Andy's Glasses

Normally this is a horrible time of the year. When the football season finishes. The hiatus. Mind the gap. But this year we have a World Cup to look forward to. Even though its going to be all late night matches because of the time differences.

And due to those late kick-offs (in UK time, as if anyone else’s time is important) they’re going to extend pub opening hours to enable unemployed drunks to watch the 11pm starting matches in the comfort of their own Lamb To The Slaughter, having already been drinking since about 6.30 that evening. So the government is sorting out these extended licences and they are working out the possible scenarios. And have decided that the chances of England getting into the knock-out stages of the competition are pretty remote. And that’s our own government. Another vote of confidence for English football.

But before that starts we have the inevitable ‘spring cleaning’ at football clubs. Which for Spurs, inevitably, means getting rid of the manager. Its a ceremony we perform every year. Gives us a clean start next term. Refreshes the parts. And also this is the time of year when the transfer market goes into a frenzy. Because if you wait til after the Cup to buy star players their stock may have risen and you can no longer afford them come August.

Tim Sherwood had to go. So said Daniel Levy. Because the players don’t like Tim, the board don’t like him, the fans don’t like him and even his wife’s not that keen. However, if you adopt an ‘appointment by popularity’ paradigm, surely Daniel Levy should be the first to go. Everyone hates the Chairman. And how about our director of football? What a waste of space not just he is, but the whole concept of such a role. And if you accept the importance of a Baldini then surely, after last year’s disastrous wasting of 100 million quid on worthless mediocrity, he should be replaced too, with someone who knows his backside from the bend in his arm.

We need a ‘big manager’ to keep the players happy, otherwise they’ll leave. The phrase “FUCK’EM!!!” probably best summarises my own feelings on ‘player power’, as we describe the throwing of toys out of prams by the world’s most moronic, overpaid divas that council estates and trailer parks can produce. Players so loyal, so devoted, so passionate about ‘the shirt’ that if that shirt is not in the Champions League next year, then bollox, I’m leaving. Rather than playing better to improve your club to the point where all deserve entry to that most hallowed of competitions, they’d just leave and go to Chelsea, who are already there. All the glory, none of the work. Great ethic.

But Brazil; wow. I love Brazil. I love Brazillians (especially those beach volleyball ones), I love the whole thing. The fact that the nation has essentially bankrupted itself building a bunch of stadia with no plans for after July. Maybe they’ll become shopping malls? Maybe a prison (honest, that’s one possible plan), maybe housing? And will it all be finished in time?? Are there enough workers left in that country to complete the works after so many have died in the construction so far??

Didier Deschamps has the right idea about the world cup. Its not about players, its about teams. So Samir Nasri, petulant little French shit, may be a great player but if he’s a sub he moans, whinges and upsets other player, so Didier has left him behind. In Paris. Or Manchester. Like I care.

Oh well, bit late today cos much to be done in order to escape. At the airport now waiting for flight to Tel Aviv. Taking our baby daughter to the seaside for a few days.

Shalom,

A xxxx

I’m a reader. I read a lot. That’s what tube travel was invented for. Not time travel, that’s something else. Not somewhere else, more sometime else. If you were a time traveller and there was a delay, would that mean that your British Timeways trip to 1776 is not leaving for 15 minutes? (and would that matter??) or that its only going as far as 1829?

Anyway, books, me, snob.

I don’t read classics. Anything by any Bronte, Austen, Dickens or anyone else on my set books from school, wouldn’t touch ’em. Nor Agatha Christie. Who wrote a hundred whodunnits. Or the same one a hundred times.
And I don’t read biography or autobiography unless its by/about a really good sportsperson. Or maybe someone who’d had multiple breast enhancements. I will read non-fiction, but only if its very sciency. Fermat’s Last Theorem. Chaos Theory. Stephen Hawking (I completely understood the meaning of life, the universe and everything whilst reading him, until I put the book down, then it was gone), even Richard Dawkins. Though my fave was the late, great Stephen Jay Gould. Who? Harvard professorial mega-brain who published 25 years of monthly essays in neat, bite-sized chunks of evolutionary biology, geology, history and philosophy of science, and all written with charm, wit and humour. Unlike Richard Dawkins who writes about similar stuff but with arrogance, smugness, dogmatism and an attitude so sneering that you repeatedly punch the book hoping that it will find its way to the author’s face. Not great if you use a Kindle.

Which I do. I love my Kindle, you can keep yer soddin’ paperised rubbish, I’m a e-man. And the best thing about ebooks is that there are free ones. So as I search Amazon’s vast ‘library’ for decent books to acquire, I also grab a few freebies. What’s to lose? Only pride. As these free books, often first time, self-published writers, and not always the best. So what? Out of every 10 there’ll be one gem. Maybe.

Free books tend to fall into categories. Or ‘genres’ as us pretentious book snobs call them. There’s the clumsy, clicheed cops and robbers ‘thrillers’, there’s slash-em-up horror, fantasy game-a-thronesesque twaddle, vampires and zombies, trying to be the next Twilight, and there’s romcoms. Loads of loved up twenty/thirty-somethings looking for ‘Mr Right’. Always written by women, for women, about women. And they’re all the same.

Girl bumps into a guy in Starbucks (all very contemporary, probably while she’s tweeting as she queues) who spills her coffee. “Why you clumsy, idiotic, stu-” his eyes were the biggest, blackest pools I’d ever seen, his muscles rippled as his white (and coffee stained) Armani shirt stretched across his maaaassive chest, the bulge in his trousers was like a third bicep…
Later the next day/week/whenever they meet again in a work/therapy/social situation and reinforce their mutual contempt and displeasure, whilst really admiring each other’s physical perfection. Ugly fat people have no literature. They don’t fall in love, they just fall over. So on page 1 you know how the book ends. All these books. But its the journey to that end that makes the book. The men are all beautiful, the women ‘sassy’ and cute. And they’re all in Seattle. I must visit that city one day and look at all the stunning women and bulging men all spilling coffee over each other. Maybe I’ll open a dry-cleaning business there.

So that’s it; my guilty secret. I love stupid, slushy rom-coms. But only if they’re well-written and funny.

Otherwise it has to be Stephen King; the Master. John Irving, a God among writers. Harlen Coben and Carl Hiaason because they write the funniest brilliant crime books. Jonathan Tropper, only 4 books so far but no-one does dysfunctional family better or with greater wit. Philip Roth is also a master. Ayn Rand (they’re ‘classics’ of a sort) only wrote about 3 books but as each is about 1500 pages long that counts as much more, and if you’re up to it, they’re quite amazing. Robert Harris is great, David Baldacci has his moments and so many others it would be like listing the entire World Cup squads for every country. And still there’d be no mention of Ashley Cole.

I’m off to the tube. Perchance to read.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

I’ve always hated the Eurovision song context. Its the most pathetic, puerile, talentless collection of horrendously dire, mid-European, plink-plonk, squeeze-box-‘rock’ garbage churned out every year and surely there are better ways to spend about 4 hours of your life. In meditation would work for me. Being tortured in Abu Graib would be a preferable use of the time. Waiting for the wheel-clampers to come and release your car having taken 400 quid for doing so; even that would be better than watching Eurovision.

I haven’t watched it… well, ever really. I was always a music snob, much like I’m a movie snob, a book snob… I suppose I’m just a snob at heart, generally. I made exception when Abba first came out of their test-tube and were presented to the world, all blond hair and mini-skirts, but that wasn’t really about ‘the music’. It was about schoolboy fantasies of the Swedish au pairs we never had. I don’t know that I can ever fully forgive my parents for that omission

On Saturday they voted a ‘bearded lady’ as winner of this year’s contest. A transgender Austrian (aren’t they all, really) won the contest. Good for him/her. But now there’s an outcry. Because the competitor with the most tits, sorry, most votes, was the ‘Polish Milkmaids’. I never saw them but you can imagine, and there’s pics in the paper today; all blond hair and big cleavages and knowing, inviting, ‘you’re next’ looks to camera as they squeeze and pull, squeeze and pull, squeeze and pull on imaginary udders. The cameraman had to change his trousers before the next act.

But the bearded drag artist (surely you’re a much more convincing ‘woman’ if you shave off the beard?? Unless you’re in Greece) was deemed winner because the ‘professional judges’ get more votes (its all sounding a bit Moscow at this point) or more influence and they chose the drag queen because they’re ‘judging more on the actual singing ability and musical talent’ than just the novelty factor, or political statements (“the contestant from Ukraine, scores 10 from Belarus, 7 from France, Russia refuses to acknowledge the independence of this singer and insists her votes be added to the Russian total…”) or whatever vague and moronic influences possess the voters.

So why go through (what seems like) 9 hours of voting from all the nations if you’re just going to overrule them anyway? That constitutes torture of the public and is illegal under the Geneva Convention. This was the greatest electoral travesty since George W Bush won the Florida recount. Though at least he did that without a beard. Just the dress worked for George, transengenderalism, as he called it.

But more importantly, using the ‘artistic merit’ card takes it all too far. This is the Eurovision Song Contest; there is no fucking artistic merit. Its not allowed. There are only degrees of hopelessness. You want ‘artistic’ go paint the Sistine chapel, don’t dress as a giant lemon and mime to a reworked Hitler Youth marching song.

Basically, I don’t give a shit who wins the Eurovision, as long as its not Russia. Or Germany. Croatia. Lithuania. Holland. Latvia. Estonia. Norway…

But I do care about abusive quasi-electoral systems. One day you’re ‘massaging votes’ in the Eurovision, the next you’re claiming Ukraine as a ‘victory for their people’, or having a Kim Jong Un haircut. And I didn’t chain myself to the Houses of Parliament wearing an Emily Pankhurst dress (and beard) for that. No siree.

Happy pro-European, undemocratic Monday

A xxxx

The seaon’s over, the last battle’s fought
for some there is gory, for others, just nought.

Manchester City are champions once more
yet one more reason for us all to deplore
their evil methods; their financial excess
their cheating and scheming ways to depress
good honest fans whose teams, humble and poor
can’t make the grade, get shown to the door.

So City get fined for financial unfair play,
but its only more money, they can still enjoy their day
then after, the penalty, 50 mil to be paid
Sheikh Mansoor spent more than that one night in Soho just to get laid.

Poor Norwich go down without any struggles
got beat by Arsenal with a team full of muggles
“if only we’d won”; their fans dids’t cry out
“by just 16 goals, then we’d have some clout”
but it wasn’t to be, the inbreds go down
their six-fingered fans share a communal big frown.

But the saddest of the day is Liverpool FC
the bestest team that city has produced since 1973
Pipped at the post, robbed of their right
the entire population will be crying all night

Whereas at Spurs indeed it is time to rejoice and celebrate
we won a game, we scored 3 goals, no-one died intestate.
The world is our lobster, we have now drawn the line
under ‘last’ season, its over, its finished, we can bide our time
and create a wonder team for next year, a team to beat all
Because we are the fucking best, and pride predeeds the fall.
Yet 2015 remains a blank page,
with all to look forward to, without any rage.
Its Europe for us, The Europa League… again
We beat Manchester United to that privledge and so we remain,
playing in Kiev on thursday nights in -30 degrees,
thawing out for sunday’s match, the team on its weary knees.
But a new manager, a new broom, to sweep well away,
the useless, the impotent, the pathetic, the insane
leaving us with… errr… hmmm… well, just the good players, and many for sale
just let us win for a change, BRING BACK GARETH BALE.

That concludes the season for this time around
about football now I’ll not make a sound.
Oh, there’s the World Cup, if f the stadium’s finished
But not for 3 whole weeks, my enthusiasm’s diminished.

So have a happy remainder of Sunday
the sun’s just come out to shine our tears away (but not for Liverpool fans)

A xxxx

No taxation without representation!!!

So rang the chorus of the Americans when they decided, stupidly as it turned out, to oust their British masters and become a ‘republic’, rather than just remain a suburb of London, 5000 miles away and 974 times bigger than its governing nation. The Amerians regret it now, of course, and rue how life could have been so much better if they’d stayed under sovreign rule. But it was all about tax. Its always about tax. No matter how many tea-bags you throw into Boston Harbour.

And we stand on our high horses, in the moral high ground; us and all the press and media, and we slag off Amazon and we slag off Starbucks and Google and Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow. Not for the quality of their appalling coffee, rotten singing or whatever google do that sucks, but because they don’t pay enough tax. And that’s unforgivable. And so we nod and congratulate the powers that be when such nasty, selfish, un-public-spirited companies/people get shafted for past evasion/avoidance and get lumbered with an eye-watering tax bill. Hah! we say, fucker(s) deserved it. Good job.

Then we pay the window cleaner in cash so we don’t have to pay the vat and moan like Jose Morinho after every Chelsea game when our tax bills come in telling us how much of the meagre monies we’ve worked so hard for are demanded, not requested, but demanded, by the government so they can squander it in handouts to India to feed their starving millions so they can use their own billions to fund their useless space programme. The Romanians get the rest of ours.

No-one wants to pay tax. No-one volunteers (other than Her Majessty, but she’s different), you can appeal taxation but you’ll never win, you can avoid it but it’ll come back and bite you on the bum (Gary Barlow’s bum has teeth-marks all over it, nothing to do with Luis Suaraz) and only misguided socialist billionaires offer to pay more.

Oddly, the most maligned and misunderstood company in the whole country, if not the whole world, the infamous Wonga, pay lots of tax. 50 million last year alone, but because they lend money to people who can’t borrow from the banks, who have no ‘line of credit’, who are desperate, Wonga’s profits are so frowned upon that no-one mentions the money they put back into the national pot.

But mainly, we hate tax avoidance schemes because a. you have to have sufficient millions to get onto them (unlike job creation schemes, homeless shelter schemes), and b. we don’t like people getting away with things we can’t. Rich people who pay tax are just about acceptable and forgivable. Rich people who don’t must be lambasted and crucified in the court of public opinion. Bastards. And companies who make big profits are total bastards. They must be to make such big profits in the first place.

So Wonga are bastards because they make a big profit. Even though they pay all their taxes. And Gary Barlow is a bastard because he’s richer than me. And Starbucks are bastards because they don’t pay tax.

I better think about this whilst sipping my skinny, soya, no-foam, flat-brown caramel mochiato with extra calve,s liver.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

When the movie Terminator came out in 1984 (I was still upset that Orwell’s Big Brother prophecy had failed to meet its deadline) I refused to go and see it. Quite frankly it was beneath me. It was yet another big budget blood and guts fest of special effects, tragic dialogue and a lead actor made of wood. Austrian wood. Because Schwarzenegger had been in a few movies, or basically been in the same movie several times before and they were awful. Big guy carries massive gun with bulging muscles and slaughters all who come before him, speaking only when spoken to in ‘boys own’, comic strip action hero bollox. Unworthy of my burgeoning movie snobbery and arthouse fixation. ‘But where’s the meaning????’ ‘What is he REALLY trying to tell us???’ ‘Its just existentialist mumbo-jumbo thinly veiled in the director’s nihilistic vision of dystopia!!’ Fuck I must have been horrible. Plus ca change. Anyway, Terminator? Moi?? Oh dahhhling, you must be having a smirk.

Then I saw it. Some years later. On tv. Where I can put it down to ‘just background noise whilst I’m reading Proust’. Not that I’ve ever read Proust, its just that a pretentious fucker like me should have been reading Proust rather than just doing the (easy) Su Doku in the Standard. But I saw it and it is one of my top 3 (yes 3!!!!, not top 5 or 10, but 3) all time favourites. Its still on tv all the time, and I watch it every time. Even just for 5 minutes.

It simply has it all. It had Arnie, still made of wood, but in the perfect role, as someone made of metal. Briliant casting. He was a frikkin robot, of course he was monosyllabic and expressionless. So easy for Arn. It had Linda Hamilton who I was already in love with (not top 3, perhaps, but certainly top 50, or 500… how many women are there?). And it had more weaponry than American Guns and best of all, the story (a surprisingly good story in such a film) was a time paradox. And I love things that if you think about them long enough can actually make your head explode. If you go back in time and father a son, how does that work for you? There could be two of ‘you’ present? Fathering the son changes your (future) history so you may no longer exist when you go back there (this ‘son’ could kill your mother?). Oh, I love a time paradox. Anyway, I can honsestly say ‘Terminator changed my life’. Not necessarily for the better.

When Terminator 2 came out I refused to see it. Don’t do sequels. Even ones directed by James Cameron. Sorry, its got a ‘number’, it must be shit. Needless to say it wasn’t. It was better than the original and took CGI to another level. Linda had lost some weight, put on some muscle, but still adorable, in a violently insane kind of way. Arnie was Arnie.

Then I watched Kindergarten Cop. Arnie does ‘funny’. In a German, humourless, really unfunny, custard pie in the face kind’a way. And it was awful. Truly tragic. Arnie had tried to portray a human and failed miserably.

And now he’s done it again. At 96 years old (well, he looks it) he has a new film out called Sabotage. In which he commits the twin errors of trying to act as a person and trying to be funny. Even though after numerous surgeries, the three facial muscles that he once employed now no longer function at all. And I simply refuse to see this film. There’s not enough money in the world to make me. (though you could try). No way.

And maybe I’m wrong again? This time though, that’s pretty doubtful.

Hasta la vista, baby

A xxxx

Easyjet, the, errrr, well, someone’s favourite airline, probably, are going to use a drone to check their planes for fuselage damage. Brilliant thing. It hovers over, under and round the entire aircraft using cameras and sensors to check for cracks and bad things. They can detect holes of 1mm in the metal. And all in just a few hours as opposed to the 2 days it takes humans to check the plane over. Fantastic.

What a shame they can’t use robots and drones to replace all the Easyjet staff, streamline their awful operation, reduce the horrendous queues at check-in, maybe even make the coffee on the flights (that’ll be £8.25, Sir) which is awful. I’m no flight snob but I hate Easyjet and will only go to Gatwick if kidnapped and dumped there in the back of a van.

But technology is a wonderful thing. Even if I consistently fail to use most of it. They’re working on sensors that can work out when you’re stressed. As the anger builds, tiny sensors in your keyboard, mouse, phone or even steering wheel, detect it and… and… and…

Well what? What can it do? Administer an instant shot of valium? Punch you pre-emptively on the nose?? Activate your phone to shout out ‘Naah, ‘Arrry, don’ ‘it ‘im!!!’? Play the sound of waves lapping on a beach somewhere near Rochdale??

They haven’t thought that far. They’re just, for the time being, working out more ways of monitoring us. All of us. They already know where we are (gps in phones), where we go (Oyster card logs on the tube), what we buy (credit cards) and what we’re wearing every day (cc tv cameras everywhere), with whom we have sex (sex tapes on youtube), so now they will know what mood we’re in too. And send down one of Easyjet’s drones, which could be circling round above the streets, to administer some ‘executive relief’. Euuuuw. Although…

They want to make a car that changes colour with the mood. So as you get angry-to-the-point-of-road-rage (and what is the point of road rage?) your car will turn, what, red? What if its already red? No-one will know. If you’re really happy and peaceful (or stoned, same difference), it’ll go a really nice shade of aqua-green. If you’re pre-menstrual, it should go black. Very black. And fill with bars of chocolate (something Apple and Cadburys need to get together on). On the way to Spurs the car would be fabulously yellow and sunny, and on the way home it would be grey, dull and shattered. When you pull into the driveway after work your wife (or husband; sexist bastard!) will know your mood and be able to act accordingly. Either open the front door with a smile, or run out of the back door screaming.

Great idea.

Big Brother is not just watching you but sensing how you feel too. That should make you feel so secure your keyboard turns a lovely shade of puce.

Happy thursday

A xxxx

Manchester City are amazing. They play lovely football, score truckloads of wonderful goals, they entertain, they are winners, they are smooth, relaxed, creative, classy and elegant as a unit and they achieve top levels of success.

So why do we fucking hate them?

Its an interesting question. And even if its not interesting, even if its a pointless, dull or downright stupid question, I’m going to answer it all the same. I’m that kind of guy.

And ‘that kind of guy’ is anyone who loved football before Sky came along, brought in the Premiership and changed the fundamental value system in the game. From ‘football’ being the prime concern, that shifted to become ‘money’. Taking away ancient concepts like club loyalty, like decency, fairness and any degree of equality between the clubs.

“But you can’t buy success!!!!” they shout. Oh yes you bloody can.

Just look at Chelsea as a model. An average team on the very verge of bankruptcy when in steps Roman Abramovich with his ill-gotten Mafia-esque rubles and just starts buying the best players in the world. All of them. When poor men are under threat for their lives from a tyrannical government or business people they’ve screwed over, they run and hide. Rich men don’t. They get a load of guards and they buy a horrible football club to raise their own profile to the point where they feel untouchable by the men with the uranium-tipped umbrellas and sharp stilletoes (the knives, not the heels, though maybe both). Lo and behold, Chelsea win the league. Then they win it again, having waited over 60 years since their previous success. They win cups, they win everything including the biggest prize of all, the Champions League. Bringing them the glory they wanted and the money to make them even richer.

So along comes Sheikh Mansoor, a humble Emiratee. From Abu Dhabi. And he buys failing no-hope club Manchester City, injects a billion quid in players that Chelsea would otherwise have bought, and guess what? They start winning stuff they’d never before dreamed of. Turning football into a dick-measuring competition for the uber-rich playboys of the world.

Uefa being Uefa (ie toothless, hopeless, moronic and probably in the pay of the Chelseas and Man Citys) under pressure from the other clubs, bring in their pathetic ‘Financial Fair Play’ rules to try and limit clubs’ spending to a level vaguely related to their earnings. Vaguely because clubs are still allowed to make ‘losses’, which is the bit the owner just gives them at the end of the financial year to balance the books and reduce his personal tax bill. Except Sheikh Mansoor, who doesn’t pay tax. You don’t when you own the country.

And thus Manchester City exceed these Fair Play rules. In which losses are acceptable up to £37 million per year. After lots of creative accounting and shuffling into acceptable piles of lossage like infrastructure and youth training (which amounts to about 3 weeks of Yaya Toure’s salary, but who’s counting). In two years Man City’s losses total £150 million. Not counting the very very dubious ‘naming rights’ deal of the Etihad Stadium for an internationally never-before-heard-of, £350 million for 10 years. Coincidentally, Etihad Airlines is owned by Abu Dhabi, which is run by Sheikh Mansoor.

And if any of this smell a touch ratty, then you’re wrong and prejudicial, just because its Man City and you hate them. They are challenging in court Eufa’s punitive measures to their excesses.

Quel surprise.

Happy Wednesday, let’s get football back to black and white, where it was lovely, and standing up at matches, and bring back smallpox and scurvy and rationing while you’re there.

A xxxx

There’s a new website in the world. Ahhh, that’s exiting, a new website, only about 3 million of those come along each week, so its big news. But this one is different. Its a kind of dating site for dog owners and lovers. Not really ‘dating’ in the sense of sleeping with a dog (either literally or euphemistically), more a way of dog owners and dog lovers to ‘hook up’ so the latter may ‘borrow’ the owner’s dog for times. Thus the owners get a break (shouldn’t’a bought the fucking mutt in the first place then, should’ja???) and the borrowers get to play House with a dog for a day/weekend/week. The perfect site where dog-hating dog-owners meet dog lovers who are shy on commitment. Who then get a chance, for the term of the borrowing, to pick up all the dog turds they need to make them happy and fulfilled. Great idea.

So great I’m thinking of setting one up for children. borrow-my-little-bastard.com will do just that. It’ll give stressed out parents a welcome break from the incessant demands of caring for sprogs, whilst wannabe mums and dads can be parents on a part-time basis. I suppose I’d have to have some kind of scanning process, ensure suitability and shit like that, but generally it’d be just a weekend away, or a 3-week trip to Thailand, unencumbered, or a one-way ticket to Rio and make sure little Johnny has a good life; bye. This is such a wonderful idea that I’ve already been approached by sponsors who are keen to get this up and running. Mothercare and Toys-R-Us jumped right in, as did Max Clifford (though due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’ we may put that on hold), Gary Glitter, Father Joseph McCleary, Bishop Murphy and several MPs who asked to have their names withheld.

Whilst watching ‘American Guns’ the other day, there was an odd thing. Other than the programme itself. What would you imagine to be the demographic of the typical watcher of such tv? Rednecks from Tennessee? Truck drivers from Green Bay? Serial killers from Chicago? Big butch, bearded game huntin’, fishin’, shootin’ good ole boys from everywhere?? Yeah, so would I. Ok, and opticians from London.

So why, we wondered, was the first advert shown during the show for Tampax. Followed by L’Oreal hair products, tights, perfumes and all manner of girly paranphernalia? It made no sense. Did the advertising mavens who study such things and analyse them to a ridiculously scientific degree, get their demographics wrong? Its the only explanation. Unless… unless women are really into guns in a big way, or (as I’ve always suspected) are psycho killers at heart. Or that most gunmen are cross-dressing transexuals who like tampons.

Poor Liverpool. Poor, poor Liverpool. There’s always so much to cry about in Liverpool, as soon as I hear someone talking with a scouse accent these days I automatically reach for the tissues. As we say at Spurs: there’s always next season. And look how well that’s worked out for us.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

Sometimes you have too much time on your hands. Bank holiday weekend, lovely sunny day, ahhhhhh.
So yesterday I played tennis; oh what a joy, then after lunch mowed the lawn, walked over to Kenwood to get ice creams (about an hour, round trip) but there were about 200 people there with kind’a the same idea, and the ice cream’s not that great, but its charged as if it is, so we came home and drove up to a fab ice cream place in North Finchley. Or, The Land Time Forgot. We got fantastic ice creams from Chix Chox, little Italian restaurant with the best ice cream machine in London, who’ve been there since the Romans invaded Britain in 374 AD, or 762 BC or whenever it was. In fact Chix Chox may be run by those very invaders, they are very old in there. We sat across the road where Costa have placed some chairs in the sunshine. To watch the world go by. And what a world it is. Filled with strange, exotic and very drunk peple (5 in the afternoon), weirdos, freaks, Poles and oddities. Not so much like being in another country (3 miles from home), more like being on another planet. So we returned to the genitility and peace of home. And I watched tv with Rachie. Something I seldom do during daylight hours.

And there’s was little on, after I saw Athletico Madrid lose their football match. So we watched a real fave of mine (even though I’ve only seen it about 3 times), American Guns. The place where ‘the right to bear arms’ is taken beyond any known extreme. The place where Charlton Heston is probably buried. This store, in Colorado, not only sells guns, but makes them, customises them, turns them into nuclear devices, whatever you would or could want in a gun they will oblige. They buy guns too. And in yesterday’s show the shop owner visited a guy to buy some of his ‘collection’. The guy, who didn’t appear particularly bright, could have been from North Finchley, was very rich. And opened a sealed vault of 3 rooms to show what was basically a gun shop of his own. Rows and rows, racks and racks, cabinet after cabinet filled with weaponry. An army would be proud of his collection, but may find it a little excessive in quantitiy. Richie (the good ole boy store owner) was interested in some machine guns. Like, fully automatic, proper, 30 shots a second killing machines. And this guy had dozens. Literally. Putin would have been envious.

Then a guy came into the store to get an ‘old family heirloom’ (probably means one of his grand-daddies used it to shoot up a school in 1937) converted into a ‘weapon for household protection’. And he knew what he wanted, how aggressive it had to be, how powerful, with a light on it (burglars come at night) and what colour he wanted it. And this guy was a pastor. A fucking priest. Who wants to flaunt the 5th (or maybe sixth or seventh, depending on biblical convention chosen) commandment and get hisself an ultimate killin’ machine. In Colorado no-one could see any irony is this at all. There again G-d herself (always politically correct, to a fault) did some flaunting with Sodom & Gomorrah, with the Red Sea closing and a zillion other ‘acts of God’ that resulted in mass murder of one kind or another. But this isn’t a biblical debate; THIS IS GUNSSSSSS. BIG FUCKING GUNS FIRING BIG FUCKING BULLETS AND LOTS OF ‘EM.

I caught the end of the amazing Real Madrid match in which they were losing at home until the 92nd minute when Ronaldo (who else?) scored yet another remarkable goal. But really remarkable.

I’m glad I’m Spanish; English football is shit, whereas ‘ours’ is wonderful and we’re all set for an incredible finale.

Happy Bank Holiday Monday

A xxxx