Andy's Glasses

Well, its all happening in the world of women. The Church of England (note: not ‘Britain’, not the ‘United Kingdom’, not effin Scotland, but the church of ENGLAND) is to ordain women bishops for the first time since records began. Well, for the first time anyway. And that is just brilliant news. Particularly for women who really want to become bishops and for… errr… hmmm…

This is good for the job market too. I don’t know how many women bishops are needed to, kind of, keep up with all the bishoply work that needs doing on a day-to-day basis, how much female praying is required, how many red-and-white frocks need to be worn in a spiritual way, but the C of E is now officially an equal opportunity employer. Or maybe God is now officially an equal opportunity employer. Their version of God anyway. Other versions may vary.

So perhaps this can be an aspiration for young girls. No longer will they devote time and energy to trying to become a Victoria’s Secrets model, or a WAG with an orange face and a yellow thong, let them become bishops. Every chess set needs one. In fact, needs four. The future is bright. The future is holy.

And yet more golden opportunities for women emerge from yet another direction as well. As David Cameron clears out his cabinet of crusty old Eton-Oxbridge white middle-class men to make room for something new, something exiting, something radical in the way of government. Which may well be yet more Eton-Oxbridge white middle-class men, but I think not. Maybe the constant feeling by the public of total dissociation from a government who bear no relation to normal people’s lives, anxieties and problems has forced D-Cam to try and appear a little more ‘man-of-the-masses’ even though he’s never had a proper job, speaks like the Queen and wouldn’t know a ‘money-worry’ if it bit him in the wallet. So perhaps its time (and 10 months before an election would certainly seem an appropriate time) to try and make government just a touch more representative of everyday Britain. Which is not the exclusive domain of former public schoolboys with trust funds.

Approximately half the population of this nation are women. Approximately. About half are men. And the discrepancy are those I’m not prepared to comment upon at this juncture. So to garner the female vote, he needs to put more women in the Cabinet. I don’t mean that in a perverse way. Though…

To properly represent the population, Cabinet should have just one upper-class twit, five women, three of them with tattoos, one complete slag and one bishop. There should be three homeless Romanian beggars, two Polish builders and five fat-bellied blokes who drive Transit vans and would normally vote UKIP on the grounds that its easier to spell than ‘conservative’. We should have several Brits of Asian descent, half a jew, or maybe one very small, kind of Woody Allen type one, and four paedophiles. Sadly, for William Hague, there’s no room left for a whining, semi-gay Yorkshireman. Sorry Bill. Even after posing around with Angelina Jolie, you’re still done and dusted. Brad Pitt you ain’t.

I’ve sent a copy of this to the Prime Minister in the hope he’ll heed my good counsel.

Happy Tuesday, unless you’ve just been sacked from the Cabinet. In which case: I’m looking for someone to cut my hedges.

A xxxx

deutschland deutschland uber alles
‘we’ played the game without any malice
unlike those Argies, South American scum,
they kicked the shit out of Schweinsteiger; booted him in the bum

then chinned him in the chest, elbowed him on his head,
kicked him in the goolies, left him there for dead.
But Bastian’s a hero, descended from the Hun
He got right up like the Terminator, never one to run.

So they beat him with big sticks, kneed him in the thigh,
punched him, strangled him, bit him and stabbed him in the eye.
His leg cramped, his teeth jarred, his bloody arm fell off
He just kept on going, a hero, not a toff.

The match was actually quite wonderful, it really had it all,
except a goal or two, which eventually came when the net finally caught the ball.
Deep into extra time, the score finally settled right
when penalties were looming the Germans ended the fight.

The match was fast and furious, played at a fabulous pace
The Germans marching onwards, the Argies exploiting the space
Schweiny, (as I call him), was pulling all the strings,
til the ball broke lose and Messi could do his things

But even the little wonderguy, so filled with all that is magical
could fail to prevent the inevitable becoming rather tragical.
To win the World Cup for Leo just wasn’t to be
to become an unquestionable superstar like Pele, Maradona and me.

They gave him the man-of-the-tournamet, a trophy to hang on his wall
that wasn’t what he really wanted, but you just can have it all
As the Germans brought on Gotze, Super-Mario as it turned out
Scored in truly fabulous style and ended the 2 hour goal drought.

So now its really over, the football’s done and dusted,
no more great games to watch, the tv might as well get busted
along with certain reputations, of teams that didn’t do well
England were just plain shite, Brazil are going to hell

Spain fell a long way, the Dutch lost the plot
The French are of no concern and Croatia can go and rot.
Because everybodys singing, from Berlin to Buckingham Palace,
of the German victory; Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles.

Happy monday

A xxxx

Test cricket is an acquired taste. For a start the matches last 5 days. So unless you’re retired, unemployed, very rich or so organised at work that you can just ‘pop over to Trent Bridge’ for the week, you generally just pick a day to go. Just one. But its a long day. Very long. A full day, but rather civilised in that most other sports don’t stop for ‘drinks’, for lunch and of course, as its a British invention, for ‘tea’. Ya need a few scones after all that… errrr… all that standing round wearing white clothes. Need to top up those calories after barely moving for 3 hours. Its exhausting. And I can’t watch it.

Yet I consider myself some kind of cricket fan. Mainly because its just so eccentrically leisurely and British and its a game so full of numbers and statistics that it appeals to my inner actuary. (Didn’t even know I had one of those, but life’s full of surprises).

One Day cricket came about to kind of ‘speed things up a bit’. Like putting caffeine in the tortoise’s lettuce leaves. And 20-20 is like ‘ultimate cricket’ when everything happens in a few hours and can even claim some degree of excitment. And that’s great for the tv generation, for the impatient, for a society that generally lacks patience and demands its sports to be fun. Cricket was never about fun. Perish the thought. Its a game for gentlemen and proper gentlemen possess a sense of fun like they possess a pair of hob-nailed boots or a thong.

A cricket team has 11 players. And when they go into bat, they start with the best batsmen. Those who are great at scoring runs. They’re specialists at hitting the ball a long way and defending their wickets (those little wooden things that, should they fall down, or be hit by the ball, then YOU ARE OUT!). So most runs are scored by the first five or six batsmen, then once they’re all out, the bowlers come in to bat and they’re also generally specialists, but at bowling and many are not to great at batting. And they bat in pairs, one at each end, and each pair is called a wicket. Yes, that’s confusing but cricket is as much about confusing the uninformed and the foreigners as it is about sporting prowess.

Yesterday morning, on day 4 of the test against India something special happened. England had partially ‘collapsed’ and after an Indian first innings score of 457, had made just 202 runs when they lost their 7th man. That’s generally a bad thing. For England. Not so much for India and the streets of Mumbai and would have been filled with dirty-faced, shoeless little slumdogs whooping around in celebration. Indians don’t work when cricket is being played anywhere in the world. In fact they don’t work at all, only for Asda, making little sundresses for Mel to buy in Cornwall, earning £1 every three months.

So there’s 4 men left, but as there has to be 2 batting, that means there only three more wickets, three more ‘outs’ before the inning is over. And the last 4 batsmen are not there a the bottom of the list for nothing. They’ve earned their right to be last by sheer determination and sustained displays of ineptitude with the bat. Yet they did ok, with three of them joining the last remaining proper batsman, Joe Root, and combining to score another 90 runs before the penultimate wicket fell and the very last man came on to the pitch. England were still 160 runs behind when Jimmy Anderson, great bowler, but batsman upon whom the whole nation was depending??

Three hours 52 minutes later (I told you it was exciting, I never said it was quick) our final pair had scored nearly 200 runs, overtaken the Indian lead and set a record for final wicket partnership in a test match anywhere, ever. And cricket scores go back fucking centuries. Every cricket ball that was ever batted has been logged and kept for posterity. Because in cricket you have the time to do such things. An abundance of time on your hands.

So to Jimmy Anderson, and the outstanding Joe Root, I raise my hat. (Gentlemen do have hats). And although I didn’t watch even one ten second snippet of the play, I was with you. Numerically. A wonderful achievement. So wonderful that the match will now probably be drawn. But that’s great in cricket. If we wanted every game to produce winners we’d all be American.

Perish the thought.

Happy sunday

A xxxx

So its arrived, the ‘big match’, the final frontier, the last hurdle, the… yeah, whatever. Holland playing Brazil tonight is so exciting, so massive, so, so, so… so something that I’m going out for dinner and will completely forget all about it. The interest in who comes 3rd and 4th in the World Cup holds the same interest as who didn’t win last year’s celebrity bake-off. Or who failed to win a first round match at Wimbledon. Its basically to find the champion loser. And no-one likes a loser. Even though if Brazil played Holland in virtually any other circumstance, I’d be rivetted.

I’ll save my rivetting for tomorrow night. For what might be ‘la grande classique’ or might be ‘la boring dull garbage’. We can only be hopeful. But who do we support? Who is the lesser of evils between Germany and Argentina? We, generally speaking, hate them both. Neutrality is so uninspiring. So pointless. Might as well be Swiss. I can’t support Argentina because:

of the Falkland Islands
of Maradonna’s cheating goal in 1986
they played the most horrible game ever on wednesday night
they can be quite horrible and nasty when required

I can’t support Germany because:

they’re mainly German
of all those wars
there’s something immensely satisfying to see them lose
they’re mainly German

I love Argentina because:

of Lionel Messi, the best player in the world, bar none
they can at times play wonderful football
I still love Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa

I love Germany because:

errrrr…
hmmmm…
ah! because my car’s German and I love that.

Yet Germany are the only team, other than a few of the south amercians, who play the game as it should be played. They play to win, rather than just to not lose. They are organised (as they would be; its a national trait), they are a wonderful collective and they are fab to watch.

Luis Suarez has gone to Barcelona on a free transfer. His teeth are going seperately for 75 million quid. And suddenly there’s a new phrase that is being used in the Liverpool context, as reciptients of these riches. To ‘do a Spurs’. Meaning to get a shit-load of money for a player and squander it on second rate (that’s only the good ones) rubbish players. How flattering for my team to be yet another metaphor for failure.

So come on Germany (yes, I’m afraid its come to that)

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

At the ‘last supper’ of our Devon & Cornwall world tour last Friday, wonderful dinner, small dining room, there was inevitable blah, blah, blah with the couple on the next table. He was old. An Englishman who moved to New Joisey in 1960 and lived there ever since. She a bit younger, second wife, also English, now a nurse ‘over there’. Damned Yanks. Now you know as much as I do about this couple. He is in fact a retired optician and they were over for a wedding. So far so good, in that ‘few glasses of wine, fabulous meal, tables 3 feet apart, kind of way’. He had a curious accent that was 1 part Artful Dodger, 3 parts Goodfellas. And all was well until we mentioned our trip to Ground Zero. At which point The Man (never asked his name, certainly not after what followed) leaned over and informed me quietly but firmly, that the whole disaster that was 9/11 was ‘done by the American government, you know?’ No, I didn’t know that, in fact, did you?

Well, apparently, the ‘evidence’ that it wasn’t all as we thought is ‘massive’. That the hole in the Pentagon wasn’t plane-shaped. That the World Trade Center towers came straight down, causing no damage to adjacent buildings, and that would never happen, that photographic evidence is overwhelming that Al Quaeda couldn’t have done it, therefore the FBI, the CIA, Homeland, whoever, did it themselves. And he was serious. I sat there with my mouth open, aghast, with some half-chewed beetroot risotto with smoked bream pate and a hint of parsley reduction just kind’a hanging off my lower lip. Not my best look.

I asked, as you have to, what could possibly have been the motivation of the American government to murder 3000 of its own citizens, most of them registered voters, destroy half of New York and upset the entire world? The answer was that enabled the invasion of Iraq and changed the way airports are secured so that the good people of the USA can be better kept track of. He wasn’t big on motivation. Wasn’t as relevant in his eyes as the ‘evidence’, which was as huge as anything generally is in the world of the paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Strange how from one moment talking to a ‘normal guy’ changes in an instant and a switch trips in my head. The one that turns on the ‘nutter alert’. And he went on and on and on and on about this ridiculous theory. No, not just a ‘theory’, this is the only way it could have happened.

Then yesterday I read that within 2 years all taxis will take credit cards. And I came up with my own conspiracy theory.

When someone is at the cash register paying for a packet of chewing gum with a debit card, I simply want to kill them. Do these people not carry 50p in cash? So that the entire purchase process can be done with in 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes? Yet we are all encouraged to be ‘cashless’ and damn the queues of frustrated purchasers waiting behind you.

Yet if every transaction is electronically registered, even paying a taxi fare, the government know so much more about us. And so does HMRC. Taxi drivers all earn £200,000 a year, but only declare £26.72, after expenses, petrol and window cleaning sprays. The rest is all cash and no-one’s any the wiser. Until 2 years time, when they’ll know everything.

So Micheal Caine can lodge 15 million in a tax ‘avoidance’ scheme but a taxi driver can’t take a tenner to buy a surgical support for his disabled child… (can you ever have enough pathos?)

Happy Friday; go to the cashpoint today and draw out a handful. Fuck the government.

A xxxx

Are you old enough to remember telephone conversations like this:

“Hello, I’d like to do something”

“Yes, that’s no problem, sir, let me just do it for you. There. Anything else I can help you with?”

Today its all password-protected. PIN numbers. Security questions. More security questions. Data (fucking) protection. The curse on modern society. Which I can almost forgive when dealing with banks and sensitive matters, but when you go in with cash to pay the paper bill in the sweetshop and they ask for your mother’s uncle’s favourite football team after Acrington Stanley got relegated, you know the world is fucked up beyond all belief.

That actually didn’t happen. Hasn’t happened. Not yet; but its only a matter of time before they won’t sell you a skinny latte without a PIN number. Those fucking Eurocrats have so much to answer for. But they can’t answer it until they’ve passed ‘security’. It would be in breach of so many rules that Brussels would fall. If only.

The other day my darling elder daughter broke her phone. Again. Fortunately for me this is no longer my problem because I sold her last year. Well, she got married last year so is no longer my responsibility. Except where O2 are concerned. Because the original contract on her first, steam-driven, brick-sized phone was taken out in my name, 14 years ago. And even though it is actually mentioned in the ancient Hebrew texts, brought by Moses’ nephew from the banks of the Euphrates, that “…and thus upon marriage shallst all mobile phonage be transferred, according to G-d’s will, to the husband, as it is written, including all free minutes and texts…” even with that, its still ‘my’ phone. Even though she pays the bills and gets all the documents.

I won’t catalogue the entire sequence of events, which started with a visit by Natalie to her local O2 shop, followed by a call for me to visit mine, as its ‘all in my name and they can’t talk to her’, but don’t worry, everything’s on the system’, which it obviously wasn’t. We met up and went together, an hour later Natalie emerged, pale and defeated, telling me that although when I’d left 50 minutes before having provided the necessary iris scan, fingerprinting and DNA sample, they told me I’d done my bit. Several phone calls later, setting up new, ‘transfer passwords’ and other total corporate bollox from a company proving again and again that when it comes to incompetence, no-one does it better, the phone actually started working. The new one.

Well, that was easy. Only took two people 6 hours to sort out something that should have taken 10 minutes.

Even more frustrating was the football last night. Has there ever been a more boring, dull, drab, dire game played. Extra time was horrible. What? Another half hour of that shit!!!

Germany deserve to win the World Cup on the grounds that they actually try to win matches. Which is very different from trying not to lose them. There were no winners last night. Wish I’d gone to bed early.

Happy Thursday; you’ll be fine as long as you don’t try to do anything.

A xxxx

Well, no-one gave ‘us’ a chance, but ‘we’ not only beat Brazil last night but thrashed them; humiliated them, put the complete socio-economic fabric of the entire nation back ten years and caused levels of pain, suffering and chest-beating amoung survivors not normally witnessed outside of an earthquake zone.

I’ve never been prouder to be a German. In fact, I’ve never been a German before now. Never had a need to be. But after such a performance, I think its time to seriously reconsider my roots, to dig deep, get in touch with my inner ‘who do you think you are’ and find a Ludvig van Conway (or Ludvig van Cohen, as it would have been) who fled Prussian persecution in 1736 and ran off to instead find persecution in Poland, Russia or points east.

Football is famously a ‘game of two halves’. And I missed the first half. Oh. No. Yes, I did. Was playing bridge. The tv was on elsewhere but running inside to see what was happening every time a goalish cheer went up actually became exhausting during the first half so I sat nursing my cards and pretending I wasn’t German at all. By the time the second half started the match, as it was, was over as a competition. Only Spurs could possibly squander a 5-0 half time lead. Not Germany. They- sorry, ‘we’, are too organised, too regimented, too… too damned jack-booted and straight-laced to collapse under the renewed Brazillian second half assault. Which itself was pretty half-hearted, even after a half time pep talk by Big Phil Scoliari that doubtless included phrases like “THE WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY IS GOING TO HATE YOU FOR ALL ETERNITY!!!!!!!!” and subtleties like that. “No pressure, guys, but if you lose this game YOU WON’T MAKE IT OUT OF THE CAR PARK ALIVE. If the fans don’t kill you THEN I FUCKING WILL!!!!”

Yet I’m saddened, even as a victorious German through and through. Because Brazil (and you always consider all previous teams when you use the word collectively) play the game as it should really be played. With passion, with love, with masses of skill and most of all, with abundant enjoyment. Only the South Americans can really do that. Brazil more than all others. Usually. They didn’t seem to enjoy last night so much, granted. And their loss will certainly deflate the wonderful feeling of the tournament to a degree.

But sadly, reality bites. And if you’re not that over-blessed with true Brazillian superstars, and the only one who can truly claim membership to that wonderful club is out injured, then you kind’a need to sort out your defense a bit. Poor David Luiz. From hero, poster boy (in the absence of Neymar) and superstar goal-scorer last week, to total fucking liability and tosser, in just 45 minutes of the perfect demonstration of ‘how to defend in football. If you’re in the pay of a far-eastern gambling syndicate’. But it wasn’t just Luiz, the entire back four were worse than useless, defensive midfielders became just midfielders and all went to shit as confidence crumbled and inevitability took its grip.

A sad day for Brazil, but here in Germany, let’s break out another case of Leibfraumilch and sing some marching songs.

Happy Wednesday (in some places)

A xxxx

After the feast comes the famine. And I’m not referring to my first few days of not having Cornish Cream Teas. Issa metaphor, innit. And it refers to the first day when suddenly, there’s no sport to watch. Yesterday. Black Monday. Tennis is finished, footballers resting. All that happened was about 200 men in lycra whizzed by, about 500 yards from where I work, on pushbikes. I didn’t actually make it down on to the Embankment to see them; I see cyclists every day whizzing round the streets of London ignoring the traffic lights. Normally everyone, motorists, pedestrians, jaywalkers, just ignores them as a pest on society, but stick a yellow jacket on one and suddenly it becomes: Le Tour de France. In the City of London, and 2 million northerners with nothing better to do, come and line our streets to watch this collective whizzing.

So in the absence of proper (ie not sitting down) sport, the peoples of Europe have to find other distractions. So they’re running the bulls in Pamplona this week. Always lots of fun, that one. Running down narrow streets with a herd of wild 3 ton bovines, hoping that the person who gets gored, or trampled, is someone else. Not very altruistic, those Spaniards. Ever since they left the World Cup…

But I love these ancient celebrations. I love their diversity and creativity and in fact their total stupidity. Yes, your great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather did this but that doesn’t mean that on the 7th of June you have to put your head on the tracks in front of oncoming train. Nor that on the 15th of August you put on stockings and suspenders and a red hat and leap off a cliff for ‘leming day’. July 23rd is when you dress as a druid and eat grapefruit. Whilst in Norfolk, the whole of April is ‘shag-yer-cousin’ month. As is May, June, July…

In Belarus yesterday was the pagan festival of Ivan Kapala (just don’t even bother asking) in which young ladies in long white dresses jump over fires. Great idea. Why not douse the dresses in petrol to make it even more stupid. But heh; if it makes a Belarusian happy for the day, then the world is a happier place to live in. Even without football.

The enquiry into child abuse in instittutions in our fine (???) and apparently perverted land is as necessary as it is late. What is more incredible is the apparent scale of this problem. I can’t believe (hope?) that more than say 5% of people are potential paedophiles, and yet some institutions would appear to increase this to about 90%. Obviously such horrible and vile people would find themselves to be drawn towards children, leaving schools, orphanages, hospitals obvious career choices, along with the priesthood. But the BBC? And fucking Parliament?? Whereas those in Westminster who aren’t kiddy-fiddlers would seem to be just normal rapists. Who are almost the ‘good guys’ of government. What the f***???

Does anyone in the world want Germany to beat Brazil tonight? Including Germans?

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Those damned Yanks. Not a clue between them. They come to London, go and watch Martin Freeman in Richard III at the theatre and once he’s done his ‘now is the winter of our discontent…’ soliloque, they clap. Applaud!!!! At a theatre!! Which is shameful and not what we do over here. And for good reason. Actors on stage have to get ‘into character’ far more keenly than those on screen. There are no retakes, no fuck-ups to end up on the director’s floor, there is just the moment. And that moment is shattered if the audience break into applause. It upsets the flow. Which is why British audiences (at least we’re the best at something) never applaud until the end of an act. Its not fair on the actors to do otherwise. Bleeding precious luvvies that they are.

Americans will generally clap and ‘whoop!’ at anything. Its what they do. That and Middle East invasions. They even clap at a cinema screen on occasion. Which, if you think about it, is just a touch weird.

But worse still is that these audiences who have so upset the ‘true’ theatre-goers don’t applaud great acting. No, they only applaud ‘stars’. And because Martin Freeman a Lord of the Rings star, and was totally brilliant in the tv series Fargo, he gets cheered and applauded on stage, whereas other perhaps lesser known actors, equally excellent, don’t. Its like the world of ‘Hello!’ has arrived at the stage door.

And is it the end for Roger Federer? Was yesterday’s amazing final possibly his last? I hope not, I truly love the man, in a very butch and back-slappy, manly kind of way, obviously. Yesterday’s match was simply incredible. And odd how such a majority were supporting Fed, the good guy, the white knight, and not Djokovich, cast in the Darth Vader, forces of evil role. Even Kate and Wills abandoned thier normal impartiality to cheer for Roger. Everyone wanted him to win. Other than the child molesters, rapists, people who eat at KFC, wife-beaters, terrorists and Lib Dems. They were on Novak’s side.

But it wasn’t to be. And even I have to admit that the Serb was very gracious in victory, very humble and even (for a Serb) quite charming. He obviously has a new speech-writer now he’s learning all from Boris Becker. Just don’t let him in the broom cupboard.

Ok, back to work

Happy monday

A xxxx

So that was Cornwall, Devon and the entire south west of England. Stunning, sunny (in the most part) and fab.

Today I’m in Norfolk. As East as you can go without falling off the edge into the North Sea. In fact I’m writing this on the 10.15 from Kings Cross to Kings Lynn (I only travel with, to and from Kings).

Norfolk, legendary place of English rural inbrediness. And yet again, a demonstration of the power of the internet.

Rachie wanted a car. Needed a car. So instead of going out to buy Exchange & Mart, several local papers and looking at postcards in newsagents windows, hoping to find maybe one car; instead with 3 clicks you can find every single car of that type in the entire fucking WORLD that is for sale.

The downside being that there’s no more walking round the corner with a pocketful of cash to pick up your 1972 Ford Escort 1300 E in ‘reasonable condition’, Ferrari Red, except for one of the doors, slight knocking in first gear… and second third and forth, needs a tarpaulin underneath to catch the 3 pints of oil lost each night. Instead, all that you have to do is go to Kings Lynn. Which is 100 miles away. Could have been worse. The car of choice could have been located in Grimsby. Canterbury. Glasgow.

Thus are younger daughter and I on a pilgrimage to the Wild East. A comedian on stage once asked of the audience, as they do: “anyone here from Norfolk?” and a few hands went up and the comic yelled “Hey! High Six”. Which remains to this day one of the finest examples of fabulous stereotyping and cruel judgmentalism ever. The people from East Anglia are NOT inbred, they just appear to be, both physically and biologically.

Last night’s football match between Costa Rica and those smug cheating, diving Dutchmen was indeed a classic. The value of the Holland team, at current market value, give or take, is probably about £350million. The value of the Costa Rica team is approximately $22.50. And yet it came down to the randomness of a penalty shoot-out to produce (what some consider) an unfair winner.

So here’s an idea. Every time a player takes a ‘dive’ during the game, that should reduce the number of penalites to be taken, should the game go that far. In which case, at the end of extra time, Arjen Robben alone would have been on minus 4 and Costa Rica would have rightfully won. Never mind, as we say at Spurs, there’s always four years’ time.

Happy Sunday,

A xxxx