Andy's Glasses

I love a bit of urban redevelopment, just like the next man. And its all the better if the planners use what’s available and add to it rather than the Berlin Method of bombing the place to dust and building a modernesque nightmare.

SoHo in New York is a prime example of how ya do it right.

Farringdon is another. The whole area east of Farringdon Road by the wonderful, old (and still used; certainly smells like its still used) Smithfields Meat Market and south of the Clerkenwell Road just sort’a crept up and became trendy. Filled with fabulous old buildings, all left wonderfully intact, most of which are now bars and restaurants. And slick and trendy offices. Used to be a dump, now its fabulous and buzzing. And obviously unaffordable to live or rent office space now, but you can’t have it all.

Only my pension people can afford their new offices there. Which is why I’ll be working til I’m 93. Bastards.

So we went to see them last night for a meeting of depression and disappointment, as always, and took the younger daughter with to sort out stuff for her ‘planning’ now she’s a working babe.

And afterwards we thought we might as well eat there, in the Meat Market. Because we love meat and you’re kind of eating it ‘at source’.
Ironic then that the place next door to the market offers ’40-day beef’ and ‘3-month-old’ steaks, when they could so easily provide really fresh stuff. Go figure.

I was more concerned with Kobe and Wagyu.

These almost mythical, mystical breeds of cattle roam the plains round Tokyo. (Do they actually have any plains around Tokyo? Maybe they roam the streets round Tokyo). They are fed beer and massaged with Sake when young. I didn’t make that up, honest. Its how they’re reared. You soak their feed in beer and whilst they’re drunk as (very big) skunks, you massage their little 2-ton bodies to ‘tenderise’ them for… er… later. And on a scale of things from ‘free-range’ to ‘foix gras’ this is a pretty acceptable life for animals who’s lives are destined to end on a plate in EC1.

I must confess, I’m not a steak fan. I really don’t dig on raw meat. Never have. Rachie loves it. She sat there eating with blood dripping down her chin like some beautiful Tyrannasaurus with orthodontistry.
I like my meat cooked. I know, that’s not how its supposed to be, its philistine, its not being in touch with my inner cave man, its an abuse of good beef. And I don’t fucking care.

But I do love a burger. So I had a Wagyu burger. Felt it was the least I could do after all that animal had been throught to get there. And I’d love to say ‘it changed my life’, or ‘I saw God’ or ‘I’ll never eat in KFC again’, but it wasn’t that brilliant. It was lovely, but just tasted a bit odd. I’d definitely try it again. Maybe next time I go to find out what happened to the pension I once had.

I’m hungry now.

Happy Friday,

A xxxx

Today is the first ‘day’ of Chanukah, the Festival of Lights. Yippee. It actually started last night while I was out, kind’a caught me by surprise. So we lit our candle (singular; only one on the first night, increasing by approximately one more every day for 8 days… or 8 ‘nights-before-the-days’ really). And chanukah is unusual for a Jewish festival in that its happy. Most aren’t. They’re commemorating the history of a people who, basically, haven’t been treated too well by history. But on chanukah we’re happy, we light candles and we actually sing songs which, unlike on all other festivals, don’t sound like funeral marches. Kids get presents. Candles get lit. Food gets eaten. But all Jewish festivals are marked by food (or an absence thereof, I s’pose) because that’s what keeps the doctors happy.

Chanukah the food of choice is oil. Fat. Fried everything. Its like friday night in Glasgow. Because the oil is symbolic.
What happened was…

many years ago there was a war and a bunch of middle eastern horrible people, kind of proto-Assads. They sacked the Temple in Jerusalam, killed loads of Israelites, raped, pillaged and plundered and generally acted just like those Glaswegians on a Friday night. The Maccabees fought back and saved the Temple. For a while. It got sacked and wrecked so many times by so many persecutors that all that’s left is one wall; the Wailing/Western Wall.
But on that occasion all was well. Phew. Except… except…

Oh No, there’s only sufficient oil to keep the eternal lamp burning for one day, and it’ll take 7 days to get more because Amazon are out of stock. Because oil doesn’t just pour out of the ground. Because Tescos had a rush. Whatever. Seven days to go, one day’s worth of oil for the lamp. Which is in serious breach of the ‘eternal’ bit of its job description if it goes out for 6 days. So the rabbis, being pragmatic kind of dudes, did what they had to do.

Make oil? Buy oil? Steal oil?

No, they prayed. And a miracle happened and the oil lasted 7 more days and all was well until the Babylonians, Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Egyptians or whomsoever came to cause more bother a few years later.
Rinse and repeat.

That is the history of the Jews.

The oil is thus symbolic.

So we could bathe in it for the duration of chanukah, or we could increase the wholesale price set by OPEC, or we could eat things cooked in it. Hmmm…

Doughnuts become the order of the day. Fried potatoes. Fried fish, meat, vegetables, chocolate, mars bars, herring, bananas and fried chicken fat.
The Torah now has a health warning inserted on the sabbath before Chanukah starts. And the word: ‘statins’ appears in the ancient texts.
Its true; too much chanukah could kill ya. But a little of what you fancy…

Happy Chanukah

A xxxx

In days of old, b4 txts & emls ruined the entire language, before the ‘digital age’, I was a well-analogue kind of guy and I actually used to write letters. There’s a surprise eh? Opinionated bastard voices opinions. Plus ca change…

I was angry of NW11. Before that I was disgruntled of E18. Pissed off from Ilford; devastated of Gants Hill. Even for a while Upset of West Hollywood.
But letters I always wrote. With a pen. Remember pens? With my hundred year old typewriter acquired from an Oxfam shop which weighs the same as my car, with anything. Things upset me, inspired me, animated me, I had to let people know of the good/bad/ indifferent/useless/pathetic they were up to.
And I wrote to Nigella Lawson. As she was then known. Pre-domestic goddess. Ancient times. 25 years ago. Before she’d achieved that rare fame (and good fortune to have an almost unique, if a bit stupid, name) in which you are known as just one name. Nigella.

Beyonce does it. Eminem. But that’s cheating. Nigella is a one-name babe. An act of stupid vanity by her father, Nigel, and the name that was probably a source of teasing and upset at school (would’a been in my school) became her making.

That and the fact that she is quite gorgeous. Despite living most of her adult life slightly north of her perfect fighting weight.
And I wrote to her at the Evening Standard, for whom she wrote a weekly column. Next to which was a picture, her byline. Like the one above. A pouting princess. A divine entity. Natural beauty. And not just that, she was clever. Wrote proper, joined-up type words, all plummy, a bit Oxbridge, more than a touch pretentious, but strikingly intelligent. Which is almost as important in a woman as bust size. Almost.

I wrote because of some slur she’d made upon new fathers. And Natalie was at the time about 6 months old, so she was ‘attacking’ me. Personally. Not that I was so bothered about this mere ‘slight’ on the character of proud new dads, which was pretty accurate really. I just liked the idea of a discourse with this gorgeous woman. As that was the only -course I was ever going to be eligible for.

I wrote, she replied, in ink (as opposed to a cave drawing, perhaps?) and that was that. She married John Diamond who died of cancer, married Charles Saatchi who strangled her outside a restaurant, and she has graced our screens, licking chocolate off her fingers, for many years.
And now the ex-hubby has revealed that she’s a serious drug user. Another serious drug user to come to light. Everyone’s doing drugs these days; drugs are the new Lattes. Bank chairmen, mayors of Toronto, now Nigella. Coke, cannabis, anything, ALLEGEDLY. Charles called her ‘Higella’. Not very nice. But I don’t think he’s a very nice man.

The Saachi/Nigella personal assistants, two Italian sisters are up for fraudulent use of the couple’s credit cards. The PAs defense is that they were allowed to spend what they liked ‘in return for their silence about Nigella’s drug use’. Which is kind of ‘blackmail’ writ backwards. So not the best defense really.

So I’d just like to say: NIGELLA IS INNOCENT ON VIRTUALLY ALL CHARGES. FREE NIGELLA (if only).

Justice must be obscene to be done.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Doctor Who is 50 years old this week. Not the Doctor himself; he’s as ancient or young as the producers of the time decide, but the series. When it came out I was 7. And really excited about its arrival. Mainly because ‘back then’ there were only 2 tv stations and they only transmitted from about 3 in the afternoon til 11 at night and 98% of what they showed was of abolutely no interest to a 7 year old kid.
Strictly come Rationing; There’s no such thing as a celebrity yet, but get me out of here anyway; Top of the Assassinations. Kennedy won that year.

Anyway; big fuss made about this ‘new sci-fi’ series, time travel, exotic locations (Hull), futuristic monsters, and all in a blue phone box. Wow. Stuff didn’t get any more exciting than that in 1963.
The show started, the original Doc, the phone box and a light being turned on and off rapidly were ‘special effects’ which were stunning. Instead of CGI (because the ‘C’ hadn’t yet been invented) they had men in dustbins with collendars on their heads. Really amazing.

I’d love to say I remember that first episode. But I can’t. It was as memorable as Preston North End drawing 0-0 with Burnley. It was as fantastic as the weather forecast. As gripping as a wet bar of soap.
Even to the 7 year old me it was just shit and disappointment.

Yet it became a cult. And part of that cult was to keep its ‘original values’, if not, never, the original Doctor. Those values being never to spend more than the tea and biscuit budget on the costumes, sets and effects.

People still rave about the show, obviously, and its still crap, but that’s life. Or that’s ‘sad bastards’ whichever way you choose to look at it.

One tv show that was much better, if a little later, was Citizen Smith. In 1977. Fantastic comedy about a group of ‘urban guerillas’ living in Tooting. The Tooting Popular Front, as they were, a little bit of communism in South London. Funny situation, inspired comedy, Comrade.

Then we learn last week that two women were kept as ‘slaves’ for 30 years in South London. But not just by a wierd and abusive couple, but by the leaders of the: ‘Workers Institute of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse Tung Thought’. In. Brixton. I’d love to be able to claim that I made that up but sadly, its real. A Marxist ‘collective’ (in that they collected slaves, it would appear) right there in SW2. Whoever would’a thought? Life imitating art.

Not like Doctor Who, which was more art imitating kitchin equipent and household utensils.

Live long and prosper (oops, mixing me sci-fis)

Happy tuesday

A xxxx

No one died
the world survived
the trees are still there
the weather’s even quite fair.
Its only football.

Children still happy
politicians still crappy
same sights as old
jolly tales being told
Its only football.

Goods are still being trucked
the economy’s still fucked
In Iran we may trust
(as it all turns to dust)
Its only football.

Dentists still fillin’
Syrians still killin’
the trains are still working
Mylie’s still twerking
Its only football.

Clooney and I still full of style
Aussie cricketers still bloody vile
British troops still full of valour
Blue is still the warmest colour
ITS ONLY BLOODY FOOTBALL.

But six goals to nil
its not close to being a thrill
its desperate and dire as I try
my utmost not to just cry

Its over its done its finished and dead
the thing we feared with anxiety and dread
the living proof, the fact of life
as I said to my long-suffering (and not that interested) wife

We are just shite, pure and simple, that’s what we are
in fact in levels of shite we’ve raised the sodding bar
the season is over, aspirations denied
we looked like we never even tried

I’m not a big fan of Manchester City
preferred it when upon them we used to take pity
they’re northern and ugly and richer than God
mercenary scum with sexuality quite odd

Yet they played in a completely different class
and a right royal pain in the bloody ass
the humiliation, the horror, the sadness, the woe
We couldn’t even get near to that foe

But when you align your mood to the team you support
you get what you’re given, which can be quite fraught
Yet you cannot change, the emotion’s not there
So you try to convince yourself you ‘really don’t care’

You have family and friends, good health, a nice house
does it matter your team play like mickey mouse?
‘Its only football’, a game, a sport, it really doesn’t matter
(that fucking result! my hearth doth shatter)

Yet the season’s still young, time to get it together
if we just beat whoever, never mind the weather
Spurs can come good, just a matter of time
I only wish ‘FUCK! SHIT! PISS! WANK!’ was a better little rhyme.

Happy monday… if only

Depressed of NW11
xxxx

I love a bit of atheism, God knows, I really do.

And yet, it can go too far. Like Richard Dawkins, who holds every ‘believer’ in total contempt and basically accuses them of being completely moronic, stupid, blind and dim if they adhere to some formulaic set of rituals known as ‘religion’. There again he’s so smug, arrogant and obnoxious he holds most of humanity in contempt just for not being him. Tosser.

Yet the point has been made that atheism is in fact a logical impossibility anyway, because you can’t ever prove a negative totally.
So it all becomes a matter of whether you believe God exists, for which, let’s face it, there is no proof whatsoever, or whether you believe he doesn’t. Atheism becomes in itself a matter of belief. Just a different belief.

Furthermore its a matter of what you need to make sense of the world. Theists believe in God because they need something to explain shit. Not ‘shit’ in itself, I’m sure the Pope’s shit stinks the same as Dawkins’. However much incense you use. But to understand the universe you need help. You can explain it by science, like Dawkins, or you invoke the Hand of God. Not like Maradonna’s goal, the real Hand of the real God. Divine intervention type stuff.

So you pays yer money, you takes yer choice. Generally quite a bit of money if you belong to my synagogue.

Most religions have issues with homosexuality. Very few condone or accept it, unless in very watered down or ‘liberal’ versions of mainstream godliness. It goes agains the whole ‘go forth and multiply’ ethos. ‘Go forth and adopt’ is a great sentiment but not biblical. There are other quotes from the holy books relating Sodom and Gamorrah to Hampstead Heath and other pretty negative commentaries on same sex relationships. In Islamic countries being gay is punishable by death. Gay marriage here in wonderful, liberal, tolerant Britain caused a mass of discontent and obfuscation by even David Cameron who feared the displeasure of the very conservative Conservatives and shelved the plans for its legalisation. The Catholics just struggle to differentiate between ‘celibate’ and ‘gay’.

One conservative less anti on gay marriage is Crispin Blunt. He ‘came out’ at 50 years old, having known his sexuality since he was 12. Coming from an army family he knew they wouldn’t’ be too pleased by any such revelation so kept it to himself, married, fathered 2 kids, then came out after 20 years of wedlock. Wife must have been pleased with that. Yet surely his parents are to blame.

The old chicken and egg debate once again. Did he become gay because he was called Crispin or did he become gay because he was called Crispin? Either way he really had little choice in the matter.

Blue is the Warmest Colour is on general release this weekend. Its atheistic, pornographic, sapphic, French and a truly wonderful film. 3 hours of only slightly uncomfortable viewing.

Happy sunday

A xxxx

Ok, we’ve done without football for long enough. It feels like fucking July round here. Ok, its a bit colder, nights a bit earlier, mornings a bit bleaker, frost a bit thicker, but the lack of proper football is interminable and awful. How can they do that? WHY can they do that?? Its abuse. It infringes my human rights. All that ‘friendly international’ bollox. Its not right. Its not real. Its rubbish. We need Premiership and we need it NOW.
Ok, we’re getting it but really… really…

I even had every intention (oh, that ‘road of good intentions’ is a slippery place) of gloating about the cricket, of paying to have “I ‘heart’ Stuart Broad” tattooed on every Australian in the land, but that’s all gone to shit now, dammit.

So we’re back. Football. Aaaaahhhhhhh.

And yet, and yet… its rather depressing. As if we didn’t have enough problems at Spurs, we’re playing Manchester City at just the ‘wrong time’ (don’t ask; I’m thinking when a ‘good time’ might be and can only come up with ‘when they’re all sleeping’) just as they’re shaking off the dodgy form of the early season, at least when they’re at home. Away they’re the shitty rubbish everyone wants them to always be, but at home they can be awesome. Even though they’re a bunch of overpaid mercenary gypsy types who define ‘home’ as the place where they pay you the most. Oddly, Spurs are better away from home. The Lane has been the place of two horribly tragic disappointments (so far) this season and will doubtless be witness to more wrist-slitting agony as the term progresses.
But I shall remain upbeat, optimistic, filled with hope and expectation and prozac and valium. Same old same old.

Arsenal play Southampton, 1st vs 3rd, bizarrely, and we want the Saints to win so we can stop the Goons from running away with the league. And we want West Ham to beat Chelsea (trust me; its political and pragmatic, not personal; both are hateful) Liverpool and Everton to draw because both are above us in the table (becoming less an exclusive club every week, sadly) and we want Cardiff to beat Manchester United because it will make Bridge-Meister Clive the happiest man in north London, at least until someone makes a slam against him.

The rest of the matches are irrelevant. I can’t be concerned with ‘that end of the table’. Not yet anyway. Few more weeks I may be very interested in it. But for now the battle for 6th place is all that is of interest to me and to those others who know right from wrong, good from evil, their lilywhites from their reds.

Spurs MUST WIN.
Not like 2 weeks ago, the week before that, next weekend, no, nothing like that at all. Though I’ve never heard anyone refer to a ‘must lose’ game ever.
Nothing else matters. This is more important than anything. Even if they find Ed Milliband was the gay lover of a drug-taking fat old bank chief…
well, that would be fun, but this is really important.

Come on you Spurs

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

What’s the purpose of a Mayor? What are they for? What do they do? What’s their raison d’etre??
Their alleged role is to represent the city to which they do their mayoring, to act as figurehead, spokesperson, head of the city council and mouthpiece for that entire metropolis. And all who sail in it.

Ken Livingstone, London’s first mayor since Dick Whittington, took his role as champion of the underdog and chose to demonstrate how open and accepting and multi-cultural and wonderful we as a city are by inviting as many terrorists as he could to have tea with him in City Hall. Anyone banned from the country, anyone wanted by the police, Ken would make them a nice cuppa Brooke Bond and open the chocolate biscuits. Which we’d fucking paid for.

Boris Johnson came with a slightly trickier past, having shagged his way round the posher totty of the right-wing journalistic world, whilst married to his poor, long-suffering, and brought his reputation for ‘laughs first, serious shit later’ with him. Though its served him surprisingly well. Some view him as a joke, as a buffoon, with his blond mop and seeming inability to take anything seriously unless its wearing a dangerously low cut top and ‘fuck me’ heels.

And then there’s Rob Ford.
WHO???
The mayor of Toronto. In name only currently, because he’s a sinner. Big time sinner. And Toronto is generally a very tolerant and forgiving place. Its simply too cold there to act otherwise. Yeah, I forgive you, can we go back to the lovely roaring fireside now?

Rob Ford was filmed smoking crack cocaine. Some might think this unacceptable for an elected representative of a major city. But I’ll give him some leeway because its not like he’s the head of a British bank or anything. Then he drove whilst drunk, arrived at council meetings pissed, bought various other hard drugs, offered oral sex to a female colleague (so he’s not all bad), though not, on record, to any male colleagues, so a bit of sexism going on there too, and he’s generally a fat ugly fair-haired slob with major problems. In fact he IS Paul Flowers without the moustache and the gay porn on his work computer.

But unlike Flowers, Rob Ford won’t resign. Instead he offered up the usual ‘get out of jail’ card for politicians: “I MADE SOME MISTAKES; THEY’RE PAST, LET’S MOVE ON”.
Fuckwit.

Tony Blair famously ‘smoked a joint when he was 19’ as did Bill Clinton who ‘didn’t inhale’ (waste’a someone’s dope that was then) when a student. Forgivable. The folly of youth. But Ford’s ‘mistakes’ are right here and now. They’re ongoing. His confession should read: I’M MAKING SOME MISTAKES, THEY’LL BE OVER SOON. But they won’t. You can cure addiction, you can cure a fat belly, but you can’t cure an arrogant, drug-addled piece of shit. It says so in all the medical books. And its time Canadia stopped being such a bloody nice place full of such bloody nice tolerant, nice, lovely people and banished this horrible man to exile. Montreal maybe, they’d hardly notice him among all those Frenchies.

Me mate Canadian Dave is beside himself with worry over his city (doh: Toronto; try and keep up). His mayor is giving hard drugs a bad name.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

What a revelation; what a story; what a life-changing, history-understanding, game-changing event of monumental…
Well, of monuments.
Stonehenge is in the news again. As it is at least once every thousand years or so. Because they’ve discovered something really important.
The stones, those fucking massive mega-rocks which make up the site, were originally thought to have come from Carn Goedog, some god-forsaken nothing in the middle of Welsh nowhere. But they were wrong. It has now been shown that they come from Carn Meini. Wow. That’s a whole mile away from the original site. Oh no.
The question as to how they then arrived at their present location, 150 miles away, seems to me a more interesting question. An even better one is WHY????
I suspect it was a proto-government-unemployment scheme, get the children off the streets, have them do something ‘useful’. Even though I don’t think they had ‘streets’ 5000 years ago when Stonehenge was born. Not exactly. Maybe it was an ‘internship’, to ‘help move a few stones’.

I’d have called UPS myself, but maybe things were different at that time. Maybe UPS didn’t have an office in Wales back then.
I reckon aliens done it. Used a tractor beam on their space ship and just ‘lifted’ them stones right out’a the ground; all 180 of them and then flying saucered them over to Wiltshire in 14 seconds.

The other theory is more interesting. If you take a look at the latest mobile phone technology, you get a lorra phone in a tiny space. Go back 10 years and some among us (nobs, mainly, plus estate agents, if there’s any difference) were carrying ‘bricks’ which only made very poor phone calls. If you extrapolate this back in time 5000 years, a mobile phone would be the size of Stonehenge.

So there you have it: Andy’s theory, Stonehenge was a mobile phone. The problem was, no-one else had one to receive the call. Details details.

Women are to be ordained at Bishops in the Anglican church. A brilliant moment for women. The reluctance for this apparently stems from Jesus having only male apostles. But he was gay, so of course he did. I read that in Mad magazine, so it must be true. And women Bishops is something we’ve waited for a long time. They look great in long purple dresses so why not?
Though as ever, when big issues occur in religious circles, some will be so opposed that they break away and become the ‘Old Anglican’ C of E and adhere to the ‘old’ and ‘proper’ values of men wearing purple dresses themselves.

At least, it would seem, there is no ‘glass ceiling’ up to heaven.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

How can you beat the Germans (or even their frikkin substitutes; how totally embarrassing?) if you don’t have the right team? If the players are wrong??

I mean: how can you beat the Hun with a team in which the players are called Wayne, Ashley, Kyle and Andros?
With surnames like Lallana and Jagielka. Even Gerrard sounds decidedly French. Unless its said in a Scouse accent. Then it just sounds horrible. Like everything else spoken in that tortuous, agonising mode of speech. Like words being vomited out in great pain. To the speaker and listener.

We need players called Billy and Bobby and Nobby and Jack. We need people called Tommy and Arthur and Alfie and Johnny. Proper names for guys who are proper English. I don’t wish this in a ‘UKIP’ kind of way but after all, this is England we’re talking about here. And that’s how we won the World Cup, back in 1827, with players of unmistakable Englishness in their names.

Wayne and Kyle are fine names. For two brothers from Mississippi out to rape their sister, Lu-Anne. Ashley is a girl’s name and Andros was one of the three mustkateers. Ok, that was, strictly speaking, Athos, but its the same root; taking its meaning from the greek work to tragically underperform and keep wasting crosses.
Ross Barkley is a cabaret singer from Newport Pagnell. Don’t go changin’.

Only Jack Wilshere is appropriately named to go and face the Germans. And he plays for Arsenal so is almost a Frenchman anyway.

And now for something completely different…
Monty Python are coming back. A reunion is being planned. And that is wonderful news. Or is it? Can you really go back to the early 70s when you’re now in your early 70s? The comedy which changed comedy forever provided a stepping stone from which the world of ‘funny’ then evolved. And its come a long way. Personally I’d be happy if they just show the old reruns every night.

Happy Wednesday

Adolph English
xxxx