Andy's Glasses

I love the world of fashion. I’m very very fashionable, exceedingly stylish and so beautiful I’m often mistaken for Cara Delevine when I’m in McDonalds. And although fashions change every season, every year, all the time, I adopt the ‘stopped watch’ approach to what’s trendy. In that a stopped watch tells the right time twice a day, so I wear Levis and t-shirts and every decade or so I’m bang-on with the trend. The rest of the time, quite frankly, I don’t give a shit. Ok, I could go out and buy a bright yellow 3-piece suit with short trousers and the waistcoat in puce, and be totally fucking Shoreditch, with accompanying fluorescent green Doc Marten high-tops and a Pharrell Williams 10-gallon hat but it will be out of fashion by next weekend by which time Mel will have left me on the grounds that “you look like a total tosser and actually cause my stomach to turn”. And who could blame her? Plus we’d be about 3 grand poorer for the effort. High fashion ain’t cheap. Which is probably the main reason I never, ever, voluntarily enter a shopping centre without great duress.

But its London fashion week, so make a bleedin’ effort, will ya? And I know this because when I walk past Somerset House on the Strand on my way home the pavement is even more crowded than usual. Vans and lorries are blocking up the traffic as they are unloaded, not by burly Scotsmen in boiler suits (how 1970s is that???), but by effeminate and androgynous creatures in Stella McCartney, mincing their way under the weight of big boxes of stuff. And although the street is insanely packed with bodies, its not actually hard to get past. I don’t say that in a Lawrence Dellaglio kind of, shoulder barge, head down, press on kind of way, but you just glide through. Because a street full of apparent anorexics simply doesn’t occupy the same volume of space as a street full of normal people. And I don’t know if this crew of 6 foot 2 girls with 13-inch waists all taking photos of each other on smart phones (before they disappear altogether, perhaps) are models, design students, trainee lampposts or what, but they are quite gorgeous. But so painfully skinny, all of them, that, and I say this with no degree of sexism or objectification, they don’t have a pair of tits between the lot of ’em.

Yet in a way I love fashion, skinny birds aside. Because although the ‘new midi length skirt’ will not stop ISIS, and Putin is still Putin however ridiculously he may choose to dress, clothes are a celebration of the most superficial layer of all of us (ok, naturists aside). They are your costume, your disguise, your elected role for the day. You wouldn’t wear jeans to visit the Queen (well, I might, but you wouldn’t) and you wouldn’t wear a tuxedo to play football, even if you could well afford it on 200k a week wages. And in a world beset by major problems, we need the ridiculous, we need the stupid, we need to irrelevantly superficial and pointless just as a counterpoint to all the dross that we’d otherwise drown in.

Happy fashionable Wednesday

A xxxx

I can think of only one good reason for Scotland to seperate from the rest of Britain. And that is that if it succeeds it will become an independent country and will have to apply to become accepted by the European Union. Like Albania. And will have to prove its economic viability and its desire to become part of Greater Germany. So whilst in that limbo-state of un-Britishness and un-Europeanality, we could get duty free Scotch. Therefore I vote ‘YES’ to separation and let’s keep their Euro entry process dragging on until I’m totally pissed.

The other interesting facet of this seemingly endless parade of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ banners, Union Jacks and Saltires, and fucking kilts, is the avenues of support voicing their views for an Independent Scotland. Which would become, geographically, North Korea. The bad guys in the north, sharing a border with their enemies to the south (the good guys).

And oddly, North Korea is a firm ‘Yes’ vote. If North Koreans knew what ‘vote’ meant. They support independence because they like whisky. How shallow and sad.

Other words of support have come from China, Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe and even everyone’s favourite, ISIS. Ok, most have the agenda that whatever makes Britain weaker is good for them/the world. And all are places devoid of democracy in any form other than the superficially meaningless. In that ‘vote for me or you’re dead’ kind of way.

And Argentina. They are keen for Scotland to leave British rule because it augers well for the Falkland Islands, even though that little group of worthless isles in the frozen south Atlantic consistently vote to remain British, even the sheep. And as they’re in a majority there, you simply have to listen. But Argentina claims the largest number of people of Scottish descent anywhere outside the English speaking world. Presumably ‘outside the English speaking world’ includes Scotland too? I’ll check on that.

Yet what’s also odd is that Argentina also has the only region in the world outside Wales where they speak Welsh. And, uncommonly for these pages, that’s a true and proper fact. I’m going to Argentina at Christmas so I’ll take an English/Spanish/Welsh phrase book and see how I get on.

Diego Daffyd Bryn Williams-Thomas-Maradonna.

I’m waiting to see Alex Salmond in a Kim Jong-Un wig. Then I’ll vote ‘yes’.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

“THERE’S A FUCKING GREAT HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER!!!!!” they exclaimed (hence the exclamation marks; if they’d just kind of ‘said’ it, we wouldn’t need the punctuation). “AUSTRALIA WILL MELT!!!!! THE SEAS WILL RECEDE!!!! ELEPHANTS WILL GO BLIND!!!! THE WORLD WILL END!!!!!!!” “THE ONLY WAY TO PREVENT OUR PLANET FROM DYING IS TO STOP USING DEODORANT SPRAYS”.

That was in 1988. The year they banned underarm deodorising. Ok, you could use roll-on thingys, powders, liquids, if you chose, or you could just forget deodorants altogether like tube travellers do and go ‘au naturelle’ and smell like a warthog in heat. But Carbon Fluoro Chlorides, the propellants used in aerosol cans, were history. They destroyed life, as we know it, and were now banned. As unwelcome as ISIS, they left our lives.

And now, in celebration of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, the ozone layer is ‘better’. Yippee! Throw out that awful ‘factor 50’ sunblock that goes on like white gloss paint mixed with iron filings, get back on the beaches, the sea level will rise once more (or fall once more, I can never quite remember which is the good one) and life will be long and fruitfull.

What kind of overly simplistic, nobbish, moronic world does Al Gore, and all the other eco-panickers, inhabit? Oh, they live in a world which is 6 billion years old but 30 years of non-spray can seriously affect the entire atmospheric make-up. Wow. Evolution takes millennia, changes happen at the rate of glacial movements, yet throw out your ‘Sure’ and the Heavens will replenish. Amen.

I’m all in favour of being a little cautious (a little, mind, just a little) about ’emissions’ and stuff, because I live in a place where we have no air quality worth being proud of. London is an ecological wreck with pollution levels always way higher than we’d like them, and certainly miles higher than the Euro-beaurocrat free-loading pedants would like it to be to come up (or maybe down) to the levels laid down in Brussels. Which also, ironically, has shitty air quality.

Yet I simply never bought into the whole SAVE THE PLANET routine, the massed hysteria of a thousand screaching Greens telling us how to live in a proper, tree-huggy, clean, fresh world with no cars, planes and farting cows (the most significant source of world methane production), where everyone recycles their grass-cuttings, eats dandelions and drives a fucking Prius.

So this OZONE LAYER IS GETTING BETTER DUE TO US!!!!! rubbish is precisely that. The Ozone layer forms a hole every spring since Diplodocus ruled the land. It just varies in size some years. Then it gets smaller. The current ‘improvement of 4% is just a normal seasonal swing. And yes the ozone absorbs ultra-violet light and thus the absence of ozone would increase levels of cataracts forming in mammels, but the whole episode is a massive overreaction and the creation of a new industry of holier-than-thouness that those of us with obscenely large car engines can really do without.

I’ll take the improvement as a good thing. We can all breathe easier now. Metaphorically if not literally.

Happy monday

A xxxxx

Its all to play for. The season’s young. There’s everything to win, nothing to lose. Its a fair game. Except when its not particularly fair. Its not fair for Chelsea to have bought Diego Costa and then use him to personally destroy the high hopes of Swansea. Its not fair that Spurs pissed away 100 million quid on useless players last year when other teams make just one significant acquisition and it changes their fortunes. Its not fair that Spurs drew at Sunderland having twice been in the lead. And its not fair that Arsenal… well, anything to do with them is not really fair.

Is it fair on Newcastle fans that Alan Pardew is still their manager? Though one thinks not for much longer as he is destined to be a very early, premature almost, one for the chop. And is it fair that when Spurs go to all that trouble to steal Southampton’s manager because he seemed to be doing a pretty good job there, we now see Potechino’s replacement doing even better?? Is that fair?? I don’t think so. Southampton in the top four?? Whatever next?

Diego Costa is the undoubted star purchase of the summer. With number two going to Cesc Fabregas. Who should really have gone back to Arsenal but at the last moment was heard to say ‘I’m not going back to those tossers’. I’m just reporting what I heard, even though there were rumours that Wenger didn’t want the Spaniard back because he’s quite ugly.

But he doesn’t play ugly. He’s ‘assisted’ in as many goals in the first four games of the season than Eden Hazard managed all last year, and he was Chelsea’s player of the year, deservedly so. Whilst Costa has scored 7 goals in 4 matches. Ok, he can’t keep that up but that is quite awesome. Fernando Torres took 43 games to score 7.

And Costa is the perfect fit for Chelsea. Because he’s a treacherous, back-stabbing, disloyal scumbag who, in former years, would have been hanged for high treason. He’s a Brazillian. Born there. Has one of those ridiculously long Brazillian names from which ‘Diego Costa’ is just the first part of a seven page list of every relative who ever provided but one DNA contribution to his body. He played for Brazil. Whoever wins what, to play for Brazil is the ultimate aspiration, the absolute inclusion into the most fab club in the world. So he left, abandoned them, and became Spanish. And got royally fucked at the World Cup. But that’s not the point. I’m not sure what is; I never do. But he changed international shirts mid-career and that is totally unacceptable. He might as well be Scottish if he wants to abandon heritage, history and class.

Today we see if Louis Van Gaal can beat Alan Pardew to early dismissal. Because if his 150 million pounds worth of recent buys doesn’t perform well enough to see off QPR at Old Trafford, they’ll be calling for his head too. And wearing green shirts again, demanding that the Glazers sell the club to Asda, complaining about their ‘right ‘to be in the Champions League, blah, blah, northern blah.

John Terry never apologised to anyone named Ferdinand for the racial abuse he gave to Anton. Rio’s pissed off.

Ahhhhh, welcome to the football season.

A xxxx

Not a lot of people know this but I have a degree in psychology. Doesn’t everybody? No??? Well, I do. And the reasons are historic, complex and involve impressing women and being easily led astray; the story of my life. And of course, I’ve forgotten most of the stuff, because a. that’s what you do, and b. because counting the number of times rats in cages shit every hour and dividing by the number of people called ‘Horace’ is simply not worth remembering. But a few ‘gems’ just kind’a stick there. And one was:

you don’t cry because you’re sad; you’re sad because you’re crying.

Ooooooohhhh. That’s pedantic. But its not. Its about primacy. Its about causation and reaction. And its frikkin true. We proved it. Statistically within a range of probability of greater or equal to 5% beyond any possibility of it happening by chance alone. (The sentence which pretty much sums up everything that was wrong with studying an otherwise beautiful subject; well sums it up using 4 different statistical analysis methods to ‘prove’ the validity).

Anyway, you’re sad because you’re crying. Except for Oscar Pistorius; he’s crying for his very life. And it seems to have worked. Having spent the last nine months in a constant stream of tears, those gullible South African judicial types have let him off the two major charges of murder and the lesser one, leaving only a very minor ‘manslaughter’ charge, which could see him imprisoned, but probably won’t. Because he’s a white sporting hero with several disadvantages in life. And the way South Africa has always been is that if you just kill one person, the police probably won’t bother turning up. Its only when it starts to reach ‘Zulu’ proportions that those fat Afrikaaners get off their arses and investigate.

So expressions of emotion precede the emotions themselves. We smile because we’re happy (or because Spurs have won a game) but the act of smiling makes us feel happier still. Like a feedback loop. Emotionally.

Then what happens if we prevent facial expressions from working? Like, f’rinstnace, if we were so stupid as to inject rat poison or another suitable anaesthetic into our facial muscles? Would stopping the expression of emotion reduce the emotion itself?? And the answer is apparently ‘yes’. Because those of us stupid enough to use Botox will suffer from reduced facial expressions; that’s what we’re paying for, but that in turn will leave us emotionally stunted. Thus doctors are now saying that their colleagues who perform such procedures are ‘ethically, morally and professionally wrong’. But what about the terminally vain? Or the vainally retentive, as I call them. Gwynnie, Gordon Ramsey, Simon Cowell, even the otherwise exquisite Kylie(!!!!), all devotees to Botox, all going to be prevented from enjoying the full range of emotions. Will this affect Gwynnie’s next Oscar speech? Less blubbing, less caring and (hopefully) less thanking everyone from her milkman’s aunt to her broccoli-squeezer.

More research is required.

Happy saturday,

A xxxx

A few years ago Wayne Rooney, noted England captain and Manchester United player (almost-)extraordinaire (sometimes), wanted a ‘better deal’ from his club. Upset that he was ‘only’ earning about £150,000 each week, barely enough to keep him in granny porn mags, he demanded more. The club refused on the grounds that ‘YOU EARN MORE THAN THE FUCKING QUEEN YOU POTATO-FACED LITTLE THUG’, or something like that. So Wayne did what every decent person would do. He put in a transfer request and asked to go to Manchester City. The place where money, quite literally, grows, if not on trees, then out of a hole in the ground in Abu Dhabi. It just pours out, black and thick and sticky. Manchester United had no choice, even though they suspected the bluff by his agents. And football agents have been refused entry into ISIS on grounds of immorality. United paid up, the fans heckled him for about 10 minutes until he scored a great goal, kissed his shirt-badge and has lived happily ever after on about 250 grand a week, under-performing week after week.

I therefore suspect quite strongly that the entire ‘get Scotland out of the UK’ campaign has been orchestrated by football agents. Not Scottish ones; they’re stuck with Scottish players who are worthless, and 10 percent of nothing is still nothing.

Because Scotland is basically ‘pulling a Rooney’. By threatening to leave the Union they are now receiving promises of further devolution and accompanying powers that had previously been scoffed at by Westminster when requested by the Scots. They wanted tax powers, control of their health and education and all that oil revenue, and the Eton/Oxbridge toffs in Westminster laughed, scoffed and derided those dirty, haggis-eating oiks as incapable and unworthy, having only been mainly educated in Scotland and thus unfit for power. So down goes the Rooney “then we’re off!!” card and suddenly those same group of pompous, stuck-up southern pooftahs are straight up there on the 7.27 from Kings Cross, with their aides, their butlers, footmen, chamber maids and basically, ‘the full Downton’ to offer those Scots the world, and more, if they’ll just stay with ‘the family’, the Union, the Jack, the rest of us. And like many ‘families’ most members fucking hate most of the others, so the metaphor is indeed valid. You can have it all, they say, just stay together and we’ll give you more than you could have dreamed of.

In the debate last night, one of the ‘panel’, the one representing the ‘NO’ campaign, was George Galloway. So I’m voting YES. Whatever they’re voting about.

Ok, I’m really bored with Scotland now. Let’s try and get rid of Wales.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

This is Spurs new stadium. And its wonderful. It will become a beacon for the good, the holy, the noble and the brave. And they’ll have to be a bit brave as this spectacular edifice, this monument to sport and all its riches, sits basically in Sodom & Gomorra central. In the urban slum that is Tottenham. The last notable ‘wow!’ that the high road received was when Turjit Akbal put a new sign over his take-away depicting a rotating kebab. And it lit up at night. Until Turjit stopped paying his electricity bill. But as a kebab shop, it ticks all the boxes: its cheap, spicy, very tasty, is fab when you’re too drunk to appreciate the difference, and its quite near a general hospital.

And I’m happy that Spurs aren’t moving. They’re staying where they should, where they belong (among the massage parlours and fish & chip shops and used car part emporia), in Tottenham. Because for Tottenham Hotspur to play their home games in Esher would be horrible. Or Croydon, Southend or Walthamstow even. “We are Tottenham”, sing the faithful every week, “from the Lane” and thus will it continue. As opposed to: “We are Tottenham, from Ashton-under-Lyme”.

But staying is not always the easy thing it implies. Because if you build the new ground on top of the old one, you can’t do it whilst they’re playing. Someone would get hurt. Going up for a header when a 60 metre crane drops half a new stand on you. And so, the ‘seamless transfer’ is now not going to be quite as seamless. A local company (Arsenal fans) are appealing against the compulsory purchase order of their poxy, worthless little site, just to stall things. Bastards. And so now, it would appear, Spurs will be displaced for the entire 2017-18 season. Which is a bit of a problem. 20 matches, no fixed abode. We can either play them at a whole variety of changing venues, we could use Wembley for some, but not for all of them due to ‘other commitments’ and we can’t use the Olympic Stadium because West Ham, being hateful, vengeful swines, won’t let us. The only other option, the horror of horrors… MK Stadium, Milton (fucking) Keynes. 60 miles up the motorway, in godforsaken no-where-land, with barely a kebab shop in sight. What an awful thought. Who’ll pay the petrol money?

Though if you stay on the motorway for just a bit longer you can instead go to Manchester United to see their new, recently signed, 145 million quids’ worth of global superstars recently added to their ranks. Even though they’re still losing. And although money has never been a problem for them Mancs, the richest club in the world, (despite the Glazers’ best efforts) their year out of Champions League football will cost them dearly. Never mind; sell Danny Welbeck and you make up some of the difference. In fact, sell him to your biggest rivals (ok, so are Liverpool, certainly Man City, but in terms of pure hatred?), Arsenal for 16 million pounds. When the average football boot cleaner goes for £25 mil, and a hot-dog vendor for 32. Panic buying is one thing, but panic selling? I smell rats. And wish young Danny had come to Spurs.

Happy thursday,

A xxxx

People who use electronic cigarette devices are called ‘vapers’. They ‘vape’. They don’t smoke. Because instead of noxious shit and tar and dead leaves and stuff, WE now instead inhale our nicotine in a harmless… stuff. In fact not just harmless but I’d say totally beneficial to the vaper and all those around him. I base that on nothing. Except trust. Perhaps naive trust, that what I’m now doing is not only ‘harmless’ to me but to those around me, those secondary vapers. Rotten freeloading cheap bastards too mean to buy their own e-liquids, they sneakily inhale all my left-overs.

But more and more people are switching to electronic addiction aids so obviously the tobacco companies are hedging and getting into that market too. Rather than leave all those addicts they’ve nurtured over the years to the cashflow of others. But it is reckoned that thousands of lives a year will be saved from smoking related illness and death by using e-things. Which is good news. Particularly for me.

Yet now, in a similar vein to the tobacco companies, the anti-smoking lobbies are quickly becoming anti-vaping lobbies, worried as they are that they’ll all be out of a job if the world stops smoking. And their argument is that ‘we don’t konw enough about e-cigarettes and their potential to harm’. Even though learned professors have made quite remarkable claims for weaning smokers into vapers.

But the best argument made against e-cigarettes was that ‘a baby accidentally swallowed his mother’s e-cig cartridge!!!!!’ Genuinely made as a supposedly valid point against electronic cigarettes specificallly.

In which case we must seriously consider banning of the following items: buttons, coins, stones, caps from almost any container, scraps of paper, fluff, keys, earth, sand, screws and nails, nuts and bolts and dog shit. All things (but by no means an exhaustive list) regularly thrust into the mouths of babies by their own hands that are swallowable.

Babies under 1 live in an oral world. And they analise that world by shoving eveything possible into their mouths. Indiscriminately. How much of that analysis is useful is an unknown, but it certainly attracts parental attention.

Freudian psychosexual development theory which termed this ‘oral phase’ is more famous for its next level, the anal one. Because people who have problems leaving that level remain ‘anally fixated’ and become of the obsessive compulsive variety of humanity. Who we term, ‘a bit anal’ for that very reason. Though it should be mentioned that Freud was a touch weird and every action at any stage of life, according to him, was sexually-linked in some way.

The anti-smoking lobby are a bit weird too. A bit anal. If a baby eats a toaster, its not really the toaster’s fault, is it?

Happy vaping Wednesday

A xxxx

There are currently 650 electoral constituencies in the UK. Of which 59 are in Scotland. About, say, 9%. And if Scotland buggers off (‘devolves’) then those constituencies will simply cease to be any part of our political system. And if you work on the assumption that, since Mel Gibson wiped the blue paint of his face, no Scot has ever, will ever or would ever vote Conservative, then those 9% of our electorate represent a massive, possibly catastrophic loss to the Labour Party. Ok, there’s a few Scottish Nationalists up there, some who are even prepared to go against any kind of considered judgment and vote for Alex Salmond, but the majority of Scots are Labourites. So when Ed Milliband mouths off about being ‘better together’; he’s not necessarily talking about England and Scotland, but just about the Labour party. Because without Scotland; he’s fucked. Which is why there’s so much fervent interest by the Labourites to retain the Union. And that’s where it gets (almost) interesting.

You need to choose a ‘big hitter’ to represent your cause. You need someone with gravitas, with intellectual clout, with charm, with credibility, affinity with the public, someone you can warm to. And they pick Gordon Brown. The most unpopular man on any side of any border, ever. The only thing Brown has in his favour is that he is emphatically ‘not from London’, the place that for some reason, all Scots feel obliged to hate. Tony Blair would have been a better choice. He’s Scottish. Well, up north somewhere. Alistair Darling lacks the charm, and the correct coloured eyebrows to be the ‘main man’ and Neil Kinnock is Welsh and a bit dim. They should have picked Kenny Dalgleish.

Never mind; the ‘spare’ is on the way. In the age old tradition of Royalty, one needs an ‘heir and a spare’ and Princess Katie is once more in feto uterinis, or however posh people describe such a condition. Little George is having a sibling. And I couldn’t be happier if Spurs finished the season 4th. Ok, I would be much happier, but the world indeed loves a royal baby. And the pre-baby stuff too. Even if that involves, mainly, a lot of vomit. Because poor Kate doesn’t do well in her first trimester, not a lot better in the second and by the third when it starts to settle down a little, she has to do the hard bit and eject the creature from within. This little proto-baby, probably now about 3 inches long and looking like an alien from the deep, is third in line to the throne of England, Wales, Ireland and possibly Scotlalnd (to be advised). If (hypotherically) some bizarre tragedy took out Prince Charles, William and baby George, then Kate’s bump would be the king/queen of all he/she surveys. Even though all he currently surveys is Kate’s womb. They’d have to find a really big crown and wrap it round Kate like a belt. Or… no, don’t go there.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I have but one question regarding the now seemingly distinct possibility that Scotland may gain the independence it (or some of it) desires. And its not a question about currency. Nor how long the North Sea oil will last (Alex Salmond says “almost forever”, people in the oil biz say “about 3 weeks”), nor whether the Queen will remain head of state there or if they intend to burn Balmoral to the ground in the ultimate statement. My question is whether our planned, Summer 2015 trip to the whisky distilleries will go ahead. Will the distilleries still be open? Will the borders be open? Will I need a passport, like travelling to France, Spain or any other hostile nation, or will it be like going from Italy to Germany with gates up and no-one there at the sentry post?

Ok, that’s about 6 questions and I’m not really done yet. Though most of the others are about the whisky, because its much nicer than Scotland and politics.

Scotland may devolve. Good word. And odd because of all British people half of the Scots haven’t yet quite evolved properly, so they’re going to miss out on the last of the Darwinism and go straight to devolution. Part of the revolution. For their intstitutions.

How many Scots voted for their football team to lose to Germany last night? Eh??

I’ve wanted to do the whisky tour for ages. So has Mel. She’ll drink anything. Preferably everything. She can’t help it; her dad’s Scottish. And I have lots of friends who are whisky connoisseurs, whisky experts, whisky devotees. You know; drunk snobs. And my problem is; I can’t tell the fucking difference. Give me Tescos 2-for-1 bargain basement Skoch (made in Taiwan so you have to be careful with the name) and I can’t distinguish it from the finest, 24-year-old, barely-half-a-malt, McTavish-Glenhoddle, made with the water that Scotsmen sweat off under their sporrans. (Eeeuuuwww). So I need an education in such matters. And driving round the Highlands with a bottle in one hand and a phone in the other getting progressively pissed all day (and all night) seems a great way to become a more rounded person. And peole say its very pretty up there too. Can’t imagine it myself with the nearest skyscraper about 700 miles away, but there ya go.

And if, as the polls are starting to indicate, their nation votes YES, will Alex Salmond become their chief? Will that smug, pompous little shit get his face on the postage stamps? Can we go back to hating Andy Murray in the way he should be hated? Can Prince Charles still wear a kilt? Can we watch old Billy Connolly videos? More importantly, will Scottish footballers be counted as ‘foreigners’ under the new team limits?

We must consider all facets of this debate.

Happy monday

A xxxx