Andy's Glasses

I love my garden. Its semi-classic, semi-wild and semi-lunacy (that’ll be the giraffe). Three semis. A mathematical impossibility but a lovely place to sit in the summertime. Takes a lot of care. Apparently. So I mow the lawn. That’s my job. Man’s job. Mel does more delicate things with little scissor things and special gardening gloves. I use bare hands. So I’m ‘one with nature’ as I kill it. Man to man. I do the lawn and I do the killing. Because sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Tough love. Its a Darwinian world out there.

Ivy. That’s one thing that regards me as its personal ‘hit man’. Otherwise instead of a house, you have an ivy plant. It just takes over. So needs culling. I’m sure there are rules, advice, proper ways to do it. In the spring, just after the autumn, blah, blah. I just grab it and pull. Anytime. Don’t care. You ain’t having my fucking flowers, ya bastard!

And then we grew another little ‘problem’. Suckers, we call them. Really long, suddenly appearing very thorny branches that just suddenly appear. One weekend you have a neat bush, the next one theres 17 3-metre long, bright green shoots, about half an inch thick, covered in thorns. So I get my shears and attack them. Next weekend they’re back. And bigger, stronger, more thorny, more aggressive. Harder to shear.

Last weekend after our week in Malta I saw a few suckers hanging over a rather large bush at the back. And they were covered in blackberries. About 3 metres off the ground. I wasn’t so concerned about the blackberries themselves, (though they are absolutely gorgeous, and FREE!! you have to love nature) but the ‘sucker’ had now invaded, taken over and was displacing our very lovely and very old bush. Back, right. Behind which sits the shed that Mel & I built one sunday morning whilst the kids were out learning to pray proper. Must have worked, the prayer that is, because 20 years later the shed’s still standing. Only God knows how.

So I attacked the suckers. With long shears whilst on a ladder. And harvested about 6lbs of blackberries, most of which were in ‘past-slime’ mode, but some made it into the freezer. I removed literally yards and yards of horrible, prickly bush. And this weekend its back. Bigger than before. Blackberried up and challenging me. ‘Are you ‘ard enough??’ it says. ‘You want some???’ (as in violence, not blackberries). So tomorrow I’m going out there. With a saw. Big one. And only one of us is comin’ out of this alive.

Probably the bush.

Happy green-fingered Friday

A xxxx

Ian ‘Beefy’ Botham is incensed by the BBC. They interviewed him on the radio, ostensibly to talk about his charity but then changed the agenda. Beefy’s charity the Country Food Trust, was to be the beneficiary of about 10,000 partridges and pheasants that will be shot on his estate. All the dead birds, to the foodbank. Feeding hungry people. But the BBC’s point appeared to be that possibly people would rather watch their children go hungry than have them eat food, the acquisition of which is morally questionable. Undoubtedly a ‘first world problem’. And undoubtedly an over-paid (BBC, they all are) anti-countryside, left-wing middle class tart asking the questions. To which Beefy swore. She’s lucky he didn’t punch her. He’d been hi-jacked because killing animals is ‘bad’. Even if its to eat them, its all about sport. Animals shot for sport shouldn’t be eaten by decent people. Not sure about hungry people. They’re generally not so sensitive.

Stan Kroenke is not sensitive. He’s the dude wot owns Arsenal. And he has a new tv program in America all about big game hunting. Ok, its not all about shooting elephants and cutting the heads off giraffes to put them onto the front of your Cadillac. They also show you how to clean guns as well. Buy ammo. Make bows and arrows. Give advice about hunting knives. Useful stuff. But mainly its about the animals. Well, about killing them. For sport. For fun. Not such fun for the animals but ‘ITS LEGAL’. Helps with conservation of animals, don’t it? Ok, not with the ones shot, obvs, but the others. It provides income for the game reserves. Kill one lion, save 3. Unpalatable but that’s life. Or death.

We know the maths, we know the moral arguments. What I don’t know is what possible pleasure an individual, even an American one, can derive from shooting a wonderful, beautiful animal.

Bizarrely, I don’t have such issues about birds. Mainly because there are so many of them. Ok, and they taste nice. If you love ‘big game’ and you’re a stupid, rich fat Yank, just send a cheque for $25,000 to the conservationists. Simple. Why shoot any of them? They’re all endangered species. You love your wife, does that mean you want to shoot her too? Don’t answer that.

So my vote is this: leave Ian Botham alone, he’s doing good work for a great charity. And lock Stan Kroenke up for life. His motives are purely profit-based and he’s related to Arsenal.

Happy Thursday

Whilst the whole world is condemning President Maduro over there in Venezuela, one voice is still so silent that it has become almost deafening. That of Jeremy Corbyn. Jezza finds it very very hard to criticise any socialist, anywhere, anytime. No matter how many innocent civilians get killed, regardless of the rights that are removed, the politicians and press that mysteriously ‘vanish’ into the night, Jezza keeps his counsel. Comrades to the end.

And the end of Venezuela is nigh. Tragically. And absurdly. Because Venezuela is rich. Or should be. It has oil. Which it sells to America in barrels full. Millions of them. And yet the country is on the verge of bankruptcy. Inflation is at 700% (I can’t even imagine how those numbers work, so I’m just thinking ‘really bad’) and the minimum wage there now equates to £10 a month. And to cap it all, Maduro has now rigged the election, locked up the opposition and created a system where he will become The Leader. A Kim Jong-Un in Spanish. A dictator. Fortunately without the nuclear weapons, and even more fortunately without the silly haircut.

If America increases its sanctions to cease the purchase of Venezuelan oil that will be, financially, the end of Venezuela. Which may be an acceptable political state, but the people? Think of all those lovely, hard-working people caught up in this shit. Millions of them. Without much of a present, let alone a future.

Yet this is the ‘model’ that Corbyn admires so. The Socialist Dream, as started by his mate, Hugo Chavez and now taken to the next level (a quantum leap) by Maduro. This is what starts as a massive, unsubstantiated promise to the ‘young’ of a brilliant future, paved with numbers that don’t add up and an ideology that is fatally flawed, and ends in total financial ruination and a man (I’m gonna guess that he is not personally ‘suffering’ financially at this point) in total charge of everything in a land now devoid of free speech or any other democratic process. “Tax the Rich!!!” he yells, and everything else can be just given away virtually free!!!!

Someone should post the ‘Venezuela Story’ as a salient message to Corbyn’s fans. “One day Son, this could all be ours”.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

There’s a company in California that provides corporations with inspiration for future planning. By using Sci-fi short stories written by a hundred authors. Sci-fi becomes sci-fact. As it did with the ‘video-phone’. Which first appeared in lots of (generally really cheap) sci-fi movies and tv series in which a phone, nailed to a wall with lots of cords and cabling, had a little, but inevitably bulky screen attached nearby. And eventually became Face Time. Apparently the first ever viable submarine was built due to inspiration by Jules Verne’s 20,000 leagues under the sea. And James T Kirk (may the Lord rest his weary soul where no soul has gone before) used an ‘i-pad’. Well, some cordless, chunky ‘electronic clip-board’ thing the size of the New York phone book. But cordless. Upon which to issue his instructions.

These were all prophetic visions, as it transpired. They became reality from a fictional beginning.

I then realised that my own preferred driving style in fact came from Mad Max. And I started Tai Chi because I want to be The Terminator. Ok, we don’t use titanium skeletons so much, only in the strictly metaphorical sense, but with better energy. And I have a burning desire to shoot people with phasers, lasers and great big smart guns, then vanish in the mist as I’m ‘beamed up’. But we all have problems.

But we need a future. Lila needs a future. So we need a longevity that is assured. And the fastest way to do that (so the Doctors say this week) is to take statins. All men over 60, all women over75. I hate to imagine the cost to the NHS, because all of those people get ‘free’ drugs. And there are potential side effects. You get religious fervour. Bad breath. High risk of watching Love Island (fucking shoot me now). Ok, I made those up but there’s always side effects from long-term drug use so they need to be discussed. With the entire 15 million (guessing here) people in the country who are in those age bands. That shouldn’t cause too many problems for GPs then, should it. They’ve got loads of time. Which is why when I went online to book an appointment for a blocked ear, I was offered two (useless) options over a month away. I COULD HAVE DROWNED IN MY OWN FUCKING EARWAX BY THEN!!!! I shouted at no-one in particular.

You wanna live to 100? Here’s what you do. Eat food, nothing else. Drink only to excess. Never smoke when someone will see you. Have chocolate at least twice a day. Oh, and coffee. Loads of coffee. Fill a loyalty card every day. This may all kill you, but at least you’ll  die happy.

Because if the future is in fact going to be Star Wars, we’re all doomed.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

We were in Paris the night Princess Diana died there. I personally had nothing to do with it. Honest. And as proof, I was never named in one of the 863 conspiracy theories that went round at the time. We were driving back from Disneyland and had to take a detour because the Peripherique was shut around ‘the scene’. But this was long long ago so we didn’t find out the news until we reached Calais and someone mentioned it. Diana had died. Car crash. Holy shit. And it was a tragedy. Lovely young woman, a mother, dying in such stupid and avoidable circumstances. I didn’t cry but it was horrible.

Then the world went totally fucking insane. Diana was instantly elevated to sainthood by public demand and literally millions of people queued up to sign ‘the book’, standing in line for half a day to do so. I signed my own book at home and saved the time. Diana was unlikely to read either so I didn’t think it too disrespectful. There was a never-ending crowd of sobbing chest-beaters around Kensington Palace. England went into hysteria mode, for weeks and weeks. It was, quite frankly, ridiculous.

And now Channel 4 want to air a programme that shows previously unseen videos of the Princess at her most pissed-offed. Charles was having the affair with Camilla, that he’d never stopped having. Diana was having affairs with numerous people herself. In fact with virtually every man in Britain except me. The Queen was unsupportive of her, Prince Phillip many still believe had some part in her demise. But that’s bollocks. It was a car crash. But ya never know.

Diana’s brother, the rather pompous Earl Spencer, wants the programme stopped. Too upsetting, too distressful for ‘the family’, blah, blah. And you know what, I agree with him. Because I’m worried that Diana-mania will resurface once more as a consequence of the film, the Royals will suffer as they did last time, hitting an all-time low in popularity, but obviously not Wills and Harry who are loved and only stand to be raised further by anything to do with their mother. But that insanity that gripped the country was pure loony tunes. And I don’t want it happening again.

There, I’ve said it. We don’t need such a programme. Show pro-celebrity golf instead.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

The football season is just days away now. The new one. New broom. All bets off. League table in alphabetical order. All to play for. Brighton have the same chance as Manchester City. Hmmm…

Other than the 500 million quid difference between the teams. Manchester City have a back four costing almost 200 million. 3 of those four arriving within about 12 months. So firstly, I want to know how the ‘financial fair play’ thing works, again? The structure that was implemented to try and ‘level the playing field’ a little bit. To stop teams funded by middle eastern black gold or tainted by Russian corruption from having an unfair advantage over ‘normal’ clubs? Oh, it is in place, and working… errr… quite well. Yup.

Neymar Junior is probably moving to Paris St Germain tomorrow, from Barcelona. To trigger the transfer PSG have to find over 200 million (pound/euros, no difference now at that level), with the final transfer fee reaching closer to 250 mil. Then they’re going to increase his salary. To over a million pounds a week. A fucking week. 55 million a year for five years. Another 250 mil +. Making Neymar ‘worth’ a half a billion pounds. Again another vanity project funded by middle east money, this time the Qataris. That famously footballing nation soon to host a world cup. If anyone is flying there by that time.

I don’t give a shit who buys who for what. Its all totally obscene and why we haven’t had some form of salary ‘cap’ or proper fair play regime in place is a mystery that totally stinks of corruption a the highest level and is poisoning the beautiful game.

Spurs total net spend this transfer window: -£68 million. We’ve bought no-one, sold a few. Notably Kyle Walker to Man City for 50 mil. Anyone else could have had him for 20, but its Man City/Chelsea, double it and add on more for good measure. They’ll pay anything.

And the only player that Spurs are apparently considering is Ross Barkley. Who, for some unaccountable reason, has a price tag of 50 mil. Although perhaps there is some accountability as that’s what we’ve just cashed in for Walker. Ross Barkley is a 50 million pound player like Donald Trump is going to make America great. He’s another David Bentley. We have the best midfield in the league (he says modestly, optimistically, hopefully) and although we need a bit more depth for our Euro campaign, we don’t need to pay 50 mil for a bench-warmer who is so full of unfulfilled promise and never lived up to any of it.

Honolulu has banned pedestrians from looking at phones while crossing the road. What a brilliant and un-zeitgeisty thing to do. People will be fined. Should be executed but its a start. Hats off to Hawaii. Though not for long, you’ll get sun-stroke.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

How do you get a name like Reince Priebus? If JK Rowling doesn’t give it to you? You’d spend your entire childhood trying to unravel the “i before e except after r” conundrum. And once you’d sorted it out, you’d still have a really silly name.

But Reince overcame this miserable childhood to become a miserable adult. And never so miserable was when he became Chief of Staff (the capitals there purely in case any Americans are reading this, over here ‘its just a job’) to… THE WHITE HOUSE!!!!! And 6 months later he’s gone. History. Consigned to the history books and to confound spellcheckers the world over for all eternity.

I’m not even sure what a Chief of Staff does there. Hire the cleaners? Make sure the front door’s nice and shiny? Anyway, The Grand Chief (that’ll be the Prez) hired a new communications chief last week, Anthony Scaramucci, whose father featured in lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody before he joined the Mafia as a horse-head severer. But son Anthony is a star of communications. Because he just ‘gets it’. The job. Fully understands the entire spectrum of what the word ‘communication’ really really means. Which is why, speaking to a reporter, and ‘on the record’ he called Reibus ‘a fucking paranoid schitzophrenic’. The reporter actually went and published those very words but being America, using asterisks instead of ‘fucks’. You can walk round town with a fucking great sub-machine gun, but never say the f-word in public. God bless America.

‘The Mooch’, as he’s known, blamed the press. I’ll never trust ’em again, he intoned. Or antoned. Anyway, that’s what he said. Implying that the reporter was to blame. For doing his job and, er, reporting stuff. He also apologised for swearing (Republicans don’t swear, its unGodly) but not for the content of his rant. Which also included accusing Steve Bannon, Trump’s policy adviser and former ‘alt-right’ activist, of ‘sucking his own dick’. Which probably translates as some kind of metaphor over there, rather than the rather difficult physical near-impossibility that it remains on this fair Isle.

To further improve Donald’s mood this week, Congress voted to keep his most-hated ‘Obamacare’ going when he’s so desperate to bury it, and then they voted to take sanctions against Russia, which has also caused as stir. The last thing to go down that well in the White House was Monica Lewinsky.

Fortunately, North Korea tested yet another missile this week too. One capable of travelling 2000 miles. Or, ‘to Chicago’ as that distance is officially known. And that’s fortunate because Trump now has to do something. He has achieved not one thing in the last 6 months, but if he can nuke his way out of this one using extreme violence and gung-ho-manship, then Americans will love him.

God help us all.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

How can I concentrate on the problems of the world when I keep getting distracted. Though if I have one pure and superlative skill, it is the ease with which I can be distracted. Always been the same. Homework to do, fine, then the tv comes on. Homework… later. But today’s distraction was a worthy one. Lila. That tiny little bundle of fluffy pinkness came for a sleepover last night. Her daddy had to go away so Mummy and baby came to stay. So I was stuck in goo-goo-land. Somewhere I seem to be spending alarmingly increasing time currently.

But I did see two very interesting articles. My fave type. Food/health issues. And stupidity. They always go together. In the first, a bunch of Danes have done the inevitable study on alcohol. And found… that its not only good for you but if taken in moderate but not particularly sparing ‘doses’, reduces the likelihood of type II diabetes by over 50% in men and about 45% in women. That is such a staggeringly big statistic even I’m impressed. They did stress, however, that they were investigating diabetes ONLY, so the fact that half the study probably went into liver failure and the other half are now recovering alcoholics was not ‘relevant to the hypothesis in consideration’.

The other ‘study’ showed how men (in particular but not exclusively) suffer from depression due to excess of sugar. Funny, I get depressed if I don’t have the stuff in vast quantities, particularly when mixed with chocolate or even ice cream. But there ya go. Maybe I’m not as much of a man as I thought. Bit of fluidity coming into my life so I can empathise with the youth. But only where sweets are concerned.

I’d personally use Jeremy Corbyn as a guinea pig and force feed him vodka (Russian, cheap, workers’ label, obviously) and chocolate until he was sick. Then see whether the diabetes prevention from the alcohol neutralised the sugar overload of the chocolate. And then I’d shoot him either way. Just for being a nob. And for not being ‘honest’ to ‘the kids’. Wooing them with promises of a perfect, Garden of Eden future Britain. Saddled with crippling debt that they will be paying off their entire working lives. Nice man.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

Funny how you go on holiday and end up with no time whatsoever. Funny. I blame Lila. People generally are demanding in inverse proportion to their size. I worked this out when I met Mel. Very small, very demanding. Lila is a quantum leap in both directions. Really tiny yet can’t even tie her own shoelaces. Not that wears shoes. Obviously. But its not that she wants things all the time, cries out for attention, yells and screams, because she doesn’t. She demands attention by stealth. You know she’s there so you have to watch her. Play with her. Make silly noises, blow raspberries, just watch her sleep. It all falls under that umbrella of ‘amaaaazing’. So that’s where I’ve been. In Malta, with Lila. And a few others. Minor players.

And I’ve come back to a world in turmoil. Ok, not totally dissimilar to the one I left, but really. No, really. No petrol cars to be made after 2040. What will the 84 year-old me do? I want to be tootling round to the shops in a McLaren F1 at 14 mph, wearing a hat (old people always wear hats) and park it really badly, causing more pollution. I don’t want to be hopping in and out of some probably driverless electric ‘thing’. Its embarrassing. But so’s wetting myself and I’ll probably be doing that too.

Donald Trump has banned transgender people from the US military. How is that fair? How does it benefit the American military? Surely nothing fills the enemy with greater fear than a marine in a dress? Yet its almost like Trump just has to be, first and foremost, controversial. Everyone worries about pollution; he pulls out of the Paris accord. Everyone is talking about ‘gender fluidity’ and Trump comes up with the latest ban on ‘trans’ people. And you have to wonder: how big a problem is transgenderism in the US military? Perhaps its a peculiarly American problem: I don’t know whether I want to be a man or a woman but either way I want to shoot people. And I appreciate that this is my own particular problem. I have endless compassion and tolerance for transgender people. But struggle to reconcile my undoubted stereotypical attitudes with a soldier’s life.

There again I’m struggling a bit with the whole ‘gender fluidity’ thing. Not about sexuality, I get being gay, bisexual, whatever. The Romans invented that too. But telling kids not to make up their mind what actual gender they should be is nothing but an unnecessary confusion in a life already pretty overwhelming. My rule is this: if you have a dick, you’re probably a boy. What you choose to do with it is really up to you.

And so to work. Has to happen sometime, I suppose.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

So Jeremy Corbyn has back-tracked on his ‘promise’ to ‘sort out’ student debt. When he shouted and screamed about it for 3 months of electioneering he sounded pretty convincing. When he repeated it at Glastonbury a month later, the implication was not only that he continued to campaign against tuition fees but that student debts would… well what? Vanish? Disappear? Be written off?? Then he did the sums.

11 billion quid. Hmmmmm. That might dent the exchequer a touch. He needs 35 billion to pump endless funds into the health service, 27 bil for re-nationalising half the country, 122 bil to increase public services and workers’ benefits. But he can count on at least 4 billion coming in from raising tax on ‘the rich’. That adds up nicely. In Corbyn’s mind.

Austerity doesn’t work; let’s try bankruptcy

So faced with that figure to wipe out the debts of a generation of students, he’s changed his mind. Or say: “I never said that”. Actually, you did Jeremy. And repeated it to the point where it became boring.

Never mind, he’s restructuring his party. Or, kicking out the deputy leader, as its known.

Tom Watson, the incumbent, was never Corbyn’s choice. When he was surprisingly voted as party leader, it was decided from on high that he was so unelectably left-wing that the party needed a bit of ‘balance’. So it chose fat Tom to appeal to the old New Labourites who found Jezza’s neo-communist ranting somewhat unpalatable. All things are indeed relative as during the Gordon Brown era, Tommy was considered pretty hard left. Ironic as he’s now deemed the party’s very own Nigel Farage and surplus to ‘the cause’. They want to replace him with Emily Thornbury who follows the staunch hard-left line. Like Diane Abbot does but Emily can string a sentence together with a degree of coherence and also probably passed her maths GCSE.

Changing of the guard. It’ll be the KGB next.

Happy Monday

A xxxx