Andy's Glasses

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

So there you are, in Cornwall, having a seasiderful great time, and its hot and sunny and everything you could dream of that doesn’t come on a plate with either chips or clotted cream. And you’re happy as can be. And then you wake up in the morning and…

…and its pissing down with rain. So what do you do? You’d probably cry and go home, you’re such a wuss. But Mel & I, adventurers to our very cores, we put on our raingear and hit the headland for a coastal walk. Which was as exhilirating and beautiful as it was miserable. So we left Padstow for the next and final destination of this ‘total tour round all of England excpet the bits we’re not doing’, Barnstaple. Which added the perfect extra dimension to the rain; traffic jams. Loads of them. Or maybe just one fucking great big one, I’m not exactly sure. For a small town, those council boys sure know how to fuck up traffic totally and horribly. They must be very proud. And summer season doesn’t start for 2 weeks. God help anyone headed to Barnstaple in August. They’ll still be there in September.

But undaunted by the weather, we watched both the mens semi-finals from Wimbledon AND the Germans beat the French in Brazil. What a stunning afternoon. In a stunning place.

You know sometimes you book stuff up on the internet and you get there and wished computers had never been invented? And other times you just strike gold. Well Barnstaple may not be in the Klondike but found the most amazing hotel.

Its called the Broomhill Arts Hotel and sculpture garden. Its appeal: it was in the right place. Its USP? A ‘garden’ (about the size of Hampstead Heath and more personal forest than garden) filled with all manner of sculptures. All for sale, if you’re interested in a 5 ton painted boulder, a bhudda the size of Croydon or a 17 foot high steel horse. For that awkward corner in the lounge.

Then we had dinner. And the hotel has high praise. 50th best restaurant in greater Barnstaple, top 400 something else. But it was quite spectacular. Inexpensive and fabulous. Like me. Not many things fall into both those categories.

Now I’m home. London never looked so… whatever, after a 215 mile burn down life’s freeways. And Kvitova just won the women’s tennis, even though the other gel, a Canadian, was a bit of a babe.

Happy Saturday, welcome home

A xxxx

we left St Austell, on the south coast of Cornwall, with some degree of sadness, though that lasted til the sun came out and we hit some really fab roads heading towards North Cornwall. And Padstow. The most lovely, quaint, pretty, picturesque little fishing village in the world. Well, in this part of the world certainly and quite frankly that’s all that matters currently. The entire trip, south coast to north; 25 miles. About 40 minutes. Would have been 30 minutes but these Cornish locals insist that every time they pass a school or a 3 house village, they should slow down? I mean; why?

Anyway, Padstow’s so fab that as soon as we arrived we took a ferry somewhere else. Though not a very far somewhere else, just across the bay to a place called ‘Rock’. That’s it; Rock. A very good description of the place really. Though I reckon ‘Sand’ would have been even more appropriate because I’ve never seen a bigger ‘beach’ anywhere. And I’ve seen a few. Even Aussies would go ‘strewth!!!! that’s some fucking beach, mate’. Its half a mile wide and goes on forever. (Normal tolerances apply to all measurements).

The photo is of Mel, in her new dress, on this amazing beach, which we walked for about 6 hours and didn’t reach the end.

The dress was an act of necessity. When packing for ‘a holiday in England’, regardless of the time of year or season, you pack sweaters, coats, jackets, sweat shirts, quilts, scarves, gloves. What you skimp on is sundresses. I know I did. She brought one. And we had another sunny day. In fact every day until today has been fabulously, wonderfully hot and sunny. So we stopped at an Asda, the supermarket. And we bought the dress. For a tenner. Ten quid. Best not to ask how they can do that. Considerations of Chinese children working 17 hours a day in sweat shops in Shanghai or Bolton, for $3 a month are way secondary.

Asda is like the diametric opposite of the Eden Project. They don’t sell sundresses at Eden. But if they did they’d be made of sustainable cotton grown in eco-friendly communes from organically reared whatever-cotton-comes-from things, woven by a workers co-operative who stop work for 30 minutes every hour to meditate and chant, eat home-grown vegetables and perform local dances for each other in prayer. And they’d cost £745 each dress. And be only available in natural beige, as artificial colourings are the devil’s work.

Meanwhile, the World Cup is progressing nicely, there’s a gorgeous Canadian girl in the wimbledon final and Andy (fucking) Murray returned with a vengeance to type. Whinging Scottish misery, stamping his feet and throwing his racquet to the ground. Loser.

Onwards and seawards

Happy friday

A xxxx

Went to the Eden Project yesterday. What a fab… er… thing, that is. Its all, kind’of, eco-bubbles set out in a former clay pit in deepest darkest (or brightest, as it turned out, being about 120 degrees here yesterday) Cornwall. They’ve made an Amazonian rainforest, under immense plastic bubbles, and its like being in Brazil, but without the football. Or snakes. Though they do have animals there, birds and frogs and other insect-eating stuff so they can save on the price of a (very big) can of ‘Raid!’

There’s also a ‘Mediterranean’ bubble, or ‘Biome’ as they unpretentiously call them, offering all the plants and flowers and trees you’d find in the Med. Or by the Med. And humous too. You can get that in the cafe, and that’s a very ‘med’ kind of a dish.

But the Eden project is really not about showing how fucking clever they are at growing stuff. No. Its about goodness and light. Its about ecology and sustainability. Its about recycling and fair trade. Its like the new god. And I walked round, marvelling at the amazing plantlife they have there, every flower totally perfect and probably really sustainable, if you feed it and water it. There’s an exhibition room there too, showing how we abuse the world. The Al Gore Exhibition Centre. Well, that’s what I called it. They call it ‘The Core’. Cos it looks core-ish.

A wonderful equation: trees absorb Carbon Dioxide with sunlight to grow their fruit, which are natural sugars. We eat the sugars (the fat bastards round here do, more than their fair share, it would appear) and breathe out Carbon Dioxide, which the trees then re-absorb… Ya geddit? Perfect.

There was a Smart Car. And a label telling us that every kilometer it travels it expends 100 cubic hectizules of Carbon Dioxide. Or 100 somethings anyway. And I realised that I am an eco-warrior, without even knowing it. Because I don’t drive a Smart car. I drive a fucking monster V8 gas guzzler that eats Smart Cars and recycles their parts as roadkill. So I must produce a zillion gms per square centilitre of CO2 just getting out of the car park. And think how happy that must make the trees, giving them all that carbon? So what I initially felt was an ironic kind of hypocrisy, turning up at Eco-Central in the world’s most uneconomical and unecological car (that’s how they sold it to me, anyway), that I was ‘off message’. But no. Turns out Carbon is god, if you’re a tree, so that makes me a disciple.

I love Cornwall. So hot down here. So eco-friendly.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

So here we are in Cornwall. First English summer holiday for 50 years. First time I’ve ever been to Cornwall and Devon. And its bloody wonderful. Though fucking exhausting. There’s so much to do in England. All other countries offer endless sunshine and footballers who dive a lot. England has sooooo much to offer the innocent tourist, like me.

We started our voyage in Lyme Regis. The seaside resort chosen to typify and exemplify the consistency of the genre. And it does. It still has people sitting outside their little beach huts, with an almost smug look, relaxing outside a 5 foot by 6 foot windowless box, that says: ‘yes, I have my beach hut, in pink/blue/green for the week/month/season, and you don’t’. Whilst his children pull on his legs and go: “oh daaaaad, per-leaeaeaeaeaease let me have one of those (fill in overpriced piece of coloured plastic shit of your choice); its oooooonly £526.97!!!!!”

In the intervening 50 years food has changed. But not at the seaside. Its as if a half century of understanding the constituents of our daily bread has simply not reached the ‘bit round the edges’ of our fine nation. As if there’s an assumption that just sitting on a beach in a bikini and a sheepskin coat somehow allows you to metabolise 20 times the fat and sugar you normally would fail to do by just sitting on your arse for 6 hours.

Lunch is fish’n’chips. Its compulsory. By law. We had it. Good but not great. Heavy on grease and batter. Or ‘perfect’ as its known nationally. Then you get an ice cream. To shut the fucking kids up for 20 minutes. Followed by cream tea. Well, you’re in Dairy Country, you’d be a Dairy C-, er… misser out, not to enjoy it. Then Burger and chips for supper. The whole 5-a-day thing is extended at the seaside to include hops. So five pints a day sorts that out then.

We left Lyme Regis whilst we still had one artery between us that wasn’t clogged up and drove down to Cornwall. Which is beautiful, amazing, fabulously interesting and filled with good food. And all of the above.

This was tuesday; it wasn’t planned like this, but kind of evolved around certain things.

8.30. Swim in the pool. Mel’s a swimmer. Like a fish. Gills. Swims every day in the gym so bit of a busman’s holiday for her but I don’t normally (read: ‘ever!!!’) join her. I’m a drowner by nature. But I did what was necessary.

9.00 Breakfast. Don’t ask. Show me a buffet and I’ll show you a pig. Then eat it.

10.00 Tried to find the ‘coastal walk’ along little forest paths. Failed fucking miserably, walking about 6 miles in the process. Knackered. Stopped for ice creams.

1.30 Set off from our base in St Austell for St Michael’s Mount. 60 miles away. Weather had improved so top down on the car and off we speed. St M’s M is brilliant and wonderful and just google it and you can see why. Involves a lot of (more) walking and some light climbing. All for a poxy 11th Century castle on an offshore island that’s accessible by a causeway only at low tide.

5.00 Tea and snack/late lunch on the beach.

6.00 Arrive at Land’s End. Has to be done. Its like where the land, kind’a, ends. And the sea begins. Almost like any beach in the world but in a much more profound way.

7.00 Weather still totally amazing, top still down on the car as we arrive at the Minnack theatre. Built like a Greek amphitheatre, but on a cliff right at the sea. The Tempest. Shakespeare, ya nob. And fantastic Cornish Pasties. Unhealthiest food you can buy. Unless you’re in Lyme Regis.

12.00 Arrived back at hotel. Traffic coming back light to non-existent. Cornwall closes at 9.

So we did geography, history, English, Drama, maths (working out the mileage) and Physical Education. All in one day.

Come to England for your vacation. Then you’ll need a holiday.

And don’t ask me where my blog went yesterday. Or I’ll eat you.

A xxxx

When I was a kid we didn’t ‘go on holidays’. We ‘went to the seaside’. Small difference but concpetually world’s apart. The whole world apart in fact because ‘the seaside’ was in England. You could probably find one in Wales, even Scotland. But the real one was in the south of England. No-one accused me of being worldly at age 6. But in the 60s that’s what we did.

And ‘the seaside’ embraced lots of things. Ok, sea. That’s pretty much a given, obviously. Sand in various degrees of stoniness, depending where you were exactly. Dodgy weather. This was England. Shops selling buckets and spades and lilos and all manner of brightly coloured plastic to which children are drawn like moths to a light, like dogs to shit. Though dogs seldom (to my knowledge) nagged their daddy-dogs incessantly to be bought shit. Like I nagged for everything bright and plastic and inflatable.

Then there was the other essentials. Beach huts. People rent them for a week, a month, a season so that they can… well, in order to… hmmmm… to enable them to sit in front of them. Beach huts being too small to sleep in, sit in or anything really ‘in’ other than store chairs and stuff. And I always wanted a beach hut, even though I knew not why.

Then there were amusement arcades. Slot machines. As much a part of the English seaside as anchor tattoos, as fish’n’chips, as wearing swimming trunks and wellies and a Liverpool football shirt.

Ahhhhh, the memories.

Package holidays made ‘going abroad’ cheap and easy. Then Freddie Laker invented a new type of aeroplane that was cheap to fly on and the world shrank. Marbella was the new Margate; Benidorm the poor man’s Bournemouth. America beckoned, Australia was nearer (until you got on the plane when it suddenly returned to the end of the fucking world where it had always been). Christmases in Thailand, New Years in Cuba. Snorkelling in the Galapagos, summertime in Italy, France, Israel, because the weather’s always nice and you get to eat that foreign muck and realise although decidedly foreign, ‘muck’ it ain’t.

So I haven’t been back to the English seaside in 50 years.

Until yesterday.

(to be continued… that’s exciting)

A xxxx

“They’ve treated Luis like a dog!!!!” said his grandma yesterday after the ban was imposed on her sweet little grandson. Well, actually, Mrs Suarez, they haven’t. Dogs that bite get shot. I was going to tell her that revelation myself but I couldn’t find the Spanish for ‘buck-toothed shit-for-brains nob’. I hope Barcelona are very happy with their next purchase.

Back in Europe, Juncker’s in so it looks like Britain may be out. What effect this will have on me personally, should it happen, I’m not sure, but what it will do is open up the duty free sales at airports for flights to ‘the continent’ once more. So I’ll save a fortune on Scotch. Get us OUT!!! (hic)

One very european is Theodora Sayn-Wittgenstein. She is a princess. All Germans have titles. If you’re not a prince you’re a count or a baron or some useless title which basically means your grandfather (when he wasn’t fighting with the bloody Nazis) owned a house somewhere in the Fatherland. Though Theodora’s family pad is less a house, more kind of Disneyland without the fun. Schloss-Berlberg Castle to give it the full 9 Deutschmarks. Anyway, Theo (as I call her) went to a reunion at St Andrews University in Edinburgh, a nice, genteel, posh place where royals from all over europe like to study, especially not very bright ones. Its where Wills met Kate, after all. And Theo, I’m gonna guess, somewhat into her cups, decided to remove her other cups, the ones holding her breasts, and stripped off. She then insulted muslims, became aggressive, fought off people trying to dress and control her and ended up handcuffed and arrested. As if a common criminal. This is disgraceful, everyone agreed. Not the behaviour, I think that should be commended, but arresting a woman for taking her clothes off in public and insulting people. What is wrong with the Scots? Where’s the freedom? Let them have independence if this is the way they treat royalty. Vote ‘YES’. See if I give a shit.

Some people are odd. Just odd. Not Theo, she’s lovely. But Luis Suarez is odd. He bites people which is very very abnormal behaviour. Punching is acceptable. Kicking. Even spitting, though vile, is understandable in certain situations. But biting is just not in any way ‘normal’. Similarly, Jimmy Savile. The reviled, de-knighted and thankfully dead DJ and loudmouth was simply fucking weird. He sexually abused anyone he went near. Anyone. Boys, girls, women, pensioners, the sick, ill and infirm, from 5 years old to 75 extends his ‘back-catalogue’ of atrocities. Even the old expression ‘anything with a pulse’ is inapplicable because when Jimmy found no-one alive to abuse he went to the morgue and took his pleasures there.

Ok, I just got rained off the tennis court, its now somewhat torrential and we’re off to Cornwall in the morning for the ‘best of the English summer’. God help us.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

Do you know the word peony?

If you do then, according to a survey, you are 96% more likely to be female.

If you’re a man and you know a peony, you’re probably gay, even if you haven’t realised it yet. Or a heterosexual florist.

I know what a peony is because I’m a totally reconstructed post-feminist superman. And because they are Mel’s favourite flower and only come out (not in a gay way) a few weeks a year and our household goes into panic mode in its attempt to buy up the entire national quota.

Half the men thought a peony was a little horse.

Because, according to the results of a word difference gender study, lots of words are very gender specific in use and consequent understanding. Why would a woman need to know what a ‘jock-strap’ is? Other than ‘oh its that thing Jimmy wears on his head when out drinking with his rugby mates’.

The study was on an American onlilne magazine, so that further explains the somewhat neanderthal level of responses. The average Kentucky farmer knows flowers only as things that get in the way of the crops. Though can name every single part of a tractor engine in latin.

Taupe was another interesting word. Is it a wig for men? A disabling disease of the left leg? Something French people eat with grits? A sheet for covering the 58 Chevy that’s sitting in pieces in the driveway?

The word most women didn’t get was solanoid. Which immediately will become the car-part of choice for unscrupulous mechanics telling females ‘ooooh, yer gonna need a new solanoid in there; that’s gonna cost’cha’ when all that’s really needed is a tyre re-inflating.

But heh, Europe is in a crisis. Not the football. England have left the World Cup, Spain are out, lots of others, like Bosnia, kind’of European but nowhere that most people could find on a map of Europe. But I’m talking about real Europe; the Union of European Peoples Who Fucking Hate Each Other. The EU. Who are about to appoint a new ‘leader’, kind of a president for the whole continent… and England. And being a bunch of like-minded democracies, the way to ‘elect’ this new leader is for Germany to announce him, then tell the other countries who he is, and don’t give any alternative, nor appeal, nor votes.

“Ze new leader vill be Jean-Claude Juncker”. Thus proclaimed Angela Merkel and thus the Luxumburger will head up the Union. Cameron hates him, but can do very little about it. Juncker is a federalist, which is awful, and a drunk, which is probably not true but when you’ve exhausted all other possibilities for a reconsideration, start making up personal shit. And ‘drunk’ is a pretty good bet for any European.

Luis Suarez banned for 3 months. Urugauy are appalled, Liverpool are disgusted. And the rest of the world thinks this ‘punishment’ for a serially bad person is pathetically insufficient.

Bite me.

A xxxx

For some the World Cup is a virtual feast of non-stop footballing wonders. For others, (well, for one), its an all-you-can-eat buffet. International cuisine. But the matter of Luis will be resolved today. One way or another. His sad plea of ‘we just banged into each other’ is in slight contradiction to the film of actual events. Yet it needs a quick resolution. And FIFA are not really good at ‘quick’. Nor really at ‘resolution’. Look at Qatar ’22. That worked well. Still is working well. But speed is of the essence so we can get on with the next course. Sorry, the next football.

Meanwhile, at home, David Cameron has once again fallen foul of the lawyers. So eager to extricate himself from any of the phone-hacking mess, even though he did employ Mr Phone-Hacker-Supreme as a spin doctor. The Prime Minister, eager to ‘apologise and put this matter behind him’ (as if) did so before the other charges against Andy Coulson have been wound up in court. Thus the Prime Minister is interfering with judicial process. Or ‘being a total nob’ as its known in the legal world. A bit like he did when he spoke up in Nigella’s defence whilst that case was still in progress.

And the usual suspects are once again calling for ‘more regulation!’ for ‘tougher punishments’, for ‘government interference’ with the press. For although hacking into murdered girl Millie Dowler’s phone was appalling and vile, hacking into a few B-list celeb messages about cancelled hair appointments and rearranged sessions with personal trainers is hardly the ‘ALMOST LIKE RAPE!!!’ that we hear about. And a press regulated by the government is not a free press. And if you don’t have a free press you don’t have a proper democracy. So for Sienna Miller’s voicemail from her mum telling her not to be late for dinner, we end up as Syria. Not a fair deal.

Phone hacking is illegal. Illegal shit is illegal even for newspapers. Thus they mustn’t do it. Or they’ll go to jail like Andy Coulson will, Rebekah Brookes won’t and Rupert Murdoch should. Regulation by the government means plonkers like Cameron would have control over what was printed about him. And that’s too high a price to pay for anything.

Without the freedom of speech I’d have to only say nice things about people. And that, quite frankly, would be impossible. I’d go to prison. And to be honest, you’re not that nice.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx