Andy's Glasses

I’ve always been fascinated by gender differences. Which I’m not even sure is an allowable phrase to employ now. Between equality laws, diversity rules and anti-discrimination policies, merely observing any action within a gender context is totally unacceptable. Then you need to add in the 47 new ‘genders’ currently on offer and suddenly, former universals like ‘if its got a nob its prob’ly a geezer’ are deeply offensive to at least 43 of those genders and illegal under 739 statutes written by civil servants at a cost to the nation of £786,442, after ‘consultations’ which cost a further £2.7mil. I would accuse someone, possibly everyone involved, of being ‘tossers’ but I’m not sure that even such a nice, expressive term can be used within contemporary constraints as the ‘woke world’ veers ever closer to total insanity.

And yet I was sitting in the bath the other evening (as I do. No fennel and rosemary candles or jojoba and ginseng bath oils, just me and the Kindle. Add hot water. Stir.) and this is what I saw. You see a few bottles on the side of the bath. I see a metaphor for LIFE! My life, anyway.

On the right is my shower gel. Its blue. I like blue. And when I’ve finished the chapter I’ll use it. It makes me clean. But it wouldn’t make Mel clean. No. Not because she’s any dirtier, she doesn’t wrestle in mud. Like she used to. But because she has to have four different cleansers for different ‘parts’. She would no more wash her face in anything vaguely ‘soapy’ than I would read a label of what any of these bottles claim.

And that’s a gender difference. Well, it is in my house, where such things are allowed because attitudes are generally mired in about 1953 anyway. I know, it’s making genderalisations (oooohhh) from very small sample sizes, but Mel’s not that small. She’s bigger than Lila. Just.

We won’t talk about moisturisers. Because we’d need about 6 photos for that. Not including my bottle (singular). Yes, I have a bottle of moisturiser. Which is not exactly a new gender designation, but I’m trying.

The point is (is there a point? Really??) that there are gender differences. You could call it a type of cleanliness perfectionism to use one ‘soap’ for your feet but a ‘totally different’ one for your legs. Or you could call it a hyper-susceptibility to toiletry marketing. Which only affects those of the penis-free type genders. Yet its not like, say football, where having possession of a penis does guarantee better football, however you may ‘identify’, but I must maintain that I don’t know any man worthy of the name who could really be bothered to even look for 4 different shower gels for the same body.

Happy Sunday, other than the football

A xxxx

As you may recall, I have something of an ‘issue’ with Sir Kier and his entire government, concerning the repeated (ad nauseam, as they do all their annoying little catchphrases, as if we’re all goldfish who can’t remember the word ‘change’ from 22 seconds ago) use of the term ‘working people’. From the context it is delivered it is simply an euphemism for ‘working class’, but you can’t say that because that perpetuates the class wars, and no-one wants that, especially working class oiks and their rabble of dirty progeny.

By Kier’s definition, lawyers aren’t ’working people’, despite putting in 85-hour weeks. Nor bankers, brokers, accountants or anyone in an office. Doctors are only ‘working’ until they become consultants at which point, even pulling 72 hour shifts, knee deep in blood and other bodily emissions, they forfeit their claim to be ‘working people’.

And now landlords. Who have been declared, by the Prime Minister himself(!!!) as ‘not working people’. Why? Well the obvious reason is that the PM is a tosser, but more interesting is why our country is so intent on demonising landlords. Screwing them over with onerous taxes and heaps of unnecessary expenditure. Like changing the batteries on the smoke alarms. That costs £4.99 for a 12-volt. Whereas a couple of burnt-out tenants is free. You do the maffs.

In Australia, if you rent a second home you are perceived as ‘helping society’ and thus get special tax breaks on rental income. Over here, in a nation completely dependant on private landlords, we use the HMRC to kick the shit out of those benevolent enough to entrust an incredibly valuable asset to negligent cretins incapable of looking after them as they pour cooking oil down the sinks, seal themselves in completely, blocking up the vents, so they create pretty little mould cultures and wreck the washing machines.

‘Rogue landlords’, we read about and see on the news. Oh, wait a minute, he’s actually a cabinet minister, oooops. Everything is done to make ‘landlords!’ into hate figures, modern day overlords, feudal villains with dirty teeth and waxed moustaches. That way, when the government screw them over with more and more taxes and, in upcoming months, less and less control, all the ‘working people’ cheer loudly.

Eventually, the millions of ‘small time’ landlords will sell their investment homes because of sheer lack of any kind of return and there’ll be an even bigger housing crisis than there is now. And the money capitalised from the sales of so many houses can be used more profitably. Perhaps on a new slave trade. Investment in drug gangs. Selling vapes at infant’s schools. At least they’d show a profit and wouldn’t incur all the persecution-taxes than landlords suffer.

Yes, I’m a (very small time) fucking landlord. For now.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

There’s so much more to being a government than just working out how to rob middle-class people until they bleed all over their rags, which is what we’ll all be wearing after next Wednesday. There’s more than just giving the trade unions whatever they want or making yet more promises to build houses and ‘make the health service work again!!’, as if.

There’s the things they don’t teach you in opposition. Things they don’t teach you on endless fucking protest marches every time any company makes a profit. There’s the art of diplomacy.

And what that means in any practical sense is securing links with people you may not particularly like to ensure a better result for the nation. So ‘we’ have to deal with Macron. No-one likes him. And Erdogan, Mohammed Bin Salman, Ursula von der Leyen. Horrible people that we need to keep onside. Even though they’re horrible.

And Donald Trump. The most hateful one. And yet the most hateful person to be within 1% of the projected vote to be the next most important person in the world. He may win, he may lose. It’s ‘too close to call’ at this stage, just 2 weeks from ‘the day’. And Trump is not a big fan of Kier Starmer. Ok, no-one is, but Trump hates his politics and is not really keen on the man himself. Can’t blame him for the latter. Or the former either, really. So Starmer absolutely needs to have a relationship with Trump. Hopefully only until November 5th when Kamala wins the election, but maybe, just maybe, Trump wins.

David Lammy, now foreign secretary of our great nation, once called Trump a ‘neo-nazi sympathising sociopath’. Which is undoubtedly true. Yet now Loathesome Lammy may have to face The Orange One, as the representative of our entire nation. And that’s a hill to climb.

Labour are obviously more aligned with the Democrats, they share a centre-left stance. So the government are sending Labour members over to key US states to canvass and lobby. And sent two top Labour nobodies over for Kamala’s coronation as Good Queen Democrat.

Trump, inevitably has made a formal, legal complaint about ‘foreign influence’ on the elections, mainly to score a point over Harris.

And all this is well and good. As long as Harris wins. Because if she doesn’t Starmer, for all the alleged ‘behind the scenes’ friendship building, will be seen as ‘the enemy’ by Trump. President Orange. But no-one in the government has the forward thinking wherewithal to realise that they are burning bridges, big, important, ‘special relationship’ ones, so they can be seen to be overtly protesting about Trump, before the elections, and jumping onto any ‘slightly left’ bandwagon they can find in the world.

And for that, our whole government are my ‘tossers of the week’. A collective achievement, too precious to restrict it to individuals. But if I did, Sofia Patel would be the first name, followed by Morgan McSweeney and Matthew Doyle. David Lammy. Kier Starmer. Rachel Reeves, just because…

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

We decided to go the theatre on Sunday night. With ‘the kids’. Both our kids and their kids. Part of their cultural education for which I’m the main protagonist. Well, I’m in charge of culture, football and punching. Eclectic, innit. Anyway, Joey wanted to see Uncle Vanya, what with being a big Chekhov fan an’ all, whereas Lila wanted anything by Shakespeare, preferably one of the more obscure tragedies. We searched to find Death of a Salesman playing but to no avail. So we ended up going to…

Starlight Express.

Which may lack the moralistic punch of Miller, lack the subtlety of Shakespeare (it lacks the subtlety of the Russian invasion), and the nuanced wit of Oscar Wilde, but fuck its brilliant. Loud as a really loud thing, brighter than firework night, all-action, fast-n-furious, live music, song, dance and great costumes, which reminded Joey of Power Rangers, reminded me of Star Wars.

My girls loved it 25 years ago, but absolutely loved it, saw it twice, bought the cd, sang all the songs repeatedly, we all loved it. Then it stopped!!! In 2002. Left its home in Victoria, for the dumping ground for obsolete rolling stock and done-with musicals in the sky. Then, like Jesus Christ Herself (just sayin’), it was resurrected this year in… Wembley!!! Yes, Wembley. That home of culture and… other things. Mainly sport. But right next to the stadium they’ve built a theatre. A really big, really modern (ie: your knees don’t touch your chin like in the seats of a West End theatre), fantastic venue. Big enough to run, fr’instance, a roller-blade race track round the stage. The production is super modern too. So they’ve modified it a bit. But only a weeny little bit, just to make the message a bit more ‘environment friendly’. But that’s hard when the star of the show is a filthy, dirty old steam train, running on coal and spewing out pure pollution. So they ‘enhanced’ it by making ‘Rusty’ hydrogen powered. Tossers. The lights and effects are so brilliant that at the end of the very first number, Joey asked if it had finished now. Oh. But he stayed the course. Lila loved every second of it, but that was never in doubt. But our boy, with an attention-span measured in milliseconds? Which can be extended artificially. Only til the Haribos run out. But he lasted the course. All 2 hours 20 minutes, including the interval. Ok, bit long perhaps but a total assault on the senses. In a really good way. Even if you’re older than 5. Or 7. Possibly much older.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Happy Tuesday

A xxx

About 3 weeks ago I was at a dinner party at some friends. Was lovely. One woman had just produced a ‘healthy eating’ cookery book, which is fab. We had a copy and actually ate some of the… errrr… pages. Well, the recipes, apparently. As pictured on those pages. All good, fab and quite delish. And as we spoke about food, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, one lady spoke of how, when a child, her mother used to serve up ‘voorscht’. You might call it ‘salami’. But to do so would be to give an unwarranted Italian cullinariness to what is actually an abused German word for an abused, enlarged ‘sausage’. Wurst. Abused? Yes, because ‘w’ in German is pronounced ‘v’ (Bratwurst, Kaiserwurst, etc), particularly in salamis, and if you turn it into Yiddish, it becomes phonetic because Yiddish was never a written language. (A fact I learned this morning as the abandoned tennis match due to rain became a lesson in the history of Yiddish, and cappuccinos). And this lady’s mum would serve her, for dinner(!!) some voorscht, possibly even fried, with eggs!!!! Today, such levels of ultra-processed, high-fat, sodium-laden, additive-riddled meat(ish) would, if served to a child, have social services round faster than you could say Jimmy Saville. Its awful stuff. The colour gives it away. Natural food wasn’t meant to be that colour.

And for 3 weeks, I’ve barely thought of anything else. Because my mum, either ‘God bless her’, or possibly, ‘God forgive her’, used to feed me such things as well. And these were the types of food we did not eat with any reluctance. These were the comfort foods, the favourites, the ‘special’ things. I wasn’t even totally sure they still made it. Because quite frankly, they probably shouldn’t. It was perfectly acceptable when life expectancy was pretty short anyway, but now we all want to live to 120 you’d think voorscht would be banned. Yet I walked into my local kosher butcher and there it was. My mate the butcher (he’s everyone’s mate, other than vegans) even gave me a ‘taster’. And I bought some. Figuring once every 15 years shouldn’t be fatal. I’ll let you know tomorrow. Or not!!!

But it was a celebration. To mark a special event. That being Spurs wonderful ‘thrashing’ of West Ham. The match was a three-way event. A cross between a football match, the Keystone Kops and Rocky (parts 1 and 2). And yes we ‘thrashed’ them because the score was 4-1 and that’s a thrashing. But it was filled with what neutrals call ‘excitement’ and what Spurs fans call ‘panic’. Then there was the sending off. Initially only given a yellow card, Mohammed Kudus attack on 3 of our players was correctly upgraded to a red for ‘violent behaviour’. He kicked Mickey van der Ven whilst he was on the ground, then pushed him in the face. He, possibly inadvertently, head-butted Richarlison on his way round to pushing Pap Sarr in the face too. He may even get a 6-match ban instead of the usual 3 because of so many ‘events’ which may be counted individually. I’d give him 9 months, nasty little shit.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

The difference between death and taxes is that you can die quickly. Painlessly. Whereas tax is slow, lingering, increasingly agonising and just when you think you’re cured, the ‘surgeon’ looks at the scans and says: “oh, I’ve just seen something here…” Ok, maybe the ‘accountant’ but we’re talking metaphors here. And accountants can only ever provide ‘palliative care’ anyway.

So whilst we’re all involved in masses of speculation over the upcoming budget and the ‘joys’ it will hold for us all, I need to clarify the situation for you, so you don’t get a shock when Rachel Reeves fucks you right over on the 30th. And she will.

This government’s key pledge in their manifesto before the election was ‘we won’t increase tax’. There are details involved, precisely which taxes will and won’t be possibly raised, but the gist of it was but one simple message, to the simpletons of the electorate, like me, which was this: “we want to be a Labour government and so we need to give you the confidence that we won’t be like all previous Labour governments and hike taxes stupidly. No. We’re a ‘middle-class-friendly’ Labour that you can feel happy to elect because ‘taxes won’t rise’. The old expression that you ‘can’t trust Labour on tax’ is a thing of previous Labour governments”.

So the first thing they do is invent a ‘black hole’, into which they wish to pour my future. And yours. And, though they just don’t get this, the future of many small businesses which will either be driven to destruction financially, or those which don’t even start because of the onerous demands on the cash which they haven’t even started earning yet. With many workers not employed because of the raise on company NI. Ahhh, the government say, that’s COMPANY contribution, so it won’t affect YOUR salary. No, but it increases the employer’s liability means many ‘staff increases’ won’t happen.

And with that amazingly blinkered outlook that Labour governments specialise in, IF YOU HIT HARD ON ‘THOSE WITH THE BROADEST SHOULDERS’, those broad shoulders will move abroad. They all can. Thus, you ‘hit the rich hard’ and find you end up with less tax than you had before.

So as ‘she’ plans to hike Capital Gains Tax, and NI, and attack pensions, and basically charge anyone not involved in mining or the railways as much as they can, I’m moving tomorrow. I’m going to live in Albania. Houses are cheap and there’s no pick-pocketing there whatsoever, because those people are all in Leicester Square.

God help us all. Because the government won’t.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

The Royal Society, the very old, venerated, distinguished and revered, scientific ‘national treasure’ (but literally so), has a new president. And, (shock warning, stay seated and find your ‘happy place’ before reading on), it is… a man! Why is it a shock? Because in all its years, dating all the way back to 1660, they’ve only ever had men as presidents. So why is electing another, as the 1500 members did, such a big deal? Because this is 2024, that’s why. And everyone’s obsessed with ‘diversity’. To the extent that choosing another old rich white man in a job pretty much made for old rich (its a non-paying position) white men, is completely unacceptable. They looked for a disabled, mixed-race, non-binary, pronoun-quoting, vegan single parent but couldn’t find one. Well, couldn’t find one who, like the new pres., has a Nobel Prize for science and is a known diplomat, as the job involves high level negotiations for government money to further research. When they’re looking for a president of a society where the job requirements are ‘on benefits, suffers from mental ‘ealf’ issues, bisexual, possibly tri-sexual, and Oriental’, we’ll get back to you.

I love the whole ‘diversity’ thing. Until it gets to the point when the most suitable candidates are overlooked just because they aren’t sufficiently diverse. And I’m speaking here as a one-legged (metaphorically!!!, don’t be so pedantic) person of colour (pink’s a colour, innit?), who identifies as a ballerina.

Someone in the Trade Union movement heard that the new PM is a total fucking pushover when it comes to negotiations. In fact he doesn’t. Negotiate. He just does the digitalised version of ‘writing blank cheques’. Possibly “giving you my online login details”. So having pissed away umpteen billion on the rail workers and doctors, he’s now faced with a series of tube strikes. Because they’re going on strike. All of them. The whole effin network. Drivers, station staff, line workers, anyone with an underground logo on their t-shirts. Even a few tourists are probably in line for a big payout for that very reason.

Consequently, the ‘black hole’ in the economy, which stood at 22 billion when Rachel Reeves invented it, has increased to 40 bil. And that’s without the Tube workers. Nurses. Dockers. Teachers. Police. Ambulance. Fire brigade. Lucky thing that the other ‘working people’, the ones who don’t count, have bottomless pay checks when it comes to paying tax. And national insurance. I hate to point out that a ‘black hole’ can’t actually ‘get bigger’. That’s the whole point of a black hole, it’s a ‘singularity’, the tiniest possible imaginable point. Except in Labour Space. Where all laws of gravity are suspended. Along with common sense, credibility and getting free tickets to Taylor Swift.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

In 1970 Wishbone Ash arrived on the scene. A new rock band. Different. They had two lead guitarists. Who played at the same time. Sometimes simultaneously. Often almost battling. They sounded different to other bands. So we ‘adopted’ them. Chose them as the leaders of our air guitar play. Like a lot of rock bands during the hippie era, they were sympathetic to and ideologically aligned with Mediaeval serfs. Scruffy villagers, farming types, always going off to war to fight some King or Lord or the neighbouring county. Because like hippies, these historical types had long hair, never washed, lived in tents and ate without cutlery. So there were similarities which became an essential part of the ‘folk’ movement, and into ‘folk rock’, the popular crossover of the time. And thus Wishbone; folk themes played to heavy (ish) rock. I loved ’em.

And I’ve had a bit of a Wishbone Renaissance of late. Don’t know why, it must have just hit me one day alone with Alexa and it just snowballed. And the album ‘Argus’ is a journey from peaceful farmers to ‘warriors’ when called to fight for… whoever, and then ‘throw down the sword’, because in that track ‘the fight is done and over’, so its back to impoverished farming for thieving Lords of the Manor, bread crawling with weevils and incest until the next war. It was the rural way.

Meanwhile, in Kindle-land, I was reading a book which is the myth of Achilles turned into a novel told from the women’s perspective. Who knew women had their own perspectives? The book’s called The Silence of the Girls (who knew girls were ever silent?), and I have no idea why or when we acquired it. Possible on some Sunday paper’s ‘must read’ list? Maybe it was 99p on Kindle? Either way, it’s a really great book. And, again, full of swords and death and Kings and warring unwashed people. Ok, about 1600 years before the Wishbone Ashers’ song lines, but all parts of my artistic world seemed to coincide in a clash of hand-to-hand weaponry. One minute I was fighting with Agamemnon to sack Troy, the next I’m in Wiltshire or Shropshire fighting Lancastrians or the French. It sounds confusing but there’s a kind of symmetry.

Yet while the British were slaughtering each other for King and country, those ancient Greeks were aspiring to game-changing levels of brutality. Over-run a town, kill every man over the age of 7, take all the women as slaves, empty the place of anything remotely valuable, then burn it to the ground. Nice.

I’m done with sword-fighting for a while now. Reading a book about a librarian. Though still can’t get Wishbone Ash out of my head, or off my Alexa.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx