Andy's Glasses

I saw the league table this morning. And thought they were showing one from 1972. Liverpool top, Nottingham Forest 3rd, Aston Villa 5th, I mean, WTF??? These are teams mired in 1970s, sepia-coloured, historical-interest-only glory. Alright, Liverpool have had their moments, in between various Hillsboro’ inquiries, of winning a few things, and of course Manchester City are there in the mix, which they emphatically weren’t in 1970, or 1980, or any other decade until the Oil Barons took over, pumped a few bil into the club, most of it illegally, (cases pending), and thrust them to the very top in a way that only immense quantities of cash can do. Tottenham were ‘way down’, as could be the case in any and every season since 1963. Arsenal were a rather limp 4th after their drubbing at Newcastle yesterday. And City were second. After losing at Bournemouth. I wish I’d have had a tenner on that one.

But this was the table for ‘now’. And if Villa had beaten Spurs this afternoon they’d have gone up to 3rd. But, ‘alas’, they didn’t. Because Joey was there and quite frankly, the Brummies wouldn’t have dared to upset him. It gets very dangerous. And in part, Spurs played pretty well too. In fact, at times, really well. Well enough to beat a high-flying team 4-1. And Villa aren’t just high flying in the league, but they’re currently top of the whole Champions League table. Which means Spurs are currently much better than Barcelona, Bayern Munich, the lot. It’s a fact. The numbers don’t lie.

The rugby was more disappointing. Firstly that they showed it on TN-fucking-T rather than any ‘proper’ tv channel, and secondly that England had two chances, whilst losing 22-24, to kick 3 points. And missed both. I don’t hold George Ford personally responsible but let’s just say I’m not sending HIM a doughnut at Chanukah.

And so the big news for the weekend, Kemi Badenoch notwithstanding, is SPURS GO MARCHING ON!!!!

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

So it’s the week of winners and losers. We had the budget, we’ve had the Conservative Party leadership contest and then, just to make up the 3, we’ll include the rather trivial American election on Tuesday. Possibly to be repeated on Friday, depending on allegations of cheating. By both sides. In the same states. And then, after 9 months of legal action, we shall see whom ‘due democratic process’ will allow to become the next President of America!!!

The budget was a well considered plan by the government to increase ‘growth’. Though they didn’t say precisely what’s growing, they strongly implied it would be the economy. They’re not interested in the new area of lawn I seeded. Whereas what would appear to be in line for ‘growth’ once the budget kicks in are, in no particular order:

Unemployment, as small businesses, hammered by a rise in the ‘working wage’ and by the rise in NI payments, employ less people. Or just go under due to the increased burden and fold altogether.

NHS waiting lists and the care sector. By not including GP practices in the new NI exemption, many will either close or have to reduce professional staffing levels. Leaving the much-advertised ‘40,000 extra appointments a week!!!’, looking more like a 20,000 reduction. Similarly the care sector, being not officially ‘NHS’, will become unviable by the increase in NI. Leaving the old and infirm to care for each other.

And tinned foods will be an area of ‘growth’ as the change in inheritance tax for farms will result in a massive loss in our nation’s food production. Be good for Deliveroo, not so good for the NHS plans at ‘prevention’ of illnesses by good eating practice, as instead of eating potatoes, tomatoes and lettuces, we’ll have a pizza instead.

So Kemi Badenoch, the undisputed winner of the (poisoned chalice?) Tory party leadership, has a lot to work on already. With what’s left of her diminished, divided party.

Kier Starmer praised her for becoming ‘the first black woman to become the leader of a major political party’. Well shame on him. Her colour and (chosen) gender should be totally irrelevant. To even mention them is to make implications and assumptions of a particularly patronising, old-white-man type nature.

America. Oyyyyyy. The devil and the deep blue sea. Don or Kam. Hopeless or Clueless. So I’m going to be honest. I know, it’s a first. But my own hope for the new POTUS, once it’s eventually finalised, is for the most Israel-friendly candidate. Don talks the talk, but is fickle and marginally insane. Kamala has to appease a very pro-Palestinian force in her party and makes a few noises supporting the ‘right to defend itself’. So we need US help to enable the continued existence of the state of Israel. And whoever supports that is my chosen candidate. Even though I don’t get a vote over there. Nor, apparently, will my old person’s rail card work in New York. Awful.

Today’s photo is of an actual ‘Batmobile’ that you can buy. They’re making 10 of them at the bargain price of 2.3 million quid each. I only want one. It has a 6.3 litre engine, one seat and must be the best fun ever. So if you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas…

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

What’s more scary than horror!!! Than ghouls and ghosties and zombies and skeletons (even if painted on)??? When I suggested to Lila and Joey that they both dress up as Rachel Reeves, red case in hand, they agreed that the point would be well made in light of budgetary revelations. Ok, they said “who???” I wish I’d never heard of her either. But you can never un-see something. It’s like the old joke: what’s the difference between a pregnant woman and a lightbulb? You can unscrew a lightbulb. Ha-ha.

Growing up in the 60s Halowe’en didn’t exist. Not in my part of East London anyway. We kind’a heard about it but it was ‘an American thing’. Though the idea of getting free sweets was indeed greatly appealing. As was the idea of putting in a few windows, keying the odd car or pulling out the odd rose-bush as the ‘trick’ alternative.

Fast forward one generation and Natalie and Rachie always went trick-or-treating. Loads of kids did. It was sweet. And sweets.

Move on to the here and now and it’s a fucking epidemic. Every kid under the age of 27 now dresses up, forms a gang with others on the street and with parental involvement/guardianship, they march along threatening quivering adults to cough up something sweet and dentally corrupting or face the wrath of… of a 4 year-old girl dressed as Morticia Adams!! Where I live it actually causes traffic jams as groups of kids spill onto the road and parents insist on following them round in a Tesla. Which I think speaks volume about the average Tesla driver.

In principle I love Haloween. It makes Lila and Joey very happy, it fills the world with sweets and, best of all, it is really anti-religion, dark, sinister and pagan. Just as we should be teaching our children. Who needs a geezer wearing a cross when you can have the undead? Its the one day when you can re-live Hammer House of Horror. Because although we ‘cartoonify’ all this ‘horror’, to ‘protect the kids’, the kids actually love to hear about horror of that nature. Ok, it might give them nightmares and scar them psychologically for their entire adult lives, but love it they do. Rising from the grave, buried alive, armies of skeletons, let ’em have it. Their parents will sort out the problems.

No problems for Spurs on Wednesday as we ‘brushed aside’ Manchester City in style. Bit of luck, but style mainly. And relief. Ok,it was the League Cup, but still…

I love football again.

Happy post-Halowe’en.

A xxxx

That quaint little expression, ‘football crazy’ used to mean obsessed with the game. Lovin’ every minute. Can’t get enough. Fab. Then they invented Spurs. And it became a bit more literal. Crazy as in less ‘wild!’ and more ‘insane’. Driven to distraction. Chewing the furniture. Banging heads against walls and screaming. Not in pain. The pain’s welcome, screaming in anger and frustration. Will need medication or locking up soon.

Because there we were; buoyed by a wonderful drubbing of West Ham last weekend and further engaged after a 1-nil win over AZ Alkmaar on Thursday night. So on Sunday, as we took our seats at Selhurst Park… ok, in the lounge, who the fuck wants to go to South London, even for Spurs?, but I looked and saw that Crystal Palace were bottom three. 8 games, no wins. 3 draws, but that’s it. And then there was Spurs. The mighty Spurs. Strutting onto the pitch. Like the heroes they aspire to be. Yet have a history of not quite reaching that aspiration. You can’t win games by sense of destiny alone. You need to score goals. Like we did with seeming ease against West Ham. Even against Manchester United. Possibly contributing to Erik Ten Hag’s dismissal from Old Trafford yesterday. After his two years of proving that you can’t win games by misplaced sense of entitlement alone. Otherwise Liverpool would win everything. But never mind, Ineos wasn’t built in a day.

So back to Selhurst Park. We were shit. They were good for a team so lowly. So we lost. One of the (very many) ‘easy’ matches that we manage to lose every year. But at least we’re consistent in that and consistency is a trait worth having.

So Manchester City went top. Where, let’s face it, the only way they won’t stay there all season would be for legal reasons and points deductions. And as Rodri hobbled his way on crutches to receive his Ballon D’or on Sunday, deservedly, it must be said, I wonder if Man United’s two ‘stars’ were even in the hall. They had travel issues, so Jim Radcliffe asked if they could ‘hitch’ a ride on Man City’s plane. The request was denied. Sorry, they were told, there’s no room. Even in economy. Radcliffe offered them some air miles but still it was rejected. City are owned by Etihad. The airline. And they couldn’t find room for the United boys. Maybe they felt that United players emit a certain toxicity at the moment which might be detrimental to their team.

Arsenal and Liverpool slugged it out at the other UAE airline, The Emirates, and couldn’t find a winner. Just a moaning Arteta.

So that’s it. Nearly November and the season’s decided already. City win, Liverpool, Arsenal and Villa (not Chelsea, anyone but Chelsea) in the Champions League, and Spurs (if we’re lucky) playing in the Europa Division 3 League. I’m booking my flights now to Jutland and Macedonia.

I hate football.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I’ve always been fascinated by gender differences. Which I’m not even sure is an allowable phrase to employ now. Between equality laws, diversity rules and anti-discrimination policies, merely observing any action within a gender context is totally unacceptable. Then you need to add in the 47 new ‘genders’ currently on offer and suddenly, former universals like ‘if its got a nob its prob’ly a geezer’ are deeply offensive to at least 43 of those genders and illegal under 739 statutes written by civil servants at a cost to the nation of £786,442, after ‘consultations’ which cost a further £2.7mil. I would accuse someone, possibly everyone involved, of being ‘tossers’ but I’m not sure that even such a nice, expressive term can be used within contemporary constraints as the ‘woke world’ veers ever closer to total insanity.

And yet I was sitting in the bath the other evening (as I do. No fennel and rosemary candles or jojoba and ginseng bath oils, just me and the Kindle. Add hot water. Stir.) and this is what I saw. You see a few bottles on the side of the bath. I see a metaphor for LIFE! My life, anyway.

On the right is my shower gel. Its blue. I like blue. And when I’ve finished the chapter I’ll use it. It makes me clean. But it wouldn’t make Mel clean. No. Not because she’s any dirtier, she doesn’t wrestle in mud. Like she used to. But because she has to have four different cleansers for different ‘parts’. She would no more wash her face in anything vaguely ‘soapy’ than I would read a label of what any of these bottles claim.

And that’s a gender difference. Well, it is in my house, where such things are allowed because attitudes are generally mired in about 1953 anyway. I know, it’s making genderalisations (oooohhh) from very small sample sizes, but Mel’s not that small. She’s bigger than Lila. Just.

We won’t talk about moisturisers. Because we’d need about 6 photos for that. Not including my bottle (singular). Yes, I have a bottle of moisturiser. Which is not exactly a new gender designation, but I’m trying.

The point is (is there a point? Really??) that there are gender differences. You could call it a type of cleanliness perfectionism to use one ‘soap’ for your feet but a ‘totally different’ one for your legs. Or you could call it a hyper-susceptibility to toiletry marketing. Which only affects those of the penis-free type genders. Yet its not like, say football, where having possession of a penis does guarantee better football, however you may ‘identify’, but I must maintain that I don’t know any man worthy of the name who could really be bothered to even look for 4 different shower gels for the same body.

Happy Sunday, other than the football

A xxxx

As you may recall, I have something of an ‘issue’ with Sir Kier and his entire government, concerning the repeated (ad nauseam, as they do all their annoying little catchphrases, as if we’re all goldfish who can’t remember the word ‘change’ from 22 seconds ago) use of the term ‘working people’. From the context it is delivered it is simply an euphemism for ‘working class’, but you can’t say that because that perpetuates the class wars, and no-one wants that, especially working class oiks and their rabble of dirty progeny.

By Kier’s definition, lawyers aren’t ’working people’, despite putting in 85-hour weeks. Nor bankers, brokers, accountants or anyone in an office. Doctors are only ‘working’ until they become consultants at which point, even pulling 72 hour shifts, knee deep in blood and other bodily emissions, they forfeit their claim to be ‘working people’.

And now landlords. Who have been declared, by the Prime Minister himself(!!!) as ‘not working people’. Why? Well the obvious reason is that the PM is a tosser, but more interesting is why our country is so intent on demonising landlords. Screwing them over with onerous taxes and heaps of unnecessary expenditure. Like changing the batteries on the smoke alarms. That costs £4.99 for a 12-volt. Whereas a couple of burnt-out tenants is free. You do the maffs.

In Australia, if you rent a second home you are perceived as ‘helping society’ and thus get special tax breaks on rental income. Over here, in a nation completely dependant on private landlords, we use the HMRC to kick the shit out of those benevolent enough to entrust an incredibly valuable asset to negligent cretins incapable of looking after them as they pour cooking oil down the sinks, seal themselves in completely, blocking up the vents, so they create pretty little mould cultures and wreck the washing machines.

‘Rogue landlords’, we read about and see on the news. Oh, wait a minute, he’s actually a cabinet minister, oooops. Everything is done to make ‘landlords!’ into hate figures, modern day overlords, feudal villains with dirty teeth and waxed moustaches. That way, when the government screw them over with more and more taxes and, in upcoming months, less and less control, all the ‘working people’ cheer loudly.

Eventually, the millions of ‘small time’ landlords will sell their investment homes because of sheer lack of any kind of return and there’ll be an even bigger housing crisis than there is now. And the money capitalised from the sales of so many houses can be used more profitably. Perhaps on a new slave trade. Investment in drug gangs. Selling vapes at infant’s schools. At least they’d show a profit and wouldn’t incur all the persecution-taxes than landlords suffer.

Yes, I’m a (very small time) fucking landlord. For now.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

There’s so much more to being a government than just working out how to rob middle-class people until they bleed all over their rags, which is what we’ll all be wearing after next Wednesday. There’s more than just giving the trade unions whatever they want or making yet more promises to build houses and ‘make the health service work again!!’, as if.

There’s the things they don’t teach you in opposition. Things they don’t teach you on endless fucking protest marches every time any company makes a profit. There’s the art of diplomacy.

And what that means in any practical sense is securing links with people you may not particularly like to ensure a better result for the nation. So ‘we’ have to deal with Macron. No-one likes him. And Erdogan, Mohammed Bin Salman, Ursula von der Leyen. Horrible people that we need to keep onside. Even though they’re horrible.

And Donald Trump. The most hateful one. And yet the most hateful person to be within 1% of the projected vote to be the next most important person in the world. He may win, he may lose. It’s ‘too close to call’ at this stage, just 2 weeks from ‘the day’. And Trump is not a big fan of Kier Starmer. Ok, no-one is, but Trump hates his politics and is not really keen on the man himself. Can’t blame him for the latter. Or the former either, really. So Starmer absolutely needs to have a relationship with Trump. Hopefully only until November 5th when Kamala wins the election, but maybe, just maybe, Trump wins.

David Lammy, now foreign secretary of our great nation, once called Trump a ‘neo-nazi sympathising sociopath’. Which is undoubtedly true. Yet now Loathesome Lammy may have to face The Orange One, as the representative of our entire nation. And that’s a hill to climb.

Labour are obviously more aligned with the Democrats, they share a centre-left stance. So the government are sending Labour members over to key US states to canvass and lobby. And sent two top Labour nobodies over for Kamala’s coronation as Good Queen Democrat.

Trump, inevitably has made a formal, legal complaint about ‘foreign influence’ on the elections, mainly to score a point over Harris.

And all this is well and good. As long as Harris wins. Because if she doesn’t Starmer, for all the alleged ‘behind the scenes’ friendship building, will be seen as ‘the enemy’ by Trump. President Orange. But no-one in the government has the forward thinking wherewithal to realise that they are burning bridges, big, important, ‘special relationship’ ones, so they can be seen to be overtly protesting about Trump, before the elections, and jumping onto any ‘slightly left’ bandwagon they can find in the world.

And for that, our whole government are my ‘tossers of the week’. A collective achievement, too precious to restrict it to individuals. But if I did, Sofia Patel would be the first name, followed by Morgan McSweeney and Matthew Doyle. David Lammy. Kier Starmer. Rachel Reeves, just because…

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

We decided to go the theatre on Sunday night. With ‘the kids’. Both our kids and their kids. Part of their cultural education for which I’m the main protagonist. Well, I’m in charge of culture, football and punching. Eclectic, innit. Anyway, Joey wanted to see Uncle Vanya, what with being a big Chekhov fan an’ all, whereas Lila wanted anything by Shakespeare, preferably one of the more obscure tragedies. We searched to find Death of a Salesman playing but to no avail. So we ended up going to…

Starlight Express.

Which may lack the moralistic punch of Miller, lack the subtlety of Shakespeare (it lacks the subtlety of the Russian invasion), and the nuanced wit of Oscar Wilde, but fuck its brilliant. Loud as a really loud thing, brighter than firework night, all-action, fast-n-furious, live music, song, dance and great costumes, which reminded Joey of Power Rangers, reminded me of Star Wars.

My girls loved it 25 years ago, but absolutely loved it, saw it twice, bought the cd, sang all the songs repeatedly, we all loved it. Then it stopped!!! In 2002. Left its home in Victoria, for the dumping ground for obsolete rolling stock and done-with musicals in the sky. Then, like Jesus Christ Herself (just sayin’), it was resurrected this year in… Wembley!!! Yes, Wembley. That home of culture and… other things. Mainly sport. But right next to the stadium they’ve built a theatre. A really big, really modern (ie: your knees don’t touch your chin like in the seats of a West End theatre), fantastic venue. Big enough to run, fr’instance, a roller-blade race track round the stage. The production is super modern too. So they’ve modified it a bit. But only a weeny little bit, just to make the message a bit more ‘environment friendly’. But that’s hard when the star of the show is a filthy, dirty old steam train, running on coal and spewing out pure pollution. So they ‘enhanced’ it by making ‘Rusty’ hydrogen powered. Tossers. The lights and effects are so brilliant that at the end of the very first number, Joey asked if it had finished now. Oh. But he stayed the course. Lila loved every second of it, but that was never in doubt. But our boy, with an attention-span measured in milliseconds? Which can be extended artificially. Only til the Haribos run out. But he lasted the course. All 2 hours 20 minutes, including the interval. Ok, bit long perhaps but a total assault on the senses. In a really good way. Even if you’re older than 5. Or 7. Possibly much older.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Happy Tuesday

A xxx