Mrs Rooney was on holiday abroad with the couple’s 3 children and is pregnant with the forth. But his woman is no ‘family breaker’, no, heaven forbid. She said so. Even though she’d have to be deaf dumb and blind to not know a. who Wayne Rooney is and b. that he’s married with kids. It was just a ‘birra foon’.

The woman basically saw pound signs flashing. I don’t like to judge but sometimes you just have to. She gets to shag Wayne Rooney, she’s made. Either he’ll pay her money to keep her onside or at least quiet, or the papers will pay more. This way is arguably better. Because sleeping with Wayne… oooohhhh…

So she gets to tell the story anyway. Must be worth 50 grand of the Mail’s sleaze-fund. If I was half the principled ethical man I like to imagine sometimes I could be, I’d stop buying the Mail on Sunday. But I can’t.

Nobody’s perfect. Not me, not Wayne and certainly not the tart with the Beetle.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

Since the Matt Dawson story the other week; how he contracted Lime’s disease from a tick bite in a London park, there are loads of horrible tales about these horrible things emerging everywhere. There’s the tale of the woman bitten in Golders Hill Park (5 minutes away from here) who contracted Lime’s too. Not nice. And yesterday the elder daughter, who used to have her own name but is now ‘Lila’s Mum’ and nothing else, got into a panic because there was a bug on Lila during a park walk. Holy shit! A bug!!! So this is in an open letter to her about ticks and life and death and the meaning of the entire universe. Because if ever there was absolute proof that ‘there is no God’, then its ticks. And mosquitoes. Snakes. Chelsea fans. Traffic wardens… Who’d have ‘divinely created’ that fucking lot??

Dear Lila’s Mummy,

further to your concerns regarding the tic ‘epidemic’ (2 cases in 19 years) and the whole Lime’s thing, I wish to illustrate a few points relevant to this matter.

Ticks are horrible little arachnids, like spiders, but smaller, they don’t make webs, they suck blood instead. Most don’t like human blood. Only that of vegans (I made that bit up for effect and to make tree-huggers in general question their belief systems). They like dog blood, cat blood, bird blood, but some are less discriminating and bite us too.

So you have to think of it like this. In terms of probability.

I walk on Hampstead Heath virtually every weekend. Long walks. In the green. Pretending I’m in the countryside whilst reassured that I’m just 5 miles from Oxford Circus. You have often accompanied us on such activities. And we walk in the proper countryside, when we have to, and in all that time, how many times have we been bitten by a tick? Answer: 0

And of all the ticks around, only a few bite humans. And of all of those, only 5% (total fiction) carry Lime’s. So the probability of Lila, or more importantly, of me! getting bit by the tick and contracting that horrible disease is 1 in 25,765,893,3478. Work it out yourself.

Furthermore, Lime’s is easily curable if treated with anti-biotics early on. And the bite site produces a fucking great bullseye pattern of red swollen horribleness that nobody could ignore. Other than Matt Dawson and the babe in Golders Hill who was misdiagnosed.

The moral is: shit happens. Just play the odds and hope it doesn’t happen to us.

I remain, etc, etc, etc,

Your esteemed father. Who walks to the tube station wearing a mosquito net and midge hat, carrying a can of ‘Raid’ in each hand.

A xxxx

Negotiations continue in Brussels. Or, probably, continue to stall in Brussels. Mainly because to negotiate, you have to be talking about the same thing. And currently, that ain’t happening. David Davis, who fills me with the same degree of confidence as did Norman Wisdom on an ice patch, the most on-the-ball politician since… Donald Trump, has some vague concept of ‘The Deal’ that we’ll get for trade after leaving the EU. And that’s what he wants to discuss. Whereas Barnier and the Euro-bastards won’t discuss anything other than the ‘divorce bill’. The number of Euros that Britain has to pay, expressed only in billions, to walk away from a wasteful union that its been over-funding for 25 years. Davis, a man you can’t help thinking is well out of his depth over there, wants to include this in negotiations. As if its some kind of ‘sweetener’. He wants all the facets to be hammered out together. The trade deal, the laws, the border in Ireland, security of EU workers here, security of British workers there AND, the ‘settlement’ figure. But ‘NON!!!’ cries Barnier. They won’t discuss anything until the separation fee is agreed. 87 billion, 69 billion, 104 billion. Numbers conjured out of the sky. They can’t even agree on how the figure should be calculated. Mainly because Davis ran out of fingers. Ironically, the main reason (other than immigrant-phobia) for leaving the EU was because of the amount of wasted money it sucks up. Ironic because I hate to imagine the cost of the ‘negotiations’ which will drag on and on with teams of lawyers and accountants on retainer and expenses and going to lap-dance clubs on my taxes.

I never wanted to leave ‘Europe’ but if we’re going, let’s just fucking go. I’m so bored with it already. We’ll still buy Prosecco, even though its much worse for your teeth than seaside ‘rock’, and they’ll still bank in London. The rest we’ll deal with. Eventually.

And whilst we’re negotiating with ridiculous sums, today is the final day of the football ‘transfer window’. If you don’t buy today, the shops close until January. Better scoop up all the bargains you can. Alex Oxlaide-Chamberlain went to Liverpool yesterday for 35 mil. If they’d have waited til today they could have got 45 mil. Its like a reverse ‘sale’. The later you wait, the more you pay. Spurs bought a new defender from Paris Saint Germain who’ll be great if he doesn’t have to go to prison. He currently owns a 2-month suspended sentence for assaulting a policeman but his lawyers have given written assurances that he won’t get banged up for the duration of his contract. Then we bought another defender from Etudiantes. For a team that currently owns one solitary striker, and a pretty weak spare, if he survives today as a Spurs player, we’ve certainly shored up the back.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx