Andy's Glasses

What d’ya fancy for dinner? Steak? Chicken? Lasagna? Ants?

You can eat what you want really. I couldn’t personally give a damn. Its all a matter of taste. However revolting that may be to others. Walking in Honk Kong a few years back there was a shop that reminded me of the insect house at London Zoo. But it was a food shop. Cos that’s what Hong Kongers like to eat. Fishing bait. Shit that we’d normally scrape off the windscreen after a long drive. Stuff that crawls and has a zillion legs, or no legs at all.

And apparently ‘we’ (ie, civilised Europeans) want to eat that shit now too. Even though most of its not kosher. Though for some amazing reason, locusts are kosher. Despite having no cloven hoof that I’ve ever noticed, nor a spine, nor any discernible scales. And if they ‘chew the cud’ they do it in a very small way. But there ya go.

So people want to eat maggots. Just like they do on the telly. The difference being that on the telly its done to demonstrate revulsion, horror and is almost a punishment. Restaurants are actually popping up extolling the virtues of mealworms and scorpions and tarantulas. Ok, they may be low in fat, I’m sure, but they’re much lower in desirability and anything remotely nice.

So Brussels, that great, sprawling horror that decides every facet of our lives, has decided to regulate insects like they regulate everything else. And ban their sale. So you’ll probably still be able to eat Giant Leaf Cutter Ants, but only if they look like cows. And the plea of ‘but it tastes like chicken’ is no longer mitigation once ‘Europe’ and its Food Standards Agency has had its wicked way.

There’s not enough money in the world to make me eat a scorpion. But if people are sufficiently hip, groovy, out-there, open-to-all, receptive and above all, fucking stupid, they should be able to eat what the hell they want.

The cricket is going splendidly at Edgbaston. How amazing that this series is so wonderfully unpredictable. With yesterday’s hero becoming today’s tosser.

And West Ham are struggling in their Europa League qualifiers. Which they gained entry to by virtue of their ‘fair play’ record. How ironic that they’ve had three men sent off in their first 3 games. Or ‘how funny’ perhaps. If you’re that way inclined. Now the world waits to see if they can turn over Astra Giurgiu in the second leg. How exciting is that?

Happy friday

A xxxx

I’m anibivalent. Don’t look that up; I just invented it. Won’t be on google for at least a year. Its like a bisexual where animals are concerned, and their welfare. I love animals. I like to see animals. But I don’t have issues with eating meat, nor fox hunting (foxes are pests and need culling; no-one denies that, its just the methods that are an issue). And I’m aware that animals die in not very nice ways in order to feed our starving population, and so be it.

I think my personal attitude was best summed up a decade ago on a safari in South Africa. We went out and watched the amazing majesty of the herds of zebra and wilderbeast and kudu and springbok, with elephants and lions and giraffes. Wow. Then we stopped in a clearing in the game park and had a barbecue of most of what we’d just seen. The perfect evening.

But I just can’t get my head round ‘big game hunting’. If, say, a dentist from Minnesota went out and fought a lion, hand to claw, to the death, I might be impressed. Going to Zimbabwe and paying lots of people loads of money to arrange and execute the execution of a lion is something completely different. A misplaced act of vanity perpetrated by a rich sadist (all dentists are sadists, they don’t all go the full ‘Marathon Man’ but its in there somewhere). And you have to ask: what is the fucking point?

Ever been to a house with dead animals hanging on the walls? Nice. Tasteful.

Lion populations are down 75% in Africa, (the lion population in Hampstead remains unchanged), in no small part due to tossers like Walter Palmer paying impoverished and illegal trackers to find and kill fabulous creatures. With Cecil’s death, the lead male in the pride has gone, there’ll be a power struggle, the death of his cubs, all sorts of contingent shit going on. It’ll be like the Ukraine out there in the jungle for a while.

Evolution can’t be stopped. Put enough dodos in front of starving Mauritians, who saw them as half a ton of deliciously unflying chicken, and oddly they’re gone. Man is a destructive force in evolutionary terms. But he’s not the only one. An asteroid killed the dinosaurs, the birds ate the bees. In 1000 years time there’ll be no lions. There will probably still be dentists in Minnesota. Unless the lions start killing them and hanging their heads on nearby trees.

Jihadi John is forgotten. Now we hate Walter. T-shirts available right now.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

What a fuss and bother over in Reims. That’s in France. Our neighbours and friends.

Some mademoiselle was sunbathing in a park wearing a bikini, as you do when sunbathing, when a girl walked past and made a snidey comment. Mademoiselle offered an insult of her own and the two came to blows. Now that’s a good thing if its in mud, or with lots of water, but just a bit of bitch-slapping in Reims is otherwise a bit low really.

Except the comment girl had four mates with her and also has a muslim name.

So the French, being the French, have blown this up into an Islamaphobic ’cause’. The bikini was an insult to Muslims. To undress is ungodly. Decency rules… er rule. Implying that the commenter and her allies were burqua’d up religious fanatics intent on cleaning up France, starting with a park in Reims. And good luck with that, by the way.

So a million tweets and instagrams and other social media stuff flew round Le Internet, showing bikinis and breasts and thighs and all manner of French undress in public places. Support for French values (undress, bikinis, breasts and thighs) against the infiltration of Sharia demands (head-to-toe covering, headscarves, full-face Darth Vader things).

Except that wasn’t really the case. The commenter with the Muslim name was just a French girl with a Muslim name. Nothing more, nothing less. She was dressed ‘western’ (or ‘undressed Eastern’ as its also known) and confessed to using bikinis in parks herself.

So its not a big massive ’cause’. Its not a civil war. Its not an insult against France and everything it stands for (extra-marital affairs, underarm hair, capitulation with invaders…). The girl was NOT a fundamentalist Islamic crusader. Just a bitch.

And what else is a bitch is depicted above. Coming back to the tube station to find some baaaaaastard has nicked me back wheel. And don’t give me the ‘desperate people…’ plea, you can’t feed your family with spokes and rubber. I’ve tried. They don’t like it one bit.

So if you see a bike with a tyre that looks like it should be on my bike, punch the rider in the face and drag him to a police station.

Happy bleedin’, wheel-less Wednesday

A xxxx

John (Lord; for the time being) Sewel is a Scotsman. I think its important to get that out there right at the start. And until Sunday he was the chairman of the Standards and Privileges committee in the House of Lords. The group that monitors, err, well, standards and privileges I’d imagine. To stop Their Lordships and Ladyships stepping over the line. Because if such high powered and ennobled people step over lines, some of the coke might get spilled. Common sense. Or Lordy sense, maybe. Nothing common about these people.

And Lord Sewel set up his committee to prevent abuse of position, to stop any further expenses scandals or even expensive sandals. Anything that we, the good people of Great Britain, are paying for, must be approved and decent and proportionate. He even orchestrated a system, should it be required, for un-Lording people who are naughty. So they can no longer be a part of the Higher House. Which needs to be kept clean so the money-launderers, expense cheats, rapists, child molesters and Arsenal fans can rule the land unimpeded.

He did a good job. A dirty job, but one that needed doing. Without that, there can be no confidence in that part of government. No trust. Its bad enough that they are totally detached from the ‘common man’ but if you can’t trust them to act in our interest, as opposed to their own, then it all comes crumbling down. So well done, John.

Then he met The Sun. Its always The Sun. They video’d him, I don’t know how, enjoying some quiet private time, in the seclusion of his own flat (which we subsidise, by the way).

Some men watch tv to rest and relax. Some play bridge. Others hold dinner parties. John Sewel prefers to hang out with hookers and snort cocaine whilst wearing a bra. But its his own private home. His privacy was invaded by the phone-tappers of the Sun who suddenly create their own version of ‘moral high ground’ for scumbags.

What was really so wrong with Lord Sewel’s behaviour? If you look at it from a non-judgmental position.

I mean; other than from any viewpoint involving morality, decency, legality or acceptability? Other than that he was just minding his own business. My main criticism is that he paid for 2 hookers, at 200 quid each, which is a bit excessive for a man on wages.

We need men like John Sewell. Mainly because to act in such a manner when you aren’t chairman of the standards and privileges committee is funny. If you are, its priceless.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

The football season is just days away. Next weekend is the Community Shield/Charity Shield/No-one-cares Shield at Wembley, the traditional season opener between the winners of the League and FA Cup. Chelsea against Arsenal. Lovely. And the following weekend its all, literally, kicking off.

And I find myself a bit numb to it all. It seems distant and meaningless. Rather than immediate and depressing, as football normally is. But that’s just probably the effect of all the friendlies being played. Of which I’m no big fan.

Arsenal won the Emirates Cup yesterday, as they would, with Theo Walcott scoring the winner against Wolfsburg. After which Wenger was extolling ‘young’ (is he still ‘young’? as he seems to have been for the last 27 years? He must be about 50 by now, surely) Theo’s skill and natural striking ability. Arsene said he had a lot of ‘offensive players’. I too find most Arsenal players offensive, and Arsene and I seldom agree. And he thought Theo was best suited to ‘playing off’ a bigger, stronger striker. Even though he looks like a winger and spends a lot of time winging it up the sidelines. Odd really that after so long in an Arsenal shirt no-one yet knows where to play him.

But this weekend was really about wheels. Lots of them. Bikes and cars.

Chris Froome showed that you can hurl all the urine you like at him; he can still pedal better than anyone else in the world. But cycling is all about the team. Yet they only make one yellow jersey? The finer points of the Tour de France are beyond most people. What it isn’t is just a race from one end to t’other. In between its all about teamwork and other cycly things and drugs. And then England won. Yippee.

An Englishman didn’t win the Grand Prix in Hungary yesterday. He came 6th. A German driving an Italian car won it. For his team-mate Jules Bianchi, who died last week, although he really died last year when the awful crash happened. The drivers had a minute’s silence before the race in his honour yesterday. And what goes through your mind as you stand head-bowed in mourning over a mate who had a massive racing car wreck, when you’re (in 60 seconds; 59, 58, 57…) going out there yourself to fly round a track at almost 200mph with no more than about 70 million quid’s worth of safety measures between you and that life-support machine? Probably along the lines of ‘there by the grace of God…’

Its almost enough to make you drive slowly. Almost.

Spurs first match; August 8th. Away to Manchester United at Old Trafford. Easy peasy. Three points in the bag already.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

Do you remember where you were on July 23rd 2011? Probably not. Its not like the Kennedy moment, not even like Spurs beating Inter at the Lane.

We had a barbecue. Ahhhh, nice. Yep, our great mates had popped round, all the way from Toronto just for a burnt sausage and some of my patented minty lamburgers. Ok, not so much patented as condemned, if we’re being accurate.

So we were enjoying a lovely summer evening when Canuck Dave’s phone rang. With some terrible news.

Much as they love a good lamburger, Mr & Mrs Dave had really flown all that way for a family party. Big one. At his cousin Lucian’s house. And that’s big too. The house. Because Lucian is the CEO of Universal Music. And he’d called Dave to say that Amy Winehouse had died. She was due at the party too. Not gonna make it.

And it was a tragedy.

But I’d never fully appreciated the extent of that tragedy and that loss until last night. When we went to see the bio-pic ‘Amy’.

Because it wasn’t that the greatest singer of her and many other generations had been lost, but a true superstar had gone forever.

Lots of people have ‘good voices’, but few can reach right into your heart and squeeze it from the inside. The lyrics she wrote were passionate, intimate and real. She bared her soul, both with her words and her delivery.

She never wanted ‘fame’. That really wasn’t her thing. She just wanted to make music. Sounds clichéed but it was true. She never went on talent shows or karaoke competitions or courted celebrity. Ironically, her ‘hard-to-get-ness’ made her much more alluring to the press than those who ‘turn up for the opening of an envelope’ in their pristine, gelled-up thousands.

The music industry came to her. They found her. Because she was always going to be too good to live under the radar. And her star grew brighter and brighter with every award won, with every new record, with every major sell-out concert in another immense stadium. When all she really wanted was to sing jazz in little clubs.

But she’d become a machine. Really, more a gravy train. So she was pushed more and more by more and more people because they depended on her for their lifestyles. And that train grew large.

Amy was always ‘real’. She never spoke like a princess, she swore, she had zero tolerance to boring questions, interviews or people. She was very funny. And she never changed.

Sadly, she had inner demons. Lots of them. And her death, rather than being attributable to neglect by her father (as the film strongly implies), her manager, he scum-bag husband, was merely an inevitability. That ‘accident waiting to happen’.

And it happened when she was 27. As it did for Jimi Hendrix, Curt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison…

Can you be so talented that you simply can’t cope with it? Or is that level of exceptional giftedness just one manifestation of inner turmoil?

Fuck me, that’s deep for a horribly wet, tennis-free Sunday morning.

Happy Days

A xxxx

If a day is a long time in politics; how long is a few measly hours in the housing market.

Last night’s Evening Standard bore the headline that ‘house prices are plummeting’ due to the new stamp duty. Yet this morning’s Times, just a few hours later, informs us that ‘house prices are rising’ due to money-laundering foreign bastards with offshore companies.

And in case you’re thinking ‘oh, they must mean different areas’, they don’t. Both about London. Houses everywhere else are virtually worthless so no-one cares about them sufficiently to write newspaper articles about them, let alone front page headlines.

And its so interesting that I’m going to talk about something else.

I want to talk about John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons. And specifically, about spending £172 of MY money on a car which took him 0.7 miles from Parliament to Carlton House Terrace. Before you start shouting ‘NOB!’ and ‘TOSSER!!!’ and ‘WORTHLESS ABUSING PIECE OF SHIT DWARF!!!!!’ you have to consider the circumstances. As all good and just people should do before condemning someone. However much of a plonker may appear to be on first glance. And second glance, third, forth and seventh.

Mr Bercow is a very important man. He said so. Ok, his wife is a gobby slut, but no-one’s perfect. And it would be wrong to expect or demand perfection. And he needed to get from A to B. Which are, as mentioned, 0.7 miles apart. As measured by every newspaper and radio station and news department in the Kingdom. What they don’t mention is that walking is a much shorter distance. Avoiding the one way bits its much closer to half a mile. 500 metres. Usain Bolt could run that in less than a minute. Chris Froome could cycle it in 20 seconds. Or less if he does use drugs. So Bercow, with his rather short legs, could have done it in 5 minutes. Maybe 10. Which is about the same time as a car takes.

He could have taken a taxi. For about a fiver. Its always about a fiver. He could have called an Uber. A bus wouldn’t have taken much longer and costs £1.20 (just guessing, no idea what they cost. On my Oyster they’re free. Ish). An ambulance would have been free but he’d have had to tell a lot of lies to get one and get off a the other end. According to a lady on the radio, you can hire a chauffeur-driven Bentley for an hour for 120 quid.

A fucking helicopter would cost £150. A horse-drawn carriage with outriders and footman; £75 + vat. They could have shot the fucker from a canon such a short distance. I’d have paid for that one.

But no. John Bercow took a car which cost him 172 of his English pounds. Sorry, of OUR English pounds and charged it to his expenses, in the interest of ‘transparency’.

Next time he’ll learn to be a little more opaque.

Though he is definitely my tosser of the week.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

I’m setting up a new charity. Its really great. I want to improve the lives of savages living in the wilds of the Third World, because they’re not very civilised. And I’m not talking Radlett here, but really wild places like Birmingham and Scotland. Oh, apparently Africa is more needy, so we’ll go there instead.

I want to send them salad servers. Nice ones. And new remote controls for tvs, with rechargeable batteries. And lawn mowers. Net curtains. Serviettes. Satchels for their children to take their books to school, leather ones. Proper uniforms for their servants. We all feel better when the Maid is dressed appropriately. Spark plugs. And badminton sets for their gardens. Once they’ve mown the lawns.

Here’s how it’ll work financially. And I’ve taken sound advice from His Lordship on this and I’m assured this is the practice as typified by the sector.

We send pictures of starving Africans, living in sheds and council houses and general abject poverty, sleeping under elephants when it rains, that kind of thing. And we simply demand that they help us to bring some propriety and etiquette into these sad souls’ lives. Sell the family silver, raid the overseas trust funds, keep the Bentley for 2 years if you have to, but give give give. Africa… or Asia, was it?… wherever, needs YOUR HELP.

Because I’m not very good with money and find it dirty, and because His Lordship is busy tending the property portfolio up in London with his band of helpers who help him there. He calls them ‘rent boys’, I presume because they collect his rent. Anyway, he’s busy.

So I shall employ someone to run the Charity, someone like that scruffy Bob Geldoff, even though he managed to lose the entire 12 million pounds raised by that awful Band Aid noise. But he knows how it works. I shall pay him £250,000 a year, for his 6 days work.

We shall rent an office. Somewhere not too flamboyant or opulent, perhaps Kensington, and obviously it’ll need staffing. Lots of staffing. And advertising. TV campaigns and banners on buses. Do people still use buses? I have no idea. And people who telephone you at dinnertime and simply demand that AMERICANS NEED YOUR HELP!!!! Or was it Australians.

So the sums added up rather nicely. The total income projected was £53,757,994. And the total expenses for the now registered charity, after rent, wages and all manner of things you could barely imagine, was £53,757,990.50. That leaves £3.50 to send to those poor people. I shall go to Harrods and look at salad servers.

How wonderful that your money can change lives in such a way.

Happy Friday and Give Generously

Lady Cynical of Charitable Status.
xxxx

This is Shayan Moradisohi. He walked past the commemorative site in London where tributes had been laid in honour of Mr & Mrs Stocker who had died in the Tunisia beach massacre, and helped himself to a couple of bunches of flowers. Well they were just kind’a lying around on the floor. Hundreds of them.

Its not the gravest of crimes. Maybe he simply didn’t appreciate what the flowers symbolised. So he received a small fine, which he won’t pay as he’s homeless. And the fine is symbolic really, just to say that its not right to act in a manner of questionable morality, of total insensitivity and very bad taste.

He’s promised not to wear his Arsenal hat in public again.

But it could be worse. It could be a Chelsea hat.

Four of ‘Chelsea’s finest’ fans were yesterday banned from football for a few years each for their part in the horrendous Paris Metro racist attack, when they pushed a black man out of their carriage repeatedly whilst singing racial abuse at him. Nice.

You can put it down to tribalism, you can attribute it to ‘gang mentality’ or whatever but the wonderful irony is that their apparent ‘leader’ was a retired policeman now working in ‘human rights’. I wonder if they missed the word ‘abuse’ from the end of that.

And further south in France, on the coast between Cannes and Antibes, the billionaires playground, a man applied for planning permission. To build a lift from his house down to the beach.

The word ‘bureaucracy’ is French. They invented it, they’re by miles the world leaders in that if nothing else. And fortunately they do lead in nothing else. If you apply to the council in France to mow your lawn it can take 3 years and countless representations and appearances to get permission. Its famously awful. Apply for a garden shed and perhaps your grandchildren will eventually benefit from its erection.

Yet our man in Cannes applied and received permission to build an ugly, concrete-based lift in the some of the most beautiful and expensive real estate in the world, within hours. President Hollande approved it himself. No red tape, no hassle, just a quick ‘ok’. Or ‘oui’ as we call it out there.

And I’m sure it had nothing to do with the man being the King of Saudi Arabia.

Money talks. I wish I was fluent.

Happy thursday

A xxxx

The picture of the Duke of Windsor performing a Nazi salute in Germany in 1937 is far more telling than those of Princess Elizabeth performing the same act in her back garden in 1933.

Writing your name on a piece of paper is of no consequence. Unless that piece of paper is a cheque for £273,487.57p. Same action, different context, different consequences. Though only if you have that much in the bank. Unlike Greece.

Because the Duke was an adult, surrounded by Nazis, with whom he looks remarkably comfortable, and, sadly like most aristocratic Brits, he loved them. But most importantly, this was just months before Krystallnacht and by then the Jews of Germany had been segregated and yellow-starred and most folks knew to some extent what was going on.

Also, its worth stating, that Edward VIII (as he was for a few days) was a nob. Who gave up the throne (thank God, or who knows which side we’d have been fighting on in the war) for a divorced American bitch, herself a strong Nazi supporter.

But what’s all that got to do with the price of footballlers?

Absolutely nothing.

The Everton full-back John Stones is being ‘courted’ by Chelsea. The courtship, as is, may look more like buying a high price call-girl for the night than anything gentle and loving, but they’ve had a 30 million pound offer refused by Everton and intend to go higher.

Jose Morinho summed it up rather nicely when he stated that ‘smaller clubs’ can do very nicely growing young, English talent and then, obviously, selling them to… to… well, selling them to Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City or possibly Arsenal.

Making Everton, for all its history and pedigree, nothing like a ‘big club’. So really, without wishing to sound too Ed Miliband about this, the division is really between the ‘Rich’ clubs and the ‘Poor’ ones. And the market for British players is really premium as all clubs need domestic representation.

Its known as Southampton Syndrome. The production of wonderful young talent which gets sold for ridiculous sums to ‘big clubs’. All of them. Those that stay on the South Coast do so for very little time, just to showcase their skills before some Oligarch-driven super-club snaps them up to sit on the bench for the next 3 years.

I’m still waiting to see one effect from the ‘financial fair play’ rules that anyone might even notice. Just one.

It’ll all be different under FIFA Nouveau. Just wait. And wait, and wait…

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx