Andy's Glasses

Britain never signed up to the full ‘Schengen’ agreement by which all member states of Europe, plus a few others like Norway agreed to ‘free passage of Europeans between states’. We never signed up because we’ve always had a small-island-mentality and we always will. Not saying it was a bad thing not to do the full Schengen, just saying it was a thing. Which won’t matter a jot once we finally, eventually, agonisingly Brexit because we’ll probably end up joining the Schengen to get the trade deals. Even though we didn’t need to when we were a part of the madness that we’ll call ‘Europe’. That clear?

Free passage of Europeans means that they can cross borders. It never referred to the freedom of Europeans to march along the streets of Islington singing German marching songs in groups of 15,000 or more whilst setting off flares and being very foreign. We never signed up to that.

So when someone on Thursday night sent me a video of precisely that I immediately went and hid behind the sofa. I mean; fuck me!! Germans marching with gesticulating arm-movements and aggressive chanting in London! Holy shit. And on a thursday too, which is not a European football night. Then I realised that for some poor souls, Thursday night IS Euro night. That other Euro night. Oh. (Sorry; but for 20 years we’ve endured such gloating so cut me some slack here). And this was just those lovely Cologne fans come to see their relatively lowly team compete at even that minorly ‘high’ level for the first time in decades. So the whole fucking town came over. Even though they were only awarded 3,000 tickets for the ‘away fans’. Itself a bit ‘mean’ really, but that’s Arsenal for you. 20,000 of the Germans came, a-singin’ and a-marchin’ and basically being really Germanic. Without tickets. Though many did have tickets but in the Arsenal sections of the ground. Supposedly some error in the system where you enter the team you support; “zat vould be ze Arzenal’, and your address: Bustenhalterstrasse 52… and those very clever computers work out whether you might be a chancing away fan rather than a true Gooner scumbag. Or not, as the case may have been.

You have to laugh.

Off to Wembley soon for the Swansea game. Doubtless after yesterday’s ‘event’ at Parsons Green the security at the game today will be vast and thorough. I bloody hope so.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

In an effort to try and reduce obesity, the world’s fastest growing health risk, doctors are now going to send porkers on cookery courses. Exercise classes. So they can eat properly and move more. That will cost about 500 quid a person but they reckon the long-term gain in reduction of diabetes will more than compensate. Though initially you need to cough up (no pun)… 500 quid… times every fat person up north… add in the few down here… Wales and Scotland… well, its a few billion quid. Everything the NHS does costs a few billion quid by the time the administrators have had their kick-backs from the diet and exercise companies involved. Where really, all you need is four words, spoken preferably over the top of a pair of reading glasses, with due gravitas and sincerity; “eat less, move more” and the world would be fine again.

Which was somewhat contrary to my experience at the cinema last night. We went to see Detroit. Kathy Bigelow’s bio-pic of the terrible race riots in the eponymous city in 1967, focussing on one specific event during that time of insanity in which three black guys were basically, cold-bloodedly murdered by the police and half a dozen others assaulted and beaten. Its not exactly a ‘feel-good’ movie. But looked interesting. And was. Though not as interesting as it was laborious. Not just overly long but long and slow. One of those films that you endure for the sake of learning things rather than enjoy for its own sake.

The tickets were free! Lila’s mum gets free tickets every week if she walks sufficient ‘steps’ for her health insurance to love her. And give her a pair of cinema tickets that she can’t use because she has a baby. That’d be Lila then. So we went in her place. And when you pick them up there’s a popcorn machine. A hot-dog thing. Fizzy, sugary drinks. Nachos. Which they drown in bright yellow fat and call it ‘cheese’ then throw on some jalapinos (one of yer 5-a-day, obvs). You could ask for a salad. But they’d look puzzled and offer you ice-cream instead. You could ask for carrot batons with humous, but they wouldn’t know what the fuck you were talking about. No, sorry sir, we only sell fat and sugar and only in humungous quantities. To justify the outrageous price we’re going to charge you.

I ordered a popcorn, medium, sweet. I only do sweet. Mel almost prefers salt but I have trouble picking the sweet ones out in the dark so she concedes to avoid the spitting out that may otherwise follow. “Would you like to go large for just 30p extra???” Holy shit, I thought, I’m living ‘Supersize Me’. I’m being upgraded.

Don’t you know that the country is suffering unprecedented obesity? Isn’t this kind of crass commercialism the very reason? Because food, especially popcorn, costs virtually nothing, so you pile it on to justify increasing your take-per-seat? In some cases very large seats. Its destructive to society and harmful to individuals and you should be ashamed of yourself and your rotten company.

That’s what I should have said. Instead I opted for, ‘yeah, why not, I’ll have the large, thanks’.

Fortunately I have the metabolism of a mosquito so its no biggy. Oh, and I’m a pig, so that was 30p well spent. Now I just have to live with the guilt.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

So a normal morning for me is nice. Mel brings me a cup of tea in bed as she leaves to go swimming (I know; spoilt rotten; which I reciprocate, in case you’re worried, on Saturdays when I go to me early martial arts and leave her lounging in bed like a total princess!!). And I sit there, princess Andy, perusing the paper all calm and lovely. Get up about 7.30, shower, shave, sh- whatever, and then its downstairs for a leisurely breakfast. Though how leisurely a banana can be I haven’t worked out yet. Drink more tea, write a blog, then on me bike and off to the tube. That’s ‘normal’. Easy. Nice.

This week we had ‘house guests’. Lila and her mummy. So the morning routine changed a little. Lila wakes up, quite late for a baby really, and calls out, not crying, not screaming, just nonsense sounds, similar to the ones Mel uses, but without the Yorkshire accent. And I run in and grab her, before her mother can get out of bed. And she greets me with a big smile (no-one’s ever that happy to see me, including me) and I grab her out of the cot. And we play. And read the papers together. Lila’s very interested in what’s happening in the world. And whether the plight of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar is better to chew than the Spurs match report on the back page. And we jump about and giggle and stand up, fall over (and that’s just me) and its wonderful. Eventually, several hours later I’ve managed to take a shower while she feeds and then I take her back. ‘We’ eat our banana. I chew and swallow my bits, she’s more creative. Way more creative. So after mopping the floor we play more. Our favourite game is rolling over. Even if we don’t want to end up on our fronts, that’s where we roll. Because we can. I put her back and she rolls again. Don’t look for logic, she’s a woman. Sorry, what was I saying; she’s a BAYBEEE.

And she’s leaving me today. Life goes back to ‘normal’. But who wants that?

Normal for Spurs is winning home football matches. And in that respect life went back to ‘normal’ for them last night, beating Dortmund in the Champions League. Not gloating, not bragging, but Dortmund are a ‘proper’ team. German. Good. Classy. Not like the unheard-ofs that many other British teams were fortunate enough to play. The Qarabags and Basels and the finest that obscure European principalities with populations less than 4,546 people can muster. Dortmund. Who nearly won the competition not so many years ago under Jurgen Klopp. Whatever happened to him, I wonder?

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

The i-phone X is coming out. Sorry; THE I-PHONE X IS COMING OUT!!!! Raise the flag and shout halleluyah. Or at least, buy a few Apple shares. If you can afford 1. Cos its gonna be the biggest thing since the abacus. Since the wheel. Since sticky-backed-plastic. This is gonna be massive. It has to be to justify the 1000 pound price tag. A grand for a phone. You can buy an ipad for 300 quid but the phone is a grand. You ordered it yet?

I haven’t. Having managed to avoid iphones 1-9, or perhaps A-W, I’ll stick with my 27 year-old Nokia with that annoying ringtone. And my Motorola ‘Oyster’. I’m not mean, I’m just… mean.

But iphones are fully legal under EU law. Therefore, come the ‘glorious day’ when we are no longer EU-bound, it will pass seamlessly into British law. That’s the deal. We call it ‘repeal’ but actually its just embracing all those lovely laws and regulations that those Euro-fuckers have forced upon us for 50 years and making them our very own. So we can destroy them, throw them out and use them as part of the Grand Foreign-People Avoidance Plan of 2019. And the best bit of all; we don’t need to put them individually to parliamentary vote. The government, being all-wonderful, faultless and totally trustworthy, can decide for us without bothering all those moaners and whingers who sit on the opposition benches with the minutae of the laws. They can just take the good without the bad. As they see them. These are the so-called Henry VIII laws. Henry invoked massive power to himself because anyone who dared argue with him would be either divorced, outlived or beheaded. And Theresa May wants the same powers over the EU laws. For her government to accept them, reject them or change them as she sees fit without due parliamentary process.

So she can, with a sweep of her pen/ipad, end those pesky Europeans from coming here (leaving our hospitals, corn-fields, restaurants and building sites almost empty, but what the hell), and keep the BMWs rolling in on their superbly oiled bearings all the way from Germany. The initial reading of the repeal bill was read last night and passed. But there is far to go with it. And when ultra-sensible, ultra-Conservative good person Dominic Grieve, the former Attorney General, says his own party are wrong on this massive legal issue, ya gotta think they’re wrong.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

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