Andy's Glasses

This is the result of the latest research: ‘NEWS HEADLINES WILL KILL YOU!!!’ Its now been shown in tests (my kitchen, every morning) that the increase in anxiety, neuroses and panic attacks is enhanced by stupid fucking, attention-grabbing headlines that are essentially dishonest and therefore daft.

On the front page of the Times this morning, right at the top, even above the solar eclipse in America (I thought it was a metaphor for the Trump administration too but in fact its real), was the headline: “Gum disease sufferers 70% more likely to get dementia”!!!!! Holy shit!!! 70%. Then, (after flossing, brushing, rinsing, gargling, flossing some more and checking my gums fourteen times), I read on. Firstly the study was on Taiwanese people and they’re nothing like me. More gummy generally. Secondly, and possibly even more importantly, the sums they quoted didn’t add up to anything like 70%, more like less than 10% but they may not have published all the data properly. And then, the kicker, right at the end, that people with long-term gum disease are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, depression and other shit which all increase likelihood of dementia. Factor those out (the article actually states) and gum sufferers ‘were not at a higher risk overall’. What did we learn (well I did) in statistics 101: “correlation is not causation”. If I wanted ‘sensational’ lies I’d read the Sun or the Mail. I (naively) expect more from the Times. Wrong again.

So we’re temporarily safe from dementia, even if our teeth are falling out. But what about tics? Matt Dawson, world-cup-winning rugby superstar (who sold his soul to Question of Sport to fund his long retirement) was bitten by a tic in Chiswick Park. Contracted Lyme disease and ended up needing two heart operations over two years of misery. You might be better off with gum problems. I wonder if you get tics in Taiwan?

But its all ok if you eat properly. Too many tomatoes (yesterday’s ‘superfood’) are apparently bad for you if you’re an ‘elite’ sportsman, like me. They prevent absorption of calcium which us sporty types need to prevent cramp. Snack on beef jerky. That’s the advice. Good for you body but hell on your teeth. Which are attached to your gums! Don’t these people see the big picture. And have greek yoghurt before bed. I’d rather sleep with the tics.

None of which prevented 50 million pound superstar elite Manchester City player Kyle Walker getting sent off last night. I allowed myself just a little snigger. Just one. Sniggering reduces carbon uptake by the quads. Unless you eat mangoes and tortilla chips to compensate.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I really don’t like football, have no desire to discuss it, no interest in it whatsoever. There’s no need. There’s things like cricket; we just beat the (once the absolute mightiest) West Indies by an innings and 200 odd runs in the first test. Took 3 days (note to non-cricket fans: that’s a virtual blink of an eye in that game; like winning a tennis match in 22 minutes). And there’s rugby.

Rugby? But there’s no test matches being played and the season hasn’t started yet??? I hear you ponder… ish.

Ahhh but this isn’t about the game, per se, more about one player. One of our own. Toby Flood. Superstar fly-half who has played 60 times for England. Blond feller. Played for Toulouse for 3 years and now… he’s going to play in Germany. Germany? They don’t play rugby, surely? They cheat at football with that penalties thing, they drink beer, do strange things, but rugby?

They are not traditionally a ‘rugby playing nation’, that’s true. But no nation is until they start playing it. Then, by some kind of definition, they must be. And they beat Uruguay in the last world cup so they can’t be that bad. And they want to get better. They want to field a team in the next Olympics, which will probably be run by a pharmaceutical company to save time and effort.

And Toby is part-German. Had a German grandfather. An actor in Berlin called Anthony Lieven. But he fled Berlin in 1936 because, like all Jews, he was about to become persecuted like no people have ever been persecuted, before or since. He came to England, in fact. Where he was watched by the government for being a ‘possible communist’. Virtually every German Jew in 1936 was a ‘possible communist’ due to their desire to get as much distance from Naziism as they could.

And that’s why it makes me happy. Toby Flood is (in some way, some small part, some degree) a Jew. An international rugby-playing Jew. And as Jews, so well represented in business, in the arts, in scholarly pursuits, in general bookishness and cleverness, are tragically under-represented in major sports, its wonderful to find a new one. Even though (the grandfather’s son had a half-sister who is Toby’s mum) the link from outside half to barmitzvah boy may be tenuous, I don’t care. I’ll take one Jewish toe-nail. We can adopt him.

So to claim his German-ness, Toby has to play domestic German rugby for 3 years, which, at the end of his glowing career, he’s happy to do. For his ‘other’ country.

Next week: rabbis playing the Eton Wall Game.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

What makes you happy? A sunny morning? A beautiful woman? A sculpture? Your children? The feel of your lover? The sound of the birds? News that Donald Trump has been assassinated?

It can be anything. We’re all different. But with so much shit happening in the world, some balance is always required. For every piece of shit neo-nazi in Virginia there’s a lovely child. For every jihadi motherfucker there’s someone getting three A* a-levels. For every Chelsea fan there’s a good person somewhere. For every punctured car tyre there’s a backhand down-the-line winner on the run. Every cloud has a silver lining. Apparently. It just doesn’t always feel like that when your in mid-cloud. So I’ve included today a photo of a cloud and a silver lining to show you.

Because after tennis this morning we stopped at our cafe and I was chatting to some people when I looked up and saw… Lila. Just sitting there on her dad’s lap. And I felt pure, simple, unadulterated happiness. A Lila surprise. Simply wonderful. Quite an amazing effect.

Last night I had a similar moment of pure joy. Read on, its clean, I promise. After our dinner guests left I sat down, turned on the tv and, quite by chance, Match of the Day was on. Oh, that’s nice. Not quite the Lila surprise that would follow later, but nice. And the screen told me it was Stoke 1, Arsenal 0, with 72 minutes played. I had no idea of the score of the match played hours before. So I could enjoy the remaining hilights. When the Arsenal player was ruled offside when appearing to score. The un-goal. Though later it was shown that the player was about 7mm offside. So how that is ‘not’ offside in Arsene Wenger’s mind I don’t know, I’m no psychologist. But I know a bad loser when I see one. That made me happy. Really happy. Ok, in a more ‘schadenfreudey’ way than perhaps a Lila moment would be, but happiness is such a seemingly rare commodity (when sober) that you take what you can. Even if it might appear to make me rather shallow and pathetic. I can live with that.

Spurs play Chelsea this afternoon. Lila’s coming to watch it. Our talisman. Oh please let her be our talisman. I’m way more concerned that its our first league match at Wembley than that its Chelsea coming.

(Let’s pray for a-) Happy Sunday

A xxxx

It would have become ‘Charlotteville-gate’ but its too long to print on t-shirts and it would go round your coffee mug twice. So instead we’ll call it ‘The Fuck Up’. Which is nothing if not completely accurate. An object lesson in how not to handle a disaster. By Donald J. Trump.

The town of Charlotteville decided to remove a statue of Robert E Lee, the confederate leader in the Civil War. Even though he was, at heart, a bit of a liberal. So every shit-kicking, mother-fucking, cross-burning, swastika-wearing, gun-toting redneck racist in the entire south of America turned up in protest. They’d announced they would. And when they turned up they were ready for war. In Virginia, if not other places in the US, you’re allowed to have a private army of gun-toting paramilitaries, just walking the streets, fully armed and loaded.

On the other side were the anti-nazis, the anti-fascists, the black rights groups, the Vegan Alliance, all kinds of ‘alt-left’ and tree-huggy types inherently opposed to fascism and racism. They too were kind-of armed, with clubs, pepper sprays, broccoli, that kind of thing.

The racists arrived. Not singing about slavery (bit late for that), nor about Robert E Lee, not even about jihadis. They were chanting this: “Jews will not replace us”. What? Who? How? Why???

Maybe the KKK had been getting a large number of rabbis making applications to join? Perhaps there’d been an invasion of Yeshiva-dudes in their Country & Western bars, the ones where the musicians play behind chicken wire? The odd thing being, there simply aren’t enough Jews in America to replace the rednecks anyway. And most of them would struggle to drive a beefed-up Chevy pick-up. But that’s what they sang.

Fights were inevitable, skirmishes, police involved trying to keep the rivals apart. Nothing unexpected. Until one dude drove his car into the anti-racist crowd and killed a woman.

Ok, so on day 1 Trump accused ‘both sides of causing trouble and violence’ and didn’t pick out the murderer for special praise. Nor even call it an act of neo-nazi terrorism. That had to wait til day 3 for that to emerge from the lips of the president but they were the words of others which he read off an autocue. At least he’d made a very belated, half-assed effort.

Then yesterday he went back to the ‘violence on all sides’ being the problem, giving, in the angry words of Paul Ryan, the Republican Chairman, ‘a moral equivalence’ between the neo-nazis and their opponents. For which David Duke, ex-head of the KKK, thanked the president. And when a man with his record thanks you, you know you’re way south of ‘doing the right thing’.

The saying goes: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Donald J Trump has called in an industrial sized earth-mover.

I hate that man.

God Bless America

A xxxx

Danny Finklestein at the Times argues today that we ignore genetic influence on behaviour at our peril. He makes this point after the recent sacking at Google of the guy who said there are less women working there because they’re more ‘neurotic’. Fair comment. Or not. Google thought not. Or thought they had to say ‘not’ rather than look bad, easier to sack him, easy to employ another man, Google employ men all the time. Disproportionately, so it would seem.

But is this a problem with ‘genes’? People react strongly to implications that ‘you are your genes’ and you’re stuck with it. Because that leads to a whole raft of horrible extrapolations. Most of which end with mass sterilisations or elevations of the chosen ‘alpha’ (say… Aryans?) to an exalted position that they neither justify nor deserve. And consequently creates an ‘underclass’. One which, because you can’t change your genes, not yet anyway, you will never leave.

This is how the caste system works in India. Its how the nazis thought. Its why Singapore had a program for years in which wealthy people were encouraged to have lots of kids, using tax breaks, whereas poor (presumed ‘inferior’) were penalised for having more than one kid. And none of it ‘nice’ or ‘friendly’. You are your genes, it says, and you’re never going to be any better/higher/anything. So you might as well give up now.

Its all so predestined and nasty. And Danny’s point was that we’re all blessed/cursed with our genes and they’re not bad and they do contribute and all is good and it shouldn’t frighten the more sensitive or PC among us to just accept that. A good point. He wasn’t proposing extermination of the gypsies.

But its all about nature/nurture. Which is why everyone’s obsessed with the quite ridiculous concept of ‘gender neutrality’ for little kids. Boys CAN wear pink. Girls CAN play with soldiers (long as they’re not real).

The problem is that you cannot ever really separate nature from nurture, genes from environment. Which is why identical twins are so interesting. Which is why I married one. As a longitudinal psychological study. But twins are always different. Virtually always raised in the same environment, with 100% identical genes, yet behave differently. In Mel’s case, rather badly. So that’s conclusive (??)

The biggest affect on behaviour is environment/upbringing. I look at Lila, just 4 months old and she is ‘bright’ because she experiences levels of stimulation that are verging on cruelty. Its non-stop. And I look at what she ‘has’ in terms of her things. Books, educational games, masses and masses. But it works. She can now chew books that are French, or Latin, as easily as English ones. That speaks volumes. Unlike Lila, who doesn’t yet, but makes a lot of noise anyway. Kids raised in a non-caring environment will not do so well. Other than the chewing.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Ok, its back. Official. Started. The football. We’re there. After the inevitable summer 8 weeks of hell, the premiership started again last weekend. And it started on a Friday night. That’s a first. There used to be a big fanfare, now there’s a big payoff. The quid pro quo being; we need to put more matches on tv. So Arsenal played Leicester and even beat them. Eventually. 4-3. What’s known as ‘a great score for the neutrals’. But the Arse don’t win their opening matches very often so is this 3 points in the bag, or 3 goals stupidly conceded? Doesn’t really matter either way because if you can defend that badly and still win then that’s fine.

Saturday brought more mayhem. Chelsea, the champions, played a ‘nice, safe’ home game against Burnley who last season managed one away win out of 19 and consider themselves very lucky indeed to still be in the top flight for another year. And they were 3-0 up at the Bridge. Or 0-3 really, properly. Chelsea were down to 10 men after just 14 minutes though. Gary Cayhill sent off for a basically clumsy, but illegal, studs-up, off the ground tackle. Manager Conte went immediately into Wenger-mode and blamed all his teams woes on the fact that they keep getting players sent off. Thus its a conspiracy by the union of football referees. So the manager has put in requests to Abramovich to immediately buy 4 more players. All expensive. All experienced. All old enough to never be able to recoup their money if sold. Spending your way out of trouble. Someone should tell Antonio that it doesn’t matter how many players you own, you’re only allowed 11 on the pitch, and if one of them (or, as on Saturday, 2 of them) are stupid enough to get a red card, the three coach-loads of reserves can’t help you at all.

Brighton and Hove Albion were given the traditional ‘welcome’ to big-time football. They played the second most stupidly over-funded team in the world and got beat. No surprise there. But big surprise at Vicarage Lane as Watford held Liverpool to a 3-all draw. Great one for the fans, abomination for Jurgen Klopp.

Spurs went to Newcastle and were beneficiaries of the single most stupid act of madness ever seen. When Jonjo Shelvey, ‘winding up’ Dele Alli, as was obviously their game plan, knowing of Dele’s famously ‘short fuse’, decided to tread on his ankle. 3 yards in front of the ref. Spurs played much better against 10 than they had been against 11 and had a pretty easy win.

Man United thrashed West Ham. Who were awful. Toothless. Second best everywhere on the pitch. Lukaku scored twice, his real skill being to do such a thing whilst at no time looking anything like a ‘quality footballer’, let alone a 75 million pound striker. But you just can’t argue with goals. Even Pogba has started to look a bit more useful than he was last year. Not quite up to the 89 million they paid for him, but he’s up to about 7 now. A vast improvement from last season.

Early days. All to play for. Everything’s still… everything. And we play Chelsea on Sunday.

Welcome back

A xxxx

Politicians don’t like lying on the record. They love lying, do it all the time, but in the public eye they rein it in for obvious reasons. And at that point, they obfuscate. They blur things, equivocate, ‘muddy the waters’. Ask Jeremy Corbyn any question about anti-semitism and he answers ‘I’m opposed to all kinds of racism’. He will NEVER make specific mention of the question asked. Not THAT question.

So I’m not sure if it was reassuring or terrifying that yesterday, after the horrific white supremacist murder in Virginia, Donald Trump stated that he was against all forms of violence (that he was not directly causing, obviously) but refused to condemn the action as ‘white supremacist terrorism’ specifically. For which he has been attacked by absolutely everybody. Not even a tweet from the most twitter-obsessed blond on the planet.

Because Trump is (vaguely) aware that black people now are allowed to vote, in some states of America, the White Supremacists are His People. Trump was endorsed by David Duke, the grand poo-bah, ex-Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Where dyslexics dress in robes and burn crosses. Trump is heavily entwined with the ‘alt-right’ who are just the KKK with Harvard degrees. So at least they know how to spell ‘racism’.

When Trump proclaimed, again, and again, and again, that he was going to ‘take America back’, he never actually stated from whom or to whom. I personally think he meant to ‘take America back to pre-civil war values’ but you simply don’t know. So everyone can use that rather vague and obfuscate-y phrase for their own cause.

Trump further ‘shamed’ both Obama and Hillary C for not ‘naming’ the problem of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. “IF YA DON’T NAME IT, YA CAN’T CURE IT!!!!” (Shout and repeat). Yet now the boot’s on the other wing…

Who gives a shit about Donald Trump, other than the entire world? He’s not that important anywhere else. Whereas Dele Alli is a star on Jupiter. Christian Erikssen is supersonic in space. And Jonjo Shelvey is a total nob-end anywhere in the entire universe.

Happy Monday. And it is, it really is.

A xxxx

I’m just into declining a few verbs this morning, brushing up the old Latin in case I decide to become a Catholic. But those 2 words are in fact very relevant to last night’s little escapade. In their own little ways.

We had free cinema tickets. Lila’s mum has one of those fit-bit things that turns you into a compulsive step-counter obsessive, but that was given to her by her health insurance. And if you reach some target or other each week, they send her 2 free tickets to the movies. Only at the Vue chain but that’s fine. Free’s free, right? We nearly booked at the wrong Vue, so easy to do online. And Mel had commented that we were due to save 20 on the ticket price. When we’d corrected it so we didn’t have to fly to Edinburgh to see the movie, but selected the correct cinema on the Finchley Road, our saving immediately went up to 30 quid. I’m still trying to work out if I’m lucky to be in London to save more or cursed with a 30% hike on everything we do.

Its August, in case you missed that. Silly season. No news (other than nuclear war), no traffic and certainly no good movies. They don’t release anything worthwhile in August because everyone’s on holiday and those all-important ‘release ratings’ will be shit. So its either kids films, the Emoji Fucking Movie (shoot me now) or Atomic Blond. ‘Cold War Blockbuster!!!!’ starring Charlize Theron. Who is gorgeous, no doubt about that. And she can fight like 17 ninja warriors on steroids.

And its violent. Gratuitously violent. Which you can forgive because the film is very stylised. So you’re allowed to up the blood’n’gore accordingly. That’s the rule. Tarantino’s Law. Basic physics.

Charlize smoulders. And fights. But other than a lesbian love interest bit, that’s all she does. James McAvoy is also in it. And for some reason I just don’t see him as ‘action hero’ or even ‘action baddie’ type material. He’s a little Scottish wimp and should realise the professional limitations this imposes.

The odd thing (very odd) is that Mel loved the film. And she always complains about films. Too long, too violent, too… filmed, too everything. But not this. Which I slept part through and missed nothing. Because its so predictably confusing (Cold War Rule, number 4) and twisty, it was all rather hollow.

But fortunately the popcorn only cost £6.30 (medium, couldn’t afford large though they do offer finance plans), so a cheap night out.

Oh well, at least the football’s back.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

You have a choice. You can buy a football team’s worth of international megastars. It’ll cost you 300 million quid, the cost of Man City’s starting line-up on Saturday when they play Brighton (31 million; the whole team, less than City’s goalkeeper). Or you can buy cheaper players. Maybe those with prospects, the young ones, the old ones, those with potential not yet realised, and price tags that reflect that. Obviously, if you buy a 50 million pound footballer, you can’t pay him minimum wage. If he’s worth that much he’s going to need to earn north of 120-150k a week, minimum. Then 3 weeks later, his agent is bemoaning the fact that another player on the team earns 200k a week and ‘our boy’ feels devalued, humiliated, ashamed to park his Bentleys in the car park.

But the problem with the ‘economy model’ is that you must always be careful what you wish for. In Spurs case Pochettino built a team of, in the most part, cheap players. Harry Kane was from the youth academy. Dele Alli, 5 million quid from Milton Keynes. Christian Erikssen, bargain, Kyle Walker, bargain, Vertongen, Danny Rose, Eric Dier, all cheap and young. And did exactly what Spurs hoped, dreamed, lusted for them to do. They became Stars. So here’s the kicker, though it should be no surprise to anyone really: they now want to be paid as the 60 million pound Superstars that they have undoubtedly become. They’re all earning (a paltry!) 50 thousand pounds every fucking week (in Danny Rose’s case, 40 of those weeks in hospital care and the physio’s office), and are suffering from Neymaria. Which is like Malaria but much more expensive.

Danny Rose is probably the best left back in Europe, if not the world. Every Spurs fan loves him because of the wonder goal he scored against Arsenal and everyone suddenly took notice. And Danny, from his sick-bed, has now spoken out against Spurs’ pay policy and effective 100k a week ‘cap’. Unsurprisingly he now has a lot of support from the rest of the Spurs squad. And the absolutely revolting thing is; Danny is right. And Spurs are in a bit of trouble.

This has nothing to with ‘real worth’, or ‘value’ or ‘how far would all that money go in the NHS?’ This is not Corbyn-land. This is football. And words like ‘value’ and ‘worth’ have no value or worth of their own. Football exists outside of the real world and massive bubble, made of 50-pound notes, funded by tv rights and the vanity of narcissistic international squillionaires, (Russians and Arabs) or businessmen looking to cash in (Yanks). The old ‘model’ of a football club being a ‘family’ is nothing more than a quirk of history. Paris St Germain is a ‘family’ like ISIS is a family. Some would say a rather appropriate analogy.

Spurs chairman Daniel Levy is a clever and canny man, no doubt about it. But I think his pay structure could be his downfall. All my boys will leave. They have the distant cousins of their agents to think about. Would you work for £50 a day when someone else (albeit a slimy, sleazy Qatari) is willing to pay you £100?

I worry about Lila’s first Spurs match and what it will look like.

Happy Friday, DANNY!!!!

A xxxx

The world is on a precipice. Not since October 1962 have we been on ‘the verge’ in such a horribly, dangerously, vergish kind of way. Back then it was Khrushchev and Kennedy playing ‘handbags’ with nukes. Two essentially intelligent, decent, moral (except for Kennedy), guys caught up in Cold War mania and for one dreaded moment, both standing with fingers over the buttons.

Now its different. The world has evolved. Nukes are waaaaaaaay more powerful than anything that could have even been imagined in the 1960s. And back then they could still remember Hiroshima pretty clearly. The only time a nuke has ever been deployed in anger. Not nice.

And here we are again. But this time instead of cool, level-headed Kennedy we have Donald J Fucking Trump in the blue corner. The school  bully given a world-sized playground to strut upon. The bragger. The pusher and shover. The dick-measurer. And a president so adrift and out of his depth in the political world that he actually needs this, is probably yearning for an excuse to push the ‘go’ button just to try and up his personal ratings a bit.

In the red corner we have Kim Jong-Un, the world’s most silly person. A cartoon character of a spoiled little fat brat given absolutely everything he ever wants. Certainly all the pies he can eat. (Ever tried eating a pie with chop-sticks? No wonder he’s angry). And as well as being a narcissist, like Trump, and a psycho, like Trump, Kim is also totally paranoid. His nuke obsession is because he feels (as do many, to be fair) that the ultimate protection from attack is a nuclear deterrent. But Trump fears Kim’s burning desire for a ‘defence’ system that is also capable of defending itself 7,000 miles away in Chicago.

So here we are; poised with the 2 most unstable men in the world pushing each other, sending silly messages of bravado, derring-do and stupidity at each other, neither capable of appearing to yield in the most minute of ways.

They fit stop-start on cars these days. To save on exhaust fumes while you’re sitting at the traffic lights. Reduces world pollution. And here we are threatening to use weapons that will send hundreds of billions of lethal, atomic particles of radiation into the atmosphere.

This is just sooooo fucked up.

Happy Thursday, I hope

A xxxx