Andy's Glasses

We were taken out for tea yesterday. As a ‘thank you’. I accept all
the thanks ever offered. Especially if it comes with strawberry jam
and clotted cream.

We went to the quite stunning Rosewood Hotel in Holborn. No, not
‘quite’ anything, really really fucking stunning. And the ‘mirror
room’ is what you’d expect; lavish, immaculate, six miles over the
top, yet really comfortable and relaxing. Not many mirrors though, so
maybe not everything you’d expect.

And I love afternoon tea. High tea. It is the infrequently taken (for
the sake of your arteries) best meal of the day. It should contain
everything you want to eat but nothing you really need. That’s the
rule. We even skipped lunch in anticipation. And I hate skipping
lunch. Or breakfast… dinner… snack-time…

Most of London’s big hotels do ‘tea’. Why not? Its a quiet lull-time
for them and they can flog you a few sandwiches and a scone for 30
quid a time, including ‘all the tea you like!!!!’ as if tea is the new
gold or single malt. Its tea. So they make a big deal about it, about
everything. To set them apart from all the other hotels doing pretty
much the same stuff.

At the Rosewood, the USP is that their ‘tea cakes’ are ‘inspired by
artists’. So the little white cube thing (salted caramel and chocolate
mouse with a mini-profiterole inside, nothing too sickly), was a
‘Banksy’ and had a little Banksy label attached. Amazing. Much better
shoved in my gob than hanging on a wall. Or scribbled on a old garage
door. The little spotty thing in the middle tier was a wonderful
‘bisque’ (the French or otherwise pretentious way of saying ‘biskit’)
with chocolate fondant and passion fruit creme, but was rather a
disappointment in that it was ‘a Damien Hirst’ and therefore I
expected something a little more ‘dead animal in formaldehyde’ or
pig’s spleen and bleach, but there ya go.

Wonderful tea. Wonderful afternoon. Sugar rush not yet subsided.

They don’t serve high tea at White Hart Lane. They serve up wins
instead. And the head waiter, the maitre d’, the head honcho in the
goals department, without any pretentiousness at all, is Harry Kane.
Who ‘only’ scored 2 this weekend, which for him is one short of his
‘usual’. Another great (ok, and ‘home’) win.

What an afternoon that was.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

Now here’s a funny thing; Spurs are the latest ‘flat-track-bullies’ (and long may it last) who beat teams lower than they are but struggle against the mighty. And logically, that should always be the case. You beat teams who generally perform worse than you do and suffer against those consistently better. Ain’t rocket science.

Yet Liverpool buck that trend. They lose to Leicester. The lose at ‘fortress’ Anfield against all manner of relegation fodder. But put them up against top 6 teams and they excel. Other than Manchester United (ironically the team they’d love to beat more than all others combined), they’ve won every match against top 6 teams this year. United they drew with, twice.

And yesterday they faced Arsenal. So Arsene Wenger, no stranger to ‘big match preparation’, no struggler with the use of histories, video recordings, and generally considered as great a master tactician as has ever pulled his hair out in the Arsenal dug-out. So he devised a plan to overcome the Scousers. A devious plan. A (sort of) clever plan to put those Liverpudlians right out of their stride, bamboozle them, confound them, throw them into disarray. He left out of his team Alexi Sanchez.

What an inspired and brilliant move. Find the most influential player on the team, the one who has either scored or been involved in 26 of his team’s goals this season, the man who puts fear into opposition defences, who draws players out of position just by his very presence. And leave him absent. Hah! That’ll show ’em.

And it did. It showed them the path to Arsenal’s goalmouth. Which they found twice before half-time when Wenger brought the Chilean into play. Just one question for Arsene:

WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?!?!?!?!?!?

The relegation battle heats up, with no-one laying down to die, just yet. So there are many contenders.

Spurs play Everton today. Must-win game. As opposed to… Its a 6-pointer, possibly 8. Because silverware and glory and championships is all good and well. But every Spurs fan in the world has but one main, consistent and over-riding aim. To finish above Arsenal. Sad, perhaps, but honest and certainly true.

Whatever happened to Scottish football? Remember Rangers, Hibs, Hearts, Aberdeen? What happened to them. Sadly its turned into a bit of a joke up there.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

Travis Kalanick, the big boss of all of Uber, had a bit of a row with one of his (millions of) drivers. And he lost it totally. And it was filmed. And went viral. Obviously. And he was ashamed and we were judgmental and everything’s gone to shit.

But when you need to get to Leicester Square this afternoon, who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters? Or Uber?

So everyone’s talking about Uber. Again. So I feel I should. Just because…

Well, because of recent events I now know a lot more about Uber than I did before. But now everyone’s talking about ‘the wheels coming off’ and ‘the end of Uber’ and all such shit. Because our moral indignation won’t get my dad home at 10 o’clock last night for 19 quid when I’m over the limit and he’s tired. But Uber did. And questioning bizarre business models won’t get you anywhere as quickly as Mohammed in his Prius. Bless him.

Uber is a ‘hi-tech start-up’. Which is a modern day euphemism for ‘cost a fortune to run, loses money by the truckload and yet has a ridiculously high perceived value’. In current money, about $70billion valuation. For a company that’s lost 4 billion in the last 7 years.

Not of my money. Of investors money. Start-up investors know the score; stuff in the millions to develop, then keep on stuffing, in this case in billions, to keep it going during the expansion. Not because expansion will necessarily produce more profits, but precisely because it produces more losses. So why? Where’s the payoff??

Uber has an absolutely amazing infrastructure, already apped up in everybody’s phones, of linking customers to rides. When the world goes driverless, which is definitely where its headed, Uber will be at the top of the tree. Tesla may make the cars, or Nissan, or anyone, it don’t matter. What matters is hooking up those cars with the people who need to ride in them.

There’s a big hoo-haa every time an Uber driver rapes/molests/gets drunk or any alleged indiscretion. Or even the ‘team’ at Palo Alto being sexist. But they’re not specifically ‘Uber’ problems, they’re people problems. Any large group of people will have 1 rapist, 2 molesters, 3 drunks and 7 sexists. Statistically proven. It happens with Hackney Carriage drivers, with chartered accountants, much higher in football clubs. Much, much higher. Its not a ‘problem with Uber’, its a problem with ‘rapists’.

So I may knock Uber for indiscretions, I may condemn their CEO for being a persistent tosser (on Trump’s economic advisory panel???), I may tut when they get bad press. But then I feel hypocritical because the next time I need to get somewhere in a hurry and cheaply, its their app I call up. I could ‘talk with my feet’, but I’d rather ride in a Prius.

Appy Saturday

A xxxx

Leyton Orient football club are in deep doo-doo. Really deep. They are going to court this month to face a winding up order due to an unpaid tax bill of £250,000. That really winds me up. London’s second-oldest football club, dating to 1881, can leave the world forever due to an amount of unpaid tax that wouldn’t even be noticed on Google’s unpaid tax account. Nor Amazon’s, Starbucks’ or countless others, who avoid far vaster sums each and every week. The sum is less than a week’s wages for Wayne Rooney, who gets about 300k for the 10 to 15 minutes he plays each week.

And that is the real crime. The disparity in financial viability of the ‘big clubs’ in the Premiership and the wee clubs down in the League. Because even though these organisations are strongly linked (generally in terms of relegation) they are funded separately. Mainly because, given the choice, most armchair enthusiasts would rather watch Chelsea play Arsenal on a Sunday afternoon than Port Vale vs Rochdale. Snobs. And I know the arguments; we have the best league in the world, but only because of Sky TV, blah, blah, Rupert fucking Murdoch’s fucking money, blah!

I have a serious soft spot for Orient. In 1969 they won (the old) Division 3. Luton Town, now out of the league altogether, were runners up. And every weekend, and sometimes during the week too, the 13-year-old me would go down to Brisbane Road and join the 30,000 who regularly attended during that fantastic season. It was pure magic. The ground so small that the players would talk to us when they came to take corners. It was just a wonderful time, even though I was a Spurs fan. This was such ‘lowly’ football there was no conflict of interest. I consulted a lawyer about that.

30 years later, 30 years of being a bit of a purist Spurs fan, it must be said, not tainting my Premiership boot-soles with lower league dirt, Orient reached the Division 1 (or, old division3) play-off final. To play at Wembley(!!!!), against, mighty Scunthorpe. So I fished out my old O’s scarf, phoned a mate about tickets (“can you get?”, “this is Orient, you can get as many as you want”), and dragged the daughters to Wembley for the day. Old Wembley. Proper Wembley. When you could still park in the borough on match days. And what a match it was! Pure, total shite. From the kick-off, the poxy Scunthorpe goal that decided it, to the last whistle, a dull and dire game of football. I fell asleep, the girls ran off to practice their pick-pocketing skills and then we came home.

But I still love Orient. Barry Hearn sold the club 4 years ago to a guy with a very dodgy track record. And now its all come back to haunt everyone. The team look like being relegated out of the league altogether and possibly wound up as a business. Leyton Orient will be no more. Yeah, Wimbledon, blah-di-blah-di-blah, but no. So please send me a cheque for a quarter of a million pounds made out to HMRC and I’ll do the rest.

Its the least you can do.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

What do you do about wannabe jihadis who wish to join their fellow psychos in ISIS? There’s a big noise about this, we stop them at airports, we detain them… and then what? They’re jihadis. They want to bring death, disruption and destruction to our way of life. They want to kill. They want to murder. They want to be given a 14 year old ‘wife’ to rape. Maybe a few more. And they wish to end all Western Ways. They’ve been poisoned to despise our way of life. How do you go about ‘un-poisoning’ them? Its like the old joke: you can unscrew a lightbulb but not a pregnant woman.

Let them go. In fact, I’ll contribute willingly to their one-way tickets to Syria. If they have ‘jihad’ on their minds, treat it as a blessing that they’ll be doing it elsewhere. In a place where they have proper armies to battle, rather than innocent civilians.

Interestingly the suicide bomber dude who died with ISIS last week, Jamal al-Harith, the guy who left Guantanamo Bay with a 1 million pound payoff for… for whatever our wonderfully benevolent and asinine government reasons were deemed suitable for someone with a serious jihadi history, Jamal took a road trip in 2009 to Gaza. On the ‘Viva Palestina’ convoy. Led by George Galloway. There were 7 other known radicalised jihadis on that trip. I’m not big on ‘guilt by association’ but I’m certainly prepared to make an exception for Galloway.

But now ISIS is finally appearing to be failing (praise be) the question changes to ‘what do we do about those who went to fight with them and now want to come home?’ On the weekend 2 British medical students died in Mosul, part of group of 9 who originally went there, during bombing. They reckon there are probably about 400 ‘Brits’ left who will want to return ‘home’ to the land that educated them, supported them and their families and which they now want to destroy.

What would Donald Trump do? That’s not a joke really. The whole ‘ban all Muslims’ thing was a tragic over-reaction to his fear of jihadis. Its obviously not morally or factually correct to assume all Muslims have jihad on their minds, its just a minute minority. But the 400-odd who might return here are exactly the ones we don’t want. And they’re British.

I think we should deport George Galloway too, while we’re at it. Just because…

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

In the good ole days, boys used to go to football and gels would stay home and do their make-up, their nails, go shopping for a new dress. So that when their man came back from footy they’d be ready to go out. Her in her new finery and fresh from 5 hours of ‘me-time’, him drunk as a skunk, blood all over his shirt, with 16 mates in tow all in a similar condition and singing loudly.

The main difference, in fact, between the sexes was knowing the offside rule. If you didn’t know it, couldn’t define an ‘offside trap’, weren’t aware of that defender on the sideline just playing him onside, then you were simply ‘not a man’.

Its different today. Women can be seen at football matches. Sometimes looking a bit rough without their me-time, but they’ve made the effort. Most even know about offsides.

Whereas the English rugby team, the most manly of Herculean, gargantuan, testosterone-fuelled super-muscly behemoths ever gathered outside my mirror, were bamboozled by the Italian team’s diversionary tactics on Saturday because no-one on the England team, basically, knew the offside rule. I won’t bore you with the details. Because of the nature of rugby and its inherent violence, it is a wonderfully complex and rule-bound game. Even though it looks like total fucking chaos, everything is done within very very carefully defined parameters. What we call ‘rules’. And they are complicated. To avoid unnecessary death.

What Conor O’Shea, the Italian coach (well our coach is an Aussie, so why not??), had his team do was confuse the English. And for an entire 40-minutes it worked a dream. Our players kept asking the ref for explanations, for help. As he said, quite rightly, ‘he’s a ref, not a coach’.

England were totally frustrated by the tactic. Couldn’t play. The first half was an un-spectacle. Crowd booing (and they’re gentlemen at rugby, they don’t do ‘booing’). By the second half Eddie sorted his team out and normality took over for a comfortable win.

But Eddie Jones (who I dearly love) turned into Arsene Wenger (who I dearly… have some respect for). Moaning about the tactics, how they should be banned, the RFU should make this illegal, blah, blah, blah. Like Wenger bemoans any team who play Arsenal without trying to imitate their style. ” ‘ow can we play a tim ooo play long balls all de time? who are very physical? who do things in a way we don’t???” kind’a Wengerism. And that’s wrong. ‘Lower’ teams can do anything within the rules to try and influence the game, whatever the game is; sometimes its their only chance. A good tactical coach will exploit such things when, if played more ‘normally’, their team would get hammered.

Live with it Eddie. Just prepare the team should it happen again.

Spurs won a magnificent match, 4-nil, in the first half on Sunday and then stopped. But didn’t concede, didn’t ‘leave the building’. Great result. And Leicester won. With the style and grace that Ranieri gave them. Even though he was only there in spirit.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Have you seen the pictures of the murder of Kim Jong Nam? Little fat Korean geezer. Strolling through Kuala Lumpur airport and a Vietnamese woman rubs his face with a cloth that we later find contained an illegal chemical weapon of death. As opposed to a legal one. Toxic stuff. Minutes later KJN collapses and is dead. Game over. The Koreans (northerners, obvs) want the body back ‘immediately!!!’ but the Malaysians refuse on the grounds that is, kind’a, like, a murder? So we, kind’a need to investigate. The cctv comes out and reveals all, along with analysis of the toxin. Murder by death. Presumably organised by his dear, beloved step-brother, K-J Un, emperor of all of North Korea.

Who have now demanded the body back and claim that the death was by ‘natural causes’. Because that’s how its reported back home in NK.

And that in turn is because they don’t have free press in NK. They don’t have free anything in NK, other than torture. The purpose of the press in that fine nation is to spread the lies that Kim Jong Un wants to have spread. To create a fictional version of his country that his population can actually respect and admire, with sufficient victimisation by ‘the West’ as required for sympathy. To say such a ‘press’ is a stranger to the truth is vast understatement. This is what all totalitarian regimes do, control the press. If the people don’t know what’s really going on then they’ll be happier.

And that journey, to a controlled press that is merely a government propaganda machine, like all journeys, starts with one step.

Which is basically the step taken by Donald J Trump when he banned journalists from organisations not ‘sympathetic’ to his Presidency from attending White House press meetings. Any newspaper of tv station that says things he doesn’t like or even just things he’s embarrassed about, like how many people turned up to his inauguration, get banned. Its his news or no news.

Meanwhile, at the other end of that fine nation; America, not North Korea, the Oscars were awarded. And once again, an alternative truth occurred. “THE OSCAR FOR BEST FILM GOES TO… LA LA LAND!!!!!!” (Uproar, cheering, speech-making, mum-thanking, God-blessing, blah, blah land) only to find about 5 minutes later that the real oscar was in fact awarded to Moonlight, not La La Land. Oh. Shit. Heads will roll. Not Warren Beatty’s, the one part-responsible for the announcement, his head’s already been totally reconstructed anyway. But what a cock-up. They need to fund that ceremony properly, spend a bit of money on it to make it run smoothly. Right.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

How wonderfully appropriate. Yesterday evening we went to the V&A to see ‘Revolution’ the story of the 60s. Not, like, all of it, just the good bits. The Beatles, sex, drugs, Woodstock, Vietnam, Ford Anglias, hippies, Lamborghini Miuras and untipped cigarettes. But of course, its heavily Beatle-fied because for many of US, they defined the decade. The Fab Four. Who… who… who… did…

What did the Beatles actually do for us? (Like the Romans in Life of Brian). I’ll tell you what they did, they grew their hair long and entertained us, that’s what they did. Oh, and almost literally, set the world on fire. They were, in pretentious talk: the apotheosis of the zeitgeist. Arguably a zeitgeist that they had initiated. At a time when the world was absolutely chock-full of teenage girls looking desperately for something to scream at. They needed to vent that pubescent overload in a very vocal and decibellish way. And here came four good looking guys (I’ll include Ringo in that because I love him) with a slightly rebellious, bad-boy-ish look who said: ok, come scream at us.

The Beatles didn’t invent music. Safe to say. Music has been around since Glenn Miller. Maybe even Beethoven. Maybe longer. General rule: if it ain’t on i-tunes, it didn’t exist. The Beatles were a massive spike in the continual evolution of popular music. They didn’t invent bands. Bands of all sizes had been around for centuries. They didn’t ‘bring music to the kids’ any more than Elvis did or the old ‘swing’ bands. Both of which were seen in their day as fairly ‘subversive’.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the Beatles. And they were my first love. But they weren’t alone. The basic light rock’n’roll format band had already evolved and they just wrote some brilliant songs that appealed to little girls, and little boys. They then produced a body of work which was quite magnificent, and I still love them. As do you. Everyone does. You have to.

Why its appropriate though, I read this very morning about a study by, in fact, an evolutionary biologist, who has studied music through his evolutionary lens and pronounced that the Beatles MUSIC was not actually as influential as that of other groups like the Stones, the Who, the Kinks. The rather ‘edgier’ bands of their day. Culturally, the Beatles had and have no equals in their massive, world-wide effect. But musically, apparently not so. BBC4, this coming Tuesday, 9pm, and you can see how Professor Armand Leroi makes himself the most hated man in Britain, if not the world. Because we’re all a bit protective of the Beatles. Our 50 year love affair has outlasted millions of marriages and even John and George.

Unfortunately, anyone who actually bought an original copy of ‘With the Beatles’ is the sort of person whose gonna forget to set the record for the program.

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

A xxxx

You know that old saying that if you give millions of monkeys typewriters (old machine used to make words appear; like a word processor but better, clunkier, easier to make mistakes on; see ‘carbon paper’ section in History of 20th Century) for millions of years, one of them would randomly come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Unlikely, but its a ‘nalogy, innit. To show the possibilities of randomness.

Bit like Leicester City football club. They run around like typing monkeys for a hundred years, then one year, so randomly that at the start of that year their recent form had them made as bookies favourites for relegation, they won the Premier League. Stuffed Manchester United, laughed at the combined billions of Manchester City and Chelsea, showed Liverpool what never walking alone really does and demonstrated for Arsenal that coming 4th every year means very little. Their whole team cost £3.97. They were cobbled together at no expense off the building yards and scrap heaps of the East Midlands (and Algeria) and orchestrated into something way way beyond the sum of the parts.

And the true maestro who conducted that orchestra (to labour a metaphor to the point where I’ve actually started to feel a little nauseous), was Claudio Ranieri. The Tinkerman of former Chelsea fame. He took this star-less team of relegation-bound nobodies and forged them into nothing short of a miracle. He galvanised them. Created a team spirit that no other team could match, gave them a belief. And as most football matches are won and lost in the minds of the participants, Claudio did the impossible and gave these apparent no-hopers a total conviction to winning mentality.

8 months after lifting the League trophy Leicester have sacked him. Nah, he’s not good enough. We need someone who can win us things. Club’s going nowhere…

Ok, Leicester are looking perilously close to the relegation zone at the moment. Whatever Claudio fixed last year has definitely broken again. And I get that, I really get that. But this, I feel, is more sinister. ‘He’s lost the dressing room’. Footballing euphemism for ‘the players won’t play for him’.

Another of the game’s great malaises. Give a man a pound and he’ll buy an ice cream. Give him 50,000 a week and he becomes an arrogant tosser who suddenly believes he’s a genius, saviour and redeemer all rolled into one little package of sub-normal IQ. In a Bentley.

I can only hope that, whoever the new manager is, Leicester do go down, lose a bundle, get abandoned by their Thai owners with short-term memory issues and all these ‘sudden superstars’ end up playing for Macclesfield and busking outside Poundland to make up the mortgage.

Its nothing short of fucking shameful. Whether you agree with the manager’s decisions or not, you get paid a small fortune for giving your all on the pitch. Every game. Every minute. To do anything less is a dereliction of duty.

Shame on the lot of them.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

The word ‘regular’ has two specific definitions. One is ‘regular’, (doh) describing things of uniform shape, size or mode of operation. A regular polygon (maths 101). Something smooth-running, predictable… regular. The other means happening at the same time/place. Bowel movements. Very regular. Doctors note that with a smile. They love a bowel movement. My regular walk to work. Etc, etc, etc.

Then fucking Starbucks re-defined the word. Gave it a whole new meaning. That of a specific size. And because they have a zillion outlets in a trillion countries, ‘regular’ has now become a food size. Though not an absolute size. Only relative. And that’s where the problem lies.

I just went to ‘Eat’ to get my morning coffee. My normal place (little independent cafe run by Catalan Alfredo and his brother Jesus) has a broken machine. So I went next door. Eat being seen as a lesser evil than Starbucks, Costa, Coffee Republic, More Coffee Bollocks and all the others.

Big mistake. Or, possibly, regular mistake.

Because they’re stupid. And only do coffee in two sizes. Errrrr, big and little? Little and large? Humungous and pathetic? Elephant and mouse? No, regular and small. As if the big one is your norm. I wanted a ‘big’ and a ‘small’ for me mate. And glance up to check the terminology that I knew to be specific to this establisment. But I looked at the wrong board, the food one, in which they have ‘regular’ and ‘large’ and thus assumed that for coffee, when the geezer asked me ‘regular’? I said no, large… regular… big… and a small… regular… little… one…

Oh, so if its coffee, ‘regular’ means big but if its food, the same ‘regular’ means small. Oh, I, errr, get that. Ish.

Yeah, I was informed, they keep changing it. Ah, that certainly helps.

Here’s a suggestion; unless you’re going to the toilet, DON’T USE THE WORD REGULAR. Then we’ll all know what the fuck is going on.

Happy caffeined Thursday. Eventually.

GIVE US OUR LANGUAGE BACK!

A xxxx