Andy's Glasses

About 3 weeks ago I was at a dinner party at some friends. Was lovely. One woman had just produced a ‘healthy eating’ cookery book, which is fab. We had a copy and actually ate some of the… errrr… pages. Well, the recipes, apparently. As pictured on those pages. All good, fab and quite delish. And as we spoke about food, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, one lady spoke of how, when a child, her mother used to serve up ‘voorscht’. You might call it ‘salami’. But to do so would be to give an unwarranted Italian cullinariness to what is actually an abused German word for an abused, enlarged ‘sausage’. Wurst. Abused? Yes, because ‘w’ in German is pronounced ‘v’ (Bratwurst, Kaiserwurst, etc), particularly in salamis, and if you turn it into Yiddish, it becomes phonetic because Yiddish was never a written language. (A fact I learned this morning as the abandoned tennis match due to rain became a lesson in the history of Yiddish, and cappuccinos). And this lady’s mum would serve her, for dinner(!!) some voorscht, possibly even fried, with eggs!!!! Today, such levels of ultra-processed, high-fat, sodium-laden, additive-riddled meat(ish) would, if served to a child, have social services round faster than you could say Jimmy Saville. Its awful stuff. The colour gives it away. Natural food wasn’t meant to be that colour.

And for 3 weeks, I’ve barely thought of anything else. Because my mum, either ‘God bless her’, or possibly, ‘God forgive her’, used to feed me such things as well. And these were the types of food we did not eat with any reluctance. These were the comfort foods, the favourites, the ‘special’ things. I wasn’t even totally sure they still made it. Because quite frankly, they probably shouldn’t. It was perfectly acceptable when life expectancy was pretty short anyway, but now we all want to live to 120 you’d think voorscht would be banned. Yet I walked into my local kosher butcher and there it was. My mate the butcher (he’s everyone’s mate, other than vegans) even gave me a ‘taster’. And I bought some. Figuring once every 15 years shouldn’t be fatal. I’ll let you know tomorrow. Or not!!!

But it was a celebration. To mark a special event. That being Spurs wonderful ‘thrashing’ of West Ham. The match was a three-way event. A cross between a football match, the Keystone Kops and Rocky (parts 1 and 2). And yes we ‘thrashed’ them because the score was 4-1 and that’s a thrashing. But it was filled with what neutrals call ‘excitement’ and what Spurs fans call ‘panic’. Then there was the sending off. Initially only given a yellow card, Mohammed Kudus attack on 3 of our players was correctly upgraded to a red for ‘violent behaviour’. He kicked Mickey van der Ven whilst he was on the ground, then pushed him in the face. He, possibly inadvertently, head-butted Richarlison on his way round to pushing Pap Sarr in the face too. He may even get a 6-match ban instead of the usual 3 because of so many ‘events’ which may be counted individually. I’d give him 9 months, nasty little shit.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

The difference between death and taxes is that you can die quickly. Painlessly. Whereas tax is slow, lingering, increasingly agonising and just when you think you’re cured, the ‘surgeon’ looks at the scans and says: “oh, I’ve just seen something here…” Ok, maybe the ‘accountant’ but we’re talking metaphors here. And accountants can only ever provide ‘palliative care’ anyway.

So whilst we’re all involved in masses of speculation over the upcoming budget and the ‘joys’ it will hold for us all, I need to clarify the situation for you, so you don’t get a shock when Rachel Reeves fucks you right over on the 30th. And she will.

This government’s key pledge in their manifesto before the election was ‘we won’t increase tax’. There are details involved, precisely which taxes will and won’t be possibly raised, but the gist of it was but one simple message, to the simpletons of the electorate, like me, which was this: “we want to be a Labour government and so we need to give you the confidence that we won’t be like all previous Labour governments and hike taxes stupidly. No. We’re a ‘middle-class-friendly’ Labour that you can feel happy to elect because ‘taxes won’t rise’. The old expression that you ‘can’t trust Labour on tax’ is a thing of previous Labour governments”.

So the first thing they do is invent a ‘black hole’, into which they wish to pour my future. And yours. And, though they just don’t get this, the future of many small businesses which will either be driven to destruction financially, or those which don’t even start because of the onerous demands on the cash which they haven’t even started earning yet. With many workers not employed because of the raise on company NI. Ahhh, the government say, that’s COMPANY contribution, so it won’t affect YOUR salary. No, but it increases the employer’s liability means many ‘staff increases’ won’t happen.

And with that amazingly blinkered outlook that Labour governments specialise in, IF YOU HIT HARD ON ‘THOSE WITH THE BROADEST SHOULDERS’, those broad shoulders will move abroad. They all can. Thus, you ‘hit the rich hard’ and find you end up with less tax than you had before.

So as ‘she’ plans to hike Capital Gains Tax, and NI, and attack pensions, and basically charge anyone not involved in mining or the railways as much as they can, I’m moving tomorrow. I’m going to live in Albania. Houses are cheap and there’s no pick-pocketing there whatsoever, because those people are all in Leicester Square.

God help us all. Because the government won’t.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

The Royal Society, the very old, venerated, distinguished and revered, scientific ‘national treasure’ (but literally so), has a new president. And, (shock warning, stay seated and find your ‘happy place’ before reading on), it is… a man! Why is it a shock? Because in all its years, dating all the way back to 1660, they’ve only ever had men as presidents. So why is electing another, as the 1500 members did, such a big deal? Because this is 2024, that’s why. And everyone’s obsessed with ‘diversity’. To the extent that choosing another old rich white man in a job pretty much made for old rich (its a non-paying position) white men, is completely unacceptable. They looked for a disabled, mixed-race, non-binary, pronoun-quoting, vegan single parent but couldn’t find one. Well, couldn’t find one who, like the new pres., has a Nobel Prize for science and is a known diplomat, as the job involves high level negotiations for government money to further research. When they’re looking for a president of a society where the job requirements are ‘on benefits, suffers from mental ‘ealf’ issues, bisexual, possibly tri-sexual, and Oriental’, we’ll get back to you.

I love the whole ‘diversity’ thing. Until it gets to the point when the most suitable candidates are overlooked just because they aren’t sufficiently diverse. And I’m speaking here as a one-legged (metaphorically!!!, don’t be so pedantic) person of colour (pink’s a colour, innit?), who identifies as a ballerina.

Someone in the Trade Union movement heard that the new PM is a total fucking pushover when it comes to negotiations. In fact he doesn’t. Negotiate. He just does the digitalised version of ‘writing blank cheques’. Possibly “giving you my online login details”. So having pissed away umpteen billion on the rail workers and doctors, he’s now faced with a series of tube strikes. Because they’re going on strike. All of them. The whole effin network. Drivers, station staff, line workers, anyone with an underground logo on their t-shirts. Even a few tourists are probably in line for a big payout for that very reason.

Consequently, the ‘black hole’ in the economy, which stood at 22 billion when Rachel Reeves invented it, has increased to 40 bil. And that’s without the Tube workers. Nurses. Dockers. Teachers. Police. Ambulance. Fire brigade. Lucky thing that the other ‘working people’, the ones who don’t count, have bottomless pay checks when it comes to paying tax. And national insurance. I hate to point out that a ‘black hole’ can’t actually ‘get bigger’. That’s the whole point of a black hole, it’s a ‘singularity’, the tiniest possible imaginable point. Except in Labour Space. Where all laws of gravity are suspended. Along with common sense, credibility and getting free tickets to Taylor Swift.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

In 1970 Wishbone Ash arrived on the scene. A new rock band. Different. They had two lead guitarists. Who played at the same time. Sometimes simultaneously. Often almost battling. They sounded different to other bands. So we ‘adopted’ them. Chose them as the leaders of our air guitar play. Like a lot of rock bands during the hippie era, they were sympathetic to and ideologically aligned with Mediaeval serfs. Scruffy villagers, farming types, always going off to war to fight some King or Lord or the neighbouring county. Because like hippies, these historical types had long hair, never washed, lived in tents and ate without cutlery. So there were similarities which became an essential part of the ‘folk’ movement, and into ‘folk rock’, the popular crossover of the time. And thus Wishbone; folk themes played to heavy (ish) rock. I loved ’em.

And I’ve had a bit of a Wishbone Renaissance of late. Don’t know why, it must have just hit me one day alone with Alexa and it just snowballed. And the album ‘Argus’ is a journey from peaceful farmers to ‘warriors’ when called to fight for… whoever, and then ‘throw down the sword’, because in that track ‘the fight is done and over’, so its back to impoverished farming for thieving Lords of the Manor, bread crawling with weevils and incest until the next war. It was the rural way.

Meanwhile, in Kindle-land, I was reading a book which is the myth of Achilles turned into a novel told from the women’s perspective. Who knew women had their own perspectives? The book’s called The Silence of the Girls (who knew girls were ever silent?), and I have no idea why or when we acquired it. Possible on some Sunday paper’s ‘must read’ list? Maybe it was 99p on Kindle? Either way, it’s a really great book. And, again, full of swords and death and Kings and warring unwashed people. Ok, about 1600 years before the Wishbone Ashers’ song lines, but all parts of my artistic world seemed to coincide in a clash of hand-to-hand weaponry. One minute I was fighting with Agamemnon to sack Troy, the next I’m in Wiltshire or Shropshire fighting Lancastrians or the French. It sounds confusing but there’s a kind of symmetry.

Yet while the British were slaughtering each other for King and country, those ancient Greeks were aspiring to game-changing levels of brutality. Over-run a town, kill every man over the age of 7, take all the women as slaves, empty the place of anything remotely valuable, then burn it to the ground. Nice.

I’m done with sword-fighting for a while now. Reading a book about a librarian. Though still can’t get Wishbone Ash out of my head, or off my Alexa.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

It is with a heavy heart that I report the untimely death of Alex Salmond. The politician, statesman, orator, former first minster of all of Scotland, party leader, divisive separatist evangelical, rapist, sexual tormentor and friend of Nicola Sturgeon. He never made inappropriate advances to Nicola. But who the hell would? So the courts found him completely innocent on all allegations from the 37 women who independently made them. May his soul rest in… Scotland. We don’t even want that down here.

And then there’s more shit for the ‘new’ PM. New? 100 odd days now. Some of them very odd. Like the one where his government authorised police ‘blue-light’ security for Taylor Swift. So all of England gets stopped at the traffic lights so that her ‘convoy’ (it’s always a convoy with Americans) of 19 Cadillac Esplanades doesn’t have to stop at red lights, or for anything. An action normally reserved for the king of Zambia, the president of Sierra Leone, the viceroy of Timbuktu, those kind’a people. Even Prince Harry was refused that when he comes home. They said that because of the bomb-threat to one of Taylor’s gigs in Europe, she became a security issue. Hmmmm. But then it transpires that virtually all of the cabinet, and half their families, all ‘acquired’ tickets for the Eras tour, which had sold out to ‘normal people’ within about 10 seconds of going on sale. Kier and Vic went, had a fab time, boogying along to ‘Love Story’, staring in each other’s eyes and inducing vomiting in those nearby. In the VIP seats, obvs.

No-one is a bigger fan of Taylor Swift than me. Even though I really couldn’t be bothered to actually go and see her. There again, I’m not a cabinet member. And I want her to be safe. But spending 150 grand on security so she doesn’t have to stop at red lights is perhaps a bit much. But hang on, we pay that money, from our taxes, so the socialist government can all get expensive personal freebies. That’s a win-win. Well, they do it in China.

But this week hails the New Britain initiative in which loads of really rich companies are invited here to… well, give us loads of money because this government has announced itself ‘the friend of business’. Even as it plans to hike Capital Gains tax, national insurance by employers and has just implemented a raft of proposals on workers’ rights which is so awful for employers that the unions have given them unconditional approval. Then, some dozy, flame-haired, worthless bimbo goes off-message and attacks P&O Ferries and suggesting a public boycott, when their parent company is one of those invited and has already pledged one billion quid to our nation for a venture. Why did she do this? Because P&O greatly upset the Unions a few years back and, like most of the government, she’s unable to think on a macro-scale. She’s still a ‘protestor’. Even though, unlike me, she is in the cabinet. Bet she got Taylor Swift tickets too.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

If a day is a long time in politics,3 days is fucking massive in not hearing from me. I’ve been busy. Couldn’t spare the time to write. Better things to do with my life. And thanks for all the messages of concern, ensuring I’m still alive, in decent health and all those other things you’re SUPPOSED TO CHECK WITH OLD PEOPLE!!!!

And why have I been so busy that I didn’t have a measly 30 minutes to spew out a toxic rant about my football team’s latest disaster? Or bemoan the state of the government’s clothing now they’re not sponsored? Defend Iran’s right to build atomic weapons even though they’re insane (by any possible measure)?

Because monsters arrived. As we’d always feared might happen. One minute it was peace and neatness and good karma in the house, and the next Lila and Joey arrived. For a ‘short stay’. Just 3 days. Just. JUST??? So their parents could spend some quality time being selfish, indulgent and… and sane.

Because you don’t get sanity with little kids. You get energy, noise and, in some cases (Joey, obvs), violence. You also get Joey in bed at 5.45 (Monday) and a sleep-woken Lila at 3.00am the next night, who turfed Mel out, cos the little one said ‘roll-over’. And because we’re grandparents, we never, ever use the ‘n-word’ (naughty), ‘our’ kids are ‘spirited’. And burdened with a grandfather who only ever heightens those spirits by over-excitement and verbal abuse. What doesn’t kill ya makes you stronger, right? Especially if it has treats attached.

Lots was happening in the world but who had time to read a paper? Watch the news? Write a blog? Just keeping them fed is a full-time occupation for 6 people. Joey’s ‘starving’ as he’s finishing dinner and needs fruit and toast and more toast just to see him through the last 20 minutes of ‘Chicken Run 2’.

But now it’s over. The house can be rebuilt. The devastation stored away and hidden. Until the next time. Oh. Its Thursday. That’s today. Run awayyyyyyyyyy…

Happy Lila-Joey Day

A xxxx

Thursday was the Jewish New Year. We’re now in 5875. Because we started counting the days as soon as Babylon fell. Possibly when Moses brought the tablets down the mountain and said: ‘thanks, God, I’ll see ya next year’. So he needed to know when that year was up. Ok, he needed to know what a ‘year’ was, which was tricky cos it hadn’t been invented yet. So they invented it, but it’s lunar, not solar. So we get more months than the rest of the world. Which is only fair. And picking some random geezer upon which to base an entire world calendar system is a touch egocentric, even for Jesus.

Anyway, it was new year so I made a resolution. Even though it’s not what’s really done in our new year. We work out how to be a much better person. Not just how to be a slimmer, fitter one. But I thought, this year I will make a big effort to improve my diet. Which is pretty good, other than the… supplements I take. Mainly, but by no means limited to, chocolate. I need to be fitter, stronger, faster, better. Because I’m very old and I’m not ready to wither just yet. Though whenever the ‘assisted dying’ debate comes up people look at me strangely, with sympathy.

So I did my normal Saturday morning bi-athlon (that’s an athletic event, not a new gender), martial arts at 8.15, home in time to hop on my bike and go to play tennis. In the fucking sunshine!!!! And so my plan was going all to schedule. I’ll be the fittest old git in the care home.

But then I stopped to pay my paper-bill. And came out with this lot. I have no idea nor recollection how it happened. One minute I was handing over my Times vouchers and the next I was walking out with this lot. As if I was possessed! By a pig.

As I was about to return them explaining it was all a big mistake, against God’s will, a temporary insanity, I stopped. Because it’s yin and yang. Balance. I’m active, therefore I need rewards. Treats. Joey gets ‘em. Lila won’t leave home without one. What about me? It’s not like I’m going to eat them all at once. That’s at least 2 days worth. And they give me energy. Good energy. Mars bars (even though I didn’t buy them) help you ‘work, rest and play’, don’t they? Its scientific. Innit.

I’ll give up chocolate in January. The next resolution time. I didn’t get where I am today by passing by Picnic bars on special offer.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

Kier Starmer is paying back 6 grand of his donation money, the cash which bought him Taylor Swift tickets, Arsenal hospitality suites and his wife’s stylist. The rest of the money, for his clothes and glasses, he’s keeping. Possibly because it failed to make him look any better. Possibly not. He just felt he needed ‘to draw a line’, because that’s what tossers do. You don’t catch me drawing lines because I blur them all. And in fact the money Kier took was legal, normal and above board. But with the perfect timing of getting a last minute deal on a Titanic ticket, he chose to take 16 grand in personal payments whilst depriving impoverished pensioners like me of 250 quid towards their winter heating bills. It was just a hypocritically suicidal thing to do. So he did it.

Meanwhile, in Opposition-land, they’re battling to be the next leader. Rishi-nouveau. And there’s four left in the running, which next week will be whittled down to the final two. And then it’s down to the grass-routers, the Tory membership, to make the final decision. Because they did such a great job last time of choosing Liz Truss, crashing the economy, dropping the value of the £££, making Britain an economic Pariah state and a laughing stock on the world stage.

But this time is different. Then they were choosing a Prime Minister, now it’s just the Leader of the Opposition.

My own personal favourite is James Cleverly. Because he has a wonderfully easy charm which, should he ever become PM, would be a massive advantage. Remember when PMs had charm? And he is experienced and very bright. As is Tom Tugendhat, the minister for funny names and an ex-soldier. And we all love an ex-soldier. Robert Jenrick is pretty popular too. Outspoken, but principled and decent. Plus he’s married to an Israeli so will probably be ‘on board’ with the right team. And then there’s Kemi.
Possibly the brightest of the lot. Certainly the most outspoken of the lot. Very right wing, which will please those Farage-a-phobes, who think he’s going to steal Tory votes, and speaks a very hard and populist line about immigration and virtually everything else. You wouldn’t want to meet Kemi in a dark alley at night, nor in a ballot box. But she’s the ‘marmite’ candidate who is either loved or hated. And, of course, being black should mean nothing, but as the voting heartland Tories had issues voting for Rishi, who was a bit brown, so may have other thoughts of a not quite so ‘inclusive’ nature.

Everything to play for.

Happy New Year/ Shona tova

A xxxx