Andy's Glasses

I’ve been asking myself a question, as I sit here, in the tropical sunshine, bathed in the guilt of the privileged, wallowing in the self-satisfaction of eating more curry in the last 8 days than in my previous 800 and pondering how those poor Brits are coping with all that grey, depressing coldness, ‘over there’.

And the question is this: do I need to include the almost automatic implicit or expressed apology every time I mention Israel, for the deaths of so many ‘innocent civilians and children’? And I reached a truly eureka moment of clariity and enlightenment. Possibly the one I should have reached in the yoga class which eluded my western cynicism.

Israel is NOT to blame for the crisis in Gaza. Hamas is. For ALL of the crisis, for every dead man, woman and child. And furthermore, to think otherwise, if you actually look at all the facts and even decide to question the validity of statements issued by Hamas as ‘doubtlful at best’, is either horrendously naive or is part of a left-wing inspired, media-driven narrative which stems directly from anti-semitism, lightly veiled as “anti-zionism is NOT anti-semitism”. When, you know what? it is.

And I’m inspired in this revelation, and liberated by it, due to the United Nations, the leaders of so many other whingeing hypocritical imbeciles. Who firstly have never questioned why, even though Gaza has for decades been one its major recipients of ‘aid’, the population starves and struggles for medicines and education for its young, yet builds the worlds most sophisticated tunnel systems extending over 500kms and can afford to store and fire hundreds of millions of dollars worth of rockets.

And who are those tunnels for? The tunnels which have access points and arms storage depots in hospitals and school playgrounds and residential apartment blocks? According to Hamas themselves, “the tunnels are to protect Hamas; the United Nations can protect Gazan people”.

The United Nations Women’s Group will attack any government in the world if so much as one female bum gets pinched in the metro system. And yet said nothing for 7 fucking weeks about over 500 women on October 7th being raped, tortured, murdered and kidnapped.

The day Hamas won their election in 2005, they started taking care of their political opponents. By throwing them off the roofs of high buildings. We’re not talking a mere few here, but hundreds. No trial, no appeal, nothing. Just instant death. Of, oddly ‘innocent Palestinians’.

So if you join the dots, you reach the only inevitable conclusion: Hamas has thrown the population of Palestine under the bus of its own distorted, murderous and dangerous to the world aims. And in the always inevitable fallout from October 7 it is still sacrificing as many as it can for the PR that contributes against Israel.

So ‘ceasefire’? Only on Israel’s terms. Hamas, the UN, Iran, Lebanon, UNWRA, World Health Organisation, Qatar, Jeremy Corbyn and any other misinformed slogan-yeller from Stoke-on-Trent, can all just go and FUCK OFF. The deaths are terrible, but they are not on Israel.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

OMG!!!! On our resort by the beach in Kovalam, they have YOGAAAA!!! But like every morning!!! In, like, India, where they invented Yoga!!! Ruvinder Yoga of the Yogic corporation, (inc. 1507, by a palm tree in the hillside), first pulled his right foot up to his left ear whilst humming and the rest is history. Because when his mate, Ronny Yoga, saw what he was doing, rather than taking a photo of Ruvinder to post along with the legend ‘what a to-sssss-errrrr!!!’, he instead looked at the broader picture and realised that this was possibly an incredible opportunity, staring him right in the face, but from underneath his mate’s right testicle whilst standing on one foot.

I filled in the ubiquitous ‘form’ before undergoing any exercise anywhere, standard shit, which between the lines says “IF YOU FUCKING DIE IT IS NOTHING TO DO WITH US!!!” One of the questions: ‘have you ever done yoga before’. Yeah, I have. ‘Where?’ To which I replied, in about 75 different hotels around the warmer parts of the globe. Because yoga, for me, is what you do in tropical countries to justify the ridiculous breakfast you’ll eat afterwards. You lie on the floor, breathe heavily whilst twisting around a bit and before you can say ‘Ravi Shankar’, you’ve arrived in a higher spiritual plane than you’d previously even known existed. Great, so where’s the maple syrup?

But in India, its very birthplace, the place where downward dogs meet lotuses and upward cobras get eaten alive by praying planks, I went to the class with… renewed enthusiasm. Not just to keep Mel company and find things that make me laugh, but to spiritually realign with my Bikram and my Tantric yogicity (sometimes you just have to invent a new word when none exists to do a job), in order that my karma will be at peace once more.

Whilst all I really got was a pain in the hip and an attack of the giggles.

Mel has managed to get Delhi-belly whilst being about 1500 miles from Delhi. And this picture is the view from our balcony. what we could call ‘typically tropical’ in the literal sense.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I’m writing this from the… prow?… the aft??… the front-pointy bit, upstairs on the good ship Saffron, as it sails along ‘the backwaters’. A concept so odd and bizarre that even though I’m staring at it, live and in ‘real time’, I’m not sure what it is. And best of all? There’s no WiFi on board. So I can’t look up to see whether this raggedy coastline down in the Deep South-west of the Indian mainland, is a bunch of lagoons, rivers, canals, waterways or some wonderfully biryani type combination of the lot. In between the water lie the wetlands where they grow rice. But paddy fields about 5 miles long. It’s about 85 degrees today so as Mel sleeps in the shade, I’m just lovin’ and enjoyin’ the peace and tranquility of the place. I asked to play ‘smells like teen spirit’ through the sound system, at volume 11!, but there are actually laws preventing such things. There are loads of laws in India. It’s very bureaucratic. But then no-one enforces the laws. Except where Nirvana is concerned.

And you do this expedition on a ‘house boat’. There are loads of them. All in a traditional style. When we booked our ‘Kerala Experience 2023/24’, we must have gone through options with our agent. And everyone who’s been within a hundred miles of Kerala has done the ‘house boat on the backwaters’. Cos it’s an overnight gig. You get on the boat for lunch one day, then have dinner, overnight, breakfast and off. So we booked… whatever, yeah, we want a nice one. Won’t sink. Doesn’t stink of fish. And not too many guests because Mel will fall out with at least half by the morning.

We were brought onto the boat by a chap who kept referring to it as ‘your boat’. Because there was no-one else invited. Our boat, rebuild completed just 3 months ago, has but one cabin. A massive fucking room with a four-poster bed, a seating area with couch and tv and an ‘en suite’ the size of a normal hotel room in its entirety with a jacuzzi bath which could hold the entire Indian National cricket team. Or 3 British darts players. Upstairs is a dining room, big enough to seat 14 in easy comfort. Or to seat 2 in fucking acres of space. It’s our boat. For the day. Ok, they won’t let me drive it so we have a skipper and we have a chef. And this was ‘just a little something he threw together’ for lunch. Just for the two of us. Holy shiiiiiiit.

And tonight’s New Year’s party will be in full swing. Mel, me, the bottle of illicit Indian whisky I bought down a back alley from an ‘official government liquor store’ and we can sing auld lang syne without a kilt in sight. Livin the dream.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

A xxxx

Kerala is known as ‘God’s own Country’. And for good reason; it is quite stunningly beautiful, virtually everywhere you look… except for a lot of the bits where man has been and dumped a load of broken and stripped down tuk-tuks in a heap. But my first question, particularly in India, is always ‘which God’? And as always, that is never an easy question to answer. Who are the local people and to whom do they pray?

There are more churches than any shrines, temples or mosques combined. But that’s mainly due to the essential humility and lack of ‘flash’ of the Hindus, who are indeed a majority in Kerala, as opposed to the inevitable grandeur and flamboyance of the once governing Catholic Portuguese and the awe-inspiring but austere brutalistic churches of the Dutch Protestants who followed. And then there’s mosques here, but fairly few and far between considering there’s a large Muslim minority in the region. And it’s all fairly harmonious in God’s own Country, even though there used to be a significant but minuscule Jewish community here too. In Cochin mainly but by 1948 when Israel was officially ‘an independent nation’, following on a year after Indian independence from British rule and also separation from Pakistan, virtually all of the Jews had left for pastures new.

And they’d been here since the 9th, 10th Century. They were the original ‘Malabar Jews’, who were joined just 600 years later by the ‘Paradesi Jews’ who came from southern Europe. A third influx at the end of the 18th century of ‘Baghdadi Jews’ provided yet more people of a proudly similar yet slightly different cultural heritage. But, of course, they were Jews. And thus were never ever going to agree on… pretty much anything. So, the last ‘departure’ was essentially due to such diminished populations of Jews who were not even allowed to marry the ‘other Jews’, who lived up the road. Through bickering, arrogance, stubbornness and an unfailing ability to ‘kvetch’ about any and everything, the Jews of Kerala made themselves ‘extinct’.

The Indian people are, on the whole, (I don’t think I’ve met all 1.6 billion yet, just feels like I meet them every day on the roads), delightful. Friendly. Genuinely so. And, of course, they ‘speak English’, which helps. Though the ‘local’ Indian dialect is Malayalam. And it is such an amazingly tongue-twisting language, as they ‘swallow’ half their syllables cos the words are sooooo long. And when that is applied to ‘English’, it really doesn’t sound like English at all. So we ‘converse’ all day with our host nationals, but it’s actually 2 different conversations being spoken and not much understanding in either direction. However, the word ‘curry’ is fully understandable in any language and by Jews of any ethnic division or nation of origin.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

So we’re in Munnar and it’s famous for being in the mountains and thus a bit ‘hilly’ and it’s where they grow the tea. Because here’s something I learned this very day, tea bushes have to grow on an incline of between 30 and 45 degrees. Well, ya live and learn.

But I love tea. Drinkin’ it. Love it dearly. I have my daily coffee, of course, because I’m a Londoner and got conned a decade or two back like everyone else and drink a coffee first thing. But tea is my drink of choice. Ok, Laphroaig and tea. Either of which I’m happy to drink either inclined or on level ground.

And here’s the other thing: I love seeing where tea grows. Tea bushes are wonderfully spectacular, as they blanket the entire visible mountainside with ‘green’. So I took loads of photos of it, but instead decided to post another ‘selfie’ of me and the Mrs in front of a photo of tea-covered mountains, which sits in front of the real, tea covered mountains, at the very end of the path up the nature reserve, the name of which is as irrelevant as it is unpronounceable.

The drive from our resort to the reserve took fucking hours. Because all of India is on Christmas holidays this week and ALL of them, every single one of them, is currently on the road in Kerala. And, finally arriving at the ticket area, there they were, the entire population of India, 1.6 billion of the buggers, all queuing for tickets to take the tour to the top of the nature reserve. Longest queue in the world currently. However… and this is where it gets a bit good, whilst getting a bit bad at the same time. Because next to the worlds’ longest queue is an empty ticket booth. Which states that Indians have to pay 200 Rupees for the gig. Whereas ‘foreigners’ like us have to pay 500. But that’s… discrimination!!!! And it is racist, and… and… and it wonderful. Because you get to pay a bit more, but you get to pay it NOW, rather than waiting for sometime tomorrow, when they wouldn’t let you pay the ‘residents rate’ anyway. And then you take your privileged, white, foreign, fascist ticket to the bus and, basically, walk straight to the front of that queue too.

In normal circumstances, I would have played the ‘I i-den-ti-fyyyyyy as a south Asian man called Ramesh’ card and saved the 3 quid. But to pay a few bob to jump massive queues? Holy moly, that is, literally ‘priceless’.

Lovin’ it here, still

A xxxx

Ok, as you can see from this picture, my arrival in the Munnar, tea-growing, mountainous, eco-friendly, zero-emission, ultra-sustainability, oooh, put an extra one in the pot for me, Marge, region, has seen me go totally native. I’ve gone the ‘full namaste’ as it is known. Just because some babe from Kerala in a sari stuck a wodge of face paint on my forehead, it has completely realigned all my chakras to such a degree that I am now not just a Hindu, but a Hindu God. Well, why not, there are thousands of them, what’s another one?? Je suis Mahatma Gandhi, kind’a deal. Though, I appreciate, he was a Prime Minister, rather than a God and ever since Boris resigned we’ve been able to tell the difference once more.

The mountains are stunningly beautiful. And blanketed in tea. Like, plants. (Who knew tea grew like that? I thought it came in bags, like, from heaven? Or just, like, in cups?) Which makes everything green. Which is fab.

To get here (Munnar) from Kochi, would take, I reckon, about 45 minutes. Then you have to make a minor allowance for Indian travel conditions and traffic (travelling in seven different directions at once, all overtaking everyone else) and that adds about 4 hours. We’ll never get that time back. But the really odd thing is that if you asked me at which point Kochi gave way to ‘not Kochi’ which then became ‘Munnar’, I have no idea. The shops just go on and on and on. And its interesting; very interesting indeed…

Because I reckon that England, where I used to live before my awakening this afternoon, has a complete demographic from the super-rich, through an immense middle-class range, and working class, to unemployed at the bottom. Whereas here, in my new homeland, India again has its super-rich, but then a smaller middle class and a working class going from ok-getting-by to super-poor. So India’s ‘range’ of lifestyles is much bigger than YOU English bastards’. Hence some rows of shops are fairly ‘normal’, what you’d expect, kind’a deal. Nice clothes, pharmacies, food, boutiques, lovely lovely lovely. You first know you’re in a very poor area by the number of cement stores available. I don’t know if poor Indians eat cement, but fuck me they certainly have a lot of stores selling it. Almost only exceeded by the number of motor cycle/scooter/moped sales/servicing/spares outlets. And an hour on any road leads you to no concern as to where those vehicles go.

Whilst the cement remains more of a puzzle.

Have a fab everything,

A xxxx

We’re here in India. Where its ‘movember’ every month. For all the genders. Where they have more Indian restaurants than, (I’m guessing), virtually anywhere else in the world!!! And, more specifically, cos it is a fucking massive place, is India, we’re in Kochi. Which used to be called Cochin. Until the Mumbaiians took over Bombay, Leningrad became St Petersburg and Ceylon changed forever to Sri Lanka. And in Kochi they have their very own martial arts, unique to the state of Kerala. It’s called kalaripayattu. Which translates from the ancient Tamil as ‘why are you fucking pushing me??’, and started way back in the 12th century, specifically to address the then nascent hobby of ‘barging’, which has blossomed, bloomed, exploded and mushroom-clouded since then into something of a national obsession. And it’s simply the best fun you, and your moustaches, can have. You go to, say, a lift in a hotel. Lobby floor, where everybody gets out the elevator. But here’s the great bit; you don’t wait for the 22 people crammed into the lift to get off, where is the fun in that??? No, as the doors slide open, you BARGE your way IN to the lift. And if you can make it all the way in before any single person has jumped out, then you inherit all their moustaches to add to your own. However, if one of the the people on the lift is a local and an exponent of kalaripayattu, he may well kill you with one of these vicous looking murderous weapons. So always best to check who’s dangerous before your barging begins.

The barging continues, as it does in all majors Indian cities, on all the roads. You just barge people from inside your car instead of outside. As chaos plays out on every road and in every direction on every road. Never limit or restrict yourself just because of a few road traffic signs. Really. A big ONE WAY!!!! arrow is most certainly something with sufficient ambiguity here in India, to be worthy of a ‘debate’. And to test the water, send a few cows, goats or water buffalo the wrong way along a carriageway, just to judge reactions, check the barging, be aware of any swords knocking around.

Tomorrow we leave Kochi and head to a place called Munnar, in the tea growing region. So, to celebrate our time in Kochi, which involved dinner at the hotel buffet last night which, regardless of the hotel, should never be repeated, we ate tonight at… McDonalds!!! I know I know but… its safe, its next to the hotel, and damn the expense! It cost, for both of us, including ice creams; 6 quid. Honest. However, here’s the menu:

Hamburger (made from chicken cos ‘we’ don’t eat beef here)
Cheeseburger (same, chicken only due to Hindu constraints)
Chicken burger (no changes made)
Bacon Cheese Burger (no bacon, upsets the Muslims, no beef, upsets the Hindus, so ‘chicken’ as above).

Odd and bizarre that McDonalds maybe the lowest of the low in terms of nutrition, desirability, healthiness, BUT is definitely a brand you can trust, anywhere, not to give you food poisoning.

Happy Boxing Day

A xxxx

Had a busy day yesterday. A very busy day. Starting, as usual, with Tai Chi at 8.15, but that after a week when half the class had covid. Not my half, unaccountably and thankfully, but as the wimpier and less resilient half recovered, normal proceedings had been suspended. But now we’re back, better, stronger and older than before.

Then to tennis. The daughter played, a rivalry going back at least 25 years. Not a normal rivalry, just that she hits the ball really, really hard, and I have learned to either field such assaults on my body in a way that keeps it going, or just duck for my life. Or sometimes for my testicles.

We rushed home, showered and prepared lunch. A competitive sandwich making competition, from which there are really no winners, in a calorific sense, but many victors in terms of pleasure. Just take a couple of massive slices of challah and put in between everything left over from Friday night. Chopped liver, roast chicken, stuffing, slice an avocado, add the condiments of your choice and you have the best thing since sliced bread. Ok, that doesn’t work in this context, I understand that…

Then we went to Spurs. And as I think every time I’m near that stadium: this is the best fucking place in the world. Ok, it is in Tottenham, which could do with a bit of face lift, in the way that Donald Trump could do with a bit of a new hair-do, or Kim Jong-un could do with losing a couple of pounds, but it is just sooooo magnificent at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium of Unknown Naming Rights, that it takes your breath away. When we can eventually refer to it as ‘The Hornsey Tandoori Stadium’ or ‘The Houthi’, possibly even ‘The Sportswashing Jihadi Stadium’, then we can handle it. Though for at least a generation it will always be ‘White Hart Lane’. As it should be.

The match was fab. What neutrals call ‘exciting’, what fans call ‘PANIC-STRICKEN!!!’, but we won. Nothing else matters.

And now, at 8.30 tonight, we’re off to India. This time… The South. We’ve done the north. Ok, possibly not ALL of it, but enough. Now it’s Kerala. Which is a totally different kind of curry altogether. And I’m sooooo excited.

Happy Christmas. Can Santa get onto a 747 in mid-flight? I bloody hope so.

A xxxx

I don’t watch darts. I’m scared to. Because if you watch so much as one solitary dart winging its way to the board, then you’re there FOREVER!!!! You can’t look away. Its compelling, compulsive, addictive and revolting. It was an error of God, when he made Adam; he forgot to set the ‘stop’ button on the ‘watching darts’ program. So you watch one, then two more, that makes ONE HUNDRED AND TWEEEEEEENTEEEEE (scores have to be loud otherwise they don’t work properly). But by the time he’s finished saying it, you’re already trying to work out how many points are now needed and whether he should play “double fourteen-triple nineteen bull” or “triple 17 triple 18 double top”. So the best way is, when you see that a channel is showing darts, look elsewhere.

But then once in a while that sport(? is it a ‘sport’? Really?? Its kind’a ‘leisure activity’ really, like golf) makes it onto the news. As it did yesterday. Because Luke Littler, (given the honour of today’s pic), is just 16 years old and won through to the third round… possibly 5th, of some tournament or other. You know the one, played up north, loads’a great fat people frowin’ arrers, crowds of screaming, tattooed drunks in the audience… that one. And that is great for sport, great for Britain, great for kids, even if they look like grandparents, and fabulous for fat people in general.

Luke’s secret? How he did so well? It was all down to the kebab he ate the night before. Which, I’m guessing a bit and ‘judging by appearances’, is not really a rare or unusual occurrence in his life. Yet in this morning’s paper they actually had a photo of him eating the kebab, the one that is his inspiration, his stimulation certainly his satisfaction. Never likely to be his constipation.

Is that how we want our kids to be? Do I see Joey, at age 16, being ‘shit hot’ at darts, semi-literate, grunting monosyllabically and morbidly obese from kebabs? I can only dream… Otherwise he’s destined to become a hit-man.

Happy not-many-days-before-Christmas Day

A xxxx

Issa funny ole game, is bridge, said Jimmy Greaves. Whereas in fact, it’s a game of immense skill and cunning and geniusness. And a bit’a luck. Just a bit. Not enough that when I win I can’t run round the table performing ‘goal celebrations’, breaching all protocols of propriety, gentlemanliness and decorum, but enough that fate has to provide you with good cards. Without which, however fucking clever you might be, there are limits to what you can achieve.

And, like number 7 buses, you wait all week for a good hand and then three come round at the same time. Which was precisely my experience the other night.

We normally play 8 hands. Because you can’t let a few playing cards get in the way of a good cake. Or fruit. Biscuits. All three. And normally, I reckon I’ll get a couple of ‘decent’ hands at most. And if on one of those ‘partner’ gets a decent hand too, then that’s the normal bridge experience. Conforming to statistical probability. But I had 4 amazing hands. And on all those hands, partner had a near perfect ‘fit’. Something else that rarely happens.

I won’t bore you with the details because if you don’t know bridge it’s meaningless and boring, and if you do, you’d doubtlessly have done much better, and then I’ll hate you, but it was wonderful. And now I’ll have to wait another 7 months for the stars to align with Jupiter and Sagittarius to disappear up its own trouser leg.

Meanwhile, back on planet football, all is not so wonderful. Arsenal sit at the top of the table, Liverpool are flying, Manchester City have (thankfully) lost the plot and Spurs and Aston Villa are on the ascendant. Aston Villa? Yes, the team which, for those old enough to remember, were biiiiiiig back in part of the 70s, winning the ‘old’ European Cup and being generally… big, have risen under the fantastic stewardship of Unai Emery, the Arsenal reject manager, to be currently ‘presuming’ on the title chase. I’m not sure teams from Birmingham are allowed to harbour such aspirations, but teams from Leicester aren’t either and look what happened there. The Christmas program normally sorts things out a bit; 14 games in 4 days, that kind’a thing. And on Saturday I’m going to White Hart Lane to watch my boys (I simply can’t do gels football: I keep trying but… but…) play Everton. Who, since being cruelly and horribly docked 10 points by the league for wilfully and persistently NOT being Manchester City, have won every game they’ve played. We can only hope that ends NOW!

Happy Thursday

A xxxx