Andy's Glasses

You have to be philosophical about things. Especially here in the Holy Land. Even unbelievers like me can’t fail but to feel a holy presence in every shwarma you eat, every iced coffee you drink, every dollop of hummous that falls on your new t-shirt. God is everywhere. and He was a chef. Didn’t you know that? That’s why swearing is not a sin.

So we arrived yesterday, picked up the car and instead of heading north to Tel Aviv and the wonderful, European and culinary miracle that it represents, we instead headed south. Made a right before Jerusalem (too much religion, too little food) and went southwards. Towards the Negev. 180 kms beyond was the Ramon Crater, a geological wonder of the world. A natural erosion crater, as opposed to an ‘impact’ one, 42kms wide. In the middle of the desert. Been there for 15 million years, but they only built an amazing hotel there a few years back so no-one bothered to come before.

Anyway, got the car, on the road, headed to Be’er Sheba. Straight road, freeway, round that little city then straight down south to the Crater. Easy Peasy. What could go wrong? 2 hour drive. What could fucking go sodding, bleeding, awfully, catastrophically fucking wrong?????

Let’s just say everything. I took one wrong road. Just one. But straight into the world’s worst traffic jam. So it was an hour before we could turn round. One whole hour. Never mind, we’re back, we’re on the freeway again, Ramon here we come.

Oh, there’s roadworks. Big ones. Diversion. Which tells you in no uncertain terms how to get off the freeway, but not a mention of how to get back on. So we managed to take the wrong road out of Be’er Sheba and headed south but not in the direction we really needed to be. And as its a desert, there just aren’t roads going across. You either drive across the desert (not recommended) or you reverse your tracks and start again.

5 hours after setting off our 2 hour journey was completed. Easy peasy. Jesus fucking Christ. Though he left here a long time ago.

The crater is magnificent. And interesting. But only in a geological, evolutionary, historical and biblical way. Otherwise iss just a fucking big hole in the desert. What’s all the fuss about?

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Its horrible when your heroes let you down. When your favourite actor turns out to be a drug-crazed serial child-molester, when your favourite footballer is arrested for rape, when your favourite mp turns out to be an Arsenal fan. Or when your favourite company turns out to be just like all the others.

For years I’ve been an evangelical Amazonian. Amazon is just a brilliant company, I would say to any who would listen and many who really didn’t want to. But they’re great! I’d say, they are so efficient, so cheap, so reliable, so thorough, and: if you have a problem they will sort it out so easily, no nicely, so considerately. I love(d) them like no other.

This hero-worship came about mainly because of a few incidents. Like when I sat on Mel’s kindle. Her 7 day-old kindle. Ooops. They were lovely, they were caring, they replaced it at a discount, they sent the new one in day, all was great. As it was when Mel dropped the next one in the bath. They were great. And everything was fast and furious and fabulous in Amazon-land.

And they kept growing. And growing. And, fertilised by all that unpaid tax (for which I fucking forgave them totally, just because they were Amazon), they grew bigger and bigger and bigger.

Two weeks ago I left my kindle of a bus. A number 11 if you’re interested. Big red one, if you’re not. The kindle was 3 or 4 years old but its upsetting. But heh; this is Amazon. THEY CARE.

Well, they did. In the old days (2012). This time my request was met by a stony-sounding automaton spurting the company line. No, we don’t discount for that.

It wasn’t the tenner off that bothered me. It was his horrible attitude. Gone was the friendly Irish people I’d previously engaged with. This was someone who sounded a bit like Stephen Hawking reading from a corporate auto-cue.

So I wrote to Jeff Bezos. You can do that. Explained my disappointment. Unfortunately and surprisingly, Jeff was a bit busy, so I got a reply from a clone (they can do that at Amazon, they can do anything) or from some 5th grade minion with absolutely no sense of humour or ability to answer the question asked. Instead he sent me a full-page disclaimer of all Amazon responsibility, a copy of the kindle warranty, the terms and conditions of the sale, countersigned by 3 lawyers and a judge. Like I didn’t realise that ME leaving MY 4 year-old kindle on a bus was in fact down to me.

Tosser.

I’ve also noticed that the ‘free postage’ option has changed at my former fave corporation. You would generally receive goods within a couple of days. But since they invented Amazon Prime (which gives you FREE next day delivery, for a tenner a month… otherwise its free), and charge a hefty premium to buy a next day charge, their normal delivery has become decidedly third-rate. Its almost as if you’re being punished for not being a ‘prime’ customer. Almost?

But again, it ain’t about the money. Its about the general attitude of the company changing from one that really strived to care to one that is more concerned about exonerating itself from any responsibility including being nice to its customers.

I have a new kindle, of course, named ‘Andy’s 7th Kindle’, when we only have 2, but I am so over Amazon. I wish I could stop shopping with them but for some things, like tennis balls, its just impossible to beat them. I just hate them now. And I hate Jeff, and I’m gonna tell all my friend to abandon them for a massive failure. From being a fantastically successful company who are so much better than all the rest, they’re now just a group of stereotypically inaccessible corporate shit-heads. Don’t expect anything else from them. You won’t get it.

Happy Monday from the Ramon Crater. (oh, look it up, then you will know)

A xxxx

There’s confusion and there’s confusion. And then there’s the mysterious case of the gay bishop. Who is ‘celibate’ anyway. So if he’s celibate, what possible difference does it make to anyone which form of sexual activity he chooses to abstain from? Its like a teetotaller saying gin is preferable to whisky.

Its fucking irrelevant.

In this case literally so. I sincerely hope. Because if the Bishop of Grantham is in fact telling porkie pies about his ‘celibacy’ or re-defining it in some Bill Clintonesque way, then he will certainly burn forevermore in the eternal hellfires of damnation! Otherwise known as being transferred to Peckham.

But assuming the Bish is an honest dude, what’s the problem?

The main one, of course, being that the Church, as in the institution, doesn’t like queers of any stripe. Though most gay men would NEVER wear stripes anyway; not with those shoes. The church has a bit of a problem with homosexuality generally in that even though it would appear that probably three quarters of all clergymen are gay, the church opposes gay marriage, gay ministers, gay anything. They live in a constant state of denial. And that’s just the Anglican Church; the Church of England. In the Catholic church the rate of gayness goes up radically, as does the stated opposition to all things homosexual. Go figure.

Odder still is that Nicholas Chamberlain is indeed Anglican. And in that church, forced celibacy was abolished in 1549 (I googled the Bishop of London himself for that little snippet). Probably when some mediaeval cassock-wearer who was horny as hell. Who knows?

Yet Bishops are indeed expected to take on the whole ‘poverty, chastity, obedience’ shtick as proof of their worthiness to wear purple.

More interesting, and certainly more heterosexual, is the new Woody Allen movie, Cafe Society.
Saw it last night. Its my duty to watch everything the great man (who himself is no stranger to sex scandals) produces.

Its a wonderful film. Stylish, beautiful to watch, funny and re-assuringly only 90 minutes long, it was great. Jesse Eisenberg played… well, he played Woody Allen; everyone plays Woody Allen in his films, that’s his rule. Woody himself narrates, then all the actors and actresses impersonate him as they read his words in his style, with his mannerisms. And its about love. In Hollywood in the 1930s. Kristen Stewart smoulders in her first attempt at love without vampires. Steve Carrell is great, Eisenberg pretty good himself. Its not ‘vintage Woody’ because he simply doesn’t do that any longer. But it is a lovely movie.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

I’m what’s known as ‘good with faces’. Which is different from having a ‘good face’, which I fortunately do, but means I recognise people. And I do. Can’t always put a name immediately to the face, but faces I just know. My dad, bless him, is the same. He bumps into people he hasn’t seen since the last war and still recognises them. Its what we do in our family; recognise faces.

Even ‘old’ faces, that we haven’t seen for 20, 30, 40 years, I immediately know that I know them. I’ve even been known to approach these seeming strangers to work out from whence I know them.

“Yesssss!!!! I’ve got it!!! You were that really great looking babe from the Room at the Top in Ilford High Road; we went out, I got you pregnant, faked the dna test by giving them my mate’s toothbrush, ran away, left the country, never answered the calls from you or your solicitors, punched your mother in the face… How the hell are you??? What happened to your face?”

That kind’a thing.

So when I see a face that I don’t know, even on someone I’ve seen very regularly in movies, on tv, then something is amiss.

I was watching an interview on the news and wondering why this complete stranger was talking about the new, as yet unseen (as it, and all its previous incarnations, will remain unseen by me) Bridget Jones movie. I only realised it was Renee Zellwegger when she started denying to Fiona Bruce that she’d had any ‘work done’. Talking about how angry she is that everyone assumes she’s been under the knife! Just because she looks totally, completely, unrecognisably different from how she did 6 weeks ago. And seems to have a face totally devoid of movement or any other human characteristics. What an awful assumption for people to make!!!

They need to change the law. If you get a new face, YOU MUST GET A NEW NAME TO GO WITH IT. Otherwise its just too confusing. She should call herself The Remake, Lady Frankenstein, Bridget Jones, Vinnie Jones, anything but Renee Zellwegger, who she no longer resembles in any way shape or form.

Ok, I had a little nip and tuck, some botox, new lips; I wanted Brad Pitt, ended up with Mick Jaggers, a few fillers, but nothing that major. I had to have it done for my… errr… blocked sinuses. Honest.

Happy Saturday (even though the season’s three fucking weeks old and has been stopped already for ‘international bollocks’)

K xxxx

Sharon Stone famously said it took her 19 years to become an ‘overnight success’.

A parallel, one must feel, to events on the final day of the football transfer window, yesterday.

Moussa Sissoko, the (ex-)Newcastle midfielder arrives at Spurs so late that the trains had stopped running and he had to take an Uber. The cost from Newcastle; £3674.23, his driver was Mo, who rated a strong ‘4’, the Prius needed recharging at Newport Pagnell, and due to the nature of footballing contracts, Spurs had to pay the player’s agent a commission on the Uber, of £426,839.22. Seems fair.

The saga to sign this player has been ongoing for seemingly, about 7 years, though in reality, only a few months. Footballing time is not like real time. The final day of the transfer window was shown by Einstein to be 3 weeks long.

Yet this ‘day of drama’ (zzzzz) and suspense(!!!) is a distraction. From football. Which started 3 weeks ago. It is, other than the fact that it is NOT good tv, whatever all the tv companies think, a load of bollocks. Because it should end in July. Before the football starts. It would be just as dramatic, just as ‘exciting’, just as mind-numbingly dull listening to Danny Murphy and Jermaine Jenas ‘intellectualise’ a process that is as simple as it is uninteresting as they just wait for players to be bought, about once in every 6 hours of dead time.

Its also a bit ‘Groundhog Day’ as Chelsea re-sign all the players they signed a few years ago, then sold a couple of years later. David Luiz? Is he the man to provide security and consistency at the back? Yeah, right.

But best of all was Bournemouth’s acquisition of Jack Wilshere, on loan from the Arse for a year. The little Cockney Sparrer, the British Bulldog, was about to leave football and star in a movie sequel, as The Man with No Brain. Steve Martin had 2, Jack Wilshere, nil. But Eddie Howe, Bournemouth’s main man, sorted a loan arrangement with Arsenal. Though why, exactly, Arsene Wenger would be prepared to part with the poster-boy for Benson & Hedges is another question. All that talent!!! Ok, not in an England shirt… nor really in an Arsenal shirt for the last few years, but he still remains the finest player to grace many orthopaedic hospitals. AC Milan was also keen to take him on loan but Wilshere chose instead the glamorous and stylish option that Bournemouth could offer. His salary of 80,000 a week will be paid by Bournemouth, into the Hampshire NHS trust directly. But most of all, Wenger couldn’t keep this moron under control. He’s an indisciplined idiot. Good luck Eddie.

Ok, I’m finally ready for the football season now.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Getting angry with tax avoiding companies is only natural. Its part of growing up. So when Starbucks are shown for the exploitative tax dodgers that they are, a lot of people boycotted them. Talking with their feet. Its what we do. It was no loss to me, I’d avoided them for years because their coffee’s shit. So I’d made my, kind’a, ‘pre-tax statement’ ages ago.

But companies are in the end, in some way or another, accountable, first and foremost, to their customers. Without whom, there is no company.

It was harder to boycott Google because it is without a doubt the most essential ‘thing’ in the life of every civilised person in the world. So we just amended their name in our ‘favourites’ to ‘Fucking Google!!’ and let that be sufficient to voice our extreme displeasure. Using another search engine is, quite frankly, unthinkable.

So now its Apple. The biggest company in the world. Paying tax amounting to about 0.005% of their profits, which are expressed in loads of billions every quarter. Even in Ireland that’s low. But that’s how its been.

Until now. When those ‘fucking Europeans’ have voiced their displeasure and demanded a payment of back taxes amounting to 13 billion Euros. To be payed to the Irish government.

Who don’t want it.

I’ll have it. Then everyone can be happy.

The Irish don’t want it because the deal they did with the late Steve Jobs, back in the day, allowed very favourable tax terms. Ok, perhaps not quite as favourable as those mentioned above but creative accounting is what corporations do. And that is why Apple is based in Ireland. And not in the British Virgin Isles, Bermuda or Grand Cayman. Employing 6,000 Irish persons and putting masses of cash into the local and national economy. That was the deal: set up shop here, rather than over there, and we’ll give you all sorts of benefits, because OUR ECONOMY IS SHIT AND WE NEED OVERSEAS INVESTMENT. And it was shit. And now its not. Because of companies like Apple and many others, who took advantage of what the Irish offered in a wonder of quid pro quo which turned the Irish economy around in a decade.

Now Europe wants its quids out of the pro quo and everyone’s up in arms.

As a (fairly) staunch ‘remainer’ (remember THE VOTE?) I’m curious about this. We have some Euro bitch demanding that a sovereign nation (Ireland is an independent republic, in case you missed that) within the Eurozone implement a fine on its favourite company because it breeches European tax laws, not Irish tax laws. They obviously don’t have many, if any.

So really, from my perspective, I don’t give a shit about Apple, nor the 13 million, because I won’t benefit from it in any way at all. But I do care that unelected Euro demigods can try to force an independent country to go back on a long-standing deal because ‘they’ don’t like it.

I normally delete the little ‘signature’ from my words but today, in protest (no idea against whom), I shall leave it in.

Happy Wednesday,

A xxxx

Sent from my iPad

My life changed in 1974. Blazing Saddles came out. And hit the screens with a bang, a crash and an oy-vey! No-one had ever seen anything like it before. Ok, I’d never seen anything like it before. The world learned of Mel Brooks. And of the redefinition of irreverence.

Blazing Saddles attacked every stereotype in Western movies. They had a black sheriff, and consequently employed the ‘n-word’ with abandon throughout. There were Native Americans (red indians, as they were known) who spoke yiddish. There were shit-head red-necks galore, dirty dealers, ballroom whores and baked-bean eaters who farted. And farted. And farted.

And an alcoholic gunslinger played by Gene Wilder.

Who’s role really was to add a subtlety to what would otherwise have been a very good but undiluted slapstick-fest. And their lay the genius of both Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder.

A few years later, even though it had come out a few years earlier but no-one bothered to show it, I saw the Producers. And my life changed again. (Yeah, my life changed a lot back then, pretty much with every movie I saw, every book I read, every girl I passed at the bus-stop). The Producers remains to this day My Favourite Film. There, I’ve said it. I’ve finally reached the zenith of my lifelong equivocation over best movies. The Producers wins. And the Blues Brothers. Play it again, Sam. And Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Gene Wilder was one of The Producers. Playing the nebachy Jewish, panic-attacky mother’s boy accountant (Mel Brooks loves a sterotype like no-one else), the straight man to the comic tour de force that was Zero Mostell; the other Producer. The perfect film. Based on a brilliantly clever ploy (that if a musical production loses money, you don’t have to give back the sponsor’s money; even if you’ve sold 650% of the costs), the two finest of comic talents, ably accompanied by the incredible Dick Strawn as Hitler, and their chosen production that ‘had to fail’; Springtime for Hitler. So brilliant. So Mel Brooks. So Gene Wilder.

Wilder also starred in a film that no-one ever saw, other than me, because I was already ‘his biggest fan’. It was called The Frisco Kid and looking back, it was a bit Mel Brooks derivative but only because it had Gene Wilder and a silly plot. About a Polish rabbi (Wilder) crossing all of America in ‘cowboy days’ and applying the black-hat values of the shtetl to the wild west. Very funny, very Gene Wilder.

When he died yesterday a legend left this world. But left it a much happier and funnier place than we he arrived.

RIP

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I’m not ready for the football season yet. Unfortunately, it would appear, neither are Spurs. We’re stuck in ‘1-goal hell’. We score one goal per game. That’s it. If we’re playing a really shit team, like poor Palace, then its enough to win. If the team are a little better than that, like, say Everton, then they score one too. Liverpool were different. They were, according to Liverpool fans, ‘foookin’ greatsch’. They scored first, Spurs never came fully awake. Didn’t need to, it was only Liverpool, but that’s not the point. Ya gotta try. For the fans. But no. We were shit, managed to equalise and that was it; 1-each. September’s our month, ask Harry Kane.

So I’ve always said: if you leave London, do it in a plane. Anywhere your car can take you is just not worth the bother. And yet… and yet… time and again I’m surprised. Not sufficiently to curb my provincia-phobia and my Londoner’s view of the countryside (too big, too green, nuffink ‘appenin’; too far from Shoreditch), but I’m surprised. The pic is Mel and the Cotswolds. Mel’s the orange thing.

Yet marriages can’t survive on football and London alone. Well, mine couldn’t. And because Mel and I are just so ‘in-synch’, we took a road trip. It was perfect. There was a furniture design exhibition. In Cheltenham. Mel loves chairs and tables, I love driving through the countryside very very fast. Then a bit faster still. GET OUT’A ME FAAARRRRKIN’ WAY YA GRASS-CHEWIN’ FAAAARRRRKIN’ BUMPKIN!!!! So 90 miles down to Cheltenham; perfect.

Of course the bad thing about London is that driving here is simply no fun any more. Speed cameras, speed humps, endless traffic lights, bloody pedestrians, even London ones, awful. But you get out past Oxford and the roads are brilliant. They’re just made for exceeding the speed limit.

Came back to a very depressing thing. League table: 1st Manchester City, 2nd Chelsea, 3rd Manchester United. I know, its early days, but still…

Happy Bank Holiday Monday

A xxxx

Phah! Kids! Ha! (That’s my ration of exclamation marks until November.)

When kids are young they like repetition. If a game’s great, play it again. If they like a book or story, read it again. No, let’s try this one, darling. NOOOOOO, WANT DAT ONE ‘GEN. You know what its like. You’ve read the Hungry fucking Caterpillar every fucking night for three fucking months and you’re desperate for either a new story or for the caterpillar to turn into a moth and get beaten to death with a rolled-up newspaper. But no, that’s THE book of the moment, that’s what we read. Grrrrrrrr.

Same with videos. Remember videos? We used them sparingly, in a (as it turned out, as it always is) failed effort to see the tv as something different, a new game, something sparing. Not as the default for all day and night. How’d that work for you?

Anyway, the girls, when young, were allowed the ‘treat’ of tv when all else was done or I got bored of reading the Hungry Caterpillar, or so Mel & I could get drunk secretly in the kitchen, whatever. And they would choose the video.

When they were about 10 and 7, it was Mary Poppins. And only Mary Poppins. Again and again and again. And I’m trying to read the paper and I’ve got Dick Van Dyke’s nauseating faux-cockney as my soundtrack, or the oh so sickly sweet voice of Julie Andrews feeding the fucking birds for tuppence a fucking bag.

So after sufficient time elapsed and I got ever nearer to wielding the pick-axe handle at the tv just thinking about the word supercalafragalistic… I introduced something new to them. For their education. And growth. And enlightenment. I played them MY favourite movie.

The Blues Brothers.

The perfect film. It has amazing music, excitement, car chases, its achingly funny and great fun. Ok, and has quite a bit of swearing, some very stylised violence and lots of abuse. But kids have to learn that shit some time, right?

They loved it. But like LOVED IT. For the next year that was ‘the movie’, ‘the video’, the ‘let’s watch tv’.

My mother wasn’t so impressed with it the first time she sat with them and John Belushi swore at someone. She was shocked. ‘Do you think the girls should be watching that, Andrew?’ she inquired, ever the lady, ever the non-interferer, ever wonderful, and never-ever ‘Andy’. ‘Do you think its appropriate???’

Yeah. I do. I did. I think its very appropriate. You’re never too young to appreciate a totally brilliant movie. Which came on last night on some low-end channel just as I was going to bed. And I just had to watch ‘a bit’, just had to. For the brilliance of Belushi, Aykroyd, Landis, for the memory of the girls long ago, and for my mother. Who is probably still disapproving of it from her heavenly perch.

We’ve got a half a tank of gas, a full pack of cigarettes and its 170 miles to Chicago.

Hit it.

A xxxx

Wow!

I’ll say it again: wow!!

Went to see Yerma last night. Issa play, innit. Something I try to avoid at all times, normally. But these aren’t normal times. Generally, if the tabloid press give a production ‘rave reviews’, it means there’s nudity, probably a lot of farce and tons of swearing. If the broadsheet press ‘rave’ about a play its generally going to be dull and often very opaque. They love a ‘hidden meaning’ and ‘undercurrents’. Most times so ‘hidden’ and ‘under’ that I give up even looking long before the intermission, along with the will to live and the desire for sobriety.

Then along came Yerma. It means: barren, in case your Spanish is as poor as your English. And it was actually written in 1934 by a geezer called Yorca. No relation to Orca, who came later to movie screens. And its the story of a woman’s total decline during her inability to conceive the child she so desperately wants, over about a 4 year period. No pun intended.

That synopsis would normally have me running for the tv sports channels. Another post-feminist cry of sympathy for another woman in crisis. Shoot me now. Except the reviews for Yerma were unequivocal. “It is brilliant”, they said. All of them. No ifs, ands or buts, just plain fucking brilliant. Oooooh, that’s unusual. Except I don’t trust critics. Who all suffer from Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome and if one decides that some boring shit-fest of nothingness ‘speaks’ to him/her, the rest all worry that they’ve missed something essential and join in with the praise-heaping for fear of being thought stupid.

So this play is supposedly brilliant. Well ain’t they all. Its on at the ‘Fringe’, the Young Vic in Waterloo, so its not eye-wateringly, West End theatrical, Michael fucking Ball type expensive. And it stars Billie Piper. The deciding factor. WE SHALL GO!!!!

I’ve always had a thing about Billie Piper. She has a face made of the oddest of parts, any of which would individually cause the bearer to inspire sympathy. She should look like a footballer from the Serbian 2nd division, the village team where they’re all cousins. But on her it works. She has a mouth 6 miles wide, yet manages to cram 7 miles of teeth into it. Ok, she married uber-tosser Chris Evans, loud-mouthed northern ginger Top Gear reject, but we all make mistakes. She was only 9 at the time. I forgave her when she made the ‘Diary of a call-girl’ tv series in which she spent half an hour each week writhing around in frilly underwear and leather. Apparently.

And she is simply, fantastically, believably, heart-crushingly magnificent in the lead. As the inconceivable woman who descends from witty, charming, clever, has-it-all fiesty chick, to total shipwreck in 100 minutes. The set too is spectacular. All set in a glass box in the middle of the theatre. Quite remarkable.

I found a hidden message. That all women are in fact dangerous to the point of insanity and almost any event can trigger the psychopath within. I’m just sayin’; its one way to see it.

I would say ‘go see it NOW’ but (please read very smugly and sneeringly) its sold out. The entire run. It’ll be back though. Its fantastic.

Happy Friday

A xxxx