Andy's Glasses

This has been a memorable year, thus far. I know, its a bit early for that ‘week after Christmas summary of the year past’ but that’s where I am. David Bowie died, then Brexit happened, well, Brexit started and we’re watching that space, next came Trump and then finally, the biggest tragedy of all, the one that’s had millions of pilgrims beating their chests from the Ganges to Camden Lock, from Ayers Rock to Seven Sisters; Spurs are out of Europe.

Last time we went to Europe to play, and I mean proper, Champions League Europe, not ‘that other thing’, we were simply magnificent. Bale, Modric, Van der Vaart, everyone ticking, every match spectacular. Even when we lost 4-3 in Milan it felt like a massive win. Such is the power of delusion so essential when supporting my football club. “If that match had gone on for another 72 minutes we’d have won 6-4!!” But it didn’t. Didn’t even need to really. From 4-0 down at half time Bale’s hat-trick was not just a thing of magnificent beauty but probably accounted for an instant 50 million Euro hike in his asking price.

And every match was fantastic. Spurs were awesome, teams were very wary of playing us. Except, eventually, Real Madrid, but heh, the ride was amazing. Unlike this year. Never mind, now we can concentrate on the League!!! So that we can… errr… hopefully… errrr… make it to the Champions League next year. That wonderful circular irony that is the plague of the modern ‘big’ football club.

Never mind, to cheer everyone up new Chancellor, Phillip Hammond (and I never thought ANY Chancellor could EVER be as creepy as George Osborne; how wrong I was) has made his announcement. Basic tory stuff. Take food from the table of the needy, tax the cardboard boxes and plastic bags of the homeless and use the extra funds to fill the Bentleys of the rich. Ok, in reality he was much more depressing than that. More debt, more austerity, more bleuhhh, for decades to come. I can live with that.

I have more trouble living with the dodgy shoulder. In Tai Chi we love a ‘wrist lock’. Its the basic first line of self-defense. But in fact a ‘wrist lock’ doesn’t hurt the wrist. It hurts the shoulder. And, when you reach the point that even sleeping hurts the shoulder, something’s gotta give.

No tennis, no Europe, no Bowie (other than on vinyl, cd and downloads, posters, pictures and my face make-up), no future for America and now my favourite martial art is becoming a problem.

(Not very) Happy Thursday

A xxxx

…Britannia rules the waves… (all join in!).

Nothing like a rousing song to start the day. I feel better now. Until I look and see that us wave-ruling, sea-faring Brits have a navy comprising merely 19 ships. No aircraft carriers, no… big things with nuclear shit, just 19 paltry vessels. Destroyers and Frigates. Which, presumably, destroy and… do other things, respectively.

Its a big problem. Should we go to war (again) or need to defend our shores, although ships seem slow and lumbering, they’re always the way to win such things. I suppose that if such a thing happened, we’d just be dependant on the navies of our close friends and colleagues. Like Europe. Hmmmmm. Or American. Hmmmmmm…

They’ve given Trump his phone back. After it was confiscated for sending out stupid tweets during the presidential campaign, The Don is back on Twitter. Saturday Night Live took the piss out of Melania. Its a satirical, current affairs comedy show. A brilliant one that’s run for about 40 years during which time the show has spawned all of America’s top comedians and comedy actors. Trump tweeted: ‘SNL totally one-sided, biased and nothing funny at all’. Yet if Hillary had won, they’d have ripped into her. Its what that show does, its what comedy is. So to all the incoming president’s much lauded faults and flaws, we must now add: ‘no sense of humour whatsoever’. And: ‘moron’. Oh, we already had ‘moron’. Think it warrants entering twice.

But Britannia may indeed rule the skies. ‘We’ have invented a new thing. A kind of ‘motor’ that runs with no propellant. Nuffink. “What?!?!?” you shout in a fit of Newtonian outrage, “that’s against the laws of physics!!!” Ok, it runs on microwaves, which to me is ‘something’ as they have to be produced, but for some reason the scientific world seems to view them as some kind of irrelevance, so the EmDrive runs on nothing. And it produces tiny amounts of power, like really tiny, but that’s enough to keep it going to Mars. And beyond! Because space is a vacuum so this thing would just keep on accelerating, like me driving in the rain, but slower.

We’ve given the technology to the Americans because we can’t afford to develop it. We’re spending all our money tarting up Buckingham Palace. Otherwise the Queen would be down to her last 3 palaces/castles and how is anyone supposed to live with just 635 rooms at their personal disposal. Unthinkable.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I’m going into the travel advice business. I’m qualified; I been lots’a places. ‘Merica. ‘Stralia. Whitby. Barking. And when asked, say, about the ‘best way to get to Yorkshire’, I’ll answer; DON’T!!!!!! For fuck sake just stay home. Spring clean. Clip the budgie’s claws. Shred last year’s bank statements. Watch telly. Just DON’T GO TO YORKSHIRE!!!! Because it looks like this (see above… like there’s anything else to see here).

This was, in fact, the ride home. Always the best part of any trip northwards. Which always starts with the ‘A1 or M1?’ conversation. And ends with ‘we took the wrong fucking road’. This was the A1. I’m sure the M1, 15 miles away, was bathed in tropical sunshine and lined with smiling policepeople holding signs reading: ITS OFFICIAL GO AS FAST AS YOU WANT DAY, WITH OUR BLESSING.

We had to go to Leeds to see Mel’s dad. He’s old and sweet and lives in Leeds. Obvs. Not like we’d pick him up from Enfield and take him 200 miles north for a day-trip. So we went yesterday (M1, if you’re interested; just piss off, if you’re not), checked in the hotel, had dinner with the Man, took him home, slept, swam, ate breakfast and came home. And this was what coming home looked like. Virtually all the way. Other than the traffic jams, which were few but still annoying. And the faster you drive, the worse the spray from lorries. But after a while you just accept the temporary blindness and drive ‘by feel’. Better than slowing down. Not necessarily safer, but better.

We made it. Warm (it almost is), sunny (very very slightly, between the clouds), glorious (always) London. Phew. Dodged a bullet.

Murray beats Djokovic at the O2 last night to retain his world number one-ness. Quite remarkable really. I still can’t take to the man but he is a very good tennis player. There again, he probably doesn’t have an arthritic right shoulder and a tennis-elbowed left arm. They spoke of winning in front of a ‘Partisan crowd’. I presume that means lots of Scots made the trip to see him in London. Now that Britain is no more and Mrs Scotland (Nicola S) has declared they are in Europe even though we’re out. I wonder if those fans used the A1 or the M1…

Happy Monday

A xxxx

Due to the latest in a long line of what the medical world terms: shoulder fuckage, I haven’t been allowed to resume my tennis habit. Which is a bummer. I love my tennis. Its my ‘thing’. I don’t gym (I’d rather grow obese gracelessly, with a chocolate eclair in each hand), I don’t swim, I cycle a little but for practical purposes only, I don’t run and I’m not allowed anything else. At my age. I did ‘spin’ once and realised I’d rather go and watch Arsenal with Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and a dozen financial advisors than repeat the experience. Tennis allows me to run around like a mad thing for an hour or two, engaged in enjoyable pursuit. And its fun.

So I had the ‘guided’ steroid jab, I’ve religiously performed all the physio I’ve been given, every day, except last night when I was really drunk after a brilliant party and was blissfully unaware of my arse, elbow or, indeed, shoulder. And yet last week, after being allowed to play ‘gently’ I experienced pain and suffering and general worsening of my right shoulder.

Thus I arrived at a decision. I’m gonna play left-handed. How hard can it be? Rafa Nadal does it. Aussie Johnno does it. The Wolf Man does it. None of them are particularly bright. So I’m gonna do it. I can play bridge left handed. So I went with Mel yesterday for a ‘little try’. And despite it feeling the oddest most unnatural thing in a life full of odd and unnatural things (court case pending), I could actually do it. Hit the ball. Not well, not always and not with too much accuracy, but I could hit it and sometimes even get the it over the net. So I had two thoughts.

Firstly: I can do this. It’ll take a lot of time, it’ll take some lessons, but I can play with my left hand.

And secondly: I’ve got tennis fucking elbow in my left fucking arm. Because ‘tennis elbow’ is nothing to do with tennis. Other than stopping you playing. Its repetitive strain. Like the million things I have previously used my left arm for, like ‘mousing’ on a computer.

Ironic? That’s one word for it. I can think of many many more. Next week I’ll try with my right foot.

A note to West Ham fans: sometimes life is just like that. Its not always fair, not always as we’d like, it just is what it is. Football as a metaphor for the inherent injustice of life. Don’t despair.

Even though you’re barely above the relegation zone, have a new stadium (stolen) that is proving to be a conceptual Aleppo and you can’t seem to buy a point. Maybe the government or local council can buy one for you with tax-payers money?

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

If ever any dress was worth £4million it was that one. I’m not saying that’s what I’d spend 4 mil that I don’t have on, that would be a Veyron, a pro-fuel dragster (for communting), a new shoulder, one that works properly, a 1970 Dodge Charger and a bottle of face cream for Mel. She loves face cream. And a different dress. ‘Nude’ is not my colour. I’d get a blue one. To match my Spurs tattoos.

But its worth 4 mil of anyone’s money. The sexiest dress ever on the sexiest woman ever. And I don’t know why. I’ve never known why; that’s the magic of Monroe. I’ve never particularly been into blondes, nor ‘voluptuous’, but Monroe just took all the previously ticked boxes, rubbed them out, very slowly and gently, and wrote new ones, in a very soft felt pen, all over your body.

Sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah, Donald Trump. You bored with him yet? Funny thing is; whatever you may think of him, the only negative adjective you can never use about him is ‘boring’. Insanity is anything but dull. And the motto for his entire presidency (we can only pray that its 4 years and not 8) will be ‘conflict of interest’. How can it not be. He has vast business holdings, is constantly being sued and now he’s going to be in control of building stuff and part of the judiciary. Yesterday he settled a suit against him for $25mil. A suit he’d previously refused to even discuss, being so spurious. I hope the litigants voted for him. Was well worth their while.

He’s now appointed a new dude. A right wing General called Michael Flynn. He’s never had a dress you need to be sewn into. He’s head of security. Which should be absolutely fine. As long as you’re a middle-class white man. Everyone else better be really careful.

Because the man Don wants for attorney general is a real, robe-wearing, cross-burning fully paid-up member of the KKK. Ok, not in actuality but he sounds like he could be. He’s from Alabama, and that’s almost the same thing. And Jeff Sessions has a bit of a history of allegations of racist comments. All of which, I must stress, were ‘taken out of context’, or ‘made in jest’. All of them. There’s nothing inherently racist in calling a colleague, a black judge, ‘boy’. Nothing ‘Gone with the Wind’ about that at all.

Happy Saturday, I’m going to get dressed. Where’s the sewing machine and CAREFUL WITH THAT FUCKING NEEDLE!!!

A xxxx

Michael Palin’s Monty Python accountant wanted to be a ‘lion-tamer’. The glamour, the danger, the spotlights, ahhhhhh. Ok, he didn’t exactly know what a lion-tamer was or did, but that’s not the point. The point is: do we need lion-tamers? As we go about our daily lives, are we enriched in any way shape or form by people who, basically, beat lions and tigers into submission? Though are our lives enriched by traffic wardens, tax officers, telesales-bastards or Arsenal fans?

Ahhh, but the kids love it. They say.

Lions and tigers aren’t naturally ‘tame’. They’re wild animals. Like Russians. They don’t know right from wrong, they only know eat, fuck, shit. Ok, Russians know ‘hack’ and ‘murder’ too, so they’re a little better. So to make a lion ‘tame’ you have to use conditioning. The carrot and the stick. Punish bad behaviour, reward good. Rocket science it ain’t. Every time the lion bites someone to death, you hit it with a little stick, and every time it kisses you on the lips it gets a piece of road-kill you picked up on the way to the ‘office’. Easy peasy. Ish. Its still a fucking lion, however many fox spleens its eaten today.

Thomas Chipperfield is from a long line of lion tamers. He really does come from a ‘circus family’, literally, not euphemistically. They’ve been taming lions since 1874 or some such. And now Thomas has applied for the official, government lion-tamer license. Like a pilot’s license but without the plane. You have to parallel park a lion, reverse it round a corner and good luck with the emergency stop. But then he’d be the only licensed lion-tamer in the country(!!!!). Wow!

The problem is not really the ‘taming’ but with the fact that in between training and performing, the lion lives in a lorry trailer. The size of… of a lorry trailer. Not very big. Smaller than the veldt, not as big as the pampas, a touch shy of the jungles of Africa. A fucking trailer. King of the beasts. And that’s wrong. I hate zoos, and I hate circus animals. Not fair. Horrible. They’re arguably better off at the butchers’. I’ve always been upset by animals in captivity, even as a kid it seemed ‘wrong’.

I should be a vegan. And in many ways I am. Other than the meat eating bit. Fish. Eggs. Milk. Cheese. More meat…

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

How excited can you get over HS2? On a scale from: ‘so what?’ to ‘oh, a new train; wake me up when something interesting happens’. Estimates for this project range from £60billion to infinity. And beyond. But worst of all; it won’t be completed until 2030. Which, allowing for delays, legal issues, union business, the deportation of most of the work force when Farage becomes Prime Minister in 2024, probably 2050 by the time the first High Speed (2) trains start their official delays. Its Hinkley Point all over again. You’re building something that will be obsolete by the time its finished. If it gets finished. Its a government, infrastructure vanity project. Which is fine, we need those for jobs and morale. But do something better. Piss away our money on things we can get excited about.

Like Boom jets. They look like Concorde, they smell like Concorde (aviation fuel does that), they have long noses, like Concorde, they don’t take many passengers, like Concorde, but they’re fast. Wonderfully, unashamedly, obscenely, carbon emittingly fast. New York in 3hrs (and 15minutes if we’re being pedantic, and we should, we really should). LA to Sydney, 6.5 hours instead of the current 15. That’s almost as wonderful as cutting half an hour off the journey from Stoke to Newport Pagnell, as long as there’s no leaves on the track.

Boom is the company and Virgin are their main investors. Not sure they’ll ever make any money, just like Concorde, but at least its hi-tech and the French aren’t involved. Because the plane will only take 40 passengers. Seated in single rows so they can all ‘look out of the windows’. Like they have a choice? Concorde took 100 at a time and made a year-on-year loss, think how much this can lose? The potential is limitless. But let me know when it reaches 60 billion quid and I’ll start to worry on Branson’s behalf and do the ‘I told you so’ thing about HS2.

So it won’t be cheap to fly. And its all about weight. To fly at 1400mph (100mph faster than Concorde) the plane is made of carbon fibre instead of aluminium, to cut the weight. Fat people will be banned from using it. I made that up. Obviously they won’t be as that would be discriminatory against Americans. Not sure what they’ll do about luggage, maybe send it later by HS2. So you arrive in New York 2 hours before you left London (time change effect) but your bags arrive Thursday week.

I’m not suggesting that the millions of people using trains every week shouldn’t have a better experience. I’m just not convinced HS2 will provide anything different. Build a Superloop; the technology is there. Build something for the future. This is no longer the year 1876. Robert Stephenson is dead. Get over it.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

“Chief branded a racist, fascist, misogynist”, ran the top of the page in the Times. Oh, they’re talking about Trump again. But no, this was Steve Bannon, Trump’s newly appointed chief strategist. And again, a man with no political experience. Unless you count running a right-wing web-site as ‘political experience’. The site, ‘Brietbart News’ is the digital version of the Ku Klux Klan. According to some. According to the site, it represents the ‘alt-right’. Whatever the fuck that means.

The implication is ‘alternative’, of ‘not-quite the full Adolph Hitler’, of ‘racism light’. Its the Faragesque sanitised version, the ‘nationalism in smart suits’ which makes ‘immigration’ as its main focus and then blurs it to existing immigrants. Which in America, unless you are a descendent of Cochise or the Sioux Nation, you are the ‘son’ of immigrants.

Bannon has been accused of being a ‘white supremacist’. A hateful and all-encompassing term which normally brings to mind swastika tattoos and cropped hair on death row. But it comes in many guises. Even in that of a fat ex-Navy, ex-Goldman Sacks, Seinfeld producer like Steve Bannon.

He’s also, allegedly, an anti-semite. Which is not unheard of at that end of the political spectrum; they’re pretty much anti-everything. But Trump’s dearest and favourite child, Ivanka, is now Jewish after her conversion when she married Jewish hubby.

So if we now remove the 90% press sensationalism, the liberal media over-reaction, the anti-anything-Trump sentiment currently raging across the States, you’re still left with someone in the President’s ear who is, say, just 5% Grand Imperial Wizard of the KKK. That’s ok; surely???

Trump has many more people to appoint. He promised, pre-election, that he wouldn’t use those same old political staffers that are part of the ‘old establishment’. Then he appoints Reince Priebus as his Chief of Staff. He may sound like someone who taught at Hogwarts but in fact he is as Republican establishment as you can get.

Trump doesn’t have enough family to fill the 10,000 jobs at the White House, so he has to use ‘outside people’. Obviously white people.

Its very exciting. In a scary kind of way.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

So the movie ‘Arrive’ had to be seen, and was. Job done. Food for thought. And without ‘spoiling’ it, its about aliens arriving from another planet. Not aliens from another country, though the questions raised are roughly the same in both cases.

Do you come in peace? (ET, Close Encounters) Or are you here for dinner? (War of the Worlds).

These massive suppositories arrive, made of ‘unknown material’, tougher than teflon, harder than steel, lighter than feathers, 150 metres high. Usual sci-fi stuff. ‘From another planet’. Inside are the ‘aliens’. They look like Squiddly Diddly. All tentacles and squirting ink, floating/hovering in the mist. Big fuckers. Calamari City. And 12 of these ‘pods’ landed in various places around the world. Oooohhhhhh.

So you have various nations working out the issues. Together. Ish. As is the nature of nations. Trying to communicate with their own visiting squids as best they can. Which is not easy as the visitors only speak in ‘ink circles’ and we use words. Even ‘google translate’ can’t handle that. But fortunately for planet Earth, Amy Adams, linguist exrta-ordinaire, can. Or could. For the purposes of the movie. And Amy has deep love for these deep-sea-looking things, you can tell. She trusts them. They bond. Whereas the Chinese pod-squad don’t. There’s distrust. Which rapidly flows to the Russians and Sudan. Who all want to attack the aliens. Squidicide.

At which point, if there was any doubt, you know you are watching an American movie. ‘They’ are brutal and violent; ‘we’ are calm and prepared to ‘speak’, in an inky way. The squiddleys have almost become less of an issue than the damned Chaaarrrrnese and Russkis.

Yet it remains an interesting point. Aliens arrive; what do you do? The great body of this planet’s science fiction history would suggest a 90% chance that the aliens would want to kill us, eat us or destroy the planet. But that’s only because those films sell better than the ones when we all get on and love each other, like Cocoon.

And how would Donald Trump respond? He’s a real ‘shoot-first-ask-questions-later’ kind of a dude and he calls Mexicans ‘aliens’. What would he do when negotiating with a squid-thing?? Just as important; what would the squid-thing think of humans if Trump was their only example. It’d think we’re all loud, stupid and orange.

Live long and prosper

A xxxx

The thing about Cockney Rhyming Slang is that its not a proper ‘thing’. Its not a language. Its a nothing really other than a way for chirpy cockneys (read: low-class West Ham supporting thugs) to appear chirpy, clever and enigmatic. Obscure. The synonym for which is ‘dim’ but that’s not where I’m going. I have no fucking clue where I’m going, in fact, and seldom do.

“I took a butcher’s outsaaard an’ it was well parky so I grabbed me titfa, ran down the apples and…”

What a load of bollocks. It sounds like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Bob Hoskins in virtually anything. Strained. Too much effort. And scummy.

The point is though that its a bit of a game. Which is the bit I like. Because you never say “‘old on, got a call comin’ through on me dog’n’bone”. You just say ‘dog’. The game bit is someone either has to know that dog’n’bone is phone, or work it out. Either from the context (ie a phone ringing loudly; even real Cockneys probably wouldn’t miss that) or because they’ve heard it before. Its not like there’s a limited number of accepted and definitive ‘rhymings’ listed on the sacred wall of the bus stop at Bethnal Green and everything else is wrong. You can make it up on the spot. As long as someone else can work out what you mean. Otherwise the whole, kind’a, ‘communication’ bit of language is lost. ‘He’s off for a quick Jodrell’, like Spurs Paul.

Many years ago a guy I worked with ran into work, looking anxious, and, tearing off his coat, said: ‘I’m busting for an Ivana’. I paused, as he headed toilet-wards, and then laughed until the tears… yeah, it was funny. I’d worked it out. Ivana Trump: ‘dump’. Fabulous.

Thus I’d now like to propose before the approval committee, to amend this tres amusante phrase so that in future, if you need to take a shit, you’re simply off for a ‘president’. All in favour? Say pork pie.

Went to see Arrival last night. Fab movie. And total, absolute and irredeemable mind-fuck. It took all the way out, the walk to the car and most of the way home before we’d sorted it all out. By which time my eyes were bleeding. No spoilers here. Go see it. Amazing Amy Adams. That’s not rhyming slang. To my knowledge.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx