Andy's Glasses

Christmas is just around the corner. Which is why today’s Sunday supplements aren’t so much magazines and sales catalogues. “148 pages of gift ideas!!!!” shouts the cover of the Times ‘Style’ section. Shoot me now.

Hate shopping. Hate Christmas. Bah humbug.

Never mind. We go away for Christmas. We always do. Because Mrs Conway needs some sunshine, Sunshine. Otherwise she gets low and miserable. I always thought living with me did that but apparently its living with me in the winter. There’s some hope in the summer.

Its not a heat thing, she don’t mind the cold. Prefers 40 degrees to -3 any day, but its more about sunlight. Vitamin D. Otherwise she gets SAD. Not just sad (unhappy, miserable, listless) but SAD (Seasonal Affectational Disorder). Oh, that one. Yes, that one. Any excuse to go find some winter sun.

The elder daughter used to go horse riding. Every (fucking) Saturday morning for about 8 years. The horsey years. When I’d sit in a fucking barn in the freezing cold, watching her fall off various ponies for an hour and thinking of Christopher Reeve. Nice, relaxing time. In a barn in Radlett. I’d have preferred a barn in Burnley but Radlett was (marginally) nearer. And one day as we walked through the stables, there was a little pony in its stall with a reading lamp. Odd, I thought, I’ve heard of talking horses (Mr Ed), but never ones that read. Oh no, said the stable lady, that’s a UV lamp for vitamin D. That pony gets SADS.

How the fuck would anyone know that? Mrs C speaks pretty good English (for a northerner), but little Rosie, or Hemlock, or Heart of Midlothian or whatever it might have been called, doesn’t. So how do they know? Is this a ‘why the long face?’ moment?

Anyway, taking your main holiday at Christmas, when its cold and dark and grey here for about 5 months, is great. We’ve always done it, even when the kids were little we’d drag them off to Thailand or South Africa or wherever the sun shone at that time of year. Poor things.

So we won’t be here for Christmas. We’ll be in Jamaica. Oh, that’s nice, people say, where abouts are you going? No clue. No idea. Don’t care. We’re going to the sunny bit and we’re going to stay there lapping it up. We won’t deviate, diverge or do anything other than digest. A lot of digestion, I’m hoping. Its not a fact-finding mission, its all about sun.

The only shopping I’ll do is for sun-tan lotion.

Happy Christmas,

A xxxx

We need to talk about Paris. No-one’s talking about anything else today. Not just because Spurs aren’t playing, but because what happened last night over there was a horror of truly horrific proportions. And worry.

You can’ help but worry. And think ‘where next?’ According to today’s extensive radio coverage, exclusively relating to precisely that, over 2000 French kids have gone to join ISIS. The issue though is the 500 plus who’ve returned. Couple that with the apparent ease with which ‘radicalisation’ seems to occur even among the ‘so normal’, ‘so intelligent’, so Manchester United supporting (Jihadi John) and you don’t know who is walking in our midst.

People who revere death above all else. People for whom ‘freedom’ means something very very different from our own Western interpretation. People who value neither the concept of ‘innocent bystanders’ nor the sanctity of historical and cultural icons that may lack specific relevance to their own beliefs.

So do you get paranoid about it? Cancel plans, stop travel, avoid the tube, don’t go to football? Or do you accept that if you yield to the threat then ‘they’ have won? In which case life must go on, in all its diversity and splendour.

Those of us sufficiently life experienced (read: ‘old’) to remember the good old IRA bombing days, know that you just carry on as normal. More carefully perhaps but as normal. You simply have to. What use are our freedoms if we can’t enjoy them?

Europe has received, over the last 6 months, about a million refugees. The vast majority of whom are Muslims. Which is fine. Most are the ‘wrong kind of Muslim’ for ISIS and thus have run for their lives. Others simply don’t want to live somewhere in which death and destruction are all that occurs. Where music is banned. Where children have no future.

But none of these people have passports or papers. They’re all unknown. And some, it must be assumed, are terrorists, finding, for them, easy and anonymous passage into enemy territory.

Francoise Hollande today said that the attacks last night were a declaration of war. Which will be responded to in kind. But he’s not fighting an enemy. He’s fighting an ideology. Which is sick, twisted, merciless, indiscriminate and positively evil.

The bombing of ISIS started because of the murders of innocents. Filmed live for our ‘enjoyment’. Because you can’t let them win.

Jihadi John is dead (as son-in-law posted: ‘may he rest in pieces’) but there are many ready to replace him.

The fight goes on. Today in Paris, tomorrow…

Sad Saturday

A xxxx

Sounds Shakespearian. The House of Lancaster hath fallen. Whereas in fact, its just another rugby manager losing his job. There’s only two options for national team managers at a World Cup. You either win the competition, like Clive Woodward did in 2003, and retire from the game, take a knighthood, become a legend and follow a lucrative career as a pundit. Or you fail to win, like Stuart Lancaster, get sacked, become a legend and follow a lucrative career as a pundit. There’s always a shortage of pundits. Like there’s a shortage of traffic wardens.

So Lancaster had to go. Win or lose, you have to go. If you win because you know you will never win it again, should you live to be 150. And if you lose because the World Cup is the defining moment of rugby, the aspiration, the dream. I think that rather than agonise over replacement managers it would be a far more positive move to simply ban Southern Hemisphere teams from the tournament until they… errrr… until they move north or learn to play more fairly. By giving others a chance.

And Jeremy Corbyn met the Queen yesterday, to accept his entry, as leader of the Labour Party, into Her Majesty’s Privy Council. Must have been a dream come true. She’s always dreamt of meeting the staunch Republican, anti-royalist Trotskyite lower-class scumbag and there he was, refusing to kneel before her, as he kissed her ring. A phrase that itself needs some elaboration to avoid some horrible images springing to mind.

Membership of the privy council entitles Corbyn to have access to all manner of state secrets. Just what you want of a man who counts Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA and numerous other terrorist organisations as his ‘mates’.

Corbyn’s USP was that he holds very strong views, most of which any normal or sensible person would whole-heartedly find ignorant, stupid or just wrong, but heh, they’re his views, not ours. And that he was ‘honest’ about them, which he had been. His ‘honest politician’ persona got him elected. A man of principle. Who refused to sing God Save the Queen when first elected. Yet on Sunday at the Remembrance Service, he managed to remember the words, albeit in a very half-hearted way.

So already, after just a couple of months, Corbyn is no longer so ‘true to his long-held views’ but instead, he’s yielding to the weight of public expectation. First he sings the anthem, then he bows before Her Maj, what next? 2 Jags? An affair with Ryan Giggs’ wife? A new tattoo??

He’s blowing in the wind, like they all do. Bob Dylan was right. Even though he never knew Corbyn. And never wanted to.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

This is Yekatarina Tikonova, (and friend), an ‘accomplished rock’n’roll dancer’. How this is accomplished is presumably that she can boogie-woogie like there’s no tomorrow. She has in fact won prizes for her boogie and her woogie. And she’s worth 1.3 billion quid. Not rubles, but your English pounds. That’s a lot of dancing.

The secret of this massive fortune though lies not with her career, but her ‘other name’. Yekaterina Putin. As in ‘Vlad’.

Her ‘spouse’ (true status unknown) is the son of a Putin henchman, who happens to be the main shareholder in Bank Rossiya. That’s a bank, presumably. And the positions held by Yekatarina and main man, Kirill, are the usual Russian thing that they head up various organisations that acquire loads of state funding after bidding against no-one else and surprisingly winning.

There has been no indication of illegal money acquisition by Yekatarina or Kirill, but they seemed to have amassed a vast fortune nonetheless. In their early 30s, having done not a lot more than dance around in a leotard. And be the daughter of a man who discloses an annual income of £77,000 for 2014.

Nice work if you can get it.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, another surfer in Australia has been attacked by a shark. That makes the score, this season: Great Whites 12, Humans (assuming Aussies…) 0. Though not all attacks are fatal. Only 2 so far. The most recent one, right at the top of New South Wales, and unsurprisingly on the coast, left the surfer able to get himself back to shore. Before collapsing in a pool of blood. He’ll be ok.

And much as a great part of me shouts out to these Aussies: DON’T GO ANYWHERE NEAR THE FUCKING WATER; THERE’S FUCKING SHARKS OUT THERE!!!! another, slightly quieter, more considered part is impressed that these dudes (all surfers are ‘dudes’, they invented the word) and dudettes, will not be cowed by the potential presence of the world’s most accomplished killers, other than Robert Mugabe. They will not wimp out of the sport they love just for fear of death. Their freedom to challenge the forces of nature are so important that they accept the risks.

Because they’re brave. Because they’re Australians. Because they’re fucking stupid.

Happy Shark Day

A xxxx

What a mess. What happened to international sport? Where did those lofty ideals of fairness, honesty and hard-working competitiveness go to?

First it was FIFA, left worthless in a flurry of revelations about corruption. And now the Olympics and International athletics, brought down by cases of pharmacological enhancement. Oh, and by Russia.

Though not exclusively.

Drugs have been rife in athletics for decades. I remember watching Ben Jonson beating Carl Lewis in 1988 and thinking ‘wow!’ He was fast. Superfast. Steroid-fast, as it turned out and his gold was taken away and he was shamed. But he wanted to beat Lewis and really there was no other way but cheating.

During the Cold War years the East German women were fed on testosterone from birth so that by the time they reached maturity they could shot put like no women before them. They also had facial hair issues, weighed 20 stone and suffered male pattern baldness.

Really its all about nationalism, rather than individuals. Lance Armstrong is an obvious exception. But for Russia; cold, arrogant, image-obsessed Russia, they have to be seen as the ‘perfect nation’ because that would justify, in their eyes, all the shit that goes on there. Starvation. Secret Police. Gulags in Siberia. That shit. “yes, but look how great we are at sport, how we are superior to all the capitalist nations on the planet, so our communism is the best, healthiest, winningest way”. Yeah, right. And don’t use the word ‘winningest’; the Americans have sole rights on that one.

So the entire Russian athletics team is pumped full of steroids. Sponsored by the government, aided by the Sports Ministry, probably signed off by Putin himself. Its not the cheating itself that so cynical but the sheer scale of the problem in Russia. And apparently in Turkey too. Though not with quite so much success for the Turks.

So whilst we ponder what we need to do about Russia (World Cup there in 3 years; Olympics coming up next year; barely time to get the drugs out of their systems), let’s take one minute to look at Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi seems to have won an election, although in a much more meaningless way than winning elections normally implies. But one problem in Burma is the hatred there for the Muslim minority, treated so badly they’re not allowed to vote, get thrown out of their houses, have to live in walled compounds for protection. Because of ‘militant Bhuddists’.

How can you be a militant Bhuddist? Its a complete contradiction. Like being a ‘nice Chelsea fan’. A Bhuddist extremist is one who never actually moves. Just sits under a tree every day contemplating his former lives. How do you get from there to ‘militant’?

I want to see one.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

If you’d have offered me a draw against Arsenal yesterday morning, I’d have taken your hand off grabbing it so fast. Spurs playing the Arse is traditionally like England playing Germany. Whatever happens during the 90 minutes is largely irrelevant; the bad guys win in the end.

Manchester United were annihilated in the first 20 minutes of their visit to the Emirates the other week and all other recent attempts to prevent the Gunners from winning league matches lately have failed miserably. Different in the Champions League but we weren’t playing in that tournament; this was a league match. And Manchester City had drawn the early game yesterday so with a win Arsenal would go top. Or, The Doomsday Scenario, as some see such an occurrence.

But who would have known, about 6 weeks ago, when I agreed to attend a rather important Annual General Meeting at 5 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, that it would end up being November 9th; Arsenal Spurs Day?

So I watched the first half, with my usual anxiety-verging-on-all-out-panic-attack that always accompanies this fixture. Then I had to fucking leave and go out. Unbelievable. I must buy a diary. From the Spurs shop so it has all the fixtures in it and such conflict can be avoided.

The first half was brilliant from a Tottenham perspective. Just wonderful. We bossed them. We ruled. We closed them down. We played a high line. We tackled better, went in harder, shut them down more efficiently and pressed. And in the 32nd minute we scored. Fab goal. Harry Kane; the one and only.

That’s when the panic set in. Is a goal a good thing? Generally, yes. Would it make the Arse angry? Probably. Memories of being 3-0 up and losing 5-3 suddenly sprung to my mind. But this time we stayed solid, kept cool and played out the first half much as it had started, with Spurs on top of everything.

Then I went out.

Fuck shit bollocks.

During the meeting two texts arrived. One from a daughter: “Gibbs just equalised; shit!”, the other from me mate Dom: “C***********************nt!!!!” He’s a man of few words; all of them obscene.

I came home and, knowing the score and result, watched the second half a little more relaxed. They scored their ugly little goal but we were better. We were great. The Arsenal suddenly turned into Arsenal for the last 10 minutes and we foolishly adopted a deeper position. But we were tired. 3 games in 6 days tired. I was exhausted and I hadn’t played in any of them.

It was in fact a brilliant game of football. Exciting. Clean. A moral victory for Spurs. A proper victory would have earned us 2 more points but we’ll take what we can get.

Rather happy Monday

A xxxx

My wife and I (love that phrase; so royal, so 1940, so classy) recently had a quote for a life insurance policy. In case we kill each other. Then the kids would at least be rich orphans. So our Independent Financial Advisor (spit now) or ‘IFA’ acquired a quote for us, by hiking round to every insurance company in the land, flying over to Zurich, taking a slow boat to China, to ascertain what the best possible deal in life insurance for us, his loving clients.

In reality he probably spent 10 minutes online looking for the best deal for…

And that’s where it gets a bit interesting. The ‘best deal for us’ turned out, in the very last line, the afterthought, after all the other smallprints and afterthinking, to pay a commission of about 10 thousand pounds for his ‘services’. So certainly the best deal for him.

For the first two years, 60% of our monthly payment goes straight to the IFA.

I questioned IFA about this rather large amount of payment. To which he replied that they get a commission from the insurers otherwise “I’d have to invoice YOU!” Like that. With an exclamation mark included to let me know how funny this all is. Even more hilarious, we pay him a yearly retainer. Laugh???

We’re still in discussion. My half of the conversation along the lines of: I’d rather be homeless forever and forced to eat my own legs than give you 10 grand for nothing.

Then on today’s papers a new scandal. Footballer players being given terrible advice by IFAs losing millions and millions. Whilst the IFAs ‘earned’ themselves 5.2 million quid in ‘fees’.

Property deals in Florida, film-backing tax avoidance schemes, condos in Spain. All crumbled, fell, never quite materialised, or just failed miserably as any kind of ‘investment’ and all covered by that horrible ‘investments can go down as well as up’ line they put in everything.

The fact that this has come to light is great. IFAs are legally bound to act in the client’s interest and NOT in that of the investor, nor purely for their own gain. Yet time and again ‘clients’ are put into contracts that benefit the IFA. Who is then not in any way responsible for the shitty advice he’s given you and been paid a fortune for. That sounds fair.

Life goes full circle. 40 years ago a ‘life insurance salesman’ was a euphemism for a dodgy-dealing, foot-in-the-door cowboy. So they regulated the job to total fucking death until now they’re fully qualified to rob us blind.

Doesn’t seem right.

Happy Sunday

Come on you Spurs

A xxxx

The director who made the movie Senna, which was fab, and Amy, which was brilliant, has just released his third bio-pic. Ronaldo. Man and ego. It takes 5 minutes to sum up the man (he’s a footballer; how long can it take?) and 2 hours on the ego. Because its big. Bigger than big; its humungous.

I haven’t seen the film and I’m not sure whether I could bare it. The reviews and the trailers would indicate that it is something of a psychological study of an egomaniac, a man obsessed with not just how he is but more importantly how he is viewed by the world. His desire to be ‘the best in the world’. His achievements. Not his club team’s, nor his national team’s, just his. If someone thinks that Lionel Messi is the best player in the world, then that someone is entitled to that opinion, even if its wrong. According to Christiano.

He also has a son. A mini-me. Who is destined to either become the next world’s best footballer, or a spoiled waster drug-addict by the time he’s 12, a life of rape, crashed Lamborghinis and lots of quality time in jail/rehab.

For my opinion, which indeed may be wrong, Messi is the greatest in the world. Simply because there is no film about him.

Ok, enough six-packs and Ferraris, let’s get back to earth. More precisely, to the Emirates stadium. Where tomorrow afternoon, to break with tradition, they’re allowed to have some atmosphere in there for just one day each year, when Spurs go to play there. And the magnitude of this match is massive. Its way beyond mere football, its over and above any other Premiership match played. The number of points this game is worth is beyond measure. Apparently even God has suspended all activity tomorrow and has renewed His Sky subscription.

In terms of league position it is definitely worth 6 points. But its beyond that. Way beyond.

Arsenal were royally shafted in Munich on Wednesday, in case you missed that, whereas Spurs managed to beat Anderlecht. I think that says a lot. Though I’m not sure precisely what.

Arsenal have injuries, as they keep telling us, and Spurs are on a bit of a roll, having gone 10 league games without defeat. Arsenal have won six in a row. Because they cheat.

Its all about pride, its about relative excellence, its about good and evil.

Happy Saturday, Sunday remains unknown

A xxxx

I came out of Charing Cross station yesterday and walked along the Strand. As I do. And for some reason, that entire area is ‘wino central’. Tramp District. Every doorway filled with waking, or still sleeping, homeless people. Its tragic, but after a (very long) time, you almost become immune to it. Which may sound a bit heartless but you can’t help everyone, particularly those who don’t want help anyway. They just want oblivion.

There was a man in a doorway, but he was quite respectable looking by relative standards. And in front of him were two half bottles of whiskey, one full, one nearly empty. And a bottle of coke. And he was pouring whiskey into the coke bottle. Itself odd because most street people drink either cans of extra strength lager or bottles of very cheap wine. More alcohol for your buck.

But oddly, my first thought on seeing this man, at about 9.30 in the morning, engaged in his preparations, was: ‘that coke will kill you!’ Real coke. Red coke. The real thing. 37 spoons of sugar in every glass. Surely, from a purely health perspective, if you want to drink whiskey for breakfast, drink it neat. And assuming (quite a fair assumption, I feel) that this drinking pattern would probably be repeated all day, I was more concerned about that coke than about the booze.

Homeless people are the mark of a civilised society.

You wouldn’t see them in Moscow. They’d be there, but swept aside, locked up, shot. Especially if any state visit was forthcoming. ‘Clean up the city’ has a different meaning in many places.

The best homeless in the world are in San Francisco. Walk round Union Square (if you absolutely have to) and you’ll be accosted by dozens of ‘bums’. But these do not sit there in a boozy haze with an outstretched McDonalds cup. No. These guys walk along with you and, in a wonderful, eloquent and charming way, make a perfectly logical and compelling case for helping those (war veterans, down on their lucks, reformed whatevers) who are deeply in need. But, like, ‘only if you’re really comfortable with that, Sir’.

And why are there so many ‘bums’ in San Fran? Because the city allows them. Whereas many US cities don’t. If Americans did irony they’d perhaps question where you send a homeless person to in order to get him off the streets. But that’s what they do. You can’t sleep here. You can’t stay here. We don’t want you here.

God bless San Francisco.

God bless London.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

There is no French word for ‘morality’. Ok, they use our word and just say it with that ridiculous, allo-allo type accent and say ‘morrrraliteee’, but they don’t mean it. No use for it, no clue as to the concept. Whereas there are 57 words for ‘scumbag’.

Why would Karim Benzema try to blackmail his own mate over a sex tape?

Yet he is currently in prison, in France, awaiting the guillotine. Well, awaiting a charge of extortion. (In French: ‘extortion’, but with a funny accent).

Mathieu Valbuena plays for Lyon and France. Benzema plays for Real Madrid. And France. So Benzema has his mate’s sex-tape and allegedly threatens to make it public. Unless…

Unless what? What would Benzema want? He’s a world famous ‘galactico’. And they earn serious dosh. Probably not in Ronaldo’s 250k a week league, but not far short. So what; he’s going to blackmail his mate for 500 quid? Even for 50 grand, its nothing for someone like Benzema.

Yet this is what you get when you mix French rabble with lots of money. Sex scandal. Mix French anything with French other things and you end up with a sex scandal. Its the nation’s default setting. Plus ca change…

Meanwhile Chelsea won a game of football! All by themselves. Beat Dynamo Kiev amid their chaotic week of in-fighting, statements of manager-hate from undisclosed ‘senior players’, Jose off the rails, law suits for constructive dismissal, and on and on. Yet win they did. More than they’ve done in the league much this year.

Whereas Arsenal, seemingly invincible in the league, got Mullered (in every sense) by Bayern Munich. Five goals to one. And Arsenal don’t concede 5 very often. Was this what Spurs need? A ‘softening up’ kind of ‘reality check’ for the Arse before Sunday’s derby? Or will the repercussions be severe as the Goons ‘bounce back’. Ooooohhhh, I hate the uncertainty.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx