Andy's Glasses

I need to check once more, but I actually think this weekend’s game at Spurs is EVEN more massive than last weekend’s at Anfield…

Yes, I’ve checked now, on my patented ‘DON’T PANIC; OK, FUCKING PANIC NOOOOWWWWW!!!!’ system for importance assessment and Sunday’s match with Manchester United is simply humungous. No-one will be talking about Panamanian tax avoidance schemes at the Lane on Sunday. Although the lawyers of several of the Upper West Stand’s faithful may well be doing just that. As should happen at a club owned by a billionaire currently ‘domiciled’ in the Bahamas for tax purposes. At least he’s British for, errr, other purposes.

But they will be talking about Arsenal. You don’t need non-dom status (currently) to do that. Its allowed. Even David Cameron can talk about Arsenal if he wants to. Though he may again choose to ‘temporarily forget’ that he is in fact an Aston Villa fan. Or is it West Ham?

Because I must confess that with the loss of 2 points last weekend and Leicester’s continued, relentless consistency in winning 1-0, my ‘belief’ has not so much dropped as, sort of, shifted focus somewhat. I’m now guilty of the cardinal sin of ‘looking down the table’ rather than looking up. And I don’t have to look very far to find (fucking) Arsenal. Hanging on our shirt-tails, breathing up our bottoms (eeeeuuuwwww), and just sort of ‘being fucking Arsenal’. It shouldn’t be allowed.

So now my new obsession is not winning the league, I really think that is virtually impossible, but finishing above the Arse.

And I say this not just because we have never finished above them in the Premiership, because they’ve won lots of shit and we have but 2 League Cups in the ‘modern era’, but because of basic right and wrong, good and bad.

At Spurs you’ll find lots of lovely people. Good people. Honest people. Spurs Paul, Fascist Wayne, Tourettes Tim, me on occasion, Dirty Dom, The Swerver, all sorts of niceness. Whereas at Arsenal you’ll find Jeremy Corbyn. Osama bin Laden. Andrei Lugavoy (the plutonium murderer) and (probably) Bashar Assad, Kim Jong Un, President Xi and Donald Trump.

I think that says it all. Even the bits I made up for effect.

Thus for point-avoidance purposes, I’ll be temporarily domiciled at West Ham tomorrow lunchtime, in spirit if not body, and will temporarily suspend all moral considerations to support the Hammers that they might best the Arse and give me some minor relief from my stress. Is that too much to ask??

Happy nervous Friday

A xxxx

The headline reads: ‘paying prostitutes is a new French crime’. Fantastic! Prostitution is now free (at the point of service) in France. Maybe state-aided. You get vouchers with your tax return. Those French who pay tax, that is. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now implicated in ‘the Panamanian Shit’, certainly doesn’t pay tax. There again he doesn’t pay prostitutes either, preferring to rape chamber maids instead. So whilst being the major outspoken advocate for the evils of offshore banking, DSK now features prominently in the Mossack Fonseca offshore banking scandal. What’s French for ‘irony’?

But I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about prostitutes. And the French. Two words that sit very comfortably together. The French are an amoral bunch of shag-fiends. Always have been. For them ‘love and marriage’ go together like a horse and carriage (until you eat the fucking horse! you Gallic savage) but not exclusively. Never exclusively. You love your wife. You love your mistress(es). You love anyone you can get your hands on. And if you can’t do it for free, which even pathetic ugly losers like Francoise Hollande seem to have no problem with, then you go find a hooker. There’s thousands in Paris. La Pigalle has been their home forever. I’m sure other French cities have them too. And I’ve heard that you can find prostitutes in other major (and minor) cities and towns too. Right throughout the world.

But the French now want to make it a crime to pay a prostitute. Prostitution is not illegal and never will be. But the client is now guilty for payment and will be fined.

What’s the point of that? Do they think they can end prostitution over there? Good luck with that. Not for nothing is it called ‘the oldest profession’. Maybe they’ll make payment to hookers via offshore accounts in Panama to circumvent the problem.

Tom Cruise is moving to England. Halleluyah. He’s moving to Saint Hill Manor, the UK home of Scientology. Little Tom is now so big in scientology that he’s about to be promoted to the status of ‘Vulcan Warlord’, just one away from Obi Wan Kanobi. And all it cost him was about 762 million dollars. A fucking bargain.

The ‘Church’ of Scientology is just bollocks, pure and simple. Based on the rantings of a third rate science fiction writer who changed, when his books failed to sell, and turned his ridiculous fiction into a religion. And people actually believed his shit. I think I’m going to invent a new religion based on pure fiction and fantasy and fabrication and get everyone to believe it. I going to call it ‘The Bible’. Send your donations NOW!!!

Blessed Thursday; live long and prosper.

A xxxx

The Mossack Fonseca scandal goes from strength to strength. It has now moved from ‘oooooh’ to ‘Jesus fucking Christ!!!’ mode on the international scale of amazement and tabloid incitement to moral high-groundiness.

To encourage these feelings in the public, the media have found some interesting facts, nice, inflammatory ones, to help us with our disgust, in case bent politicians and money-laundering oligarchs should be insufficient.

Mossack Fonseca was started by two men. No prizes for guessing their names. The Fonseca half was an author, quite a famous one in most of Panama. Mossack was no less than a fucking nazi!!!!!! (I borrowed those exclamation marks from The Sun; they have plenty more). Mossack’s father was a high ranking third reicher who fled prosecution to Panama, where Nazi war criminals were always welcome. He had a son, who I’ll call ‘Adolph’ but really I don’t know his name. And it was Adolph that joined Fonseca to create ‘the most evil company the world has ever known!!!’

And now it transpires that London is the most likely place for offshore billionaires to buy their property portfolios. Which we’ve known for years. ‘Big’ houses aren’t owned by individuals, they’re owned by companies. Offshore companies. So when Billy Smiff from Dagenham buys a ‘big house’ from Kenny Entwhistle, from Bromley, he simply buys the offshore company. So the house is just an asset of the company, even if said company owns nothing else. Thus it stays offshore, stays in the company and there’s no tax, no stamp duty, nothing. Cos its out of British jurisdiction. Even though its in Pimlico. Which is, far as I know, still part of Great Britain.

Mossack Fonseca facilitate such deals. A lot of them. Ok, they also facilitated a lot of much much shadier stuff too. Money laundering. Corrupt politicians building up hidden caches of cash in accounts in close relative’s names. Possible bribery issues with FIFA’s main man when he was at UEFA (FIFA corruption??? Again???? Nooooooooo…) And this is all very bad.

A question: how much tax would you LIKE to pay?? How much would you voluntarily gift this or any other fine nation, that it can squander it on parking restrictions, benefits payments for illegal immigrant jihadis (I borrowed that one from The Mail, WAYNE!), and overseas aid to countries better off than we are?

If the answer is anywhere between ‘not a penny’ and ‘less than those bastards make me pay every year’, then you too, were you sufficiently moved, could find ways to ‘avoid’ some taxation. If you were very rich, you’d have teams of people working on nothing but that. And its legal.

Offshore trusts, foreign registered companies, tax havens, all perfectly legal. The tax system, however, is totally fucking useless. They’ll come after me because the lightbulb I claimed as ‘a business expense’ in 1983 was in fact used in my home. (The bulb cost £1.27; the cost of the investigation: £42,578.99). But they can’t touch the ‘big guys’ whose money movement are all carefully controlled and perfectly legal.

And that’s where the indignation comes in. We, as poor individuals, are not in the position to ‘avoid’ tax, whereas the super-rich are. And do.

String the bastards up; that’s what I say. Nothing to do with jealousy. Just ‘morals’, innit?

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Who said that? Well not David Cameron. Who, even in my cynical mind, is in no way ‘corrupt’. Just a bit of a nob. An upper-class rich kid who’s never had a proper job in his life.

He didn’t need to. He had a very rich daddy. Who I’ll call ‘Mr Cameron’, to protect the innocent. Yet the recent leak of 11 million documents from a Panamanian law firm has revealed that Cameron senior may be ‘innocent’ but was far from squeaky clean. Because he chose to keep his money in an offshore tax haven. Hmmmmm.

When questioned Cameron the Dave said yesterday: ‘his family’s tax affairs were a private matter’.

Which is the namby-pamby Western, democratic version of what they’re doing in China. Which is removing all access to details from the internet and banning it in the press. Cameron obfuscates while Xi Jinping will lock you up, remove your testicles and make you ‘disappear’ for even mentioning it.

Of course tax affairs are private. Unless you’re the prime minister and implicated in the biggest tax scandal of the century (so far; I’m not writing off further revelations) and part of a government obsessed with ‘transparency’. You can’t choose selective opaqueness. Even for your dead dad.

To be honest, I couldn’t care less about Cameron’s dad. He had an ‘offshore company’ in name at least. Who fucking cares? He left a ‘fortune’ of 2.74 million quid. An amount known in the posher parts of London as ‘a small house’. Its a lot of money but a fortune it ain’t. And even if it was, I still don’t care.

I care about corruption. By state leaders. I care about money laundering, because its evil and sustains the drug trade and the criminals, allowing them an appearance of legitimacy that they shouldn’t have.

Mossack Fonseca arranged for bogus ‘offshore companies’ to protect funds from the tax systems of the world. Fine. Such things are not illegal; they’re a moral issue. Especially if you happen to be a prime minister, like Cameron. Or like Sigmundur Gunlaugsson of Iceland who, it would appear, did the modern take of Nero and fiddled funds whilst the Bank of Iceland burned. But in his wife’s name, so that’s fine. According to him.

This Panamanian law firm also allegedly handled the stolen ‘Brinks Matt’ gold bullion, with full knowledge of where it was from. They hid money for Putin, for Xi, for Assad; safe to say, they weren’t fussy.

All the ‘Red Aristocracy’ of China seem to have hidden quite vast fortunes, whilst most of China starves. I’ve never been a fan of hypocrisy. And these are times of ‘anti-corruption’ in that fine nation.

I don’t really need an offshore trust, so I have a canoe anchored just off the coast at Brighton with a 50 pound note hidden in it. Its the best I can do.

More to follow… lots and lots and lots more.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

There’s two topics currently obsessing the media. The British Steel Industry and Overseas Aid.

So it was only a matter of time, and sufficiently shitty journalism, before someone put 2 and 2 together and came up with the reactionary, knee-jerk, middle-class, right wing result of 172 million.

Because that was the ‘extra’ overseas aid that we, the British people, and Me, the only British tax-payer, sent to help in foreign lands, over and above the 2 billion we promised to send. And that ‘paltry’ and apparently ‘accidental’ sum (“oh shit, I accidentally paid a hundred and seventy two million quid into the personal bank account of an African war-lord so he can build a new heli-pad to help his drug import business; sorry”) would be sufficient to keep the Port Talbot steelworks open for another 6 months. It currently loses 1 million pounds every day.

So the Mail on Sunday, that bastion of bollocks, decided that their campaign to restrict overseas aid payments should be allied to the steel industry’s woes and linked in a facile, tenuous, trivialising but hard-hitting way.

A way that is very tabloid, very wrong and does injustice to both causes.

The possible closure of the Port Talbot steelworks would be a catastrophe in socio-economic terms for the region. Port Talbot, the town, IS the steelworks. If that goes, the jobs go, the money goes, the economy goes, taking the shops and the entire town with it. Disaster. Yet do we renationalise the company and subsidise an industry destined never to break even again? Or do we close it down and spend probably more than a million pounds a day in welfare benefits and re-training and sorting out the economic mess but not the deeply wounding psychological and emotional impact on every worker and their families?

The overseas aid money, stupidly pledged by Cameron (had a good day, did Dave, in the run-up to the election: a promise of 0.7% of GDP in overseas aid PLUS the stupid, divisive and positively daft Euro referendum) is actually ok. We are a ‘rich country’ even though none of us feel particularly rich and all the news is generally bad. But where does our 2 billion go? And how is it monitored?? It is sent to ‘aid agencies’ in Europe to be distributed. The aid agencies pay their inevitable team of ‘executives’ millions each year in salaries and to keep them flying round the world looking at ’causes’. Eventually, some of the money filters through to the countries where it is desperately needed. But these countries are generally very corrupt. Which is why they need aid in the first place. And thus the money stops at their ‘governments’, providing luxuries for the priviledged few whilst the intended recipients never feel any benefit whatsoever. Once our money has left here it is completely unaccountable. I would love to know the actual percentage that eventually reaches needy causes. Cos it ain’t very high.

Don’t want to talk about football. Which makes the Port Talbot crisis seem ‘uplifting’ by comparison.

Happy Monday; if ya live in fucking Leicester

A xxxx

Its all over the media. Men, in an effort to be fit, to improve body condition, muscle tone and other such worthy desirables, are going to the gym. Fair enough. To do (fucking-) yoga???

I mean; men pump iron. They run treadmills. They even spin, with or without lycra cladding. They ride their bikes, they play sports, run miles, do boxing, anything. But yoga? What the f-????

Apparently half of all yoga participants? devotees? tantrics?? in the world (and that’d be my ‘world’ of England but mainly London; we don’t count the rest) are now men. Yoga classes are brimming over with masculinity. In what used to be the exclusive domain of the female. And for a good reason. Yoga is definitely a girly thing to do. Its as manly as flower arranging, sewing your own clothes, eating kale, moisturising your thighs or supporting Arsenal. Just not something real men do. Eating quiche for the post-Playboy world.

I’ll do pilates. At least it feels like something that hurts sufficiently that it must be good for you. But I refuse to enjoy it. That’s why I do Tai Chi. Its relaxing, spiritual, meditative, improves core strength, strengthens virtually all muscles, improves tone and flexibility, and allows you to hurt people really, really badly at the same time. Martial arts do that. Even if they have their subtle side too.

But yoga? Whether its the new ‘hot yoga’ in which you prance around like a pillock in the tropics, whilst in a dingy room in Hornsey, or any of the new inevitable forms that will always follow an arriving trend, its all bollocks. Even if now practiced by those who possess bollocks.

On thursday nights, our tai chi studio is used before us by a yoga class. And when we pitch up they’re all asleep on the floor. On their mats. Ahhhhh, sweet. No! Its not ‘sweet’, it pathetic. Sleep at home, not in MY studio which you should have vacated 10 minutes ago. Tossers. Sleeping tossers, the worst kind.

So no, I shan’t be giving up tennis to go and sit on the floor for an hour with my legs wrapped round my neck. Or swap tai chi for napping on a mat when I could be hurting people. Even bridge is better for core strength.

But I make no judgments.

Draw at Liverpool. I’m still stinging. Don’t want to think about it.

Happy Sunday (though that’s in Southampton’s hands… or feet)

A xxxx

So having been ‘totally relaxed’ last weekend as England played and Spurs didn’t, I can now return to ABSOLUTE FUCKING PANIC mode for the remainder of the season. And that starts tomorrow. At 5.30. Because tv can’t show 3 o’clock Saturday kick-offs, iss’illegal, they put matches on at other times in order to help Sky.

For the first half of my life football was only ever played at 3 on Saturday, never shown live on tv and you had to wait for Match of the Day later that evening when they’d show ‘hi-lights’ from one game and 30-second snippets from 2 others. They couldn’t afford cameras at every ground; Jesus; what were you thinking?? If you wanted to ‘watch football’ you had to go to the matches. Which was fine then, it was cheap to get in and because most people stood for the match, you could squeeze twice as many bodies into the ground as you can since compulsory seating came about. Ok, it was dangerous (Hillsborough, Heisel…) but it was wonderful. If the ground was ‘full’ the guys would let kids jump over the turnstiles and go in anyway. Without paying. No-one ever had any real idea how many people attended. And most of them would puff their way through 20 Benson&Hedges during the 90 minutes. Health & Safety wasn’t invented until 2005.

Anyway, we don’t do it like that any longer. We have TV.

And thus as Spurs visit Liverpool in what has become a truly MASSIVE game. A match that could decide not only the league but also continued life in the entire known universe. Its THAT big.

Every game is big now. We’re done with ‘small’, with ‘pointless’, with ‘who cares?’ with ‘don’t really matter’. Every game is immense. Which is why it becomes a mental rather than physical challenge. The pressure. Which is massive too. And that’s just for the fans. For the players?? Wow.

If we win (may it please the Lord) tomorrow, we still have some chance, should Leicester ever think about slipping up to any even tiny degree, of winning the league. If we drop points we’re done. As it will be for each and every game now.

I’m rooting for resurgent Southampton who are playing the Foxes tomorrow. And I’m rooting for Watford, on the grounds that I’ll always root for ‘the other team’ when Arsenal are involved. If the Gunners played the Demonic Zombie Evil Alien Vampires from Hell 11, I’d get my Rocky Horror Show costume out and howl at the moon. Can’t help it.

But this isn’t the Devil’s work. This is Tottenham. From the Lane. And I want you all to cheer on my boys tomorrow, where you may be. For Spurs. For right. For everything that is holy and good. For God.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

Marks & Spencer sell burkinis. Which are anti-bikinis. Bikinis without the bits showing. To preserve the modesty of those who wish to remain modest. Or those who the rest of us are happier to see covered up. But mainly, of course, such items are aimed at the Muslim market. And apparently they sell well.

Dolce & Gabanna and Uniqlo also make ranges of veils and robes specifically for this market. And why not? Its a massive market. The whole debate about whether such clothing imprisons women, enriches their lives, liberates them or makes them a bit too ‘darth vader’ for some tastes, is irrelevant. If enough women want to veil up, the market will accommodate them and smother them with options.

Yet a geezer (using the term loosely for pretty much anyone involved in fashion) called Pierre Berge, the 85 year-old former partner of Yves St Laurent, feels that this market is in fact ‘a denial of fashion’ and is wrong. These women should be taught ‘to take their clothes off, to live like the rest of the women in the world’. Yeah, good luck with that.

But Pierre actually questions the ‘morality’ of these designers.

Morality. In an industry where they make £800 jeans. Where they’ve created the entire world of eating disorders to keep its ‘models’ whippet-thin at whatever cost to their health and that of the mimicking masses of girls who idolise and aspire to them. Yet putting stripes on a headscarf is ‘immoral’. Tosser.

You want immorality you need never look any farther than Donald Trump. What; agaiaiaiaiain??? Yes, again. This time the Republican Orange Thing has made a point about abortion. Which has always been fought by Republicans. Donald wants to make it illegal. And consequently any woman having one would in that instance be committing a crime and need to be punished. ‘So what about the fathers/partners/men involved?’ they asked him, ‘would they be punished too??’

No said Donald, that’s a different thing altogether. Yet its a similar thing to that poor woman in Iran who was a rape victim and they were going to stone her to death for being unfaithful.

Donald too is an extremist. An extreme tosser. God bless America.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Sometimes you read a little snippet in the paper and it just makes you laugh. Well, it just makes me laugh. And today it totally cracked me up.

As England lost a meaningless friendly to Holland last night, talk again centred on Wayne Rooney. Should he be an ‘automatic’ starter or do we now have better players who do the job far more consistently than the floppable Man United granny-shagger?

Fierce debate (yawn). Then I read that Rooney’s son has asked his dad for an England shirt… with Jamie Vardy’s name on it. ‘Et tu, Kia’.

And whilst we’re fiercely debating stuff, let’s get back to Europe. I know, England are in Europe (skin’a’the’teeth, but we are at the moment) and Holland are definitely Europe, which we know because they cheat. But its all about the referendum. Cameron’s Folly.

I just read an article by Danny Finkelstein in the Times. And its the first decent, proper, useful article I’ve read in all the Euro-debate rubbish that’s been a constant in the press for the last 6 months. What he said was: ‘there is no answer’. Alternatively, there may be an answer, but it lies deeply buried in libraries full of European information that would take a team of researchers 14 years (I made that up for effect, but you get the idea) to sift through. And as well as there not being an answer, most people don’t have a clue what the fucking question is.

Its all speculation. Its all open to opinion. Balance of probabilities. Because we have no idea how Europe might respond to our leaving. They obviously won’t want us to stop buying BMW cars and Miele cookers and baguettes, but will it all become more expensive? We don’t know.

Ahhhh, but we’ll have control of our laws if we leave. Will we? That assumes that we don’t now. In various speeches, politicians stated what they thought was the effect of ‘Europe’ on ‘our’ laws. Nick Clegg (an ‘inny’) said 14%, Nigel Farage (doh) reckoned 75%. I think it safe to say that those numbers differ in a statistically signifiant way. And neither are worth the wear and tear on my keyboard to state them.

So God bless Danny Finkelstein. Now I know why they made him a Lord. Because he didn’t answer even one single question. But he made me feel better about not knowing. And as we’re already in, I now feel that I need to be convinced to leave. Otherwise I’m staying put. Unless Turkey get in, then I might reconsider.

Though dinner tonight at Izghara, the fab Turkish restaurant, might make me even re-think that.

Happy Wednesday, may your kebab be flowing and your goals uncontested.

A xxxx

Big storm round here yesterday. Katie. That’s what ‘she’ was called. They gave it a girl’s name because it was really fucking vicious and nasty and bitchy. Caused havoc. Stopped planes landing at Heathrow, brought the M25 to a close, blew over… stuff, stopped me playing tennis and blew the table over in the garden. Havoc. But when did they start naming the storms? We know Katarina, we’ve had Alex, Jane, all sorts. In the old days they were all called Gail.

But that storm’s over now. We’ll await Lara, Lexie, Louise or Lumpen. Its a beautiful morning in London and probably all over peaceful, loving, safe Europe. Whereas in Donald Trump’s America they’re in panic. Lock-down. High alert.

The irony (if ONLY Americans got it) is just so exquisite and as no-one got hurt badly we can really laugh. Trump tells Americans not to come to Europe. Its dangerous. Terrorists. The very next day some fucking loony bozo starts shooting in the Capitol building in Washington.

And a few little ‘facts’ for Donald. More people have died in America from random shootings than have died in Europe from terrorism. Its true. Heard it on the radio yesterday. Can’t remember all those numbers and I don’t care. You’re bothered, go look it up. And as a Repbublican (the party funded by the gun lobby) we know all the rest of his opinion on guns that he hasn’t screamed from the hustings already. How can you shoot all the Mexicans and Muslims if you don’t arm up??

Have you ever done ‘spin’? Its an exercise activity in which you sit on a pretend bike and… errr… spin. You pedal. To music. Loud, pounding music. Which is supposed to keep your pedalling in time. I did a class last night. With Mel, a frequent spinner. I was the only lycra-free person in the room. Perhaps that’s why I found it so horrible. But as I only have one tattoo and it reads: DEATH BEFORE LYCRA!!!! I would be a hypocrite to have worn a pair of testicle-squeezing shorts that I don’t possess.

“OK!!!!” roared Hilly, our leader, our guru, our coach, our lord and mistress, who, for the purposes of her class only speaks in capitals with lots of exclamation marks. “GET READY FOR THE RACE!!!!” but I’m already pedalling my kishkes out; I need to go faster? “TURN IT UPPPPP!!!!!” (that’s the resistance, she means, to make pedalling harder) “WE’RE RACING UP A HILL; IN 3… 2… 1… PEDAL LIKE SHIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!” And everyone dutifully stands on their pedals and goes fucking mental. The sweat pours, literally pours and I feel exhilarated, I feel free, I feel… I feel sick and want to die. At least that’s quick. Unlike spin which lasts 45 agonising minutes. But feels much, much longer.

At the end I realised I hadn’t died. Even though I’d been wishing for it for 44 minutes. And everyone’s great and happy and ‘woooow!!’. Its one of those activities that you do for how you feel afterwards. I like activities that I enjoy ‘during’. Retrospective pleasure motivated by guilt can only get you so far, how ever many calories you burn. I’ll stick to bridge.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx