Andy's Glasses

The term ‘gonzo journalism’ was used back in the 70s to describe the work of Hunter S Thomson in Rolling Stone magazine. It’s like journalism with no rules. It’s first person rather than 3rd a lot of the time and it doesn’t adhere to normal structure or protocols. Like evidential truths. Who needs ‘em? So I would say ‘I modelled myself on the great Hunter S.’ except I hadn’t heard of him until Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas came out which was a kind of autobiographical story of an excessive stone-head, boozer, smoker, all round bad boy. So bad they had Johnny Depp play the lead in the film. And by that time I’d already started on my ‘career’ of making news articles more interesting by inventing stuff, including myself in the narrative (yes, it IS always about ME) and replacing ‘truth’ with ‘funnier’.

The tennis I play is rule free too. Because all those rules slow it down too much, cause people to become overly conservative and allow way too much time for ‘ball bouncing’ and other useless exercises. My way is better. Uninhibited by lines, bounces, niceties or anything, it’s about the pure enjoyment of hitting a ball.

But yesterday tennis turned full Gonzo. I played the younger daughter. First time in quite a few months. And she is a hard hitter. So hard that she hit the ball over the fence 3 times during an hour’s play. My balls. One of which now lives with the fishes. As it landed in the fucking brook. The other 2 were retrievable. So she hits hard, I hit it hard back and then, she slams a ball in the direction of my head/heart/testicles. I’ll parry it and get it back, and she’ll volley it over and I’ll slam it back at her. It resembles a duel using tennis balls as the chosen weapon. All the shots would count as ‘out’ if left, in any ‘normal’ game of tennis. But this ain’t normal by any definition. That’s when it becomes Gonzo. Which you can tell by the width of the smiles as we attack each other.

Maybe they’ll include it in the next Olympics, where the break dancing used to be.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

If there’s one thing more depressing than the Olympics ‘opening ceremony’, it’s the closing ceremony. The purpose of the opening ceremony is to bore everyone to tears and incitement to suicide. It goes on for 13 hours and even if its not raining it can only be seen as some vanity-project of narcissistic artistic directors who, if its wasn’t for the Olympics, I would call ‘on steroids’. Such metaphors can never be uttered near any cyclist. Sprinter. Boxer. Athlete. I’d even test the horses. But at least, once that ceremony is over, we get two weeks of amazing sport to enjoy, get exited about, to follow and to cry about. Excessively. Ok, it’s also an amazing parade of amazing abs, flying pony-tails and incredible thighs, but this is not the place for such objectifying discourse. So I never look forward to the Olympics, then the opening ceremony makes it all seem much worse. But once it starts…

It’s just amazing. Captivating. And so I really don’t want it to finish. But it does and that closing ceremony will confirm that by rubbing salt in the wounds. Probably making me cry all over again.

Yesterday I found a new sport. But literally. They invented it for Paris and by the next Olympics it will be gone. Which is a bit of a tragedy. Yesterday’s final was won by Japan in the ‘goldfish on the kitchen floor’ competition. Or ‘break dancing’ as ‘they’ call it. Simply incredible. Two women hurling themselves around the floor like they’re having a severe epileptic episode, but controlled, gymnastic, athletic, and all in rhythm with the (obviously horrible, garage-type, hip-hop, terrible young-person) music. The Japanese woman out-flapped the Lithuanian but it was possibly the best thing in the entire Olympics. Because it was 10% physical brilliance and 90% attitude. Like Simone Biles in an MandM film. The two girls, competing for the gold, encouraged each other throughout, praised each other, applauded. There was love. I cried. Obviously.

An Englishman won a bike race in the velodrome. The place where all logic is suspended at the door, where gravity is defied, where if you think you understand what’s going on in any particular race, then you’ve got it wrong. But the power they use, the speed, the total spectacle is pure brilliance.

And finally, Katarina Johnson-Thomson-Fromson-Watson won an Olympic medal in the pentathlon. The ultimate statement of ‘you reckon you’re special for being great in a sport? Well I’m fucking brilliant in 5!!!!’

And the ‘women’s’ boxing. Hmmmmm…

You just can’t have men hitting women. It’s unfair, it’s unbalanced, it’s ridiculous and it’s downright fucking dangerous. I don’t care that Imane Kelif has ‘been a woman since her (rather gender-ambiguous) birth’, ‘she’ is a man in virtually every physical way… that is observable with clothes on. Which therefore renders the entire sporting competition ‘unsafe’. And renders the entire ‘Olympic committee in charge of such things’ (because there will be one, if not about 7), total tossers.

Otherwise: BEST OLYMPICS EVERRRRRRR!!!!

Happy final 2 days

A xxxx

(2 years ago today my lovely old dad died)

There’s a wonderful scene (they’re all wonderful) in Blazing Saddles where the baddies are recruiting people to attack and destroy the town of Red Rock, with arson, rape and murder as initial requirements. I never said it was a politically correct movie, just a brilliant one. And so a line of candidates is shown ‘for interview’. There’s evil looking cowboys (its a cowboy film) with bad teeth and big guns, there’s ’Red Indians’ with sharp knives and tomahawks, there’s Sumo wrestlers, KKK dudes and the wonderfully anachronistic (for a film set somewhere around the 1870s), Nazis.

And yesterday I saw this ‘call to arms’ for the ‘anti-fascist’ brigade they were calling up in case the hard-right Skinheads decided to turn up and pester asylum seekers or anyone else they fancied fighting. Which is, primarily, the police. On my own doorstep. Well, Finchley. A few doorsteps up the road.

I fucking hate fascists as much as the next (decent) man. Probably more so, if he’s not a Jew. Cos we have a ‘bit of a history’ with fascists. And the right wing scum, if any of them can even spell ‘right wing’ (though they can all read ‘Special Brew’), organised by Tommy Robinson and instigated by Nigel Farage (however much he denies), forgot to show up. Or were suddenly cowed by the quite serious sentences passed out to their ‘colleagues’ after the riots up north. Thus, not just in Finchley but right across the country were massive ‘anti-fa’ rallies, with no-one to ‘anti’. It was like turning up for a big Cup football match and the other team didn’t show.

But as I was marching towards Finchley I saw one of these posters and thought… ‘Zionists’… that’s me!!! But we’ve been promoted. No longer the quiet refugees seeking their own homeland to try and avoid pogroms and holocausts, oh no. Now we’re part of ‘the problem’. “Fascists, racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes”. Now I can officially join Mel Brooks long line of ne’er do-wells to go and wreak havoc in Red Rock. Just by being a Zionist. An organisation originally set up on socialist ideology. And now, according to some, part of the ‘hard right’ problem.

Just as it was conceptually flawed to make the tragic death of three schoolkids in Southport an excuse to pick on immigrants in general and Muslims even more generally, for the ‘other side’ to include ‘Zionists’ in their list of ‘baddies of the Right’ shows the very same paradigm of conflating separate issues for their own distorted value system.

So for any ‘anti-fascists’ reading this (as if), two plus do does NOT make 19 and Zionists are NEVER fascists. Unless there’s a good movie in the making.

Happy Thursday.

A xxxx

Elon Musk is a two-tier-tosser. Hah!! And that’s a scientific assessment. Because on one level he’s total tosser, then on the next level, he’s an even bigger one. And the worrying thing is; he constantly succeeds in finding new levels, with seemingly no limits. Bit like his wealth.

However, when he states, very strongly, that ‘Britain is facing a civil war!!!’, you simply have to sit up and take note. By saying “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???”

Because he may have talents, ok, he definitely has talents, quite incredible ones. All of which involve him in being in a science lab or a home office with absolutely no need to have any contact with other humans. Who he seems incapable of having any dealings with without causing upset, offence or anger. He’s a boffin. A brilliant one. Who told him that gave him the right to be ‘a statesman’? The man is patently ‘on the spectrum’ and thus will always have worn a ‘does not play well with others’ badge. And he’s an angry man. And a very right wing man.

Perhaps due to his South African roots, being a ‘son of Apartheit’, he hails from a culture of loud-mouth Boors which accounts for his sympathies towards Trump, Steve Bannon and the whole ‘alt-right’ thing. Which is fine. That’s all ‘over there’ where, if the Americans choose not to assassinate him, that’s up to them. But once he starts on MY sceptred isle, he needs to be careful. Doesn’t he know how powerful I am?

He doesn’t like Kier Starmer, well who does? The man’s a dick. But he’s OUR dick. And accusations from afar of having a ‘two-tiered policing’ system are as baseless as they are lacking in understanding. Also odd that he’s accusing the police of being overtly anti-white whilst everyone knows, even the police themselves, that they are institutionally racist. Reconcile that Mr Elon-fucking-algorithm!

Everyone is allowed to have an opinion. Even people who are so obnoxious that to make people actually listen to his opinion he has to buy the medium upon which to voice them. But by his aggression and his immediate knee-jerk defence of ‘white people’, even this current bunch of rent-a-thug Tommy Robinsonite scumbags, he’s really not helping.

If I drove a Tesla I’d set fire to it TONIGHT!!! Preferably outside Elon’s house.

Happy (?) Wednesday (as we’re awaiting the shit hitting the fan tonight somewhere very near us)

A xxxx

The BBC’s coverage of the Olympics is absolutely brilliant. Without doubt ‘the best in the world’. Because there’s no adverts. So even if the presentation was shit, which it isn’t, even if the production was poor, which it isn’t, the mere fact that you don’t get the 200 metres final interrupted to tell us about a new haemorrhoid medication, or the show-jumping cutting to an ad for tampons, the new Diet Coke, KFC’s latest ‘dead-bird-special’ or any other such annoyance, makes it totally unique. And every evening they have a ‘catch up’ on the day’s events. Of which there are always loads and loads and always across a fabulously diverse range of sports. So I call out to Mel “the Olympics is on, bring the tissues”.

And as the first woman crosses the finish line, or the first man jumps the highest, shoots the target, punches his opponent (or, topically, perhaps punches ‘her’ opponent), or rides round the velodrome, I start crying.

Its just fucking weird. I am unquestionably the most manly of testosterone-fuelled, macho, super-tough, heroic, ‘you wan’-some?? come on den!’, Nietzsche-esque ‘Superman’ geezer. And I barely cried at the end of ET. Hardly a sniffle when Bambi’s mum got shot, yet anyone on the Olympic podium reduces me to blubbering wreck. When they win the event it starts. In the interview afterwards it worsens.

Its not sadness. When Simone Biles fell off the beam I was dry-eyed. Mainly with shock because in her entire career she’s never once put one foot wrong. But I didn’t cry. But when Keely Hodgkinson won the 800 I was distraught. Mel was on the phone to my counsellor immediately but then they spoke to Keely in all her post-match emotion and adrenaline high and my sobbing reached a pitch whereby the counsellor couldn’t hear what Mel was saying.

And I know ‘the story’. Its always the same. “I’ve been working for this since I was 7. Possibly 9. Maybe 11. I’ve grown a lot as a person in the last year. I was mentally prepared. Its the most brilliant thing since the 1981 FA Cup Final.” Always the same, regardless of the sport.

Then they get on the podium and as soon as the National Anthem starts, I’m off again. It could be the result of 65 years a Spurs fan, so when anyone wins anything its upsetting. Or it could be just the sheer emotion which the Olympics generates. And it all seems to land on me. I have no idea why really. Nor do I care. Its an outpouring of… something?

Teary Tuesday

A xxxx

My window cleaner, Alan, today pointed out something interesting. Not a greasy mark on the window, something even more interesting than that. Whenever there’s a Labour government we have riots. Under the Tories, its all dead boring with very little violent civil unrest. Put a Labour man in Number 10 and it all kicks off. I’m not blaming Starmer, he’s not the one setting cars on fire. But if Alan the Window Man is correct, this is a terrible pattern.

We’re not precisely sure what the problem is, at the moment, what exactly is causing this great unrest, we’re hoping for a little clarity, or something that make a bit of sense, at least, sometime during the next 25 or so planned riots. Suffice to say: whatEVER the problem, throwing bricks at the nearest bobby is the way to solve it.

The catalyst for the rioting was the horrendous stabbing of the schoolkids in Southport. Then, rather than wait for any facts which may arise, sort of ‘informing’ people, as no-one wants that, the social media boys and gels went into ‘speculation and fake news overdrive’ to create a story in which the stabber ticked every ‘hate group’ box sufficiently for the far-right boot boys to be able to do what they do best. Which is add two and two together and come up with 17.36, set fire to four buildings and 13 police cars, then find a scapegoat for all the nation’s problems, in terms of what colour they might be, then attack the police in all major cities.

In this case they invented a ‘story’ for the stab perpetrator. Who, don’t get me wrong, is an evil piece of shit who should never see the light of day again. BUT… according to the tales spread before anyone who knew anything could get some truth out there, this man was a violent jihadi boat-person, a muslim arriving just last year. All of which turned out to be rubbish. But Christian Rwandans who were born in Cardiff simply lack the hate potential, so the narrative needed to be ‘adjusted’ for the sake of inflaming the masses. And giving them a ‘proper focus’ for all their pent-up aggression. Terrorists. Muslims. Mosques. Simple word association. Almost Pavlovian: someone with dark skin has killed a white person: burn mosques. The sort of quantum leap, guilt-by-association which is the hallmark of the far right. The KKK used it aplenty. Hitler found his scapegoats and engaged an entire nation in their persecution.

And this is where we are now. Driven by fictitious garbage to riot, attack the police and act against any symbol of immigration. And the fact that this is some long way from the initial alleged cause of the ‘protests’ becomes irrelevant. We’ve gone from nought to Krystalnacht in one week. Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, they must be very proud of our fine nation.

I’m thinking of joining the English Defence League myself now. Where can I buy some bricks?

Happy Monday

A xxxx

I’ve never mainlined heroin. It never really appealed to me. It always struck me as a way more ‘Trainspotting’ type drug than anything cool or glamorous. If cocaine was Studio 54 in its heyday, heroin was dirty syringes in the back alleys behind the club where the garbage and the homeless Scottish people were kept. But I always wondered why anyone would ever take their first ‘hit’ of something so horrendously addictive that your life, as you knew it, anticipated it, expected it to pan out, was over as of that very moment. And apparently the problem with heroin is that the first shot is so unbelievably amazing that you then spend all your time trying to get that same feeling which, apparently, is impossible.

I have a similar issue with doner kebabs. What? No, it’s NOT stupid, it’s a good comparison. Something that you know is really really bad for you but you can’t resist because it is so highly addictive. Thank you!

It’s the same thing, I am forever trying to have the feeling that was produced by the first kebab I ever ate. That taste.

It was 1975, the summer of. I was working for a mini-cab company in the West End, delivering stuff in my little mini. The office was literally underneath the Post Office Tower and I was concerned that it might fall down, because I wasn’t sure my car insurance covered me if I was carrying ‘goods’. Anyway, one lunchtime I walked into the office and was greeted by a smell so strong, so powerful, so absolutely wonderful, that it quite literally felt like I’d been punched in the face by an Algerian woman with a Y chromosome. I found out that what was being eaten by another driver was called ‘a ke-bab’, which sounded exotic, and was available, literally a 1-minute walk away. I went. I got. I bit…

And I can still remember that taste, the entire ‘wow!!!!’ as all those flavours exploded in my mouth. That restaurant was called Efes and was in Great Titchfield Street, where it had been for a decade before I discovered it and it lasted until about 10 years ago when, having already changed hands and ‘gone downhill’, it closed.

Part of me died. Is that a bit overly dramatic? For a kebab?? What you think??

Oddly, my old mate discovered Efes at about the same time, completely independently. It became something of an obsession. Although we’re talking a few times a year, rather than stealing our parents’ wedding rings to fund the habit.

He moved to France. And I’d get a call: “my flight lands at Heathrow at 4.50. I can be ‘there’ by 7”. There was no question where ‘there’ might be.

Obviously, I’ve had kebabs from many, many places. I was even taken in Los Angeles to try this ‘super new thing’ called a ‘giro’. But never has anyone produced a kebab to rival the ones Efes made.

And all this just because I had a kebab last night. From our local Turkish kebabery. And it was wonderful. I dripped down my arms, as they must do, it was filled with goodness and all taste. But was it ‘as good’? No, nothing is. As Crosby Stills and Nash sang so appropriately: “if you can’t be with the one you love; love the one you’re with”. Definitely works for kebabs.

So the quest goes on. And it’s such an enjoyable journey.

Happy Diet Day

A xxxx

It’s totally been the most, like, 100% bestest ever, like maddest, really insane week for Britain. Ever.

Because we’ve been in the Olympics and we’ve won gold medals in sports that until last Tuesday I never knew existed. Yet in just one week, we’ve excelled in the rowing, we’ve bounced on trampolines, shot things with rifles. If the Olympics was in America they would probably have schoolchildren shooting as an event but here we stick with clay pigeons. We’ve out-swum, out-run and out-horse-ridden absolutely everyone. We’ve been brilliant in triathlons, ridden bikes incredibly, had three gorgeous little girls murdered, watched 3 racially motivated riots orchestrated by right wing thugs with a promise of at least 30 morel!!! Oh, 30 more riots, I thought they meant 30 more medals. Anyway: what a week for Britain!!!! Every time I turn on the telly there’s either a gold medal coming in or a police car on fire.

I don’t know if these events are related. Does the Olympics produce levels of competitiveness and testosterone which are absent the rest of the time? The Games certainly produces unheard of levels of testosterone in a few women boxers. But this is not the place for gender issues at this time. It’s all a load of bollocks.

So as good a week as this has been for Simone Biles, it’s been even better for Nigel Farage. Because his ‘thing’ is not overt racism, no-one can get away with that any more, the Blazing Saddles days are long over. But Nigel can take an event, like the horrendous stabbing at the school in Southport, and turn it to fit his narrative. He lets others, or possibly gets others to, put out a few speculative stabs, just some fake news. Like, ‘the bloke with the knife was a Muslim boat-person’. Which then creates a narrative which falls beautifully in line with the hard-right, keep-Britain-white, stop immigration line. And by the time (about 24 hours) we know that the stabber was born in Wales to Rwandan parents, probably both Christian, its too late, the damage is done, The League of British Thugs are on their way to smash up a mosque and attack the police. And repeat and repeat and repeat.

So that’s where we are. Brilliant at the Olympic Games, not so great when it comes to controlling the streets. Can’t have it all.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

So the thing about school holidays is that they cause a lot of work, even for grandparents. On a normal Thursday, between school drop off and the afternoon pickup lie hours and hours of peaceful inactivity. Whereas holiday days are full-on. Though realistically, is my life more peaceful with Mel or with Lila and Joey? Who of those can find more things for me to do? Deep philosophical questions. As are questions of ‘love’.

Lila was showing me her newfound ability to write ‘joined up’. Which is brilliant. She’s 7 and can write joined-up, our Prime Minister is 61 and can’t even think ‘joined up’. So I gave her a phrase to write. ‘My name is Lila’, which she dutifully and beautifully calligraphied (new word required: invent one) in lovely script: “My name is Lila”. Ok, now “your name is Andy”, and in lovingly cursived hand appeared “Your name is Andy”. Right, so now write: ‘and I love you’. And on the page appeared: “and I don’t love you”.

And that simply cracked me up. Of course, it may just mean that Lila in fact doesn’t love me, impossible though that would be for you to imagine, but that would be her right. Or it could be that Lila ‘gets it’. That she understands how the truth, integrity, honesty and consistency can only get you so far. Whereas duplicity, misinformation, lying, obfuscating and inconsistency are way more fun. Values I’ve always impressed on her from her first understanding that ‘Old MacDonald has a dog, with a ‘moo-moo’ here and a ‘moo-moo’ there’ is in fact a (rather stupid and exceptionally childish) joke. Why ever state the obvious when stating the opposite gets the laughs?

I know Joey loves me because the level of violence he demonstrates towards me is way in excess of any attack he would launch on someone he didn’t love.

The kids didn’t actually do any, kind of ‘hands on’ welding yesterday, as today’s pic might imply, but their mum did think that might be a good skill for them to learn young. And Thursdays have always been ‘dangerous implement days’, so maybe we’ll give it a go.

And its amazing to think that there are 2 less terrorist leaders in the world than there were on the weekend. Fuad Shukr was a general in Hezbollah and a man wanted for an attack in Beirut in 1993 which killed 241 Americans. He was ‘hit’ by a missile. Shame. And yet, before his body had even fully cooled, the Hamas Leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was hit by a drone, along with a bodyguard in Tehran. Even the Ayatollah had to agree that this was an audacious and brilliantly precise strike. Then, of course he had to add ‘500 women and children were killed in the attack’, so the BBC can spew their favourite line, even though no-one else was actually injured during the strike at all.

The world would sleep easier in its bed tonight for the loss of these two murderers, but for the extreme probability of revenge by Iran. The most humourless nation on Earth. Other than, perhaps, North Korea.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

This is now getting personal. Me and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. First we had ‘black-hole-gate’, into which Rachel Reeves blindly stumbled, and now it’s going to get much colder. Because La Chancellor has decided that the quickest way to pay off the 22 billion pound deficit in her mathematical ability is to get pensioners to pay it from their winter heating allowance. Which, for many of us, means that this winter I’ll be walking round a freezing cold house wearing all the clothes I own to try and keep warm because I can’t afford to turn the heating on because my 250 quid has to be thrown at the Black Hole. Maybe burn a few logs in the lounge. Maybe burn the sofa.

Its hard to think of the freeziness of mid-winter when we’re at the point of the summer when Weather ‘People’ (because we have boys doing it too now) are debating whether we are in fact in a ‘heatwave’ according to official criteria for such things. Or whether, as most of us ‘amateurs’ feel: it’s just a few hot days in a rotten summer of cold and wet, and about fucking time.

I’m applying for a new job for the winter heating bills. I want to be Kyle Walker’s mistress. No, I really do. Because the last incumbent in that post (I presume ‘they’re over!!!’ as they’re in court arguing) has a 2.5 million pound house, gets 350 grand a year, plus a new Mercedes, plus a nanny for the one-but-soon-to-be-2 children, plussssss… 500 quid a month for gardening (must be a big garden) and the same for the ‘hot tub’. In case its… not hot enough or not… tubby enough.

Thing is: when did ‘mistresses’ acquire rights? I thought that very word died in the war. I don’t want to get all Andrew Tate about this but I fully get Kyle has a definite responsibility to his children. I’m just not sure what she is being compensated for. She entered into a relationship with a married man. Who happened to be a millionaire footballer, which I’m sure had no influence on her love for the man, at all. She loved him for his… err… well, he’s a very fast runner, is Kyle.

Anyway; they’re in court ‘getting divorced’ yet were never married. He reckons he pays enough, she reckons she’s entitled to the status, lifestyle and respect of any self-respecting ‘influencer’ and ‘other woman’. I’m just not sure what the going rate for that might be.

Good work if you can get it though.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx