Andy's Glasses

One ‘stroke of genius’ that Margaret Thatcher pulled off was to engage ‘Essex Man’ and win an election with ‘his’ support. And this mythical figure, who came also to be known as ‘White Van Man’, (much as the Abominable Snowman was also known as a Yetti), bought into to her policies, to her direction, to her values. He was a working man, builder, policeman, factory worker, who was convinced by her that under Conservative ideology and government, the nation, and in particular HIM, would fare well and prosper. And thus that nasty old woman regained power to inflict misery for another five years. The moral of the story being that you don’t have to be a rich, Eton-educated minor aristocrat with an Oxbridge degree to vote conservative. ITS AN IDEOLOGY.

So why, oh why, oh why, oh why, is there an automatic assumption that to have anything whatsoever to do with the Labour Party, you simply MUST be working class? And if you’re not, if you’re a professional, or heaven forbid, quite well off, or live in a nice house in Islington, and support Labour, then YOU ARE A FUCKING HYPOCRITE!!!!! As if being left of centre in your views is only allowable for those of limited means and some housing benefits. Surely, the Labourite brand of Socialism-lite is an ideology too?

The mass outrage at Emily Thornberry’s misguided tweet on Thursday has brought this ridiculous dichotomy to a head. Today’s Mail on Sunday (no fucking surprise there) leads the way with pictures of labour MPs with their houses and house prices and loads of exclamation marks!!!!!! to stress this point of how a ‘working class party’ has now moved into gentrified housing in trendy boroughs.

Political stance is an ideology. Its a view on relative values. The Conservatives (very very broadly speaking) tax less to encourage industry, both in individuals and in, errr, industry, so that money can be reinvested or spent, to enrich all as they pay for their goods and services, employing more people and with money trickling down to all. Labour are more concerned with the less well off and those who, even with every opportunity of free education, free health care, free housing, won’t be able to cope. So they tax more to fund those extra services. And the wealthy would pay more under Labour in taxes because they earn more. Simple.

Therefore, a Labour supporter who is ‘rich’, not by Daily Mail standards of ‘owning’ a house worth 1.2 million quid that has a 750,000 mortgage on it, but a real, fuck-off wealthy entrepreneur, is not a ‘hypocrite’ but someone to be revered. Someone who is backing a system which will take more of his money in order to help those less fortunate. Someone willing to sacrifice personal gains for the good of others. In the same way that a working man who votes Conservative is not ‘selling out to the bosses’ but is hoping that aligning his lot with a financial meritocracy will eventually enrich his and his (scummy, working class, boiler-suited, beer-swilling) mates’ lives.

The only hypocrisy in the political system is when parties seize on one issue, like, errrr, immigration, peutetre, as ‘the vote changer’ and realign their own stance about that issue in a cynical attempt to woo a few voters. That’s when the whole political system turns into a farce. And ‘farce’ is almost part of an anagram of Farage, almost. So for everyone else to suddenly try to encorporate hard-right immigration policy into their bigger picture is sad, tragic and woefully cynical.

This is not a ‘class war’. Its not a few Labourites living in nice houses that is the problem with our politics. Its the ever-shifting values to just try and gain votes, even if they are contrary to the party’s fundamental ideology.

Happy wet, rainy, dreary Sunday

A xxxx

People today, singles, tend to meet online. And marrieds sometimes, even though they shouldn’t. But I’m not talking about morality in this instance, this is more about shagging.

A girl from Epsom in Surrey ‘meets’ a boy from Boston Massachusettes, online. They ‘chat’, they skype, they flirt. Boy starts behaving a little stalkerish, a little paranoid, a little psychotic, but heh, he’s a yank, its well within normal limits for the type. Girl breaks off relationship. Boy pays a visit, unbeknownst to the girl, flys in, stays in the local Premier Inn (so you know he’s desperate and unbalanced) breaks into girls house and stabs her repeatedly with a knife until her brother stops him just as he’s about to kill her. True story. Much as anything you read in the papers is ‘true’. Boy gets life in jail. And hopefully some serious therapy.

So, an object lesson against internet dating. Yet, when you meet someone in a bar or a club, you have no idea about their psyche. You don’t know a fundamentalist Christian from a fucked up Cannibal just by looking. And even if you did, who would be the better bet? But I like to think that instincts can be pretty good, and judgments made on superficial evidence. Its how we deal with the world every day.

In my dating days, (with a wooden club, wearing a loin cloth, looking for a woman to drag back to my cave), I was never short of confidence. No charm, no personality, I was dog ugly, but in my mind I was irresistably gorgeous. And my mum would agree with me. So it must have been true. Yet I was not without success.

There’s the answer then. You wanna meet people, put your fucking phone down for ten sodding minutes and GET OUT THERE. Ahhhh, another problem. I’m shy. I’m spotty. I’m ugly. I’m obese. I’m not good at talking to strangers. Hmmmmmm…

Then you need coaching. That’s all. Its just a matter of confidence in yourself, your personality and your ability to pretend to be charming, interesting and shaggable. Though really, its just about initiating discourse. As opposed to intercourse.

In steps Julien Blanc. Here’s a man, albeit another American one, who can change your fortunes with women, who can change your success, who can change you entire life. From nebachy nerd to desirable hunk in just one course of lectures, a dvd box-set or $99.99 online subscription. A ‘PUA’. That’s a pick-up artist (‘scuse me while I puke). Ok, Julien crosses the line from ‘how to be confident enough to meet women’ to ‘how to fuck any woman you meet, even if she’s patently not interested and would rather eat her own leg than get naked with you’. And its that line that’s caused the problem. The one that’s between ‘be assertive’ and ‘ignore the word ‘no’ and even screams of RAPE!!!!’

So we’ve banned him from entering the country to lecture. The Home Secretary herself, Teresa May, who no-one has ever approached in any situation anywhere with an offer of anything, deemed this man a threat. Like a jihadi. Almost like a Lithuanian murderer, but those we let in.

We need people to help our young get together (apparently). But the Julien Blancs of this world do tend to slightly overstress the ‘from zero to sex in 11 minutes’ part of things. But to ban him? Get a grip.

Happy Saturday. Been busy. Don’t ask.

A xxxx

I’m a sensitive soul. Easily offended. Therefore I always try to be as inoffensive as possible. Unless I can get away with it. But the general rule is: say what you want, think what you want, but NEVER PUT IT IN WRITING. Or on the radio, for that matter. Its all about putting things in the public domain. Where they will stay and come back to haunt.

Malky Mackay, a football manager of third-rate teams (sorry to Watford fans, but that’s just the way it is in my ‘offense to no-one’ world) was sacked from his last job for some emails to a mate in which he described Chinese people as ‘chinks’ and referred to a Jewish football agent by saying ‘you know how a Jew gets when he sees money slipping through his fingers’.

So, having served his 6 month sentence in the wilderness as set by the court of public opinion; the standard sentence for disgraced football managers, mps, dodgy policemen, Malky has been given his ‘second chance’ and employed by Wigan Football Club. To much furore. And in his defense, on the radio, club owner, Dave Wheelan actually said that he thought the word ‘chink’ was acceptable. Then, using the same shovel to dig the hole a little deeper, he said: ‘well, jews do seem to chase money more than anyone else’. A wonderful, modern stereotype, not expressed publicly since Shakespeare wrote Shylock into the Merchant of Venice in 1643.

Is David Wheelan anti-semitic? Or just plain fucking stupid?? It really makes no difference to the outcome. Which is that Wigan’s sponsors are now making horrible noises about pulling out and everyone associated with Wigan FC who values public opinion will want to distance themselves from it and from Dave. They’ll be a pariah club. Hitler’s Team.

This on top of the Ched Evans saga in which the convicted rapist has been allowed to return to training with Sheffield United. Yet this debate is more interesting, even though its still really about gobby northerners. This question is: having served his sentence, is Evans not now to be given a second chance? Because once you ‘pay your debt to society’ (sit in a cell taking drugs every day for two years) you are free to re-join that society. But Evans has never apologised, nor shown remorse, nor admitted it was a crime. Which makes him worse than almost every other Welsh rapist in Sheffield. So, after the club have lost most of their directors in resignations of protest, all their sponsors, they’ve finally decided that ‘he’s just not worth all the bother’.

And the final warning about ‘putting stuff out there’ must come from Emily Thornberry, the former Shadow Attorney General, who resigned last night from that post after sending a tweet from Rochester yesterday morning showing this picture. I call the photo ‘white van man goes to UKIP via the BNP’. Emily called it ‘image from Rochester’. And Ed Miliband thought it was patronising, at a time when the Labour leader was showing his understanding and compassion for the folks in that part of Kent as to why they would hook up with UKIP in these troubled times. Never mind, Emily. Give it the mandatory 6 months and it’ll all blow over. Ed Miliband has done much more damage to his party by just eating a bacon sandwich and giving money to a beggar.

Happy Friday; just don’t put it in print.

A xxxx

I hate injections.

I’d rather face a man coming at me with a sword than with a syringe. At least my tai chi has shown me how to cope with the former. Obviously, as long as its a very very blunt sword and he comes in slow motion. But a syringe? You’re not allowed to ‘wave hands like clouds’ and break the nurse’s arm. I asked. She said ‘no’. With a Czech accent. I expected Hattie Jaques in full flowing blue uniform, instead I got Olga in a pair of jeans. Doesn’t really matter who’s holding the thing, a syringe is a syringe and only has one purpose.

But this morning, in about an hour, in fact, I have my last pre-travel injection for our xmas trip to South America. We’ve had typhoid, yellow fever, hepatitis A and B, tuberculosis, the Plague, St Vitus Dance, ebola and athlete’s foot. Ok, maybe I’ve forgotten some and made up others.

And rabies. Today’s is the 3rd and final one for rabies. I don’t have rabies, I think (but how do you know? I do foam at the mouth, but only whilst brushing my teeth) and I’m not sure if the jab is to protect me in case I’m bitten by Cujo or to protect the Brazilians in case I bite them. As Luis Suarez demonstrated so elegantly in the last World Cup, biting is a problem among South Americans.

Then its over. My body a temple for the next 10 years from all of the above plus the ones I’ve forgotten. My arm has been punctured so many times it now takes in water in the bath. But can shrug off a virus without even noticing it. I hope.

None of which will affect the voting today in Rochester and Strood for the by-election. Which UKIP will win. And claim their second Member of Parliament, Mark Reckless, another Tory reject. In that he rejected them, rather than the other way round. Another pretty meaningless protest vote. Its not like 2 MPs is sufficient to force a majority into closing the gates of Britain forever to immigration, be it from Europe or even further afield. And then start on the lengthy process of repatriation. Sending ‘them’ back. All of them. Fucking immigrants, nicking our jobs, living off the state, send ’em ‘ome.

My maternal grandmother arrived in England in 1900. My paternal grandfather about a hundred years earlier. Am I at risk? From deportation? Repatriation? Who’ll make my chicken tikka massala if everyone is sent back to Bangla Desh and Pakistan? Who’ll make my pizza? Paella? Crispy fried beef with chilli and beensprouts?? Sushi!!!!!! It’ll all be gone and we’ll be back with beef-an-ale pies, fish’n’chips and sodding Paleo. And who will do all the building and construction if there’s no Poles around?

I don’t care what Nigel F-F-F-Farage says to the contrary, he’s a smiley, boozey, faggy version of Hitler for the post-millennial times and has only one policy: make Britain single, solitary, alone and white.

Be careful what you wish for; vote anything but UKIP today.

Happy Election Day

A xxxx

So Matt Taylor, the man responsible for sending a ‘lander’ the size of a washing machine on a comet, 370 million miles away and traveling faster than any speed camera could hope to detect, after a 10 year voyage to get there, is in shame. After achieving the most amazing scientific feat of several generations, he is in the shit because of a shirt. This shirt. The ‘sleeves’ are him, not the shirt.

Because Matt Taylor is not exactly your stereotypical boffin. He’s not a bow-tie kind of a professor. He doesn’t do the Einstein look, nor the wheelchair and voice-box now favourite among the physicist classes. He’s a heavy metal guy who happens to be a genius at space-stuff. And he likes tattoos. What would be known as an ‘individual’. But the shirt caused outrage because it depicts scantily-clad women in suggestive poses. And that, according to his detractors, makes him almost a rapist. No better than Ched Evans or Jimmy Savile. A predatory sex-fiend who should be castrated then locked up for a very very long time, then registered on the Sartorial Offenders List forevermore. Amen.

Because that shirt is what’s known in fashion circles as ‘well dodgy’. A bit tacky. Awfully lairy. Hawaiian style shirts generally are an affront to mankind and the brighter they get does nothing to help their cause.

But its a shirt. A fucking shirt. Not a political statement. Not a dig at womankind. Not a mission policy. That it has pictures of cartoon babes scantily clad and in chains, holding guns and ‘pouting with menace’ does not make it evil. Its fun. Its funny. And its ironic. Would these detractors be happier if Matty wore a ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirt, made by slaves in Mauritius? Just because the sentiment is so ‘on message’? Even though they’re female slaves working 100-hour weeks for $2.50. That’s ironic.

And Matt’s shirt is ironic. 90% of t-shirt slogans are ironic. Clothes can be ironic, as can perceived ‘statements’. Sadly, Americans just don’t ‘do’ ironic. Even Alanis Morrisette (ok, Canadian, American, whatever) missed the point in about three quarters of her famous song. Thus we must assume that these proto-feminist fascist gorillas (that’s ironic, don’t complain, more importantly, don’t hit me) are Americans, thus immediately miss the point completely and go into attack mode. Well keep yer Doc Martens on, gels, its only a joke.

I hate political correctness when its used at the expense of wit. What a dull fucking world these people aspire to.

Though it is a world in which England, once again, showed Scotland who is the boss(es). Stunning display by Rooney et al. I’ve always loved the man. Always. I bet he wears wife-beater vests.

Happy wednesday

A xxxx

Its Tuesday. Bridge night chez nous. Ever since Mel decided, about 5 years ago that playing the beautiful (card) game is the only sure way to stave off all forms of dementia and… well, I’m sure there was something else, its gone now. Where was I?

So we play bridge. We had lessons then became world masters (ish) and now play untutored and for the game I’ve grown to love. But tonight there’s no bridge. Mel has a work thing. Thus I’m ‘free’. And coincidentally (because the FA don’t have my bridge schedule, I’m pretty sure) England are playing Scotland at football tonight at Celtic Park. Ohhhhhhh. That’s big. Ish. I could recline myself on the sofa, pour myself a large something or other and watch the game. The tv is mine. And mine alone.

But I’m going to go to Tai Chi instead.

Because even though England haven’t played Scotland for years, and they are the ‘Auld enemy’ or whatever, and they faiiled to secure independence and we hold their entire nation in total contempt, its a ‘friendly’ and thus becomes a fairly meaningless exercise. The managers will try new things, will tinker with the teams, use unlimited substitutions to work out partnerships that may be beneficial in ‘proper’ matches. Or it will be an exhibition match. It means nothing. Thus it will be devoid of passion, of emotion, of meaning and purpose. Its like playing bridge with all the cards facing upwards. Its like having sex with someone unconscious. Though that has at least some merits, as Ched Evans would agree. ‘Friendly’ football has none.

Which is why tonight Old Trafford will be half empty. When playing there will be Portugal and Argentina. Featuring; the two, the only, the magnificent, the godly, incredible, outstanding… best players in the world. Messi and Ronaldo will face each other (like they do about 15 times a year in the very very meaningful Spanish league) on the international stage. And truly international, as I’m fairly sure that Old Trafford is part of neither Argentina nor Portugal. To my knowledge. If an army of Argies had laid siege to Manchester, I like to think I’d have known that. Captured the city and claimed it as their own. Though its safe to think that they wouldn’t want Manchester. No-one wants Manchester, its just kind of ‘there’.

And yes, Messi and Ronaldo are beyond wonderful, but if they play, for how long? Managers hate friendlies too. Meaningless exercises that cause injury and lose them players.

But to engage the fans there needs to be something at stake. Old rivalries aren’t sufficient when it counts for nought. The old home internationals were fabulous. Then they stopped them. Yet they had meaning, as they do in rugby.

Friendly Internationals? I’d rather go duck hunting.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

Susannah Constantine is a tv presenter. Talks about clothes. Bitches about other women’s sortorial faux pas. I’ve never watched her. Until she learns to kick a football, becomes a man and puts on a Spurs shirt (and trust me; we’ve fielded worse, much worse), I have no interest in her tv antics.

But yesterday I read an article by her and I’m growing a new respect for this woman who initially found fame by dating a minorish royal for a few years.

Then she and Viscount Linley split up (I was devastated) and she married someone else and had child/children. Nice.

Her daughter is now 11. And, being ‘country folk’, the daughter was taken on her first duck shoot (sounds like a Marks Brothers movie, but that was Duck Soup, and was even funnier than killing ducks) at which the daughter managed to kill a duck or two with her shotgun. Good for her. Susannah, steeped in country tradition and rural culture, ‘blooded’ her daugher by putting a dab of the dead ducks blood on her face. Which to us townies seems a bit pagan, a touch Rambo, a symbolic act not out of place in Seven Samurai. But which passes for ‘normal’ in the big green bits outside the M25.

And there is big brouhaha about this. Big one.

Accusation of encouraging murder, duckicide, of teaching children to kill. As if today’s duck hunter is tomorrow’s high school shoot-em-up perp.

We have similar customs in the Cities. When my daughter first bought a piece of beef from Tescos, we tore off a bit of the cling-film and stuck it on her forehead.

Yet ‘duck-gate’ is the new fox hunting, so it would appear. On the radio yesterday afternoon some guy (read: ‘tosser’) called in to have his say. Which was that killing all animals is wrong. Become a vegan. All killing is murder. Blah, blah, blah, and missed the point by a country mile. This is not about the perceived morality of eating meat. Its about kids actually learning what meat really is. That is was once part of some animal. That in some ways it is sustainable. That killing ‘free range’ animals is perhaps much more acceptable than factory farming. And most importantly, its about the right to perform perfectly legal activities, put food on the table and educate your children without a bunch of fascists moaning that its not politically correct and that ducks have ‘human rights’ too. Actually, they don’t.

I’ve never been on a fox hunt, nor shot a duck. But if that’s what people in the countryside choose to do, its surely a better use of their time than incest. It controls otherwise saturated animal populations and feeds the good folk in the rurals.

As for the horror of ‘putting a gun in the hands of a child!!!!!’, she was supervised (obviously) and guns are part of country life. So teach ’em young and teach ’em well. Guns aren’t dangerous. People are dangerous. Surely better to be taught the appropriate time and place to use a shotgun than sitting a child in front of a ‘first-person-shooter’ video game for six hours, like most vegan parents do. Possibly.

Susannah’s only real ‘crime’ was to post a picture of the blooded daughter on instagram. Some things are best kept within the cultures that understand them.

Happy monday

A xxxx

I hate to keep blaiming Gwyneth Paltrow for all the evils on the planet but she’s right up there with ISIS and Arsenal when it comes to the ruination of our culture. In this specific case its food. Or ‘not food’. Her (and others, but I prefer to have a focus for my scorn, preferably a rather fit, blond one) insistence on the corruption of our diets has now resulted in a spate of ‘organic’, ‘holistic’, even ‘homeopathic’ restaurants and food styles. Now, not content with dairy-free, gluten-free, taste-free food, the new way is ‘paleo’.

Paleo? Yeah, ya nob, P-A-L-E-O. As in ‘palaeolithic’. But for Americans who can’t spell proper. Because this fad is about going back to a time before wheat and corn had been cultivated, the single most cataclysmic event towards the death of the planet. Apparently. Before that no-one touched bread, (obviously), sugars, or pizza. Just roots and free-range veg.

So they’re actually opening restaurants which are completely ‘gluten-free’ and ‘paleo’. So you go in, get a plate of raw carrots and turnips, unpeeled, I sincerely hope, eat them presumably accompanied by some Ganges-water, unfiltered, uncleaned and filled with bacteria, which is, after all, free range and organic. Thank you Sir, that’ll be £72.90 + 15% service.

For a fucking turnip.

You can go to Waitrose and buy it yourself for 42p and ‘prepare’ it. Ahhh, but no-one puts a raw carrot on a plate like Luigi.

Make mine a double cheeseburger with extra cheeseburgers on the side.

Wayne Rooney is 100 years old today. Oh, he’s not, he’s celebrating the hundredth time he’ll be sent off for being a nasty, shitty, petulant, swearing little fucker. Or maybe its his 100th cap.

So Roy Hodgson has been raving about his captain all week. Which, to be honest, is probably good for England football, but not so great for honesty when he says that ‘Rooney will be remembered as a legend like Bobby Charlton’.

Rooney will doubtless end up with more caps than Sir Bobby; he’ll probably score more goals by that time too. But that’s where the similarities end. Rooney consistently underperforms for England, much like he does for Man United. He struggles to score goals. He gets sent off. Though his temper seems slightly more under control these days, he’s still always gobbing off at referees.

Bobby Charlton played from when he was 3 years old til his retirement when he was 82. He scored shitloads, never lost his temper, always delivered the goods and was the best player England ever produced. Wayne Rooney is not fit to clean his boots, never mind fill them.

Happy whatever day Sky see fit to repair the broadband-day

A xxxx

“Can I just plug my charger in somwhere; my phone’s gone dead”.

No you can’t. Fuck off. You think electricity’s free? “Yes, of course you can, Michael, in fact let me make you a cup of tea and I’ll service your phone for you too; delete the obselete apps, enhance the screen, upgrade the battery and abuse your twitter account”.

Its a fact of life. Phones ‘die’. All the sodding time. The better they become, the more sophisticated, the more complex and all-consuming, the lower the battery life. All that R&D invested into making phones into computers, into control centres for people’s lives, and yet they’re all limited by the charge they can hold. “I can switch on my central heating at home from my phone, and record Eastenders and wash the car remotely, all from a new app”. No you can’t. Cos you’re battery’s dead.

I reckon we spend up to 87% of our lives with something or other ‘on charge’. Don’t ask me how I calculated that, you’re not bright enough to follow, just trust me, 87%.

Why can’t they just invent a new battery? One that is the size of a pound coin and could power a Prius for a month? In fact they could if they would just use nuclear power. But we’d all be dead from radiation poisoning as soon as we took the first pre-recorded call from Barlcays about our PPI claim. You can’t have it all.

Yet there are others with power issues too.

The quite amazing feat of landing a spacecraft onto the surface of a comet 317 million miles away (that’s measured from Marble Arch, presumably, if its from Sydney then deduct a bit… or add it on, depending on the time of year…). No-one’s done this before. Which I suppose is not a massive surprise. And it is a remarkable journey, which has taken 10 years and actually involved a traveled distance of over 2 billion miles. Not because they caught a cab and the driver conned them into a ‘short cut’ but because the craft had to go around gravitational fields of planets. And ended up in the right place at the right time and landed. Almost perfectly. Almost.

Because when the Philae landed on the comet’s surface, it ‘bounced’. Ooops. The bounce took several hours and the lander eventually came down next to a crater, in the shade of a cliff. A bit on its side. So its just like when your wife parks at Waitrose. But the problem is the ‘shade’ bit. Because the lander is solar powered. And in the shade there ain’t no sunshine. Michael Jackson told us that years ago. Prophet that he was. Or that Bill Withers was.

And this could be a modern tragedy. The most incredible feat of science thus far, fucked up by a flat battery. A metaphor for our times. And this is not just any old space project, but a proper, European one. Which, in this instance, and this one only, I’m prepared to include Britain as part of ‘European’. Don’t tell Nigel Farage.

Happy Friday; may your battery be permanently on 5 bars

A xxxx

It is with great relief and joy that we can today announce that the 2022 World Cup will, after all the controversy and scandal, indeed be played in Qatar. As originally voted, selected, elected and chosen in a very honest, uncorrupt and logical way, organised as ever, in the impeccable standards we’ve come to expect from FIFA, the world’s governing body for football. Following the Garcia investigation (ish) Sepp Blatter’s reputation is once again in tact and beyond any question and in fact the former Swiss wedding singer will now take his rightful place among the world’s best ‘leaders’, along with Kim Jong Un, Hitler and Prince Albert of Monaco. Don’t go changin’, Sepp, we love you just the way you are.

And the reasons for Qatar winning the bid are as valid today as they were when they first bought the vote in 2010.

1. Qatar is a lovely country. And rather rich, so the hotels for the footballers should be nice, in the understated, Dubai-style of 9-star, solid gold and marble establishments. The fans, and other impoverished scum, could sleep on the beaches, but its probably punishable by death. As is adultery, homosexuality, various other ‘crimes’ and drinking alcohol. Gonna be a fun World Cup for the fans. Who, to fill the void left by the usual 19 hours a day of boozing, can instead follow the calls to prayer, which occupy 20 hours a day. ‘Ilicit sexual relations’ are also punishable by death. This is defined as: ‘if you sleep with his wife, that’s fine; if you sleep with my wife, that’s ‘illicit.”

2. The weather’s really lovely. Clear and bright and dry and warm. And by ‘warm’ I don’t mean ‘you may need a cardigan at night’, I mean hotter than the fires of hell. Its a fucking desert. And it acts like one. 45 degrees at least all through the summer. And no humidity. Perfect conditions for bear-headed running around 90-mintues solid. Extra time could be another death penalty.

3. Qatar is a ‘footballing nation’. Famous Qatari players include…. errr… hmmm… and… well, its definitely a footballing nation because someone there likes football. And its nothing about just the prestige and respectability that comes with hosting a World Cup. And Qatar, who will field a team as the host nation haven’t had a national team qualify for the World Cup since… well, never. They didn’t previously possess an international stadium. They would play with ‘sweaters for goalposts’ but no-one in Qatar owns a sweater.

4. As the investigation confirmed, there was no corruption involved in the bidding process. The various ‘sponsorship’ deals that coincidentally occurred around the time of the voting, in which 7 new schools were funded in poor countries and 19 new private jets were purchased in lands where they don’t even have airports, was nothing to do with the bid.

5. The Qatari government has no part in the fact that the terrorist organisations of Hamas and Isis are both massively funded by Qataris. Though the government is powerless to stop this rot. They’ll cut your bollocks off in a second for having lewd thoughts about a camel, but the tracing of vast amounts of money and arms to criminal organisations is apparently beyond their capability.

And that’s just some of the many reasons why the 2022 World Cup will be in that lovely nation. Better start bottling water now.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx