Andy's Glasses

The last of the famous Mitford Sisters was buried yesterday. Deborah. Who turned Chatsworth House into the first proper, tourist-friendly stately home where peasants, plebs and other assorted poor people could wander round and see a dining room the size of their own village, kitchens like those out of the Bake Off, even though tv wasn’t invented back then, and all manner of stuff that the aristocracy of our fine land could display just to show these sad and sorry underlings how sad, impoverished and worthless their own pathetic little lives really were. And still are. We are blessed with a monarchy and thousands of titled, ennobled folks whose shit really stinketh not.

But Deborah was ok compared to most of her siblings. There were 5 sisters, now tragically all taken from us. One sister was a communist, which may strike some as rather odd, considering her upbringing as a ‘minor aristocrat’. The definition of which is that they only had up to 14 permanent servants and slaves plus a gardener who came to mow the lawn every third tuesday. Shame. But Deborah was apolitical. In fact she was generally regarded as ‘the clueless one’ by those who knew her. The other sisters were more outspoken, one (let’s call her ‘Nancy’ because there’s so many I forget who was who, and care even less) was an author. All married ‘well’. If you call remaining in the inbred world of upper-class-adulterous-twittiness ‘well’.

Then there was Diana. Who was obsessed with Nazis in general and Adolph Hitler in very particular. She married ‘well’. She married Oswald Moseley, head of the British nazis and between them they beget Max Moseley, former CEO of Formula 1 racing. Until he was caught being a very naughty boy with 5 ladies of not very aristocratic origin who were dressed in Nazi regalia whilst Max did whatever odd people do in such a situation. Get slapped with fish? Indulge in a few hands of bridge (though you only need 4 in total for that; unless he needed a referee and linesman)? But I’m gonna suggest that bodily fluids were bound to be involved with so much payment at stake. And quite what Freud would make of such antics I hate to imagine.

So anyway, poor Deborah. Last of the Mitfords. Gone but for the memories and a few doilies left lying round Chatsworth that the oiks haven’t nicked.

An assistant to home secretary, Teresa May, is in deep doo-doo for uttering, according the newspapers, that ‘Nick Clegg is a w****r’. How awful. To have to resort to asterisks. Nick Clegg is a WANKER, its a proven fact. Even he wouldn’t argue with that.

Happy very late Friday.

Fast well

A xxxxx

I’m not Tory. I never have been. Yet like so many of our voting nation I feel it comes down to the lesser of evils rather than one, stand-out party. You vote for who you hate least. Or you don’t bother at all. And then you’re forsaking your democratic right to vote in a free election. Something three quarters of the world are not allowed to do. They don’t have them in Hong Kong, they don’t have them in the Middle East, nor Russia, China or any of the other uncivilised nations like Singapore.

Cameron’s speech yesterday was good. Much as I don’t much like the man, his words were powerful. And they spoke to me. Which really, is what its all about. Making my life better. Fuck everybody else, this is MY democracy. I don’t think Cameron forgot anything, he just glossed over lots of details which are too unsavoury to consider this side of the election. Like how (and who) the tax relief will be paid for. Like how his beloved NHS (lots of passion there) will never be neglected by him, yet didn’t mention its financial structure. And we all know that if the NHS was a financial patient in an NHS hospital, it would die. Or be left sitting on a gurney in a hallway for 6 months.

The Lib Dems have their conference next week and we’re all eagerly awaiting a good rest. Let them confer. No-one cares what they say, they’re a spent force. I don’t think tv crews will bother attending. No more than they attend the Carshulton pavement widening scheme meetings.

Farage and his merry UKIPpers are ridiculous and for some reason, punching above their weight. Their ‘keep Britain for the British’ sloganising has a great retro, 1960s, Oswald Moseley type appeal. But is ill-conceived, divisive and shallow. However many Tories join them.

So that leaves the ‘big 2’. Who could vote for Ed Milliband? His mother? Certainly not his brother. And if not Ed, who could put the Labour Party in a better light? The other Ed? Harriet Harman? They have no credibility to lead anything.

And we need to sort out European immigration. Which I don’t have issues with in principle, but we simply have run out of room. And run out of money. So it no longer makes any sense at all.

But now there’s a new threat. Robots. Just when you thought the trouble started with Human Rights, as defined by Brussels, the Eurocrats have now commissioned a RoboLaw consortium to investigate robot rights. Ahhhh, that’s how they spend all our money. Because robots aren’t just C3PO kind of mechanical humanoids, no they come in all shapes and sizes. Driverless cars are classed as robots. Whereas most car drivers are classed (by me) as dickheads. Prosthetic hands are robots. Real hands get no classification other than ‘hands’.

So now we’re going to be inundated with hundreds of thousands of East European robots, taking our jobs, eating our food (???) living in our houses…

Happy thursday

A xxxxx

People from Yorkshire don’t laugh at jokes about sex. Nor about education nor death. The Scots, who probably wouldn’t have even been included in this survey by Ticketmaster if they’d voted ‘yes’ as they should have, don’t laugh at anything. Whereas the Welsh laugh at absolutely everything. Alcohol will do that to a person. Or to a sheep. And Londoners were the most tolerant of all. Even to jokes about race. The average London score for race jokes (voted from -100 to +100) was -21, whereas in the northeast it was -48. Bloody miserable regionals. I wonder how regional jokes scored?

None of this is surprising. It all hooks up nicely with our stereotypes of our brother (and sista) Brits, on the Andy scale of: the stronger the accent the more dim, daft, moronic and witless people generally are. William Hague as a good example. Big accent, total dickhead. Stevie Gerrard, unintelligibly Liverpudlian, not very funny. Except when Liverpool lose, then he’s very funny but just doesn’t realise it. Londoners don’ got no faaarkin’ accints, do dey? an’ they’re all faaarkin’ ‘ilarious. Though do tend to swear excessively. Especially the women.

As I’ve said before, I view surveys with a liberal sprinkling of salt. Like an ocean’s worth. For scientific reasons. Firstly; they’re all bollocks. Secondly, they all depend on who is doing the survey, who is paying for the survey and what they set out to show. No survey just kind of spontaneously happens. And when people are surveyed, unless you water board them during the process, you don’t get true responses. People will not say what they truly believe, they will feel pressurised into giving a ‘correct’ answer. Hence Londoners averaging -28 for racial jokes when in fact they’re all funny and made more so by their chronically inappropriate lack of political correctness. But we’re programmed and conditioned that once we’ve stopped laughing we must act according to social niceties and condemn anything vaguely in the category ‘taking the piss’. And doing so for foreigners, gays, women, Conservatives, Arsenal fans; all underprivileged, should always be heartily encouraged. “I agree!!!” I hear you say. Unless you’re taking part in a survey in which case you say “STRONGLY DISAGREE!!!!”

People from the blue half of Manchester were very funny last night, downright hilarity as they took an early lead through an undeserved (they all are) penalty at home to Roma in the Champions League. And we waited for the inevitable bombardment and corresponding basketball score that the Mancs so often produce. Ahhh, but they only produce it in league matches. So they didn’t find it quite so amusing when the oldest man in the world, the great Francesco Totti, scored an equaliser for the ‘talians. He limped onto a superb through ball, hobbled round a defender, discarded his zimmer frame just in time to lob Joe Hart for a wonderful strike. Now THAT was funny. Call me an old bastard but I do enjoy the richest club on the planet suffering in any way. And by a man so ancient he’s almost as old as Ryan Giggs. Good thing for Roma that class is ageless.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

I’ve been to Hong Kong. It always looks like this. Streets filled with zillions of people, all day, every day. No-one is taller than 5 foot 7, not a blond head in sight. If the people are smaller then they can be crammed into smaller living spaces. So they’ve been genetically modified by chemicals in the water. I was only in Hong Kong for 36 hours on my last visit, but by the time I left my trousers were all half an inch too long. It could happen. Anything could happen in that part of the Far East.

China is a contradiction. A silly place that remains, nominally, ‘a communist, single-party state’. What happened was, in 1949, on October 1st (that’s tomorrow, so don’t forget to send a birthday card) the communists overthrew the horrible old warlords and evil, oppressive Emporers and nasty old totalitarian dictators. And replaced them with ‘the people’. Who oddly very soon became horrible old nasty, evil, oppressively totalitarian dictators. “So this is what communism feels like” thought the people, as they just became beaten and subjugated by a slightly different uniform. For little Johnny Chang life changed dramatically. He was till starving, impoverished, uneducated and hopeless, but now he got beaten up regularly by communists instead of fascists.

And that is to whom we, the British people, ‘gave’ Honk Kong in 1997. To China. To Beijing. To the ‘communists’. But all went well, nothing changed, HK remained a little piece of pseudo-democratic capitalism adjoined to the most populus nation on the planet. It is the ingroing toe-nail on the athletes foot of the mainland. But such a rich, prosperous and fruitful toe-nail that China just kind’a let it be. They didn’t want to scare off the banks and businesses. So they put in a ‘governer’ (a lackey from Beijing) and let the sleeping year of the dog lie.

And now its time for ‘elections’ for a new governor. The word ‘rigged’ really doesn’t go quite far enough for electioneering in China. Democracy, the very basis, the cornerstone of communism, has long been forgotten out there. Instead of candidates you get a parade of faceless, worthless puppets loyal to The Party. And if their loyalty should falter, their families will never be seen again.

So the youth of Hong Kong are protesting, as we see on the news every night. Though the people of China don’t see this at all. Its censored. Along with everything else that happens in the world. Their internet doesn’t work like ours does. So the young people want a Governor of their choice. Someone free from Beijing constraints, someone open-minded, international and independent.

Yeah, that’s gonna happen.

Tomorrow David Cameron will make his speech to the Conservative Party conference. He probably won’t talk about Hong Kong. Though he may mention UKIP. In not very flattering terms. But whatever he says or doesn’t say, he’ll probably read it from notes. Ed Milliband’s 75 minute unscripted rant last week went down very well. As did the Titanic. And Milliband’s aspirations drowned with it. The labour tosser was blind to the elephant in the room, which was our nation’s monumental debt. He ‘forgot it’ in his flow of meaningless soundbytes and endless repetition of the word ‘together’. If he’d forgotten that word the speech would have only lasted 27 minutes and we could have all had an early lunch. Milliband is the Alan Pardew of the political world.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

of a 1-all draw.

Here’s my thoughts on yesterday’s game at the Arse, in no particular order (pretty much how all my thoughts go, as my wife would say).

1. Before the game I’d have bitten your arm off for a draw.

2. I gave us the same odds of victory as I’d give the Dagenham Girls Choir in a battle against ISIS.

3. Its generally upsetting to draw after taking the lead but in the circumstances, that didn’t count as ‘general’.

4. 3 of their best players limped off injured, though no fault of Spurs, I hasten to add, just the innate fragility of every player Arsenal ever sign. I say ‘good’, or even ‘damage limitation’ as far as we were concerned. If half their players last up to Xmas before being ‘out for the season’ Wenger thinks he’s doing well. Then spends the rest of the season bemoaning his lack of options. Having refused to buy anyone when the opportunity was there.

5. Its all very well having 98% of possession (or thereabouts) but if it doesn’t translate into goals then its a repeat of the usual Arsenal malaise of ‘chronic overplaying’. Or ‘on-field masturbation’ as more befits a buch of wankers.

6. Every Spurs fan felt the draw was a ‘win’. Every Arsenal fan felt it a tragic loss. Which, bearing in mind recent form, home advantage and the price of property in Walthamstow, was pretty much right.

7. Arsenal have for many years, since the departure of Keown, Adams et al, been a bit fluffy, a touch delicate, lacking muscle. They’d be great at London fashion week, but in football? As exemplified by Mertersacker (6 foot 6) being flattened by Aaron Lennon (5 foot 6).

8. Only Arsenal players, fans and management are fit to decide what ‘time wasting’ is. If they do it, and ALL teams do it, its part of the game, then its fine. If anyone else does it, its disgraceful, cheating and has Wenger hurling Evian bottles around the place.

So 1-1 at the Emirates was sufficient to have Rachie and me running round the tv high-fiving by the final whistle.

One more Tory has defected to UKIP where in all likelihood he will end his political career. He’s Reckless. No, that’s not a misprint that’s his name, Mark Reckless. Big upset for the Conservatives on the eve of their conference, big coup for Farage’s neo-nazis. Yet even that takes back stage to Brooks Newmark. Obviously an American with a name like that, he was Minister for Charities until his resignation yesterday. He got involved with a ‘blond gorgeous, GSOH, non-smoker, babe’ on the internet, who was in fact a male news reporter, and as their ‘relationship’ grew in stature and promise, Brooks did what all good, Christian, happily married fathers of 5 kids would do, and sent ‘her’ a nob-selfie. That’s what results from a rush of blood to somewhere other than your head and you decide to make it public. Though his original intention wasn’t perhaps to make it quite as public as ended up being the case.

The above picture is of another Conservative penis.

Happy Sunday.

A xxxx

When you nail your colour to the mast, some fucker comes along and shoots that mast down with a big cannonball. Bastards.

And so is the life of the football fan. His colours are permanently nailed to a mast and they’re always knocking it down. Every bloody week, so it seems. Yet hope must spring eternal. Because without hope we might as well all support Glasgow Rangers. Yet often that hope is tested. Are there limits to optimism?

All of which, of course, is apropos today’s maaaassssiiiiiiivvvvvvve north London derby match, 5.30 today at the Emirates. Or ‘hell’ as its come to be known over the last few years. And oddly, although Spurs fans are guarded about their optimism for this afternoon (ie; they have none, whatsoever), every Arsenal fan I meet is equally pessmistic and in a state of dread. Everybody, so it seems, except the pundits and press, hates the Spurs/Arsenal match. And why?

Because its so important. It has a value that is beyond points, beyond ‘local’ pride, beyond rubies, beyond almost everything. It is always season defining, and Spurs, who generally lose such events, stick to a pretty grim defninition of their seasons accordingly. And for all Arsenal’s claims of ‘its just another match, we’re more worried about Chelsea’, that’s all just so much posturning and mind-games. More for their benefit that for ours.

This will be my 151st derby game. I guessed that based on it being Wenger’s 46th and I’ve been around far longer.

Time has once again flown, the match has started; watch out for part 2. When I get an effin moment or three.

A xxxx

Ahhhhh, freedom, such a magnificent concept, such a superlative ideal. The dream that liberates us, whilst in some ways, constraining others. And if you express your freedom you’re either a libertarian or a total bastard, depending on whether you’re scottish or not. Or other things, perhaps.

Take Andy Murray, f’rinstance. He used his freedom of speech last week to offer the world his studied political insight in a tweet telling fellow Scots (he left Scotland when he was 12 to go learn tennis proper in Florida and probably lives in Monaco as a tax exile, visiting his mum, who lives in London, twice a year) to “Let’s do this!!!!” in the up-coming vote. “Fuck the English!” he would probably have said, and in fact, he might as well have said it anyway for all the furore south of the border his comment stirred up. Now he says he’s sorry for the upset caused (ain’t everybody; after the fact) but was free to express an opinion, though in hindsight would probably have been better off keeping shtum. Always, Andy, always. But you can’t un-say things once they’re out there. And coupled with his famous comment years ago about ‘I’ll support any team that’s playing England at football’, a pattern emerges.
There is a hill, far off in Wimbledon Town, that currently bears the title of ‘Murray Mound’. I’m starting a petition to rename it ‘Loser Lump’.

There’s other freedoms, even if you’re not a tennis player.

A girl at a school in Camden chose to start this new school term wearing a niqab. A full face veil. In terms of freedom nothing is more divisive than that single item. Women cliam it ‘liberates them’, though from what I’m not sure, unless they were grotesquely ugly to start with. Others claim it to be the ultimate symbol of female repression. Its not a ‘muslim’ thing, the niqab, its a Saudi thing. Thus theories about repression of women would seem fairly sound coming from the most hateful of oppressive regimes.

The school have told her she must unveil or go home. There’s no uniform rule at the school, just ‘appropriate’ is all that is required. So hot pants are cool, t-shirts with “THE POPE’S A C**T!!!!” are fine, even the revolting Arsenal football shirt is acceptable, and many find that more offensive than a niqab. But that, she cannot wear. Because, clothing must be deemed to ‘not interfere with teaching interraction’. And a niqab does just that. And so much more, none of it good.

If women find it liberating to live their public lives inside a black sack then good luck to them. But what it does is seperate them from society, from normality. It creates an aura of ‘weird’, it is, in every way, exactly what its intended to be, a barrier from the world. It says ‘DON’T SPEAK TO ME’, it says ‘DON’T EVEN LOOK AT ME’ and it says ‘GO AWAY’. It removes any possibility of social interraction. Including teaching. I could not hold a conversation with someone wearing a mask; it would be wrong. And thus I agree with the school. Which is more than I ever did when I was attending such institutions.

Happy new year (yes, its Rosh Hashanna today)

And enjoy your freedom

A xxxx

I’ve always had the greatest respect for Emma Watson. She was always clever and bright, consistently scoring better that both Harry Potter and Ron Weasley in spells, Studies of the Dark Arts and Dragon Rearing. After that she went to Harvard, or Yale; somewhere American, and acquired a BSc in Witchcraft, or Politics or something or other. And although getting a degree from the States is not like a ‘proper’ degree from Cambridge or Bath or the University of the Stourbridge Bypass over here, its definitely one up from buying one in a street market in Mumbai. How are you wanting to spelling ‘filosopheee’?

But mainly I respect her because she grew up rather gorgeously. Waif-like, a touch ‘cold’, but beautiful in a very fragile way. And being a man, that’s what you notice first. Long before the words. She might as well have the volume turned down to ‘0’ (as if any woman possesses such a dial, and if they did the lowest setting would be ’17’). And that’s not objectification, admiring beauty, though it may look like it to some, and its not sexism, nor chauvinism but just being a man. Even a post-feminist, right-on, egalitarian man like wot I am.

Emma is now the Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women. Angelina Jolie is a Goodwill Ambassador to the UN for something else. I want to be the interviewer for Goodwill Ambassadors to the UN. BTW: Emma made a speech, she’s a clever little thing, about how men too are ‘imprisoned by their stereotypes’, presumably meaning that we feel obliged to ‘PHWOARRR’ at passing babes when we’re working on building sites, spend evening talking to chests at dinner parties and fail to connect with our emotions, or at least to outwardly display them.

Or maybe it means we can wear her underwear if we want to. I’m not really sure I know what it means, other than it sounds clever. And on an intellectual level equality is a wonderful thing. And I revere women, not just the ones on porn sites, but all women. And believe them to be equal in virtually all abilities other than throwing a ball. There’s no ‘glass ceiling’ in my world. Honest, there ain’t.

And yet I’m a man. And men are, first and foremost, animals. Literally so. As are women. And testosterone is a terrible thing. But like all drugs, it feels so good at the time. And it drives men to objectify women. Its not a conscious act, it just happens. Its visceral, its innate and so when Emma Watson talks about being imprisoned by stereotypes (as she saunters down a catwalk in the latest Burberry, make up by L’Oreal, hair by some ponce in Conduit Street) I think she’s missed an important point. Men are driven by lust. Its chromosomal. Even men who cry. Which is often just a ploy for sympathy anyway; a quick path to physical contact.

Men are horrible. Stereotypes are there for good reason. Accept it and move on.

Avera Kadavra

A xxxx

I’m a big fan of taxation. I love it. The more I pay the happier I feel. I’m contributing to the national pot. Helping the NHS to survive. Allowing the government to help those less well off or unemployed to thrive. Keeping all those Latvian child-molesters and Romanian pick-pockets flooding to our shores in search of benefits. Its a win-win. I work like a dog so they don’t have to bother. And that’s the way of the world. My world anyway. Or so it seems.

So every penny I earn is taxed. Fair enough. The country needs to be run. Albeit not very efficiently. Then every penny I spend is also taxed in vat. Then, with what little is left, I pay my council tax, which is local, so therefore ‘different’. They should spell it differently really: ‘council tacks’ so we know its a different thing altogether. And council tax is linked to the price of your home, so that’s fair. Ish. Should you sell your home, you pay up to 5% in stamp ‘duty’. Not tax, no, duty. Because it is your duty to pay it otherwise they lock you in jail.

But now Ed Balls, he of the flailing elbows, the shadow chancellor and very clumsy centre forward, informed the Labour Party conference yesterday that should Labour win the election they will implement a ‘mansion tax’. Or ‘theft’ as it is otherwise known. All homes valued over 2 million quid will pay 1% per year in mansion tax. That’s 20 grand. £20,000. Enough to pay Wayne Rooney’s wages for about 10 minutes (plus stoppage time).

And this is unfair. Ok, all taxation is a little unfair, which is why we call it ‘tax’ and not ‘sweets’ or ‘football’ or ‘hot sex’. But this is not a transactional tax. Nothing’s happened, no money changed hands, nothing bought, sold or transferred, no income, no outgoings. Just: you gotta nice big house, mate, ergo you’re a rich, probably London, bastard, so give us 25 grand or we’ll reposess your mother-in-law. (If only.)

Ironically, it doesn’t have to be a ‘mansion’. There are thousands of flats in London that regularly sell for over 2 million quid. But ‘flat tax’ lacks the accusatory tone, the divisive requirement that will have every slum dweller in the land smirking and grinning as they sup their flagons of mead in mud-floored taverns; ‘yeah, fookin’ rich shites’.

London already pays 93% of the country’s tax. I made that up, or maybe read it recently. Either way its not far from the truth. And so now they’re inventing a new tax that is almost exclusively for London. So we can pay more. We’re just not pulling our weight. So to fund the NHS, they want 1.2 billion quid a year and so some cash-poor widow who bought a sweet little house in 1973 for £1,472.86, is now sitting on 2 million pound pile in Chelsea, has fuck all in her bank and has to find 20 thousand a year.

Is it any wonder that people find exotic loopholes to avoid paying tax?

Ed Milliband is speaking today. I can hardly wait to see what that hapless fucker has in store.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

We all love it when giants are killed. We even have a word for it: giant-kiling. If that is in fact one word. Who cares? And the manner in which giants are killed is all-important. So when the Great, the Godly (in their minds) Manchester United take their zillions of pounds of inter-galactic superstars (I’m sure Di Maria is from Pluto) to visit lowly Leicester City, recently promoted, completely impoverished and fielding a team containing not one name anyone’s ever heard of, you expect blood. And there was blood. But it was the red blood of Man United that was spilled. In rather vast, and humiliating quantities. Yet it was the manner of the defeat that was so satisfying, so unexpected, so wonderful.
The reds were 2 nil up after about 10 minutes and were ‘cruising’. Which means becoming smug and arrogant and smelling a rout (which proved to be the case, but not necessarily as they originally smelt it) and counting the goals they were all going to score. Dozens of goals. Hat-tricks all round. Even the defenders. If you can call them defenders. Which you weren’t by the end of the game.

Leicester pulled a goal back. Because the midlanders know how to fight. And the goal was brilliant and created by the amazing running of Jamie Vardie. A man who was an unemployed bricklayer three weeks ago.Ok, he wasn’t, but he was playing non-league football four years ago, which is almost the same thing. Playing for Stocksbridge Park Steels whilst Wayne Rooney was deciding how many diamonds to put on the door-handles of his next Range Rover.

United scored again. Ahhhh, 3-1 up, that’s ‘safe’. Which turned out not to be the case as Leicester then scored 4 more unanswered goals as the Mancs defence simply crumbled and forgot what it was there to do. What it is paid, collectively, over a million pounds a month to do. Shit, sorry Louis, just forgot what I was s’posed to be doing. Phah.

And that fills us (assuming the ‘us’ in question are not Man United fans) with distinct pleasure. We all love to see big teams trounced, little teams perform miracles, the odds upset. Unless, of course its our big team being trounced. Then the joy factor is ‘somewhat diminished’. Like, f’rinstance, if High Hopes Spurs (we always have high hopes and aspirations; but not always the results… hardly ever the results) face bottom-of-the-table West Bromwich Albion, at home, down the Lane, oooooohh, that’s three points in the bag. In the bag maybe, but not our bag as we managed to lose. Rachie went and sent me a text message at the end. Two words (one more than our on target attempts on goal over 90 minutes). Which read: ‘total wank’. That was it. The summary of our efforts, endeavors and achievement.

Yet even with all that happening, it was at the Etihad that the story of the day unfolded. Man City playing Chelsea. City have a player sent off and Chelsea score. Quel surprise. Then on comes Chelsea legend, hero and demi-god, Frank Lampard, now playing in Man City colours. And he scored the goal to tie the game. To save new club from disaster, to frustrate old, beloved Chelsea, who’s badge he nauseatingly kissed for 13 years to the disgust of all decent people. Frank turned, didn’t celebrate, looked close to tears and tried to show nothing for fear of being hated by one bunch of fans or another. 1-1 was the final score and Lampard maintained his equanimity. You had to respect him. Even if he does have John Terry on speed-dial.

Happy monday, though for many of us that’s not the case.

A xxx

PS today’s pic is the guy who went in for a tackle against Ed Balls, shadow chancellor of the exchequer, in a ‘friendly’ match at the Labour Party Conference. Nice.