Andy's Glasses

Manchester United have made their worst start to a football season since 1989!!!! Oh. My. God. That’s awful!! How could the Gods of football conspire in such a brutal, hard, cold way as to take away their divine right to success? How is it that the ‘biggest club in the world’ should suffer the tragic indignity of being 6th in the league after 13 games??? A single point gained at home yesterday against shitty, under-performing bottom feeders, West Ham. Its just NOT GOOD ENOUGH. It wasn’t good enough under David Moyes, wasn’t good enough under Luis Van Gaal and its certainly not good enough under Jose Morinho. Though because Jose is such a calm, considered, philosophical kind of tactician, he only received his second red card in the last month. Better than the start of his Chelsea campaign last season.

But we expect 2 good years our of Jose. Its almost biblical. And ye shall reap the harvest of 2 good years before the field goes fallow, the shit hits the fan, the team Doctor gets humiliated, the water bottles go flying, as it is written, Amen. Did it at Chelsea, twice, did it at Real, did it at Inter. Yet at Old Trafford he’s struggling like a muthaf-, like a poor Portuguese fisherman with a hole in his net.

Manchester United are soooooo big that Hollywood superstars come and see them. And Julia Roberts too. Ok, she hasn’t done much since Erin Brokovich, hasn’t looked good since Pretty Woman, but she’s fucking royalty of the A-list variety. And growing up in Wicheta, or Alberquerque or Sioux Falls, you can just imagine teeny Julia telling the good ole boys when they turned up in their red Chevy pick-ups that their daddy’s need back on the farm baaaah 7, that she didn’t want to go watch the Cougars play Baseball, or the Panthers play basketball, or the Zebras play gridiron, she wanted to go to Manchester to watch ‘sucker’. So yesterday she was there. Livin’ the dream. In the Theatre of Dreams. And a lorra good it did the team.

And what about Sunderland? Down the bottom. Watford? Struggling. Bournemouth? Just happy to still be in the top flight. They’re not hurling water bottles at the 4th official because they’re ‘only 19th’.

Never mind. As we say at Spurs, (every fucking year, after year, after year…); there’s always next season.

Happy Monday.

A xxxx

Is there a correlation between football and alcohol? This is the question on everyone’s mind, lips and… errr… livers. So it needs exploration. Not the bit about Gazza having seven litres of pure spirit poured down his throat whilst he was tied to a chair with his head held back, that’s normal. Nor Rooney going out on the piss when he was due to sit on the bench for 90 minutes just three days later. I’d never realised that ‘sitting still whilst no longer under the influence’ was a crime. No, I’m talking about the fans. The people. The masses. The great unwashed who vote Brexit, love Trump and watch football.

Because when your team wins, you ‘go for a drink’ to celebrate. When your team loses, you ‘go for a drink’ to commiserate and console. On the way to the game you ‘stop for a drink’ to get in the mood. And if you want a ‘quick one’ at half time, you’ll probably need to leave your seat at least 10 minutes before the end of the half to get in the queue. Except at Arsenal, in the famed ‘Club Level’, where the outrageous amount paid for yearly tickets actually includes ‘all the half time booze you can hurl down your throat’ as the beers are laid out on tables for the privileged to just help themselves. Which is why that entire middle tier of the ground empties totally 15 minutes before half time and doesn’t fill up until 15 minutes after the game’s re-started.

So, basically, ‘going to football’ translates for so many as ‘going drinking’. The match starts at 3, Love, so I should be home by 5 in the morning, blind drunk and sprawled across the driveway in a pool of my own vomit. Oh, and I might be bleeding from various places and possibly in possession of an STD or 2. Love you, Byeeee…

I’m interested in the relative consumption of winning teams and losing teams’ fans on any particular week. I’m interested in levels of alcoholism based on general levels of club overall success or disappointment. And whether this is merely geographical and socio-economic in nature or actually influenced by the teams and their results. We all know that northerners drink too much and piss away at least 90% of their weekly benefits by Friday night. When there’s scarcely any football ever played.

Excessive drinking occurs at times of upset, frustration and tragic disappointment. Which is why football is the perfect medium for such an activity.

And most importantly, in case I’ve failed to mention this previously: I FUCKING HATE CHELSEA!!!!

Happy Sunday; pass the bottle

A xxxx

I love the ‘far right’. As long as, politically speaking, its on the periphery, it creates a wonderful environment for the violent, the stupid, the stupidly violent and the violently stupid. Its basically politics for those who like fighting. Always has been. From Hitler who indoctrinated a group of moronic thugs (and find me any other type of thug who isn’t in UKIP) and ‘took it viral’, to Moseley’s brown shirted knuckle-draggers, up to the National Front, as was, who cut right to the chase, went to Chelsea and West Ham football grounds in the bad old days and just hooked up with anyone who looked ‘a bit tasty’ (doc Martens, Ben Shermans, sta-pressed, braces, shaved heads) and offered them the chance to beat people up on a Sunday (football was only on Saturdays back then), or even a Tuesday night!!

The National Front was banned, or died, or beat itself up in confusion, but it changed and became the slightly respectable British National Party. Which then became Britain First, the Front Nacionale and the International White People’s Darkie Hating Party. Every country has them. In Eastern Europe they have more than most. Greece is full of them, Russia loves them and these people (assuming they are ‘people’ in any normal sense) all have one thing in common.

They hate.

They spread hatred, they’re rabidly divisive and totally evil.

Probably the best example today of a totalitarian, ultra-racist, violent right wing institution is ISIS. Sadly a lot of right wingers take their lead from God himself. Or, some warped fucking distortion of any particular religious doctrine.

So its nice to see all the proper, white, European fascists get together, as they have this week, over in Bulgaria. Arguably the best place to keep Europes proto-Nazis. They’re there to ‘hunt migrants’. They catch the refugees who sneak from Turkey over to Bulgaria every day. I don’t know what they do with them, deport them, arrest them, eat them, kill them, but they catch them. Under the flag of the Knights Templar. A one-time noble organisation (about 500 years ago), now hi-jacked by our own extreme righties over here because the Cross of St George looks great as a tattoo.

Fidel Castro was never a right wing anything. He was left. Way left. So left that his regime looked very much as it would have if he was that far to the right. But without the flags.

The Castro is dead: long live the (other) Castro!!

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

In a brilliant move, based on solid maffematics, old Chancellor, George Osborne, raised the rate of ‘stamp duty’, the tax you have to pay when you buy a house. Its a basic kind of tax: you’re spending money, we want some. Goes back to Robin Hood days. Its maffia-esque. A deal is being done, by anyone, anywhere, I want a piece. Fair enough. And so George calculated that by raising stamp duty by 5%, he would rake in loads of money to the national coffers.

Because sometimes people live in a deluded and simplistic world in which ‘all things stay the same unless I change them for my benefit’. George failed to realise that, basically, people would just stop buying houses at the same rate that they did before. The tax had scared buyers off, priced them out or made them find ways to avoid the tax. The ex-Chancellor failed to comprehend evolutionary changes. Predators refine techniques, prey speed up, dig holes, climb higher as a consequence.

And thus the housing market, particularly in London, has slumped (relatively) and people aren’t moving home as they did before. So instead of a ‘tax windfall’, there is a £10billion deficit projected over the next 5 years.

Had stamp duty remained at its previous, lower rate, the exchequer would be richer. Its all about greed. And stupidity.

I don’t mind tax. Its kind’a essential. Something Donald Trump would disagree with. But Trump is a selfish and sociopathic individual with no empathy and even less common sense. He sees it as ‘clever’ to pay no taxes. Yet is happy to spend zillions on his up-coming ‘infrastructure’ projects. Where will that money come from if no-one pays taxes because they’re so ‘clever’?

But there are always limits. When tax gets ridiculously high and punitive, people stop paying it. More is sometimes less. When the Labour government put high rate income tax up to 95%, people just moved away. Left the country. With a resultant drop in the tax income. That was clever.

And history repeats. Ok, George did what he did in the main part to counter Labour’s proposal’s for its ‘mansion tax’, but still, you’d kind’a hope that governments would be able to work out projections and scenarios of likely outcomes. They employ enough fucking people to do so.

None of which affects me much personally. Other than in general principle and the fact that all these special taxes are, in essence, taxes on London. They don’t grow houses elsewhere that fetch sufficient premiums to reach the top tax rate. And again; if you keep taxing something, IT WILL GO AWAY. London won’t exactly up sticks and move to Grimsby, but if companies, and their employees, will get a better deal elsewhere, better lifestyle, greater disposable income, then they’ll go. And as London generates 30% of Britain’s tax, that would be good for no-one.

Nuf with the fucking tax, already.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

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