Andy's Glasses

I hate it when staff go on holiday. Its cruel, heartless and, to be honest, fucking selfish of them. And, they expect to get paid, for swanning around in the Indian Ocean sunshine, whilst I’m here left to actually… well… work.

I have to get in early. Theoretically that’s no problem, just means I can’t write to you whilst I’m eating my breakfast banana. Don’t be impressed, the rest of the day is full of Cadburys, carbs and cardiovascular abuse. And then I need to get on the tube, BUT, I have to pay!!! At my age!!! Because before 9 the old person’s travel card doesn’t work. Yes, I have my replacement card, yaaaaay, but it still won’t work before 9. And that is racist, ageist, anti-semitic and affects my mental health, as I intend to tell Sadiq Kahn, our little shit of a mayor.

Meanwhile, The Brother languishes in the Intensive Care unit, which I’m also paying for. As are you, for which I thank you, and everyone else in the country who pays tax. And he is improving. No question. Sedation lighter, bit of colour in his cheeks and when he saw Rachie on Monday, his face positively lit up with as much of a smile as you can muster with a face full of ‘stuff’. Tubes, pipes, wires. And that’s great. Because no-one is ever that pleased to see Rachie. Normally they run. Though running’s out of the question for Rich at the moment really, but that smile hit the spot. And he responded, in a brotherly sort of way (amazing how much sarcasm you can read into a raised eyebrow or shake of the head.) Cos he’s still ‘non-verbal’ and will be until they give him a little speech thing in his tracheostomy or sew him back up again. But we ‘communicated’ for a good 15 minutes. Until he fell asleep again. Probably due to me telling him in minute-by-minute detail how Spurs beat Palace on Saturday, knowing how much he hates football.

And I hate to get too exited because every time I do he takes a mini-dive. And we don’t want that. Again.

So that’s the progress report. Not much. But as its in the right direction, we’ll take it.

Happy Working Wednesday

A xxxx

The headline from the weekend’s sport is undoubtedly: Spurs won. The rest is irrelevant. Like how they won. Like the pain and suffering of the Spurs fans, condemned by their own commitment, frustrated by their teams irregularity of form which caused them immense pain and agony until Brennan Johnson came on and sorted things out. So that the right result would eventually come. Three points for Tottenham Hotspur, yippee.

Manchester City won the ‘Manchester derby’, which is poor, second-rate, northern version of Arsenal-Spurs, the only ‘true’ rivalry in the country. Especially the south of the country. The important bit. Where HS2 will still run. But there was never any doubt about the outcome of the match, despite United scoring first. It was ‘men against boys’ but ironically, the ‘boy’ in question (because he looks about 14), Phil Foden, was City’s hero. And to stand out as such in that line-up is quite something.

Liverpool did it the hard way. With a little help from the totally impartial ref, Paul Shankley Paisley Rushey Dalgleish Tierney they squeezed a winner in the last… well, well into Fergie-time. If that’s not mixing metaphors. The ref firstly extended ‘added time’ by adding just a bit more. Then he gave the ball to Liverpool after a re-start when it should have gone to Forest. Then he just hung around til Liverpool scored before calling it a day, ripping of his black referee’s shirt to reveal a full-body Liver-bird tattoo and running round the stadium punching the air.

You’d have to feel sorry for poor Tod Boehly over at Chelsea in other circumstances. Those circumstances being firstly that he wasn’t Tod Boehly. Secondly that it wasn’t Chelsea. And thirdly because… I can’t remember. Unimportant. What is important that you get what you deserve (sometimes) and Chelsea are just awful. After spending a billion quid on ‘talent’, they remain the Tiny Tim of the footballing charts.

Arsenal play tonight. At Sheffield United. Who will put up a (kind’a) struggle and then lose 5-nil. Arteta will say how difficult the fixture was because United are ‘always dangerous’, in that same way that a rice pudding can be dangerous (if the tin falls on your head?) or little kittens can be dangerous (if you swallow one). But no-one cares because the title fight is between Liverpool and City. Will Klopp go our on a high note? Or will Guardiola’s steamroller keep on rolling??

Though there are some (in my house) who really believe Spurs can still do it and win the league this year. I’m not saying they are ‘sane’, just believers.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

I’m going to lodge a claim against Transport for London for PTSD. I am scarred and officially traumatised. Not to mention the victim of ageism and probably anti-Semitism!!! It could take me years of therapy. Here’s what happened. It’s SHOCKING.

Last weekend my ‘old git’s free-travel, all-you-can-eat, anywhere in London pass’ stopped working. A Catastrophe of massive proportions. Anyone who has this fantastic gift from the Mayor of London will know how wonderful it is, every single time you use it. And it had cracked and no longer opened the gate. So I showed it to the TfL person who smiled nicely (bit patronising really, that smile, when they realised I was THAT old) and beeped me through, telling me to get a replacement. As I commute every day, this was repeated many, many times. Sometimes with a ‘oooh, you can’t use that, we’re not supposed to let you through’. What, is there a fucking prison for over-60s with broken cards, a holding cell at Liverpool Street until their new cards arrive??? But basically, I’m entitled to free travel and they all get that. Until last night.

Oddly the ‘your new travel card is on the way’ came on Thursday, but the card itself is yet to arrive. So last night we went to Kings Cross for a ‘discussion’ at Jewish Book Week, though its been renamed to something more pretentious now involving literary this and literacy that or some such bollocks to let us know how intellectual we all are. Anyway, I pitched up the big fat TfL butch thing (no judgments, obviously) who didn’t smile. She said ‘you’re not allowed to travel with this!’, and took it off me. “DO YOU KNOW HOW FUCKING OLD I AM???” I shouted, and tried to look old and feeble. Which, obviously, was impossible with these levels of gorgeousness. So she applied ‘the letter of the law’ and told me to pay up. Bitch. And as I ‘tapped’ my Amex card, working out the gain in air miles, I felt my mental health slipping away, my (almost) 68 years bearing down on me as she persecuted me. Mercilessly!!!!

So I went out immediately, whilst in traumatised and unstable state, and bought a ridiculous new car!!! One that bears the esteemed bonnet badge: MID-LIFE CRISIS!!! Because it’s impractically small, unbelievably fast, exceptionally pretty and impossible to use on a ‘bad back’ day.

And I think TfL should pay for it. Because ‘she’ made me do it. Even though I paid my deposit 6 hours before I had the trauma. So that’s not really the point.

I’ll show you when I pick it up next weekend.

Very happy Sunday, other than the tube travel.

A xxxx

I’m having serious trouble awarding this week’s ‘tosser of the week award’ due to a positive glut of worthies for the title.

George Galloway is always a candidate, just for wearing that stupid fucking hat. But the ‘antisemite’s antisemite’ managed to win the bye-election in Raffah, sorry, in Rochdale, on a single matter, completely unrelated to the town of Rochdale or even the nation in which he’ll now sit in parliament for. He campaigned on a ‘Palestine’ ticket. He briefly alluded to doing some local things in his victory speech, but only long after stating his motivation, his reasoning and his sole ambition. Which is to try and get Kier Starmer, who won’t listen to him, to call for a ‘ceasefire now!!!’, which Israel won’t listen to, and that’s it. An exercise in total futility.

Nigel Farage chose a different line of anti-semitism in his chat with Donald Trump. When speaking of ‘the Russian threat’ in America due to the upcoming election there and Putin’s previous putative participation in the last one, The Brexit-meister offered that the Ruskis are not as big a threat as ‘the Jewish Lobby’. Yeah, because Jews are famous for invading Ukraine, murdering their opponents in gruesome ways and parading round Red Square, right? In fact, what is a Jewish (fucking) Lobby? Is it the foyer of a kosher hotel? Jews generally argue with each other… ok, with anybody. So the presumption that a number of influential people from disparate spheres of influence would join together and agree on the destruction of American democracy is almost as stupidly funny as presuming that Britain would be better of without Europe.

Yet even with this most amazing of competition, I really think the Tosser of the Week simply MUST go to Kyle Ratcliffe. Who? Good question. He has the honour of being the father of the boy-partner who murdered Brianna Ghey, now in prison for life. But Daddy Ratcliffe will join his son, not for so long, after being possibly the first person ever to be convicted by a court of law for being ‘a total wanker’. He was caught masturbating in public in front of young girls. Twice. Same girls. And others too. Sometimes in his car. Sometimes on the pavement. What a vile man.

And thus, for sheer literal perfection, Kyle becomes my ‘tosser of the week’.

(If you wish to be considered for this coveted position all you have to do is: act like a tosser. You can be a hypocritical MP, a serial flasher, a total moron, almost any footballer will qualify, all Chelsea fans are eligible, most Arsenal fans too, a bus conductor with ‘attitude’, a virtue-signaller, a woke literalist, a mayor of London or Gary Linneker).

Happy Friday.

A xxxx

There was a fashion, back in the 1930s for ‘reductionism’ in all sciences. Breaking things down to the smallest possible parts in order to understand them. We found atoms, then broke them down into protons and neutrons, ever searching for further understanding and way to destroy Japanese cities totally and very efficiently. We researched bodies to find blood cells and nerve ganglia and all kinds of really tiny, microscopic things. Like certain penises. (Sorry, can’t ever resist a ‘nob-joke’.) But when they applied this reductionist paradigm to ‘the mind’, as opposed to ‘the brain’, it all failed. Because you can only observe behaviour, not thought, nor intention. And writing your name on a postcard is behaviourally identical to signing a cheque for 23 million pounds. It’s all about context and the fact that the world is a complicated place.

And this is what Artificial Intelligence has to cope with. Reducing every behaviour into a binary code for a computer to use. Not just behaviour, but facts, contexts, rules, regulations and social norms. Everything coded so computers can act like humans. Ok, the spouting of facts is easy; writing essays, within a given context and format; piece’a piss! And then they have to ruin it all by obsessing about ‘diversity and inclusivity’. So, now famously, if you ask Google Gemini to show you ‘a Nazi’, he (or sometimes she) will be black. Not just because ‘irony’ is virtually impossible to code, but because AI defaults to ridiculous woke concepts of minority representation. To the point where it won’t show you ‘a white man’ because that is prejudicial. Though, again with lost irony, this is actually prejudicial against white people. Though they deserve it, fucking privileged, white bastards! I’m also going to complain that Jews should be represented as Nazis too or we’ll feel discriminated against as well.

And that all might affect my ‘mental health’. Which, according to another article today, has made a school change its policy on allowing pupils to wear false eyelashes. (Note: I said ‘pupils’ not ‘gels’ because I’d be no better than an AI ‘bot’ if I were to be so stupidly straight and hetero-normal as to presume anything so offensive). Because removal of these lashes leads to… yup, ‘mental health issues’.

And I was happy when I read that. Because it has resolved for me the basis of this total fucking epidemic of ‘mental health issues’. When what they mean is: they’re pissed off. Any kid who doesn’t get his/her/its/their own way pulls the MHI card and everyone falls at their feet in supplication. “Yes, wear false eyelashes, and your Kim Kardashian body-suit; that’s fine for school and should improve your maths no end, and take this money, and… ANYTHING!!!”

‘Mental health issues’ are for the depressed, the clinically ‘not right’ and anyone chewing bricks. Except Joey, who chews them for fun.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

A few years ago Mel (dragged me? Forced me??) and I went to Colombia Road in Shoreditch, early on a Sunday morning for the flower market. If you have to get out of bed that early (and apparently I did) it is in fact a wonderful place. Filled with chrysanthemums and… roses… hydrangeas… and… errr… flowers. And they’re cheap. As the stall holders shaaart aaaart at passers-by regarding their floral offerings. They would ‘shout’ but they’re Cockneys, so they’re not allowed to enunciate nicely and are actually banned from using that final ‘t’. Ever!!! There was a ‘Pearly King & Queen’ in attendance that day, presumably to enforce the linguistic laws and ensure that anyone speaking in anything approaching ‘Received Pronunciation’ is arrested. Ok, they were there doing charity stuff, as they always do. Wearing jackets so laden down with buttons I have no idea how they could even get them on. I chatted to them and learned that in fact this defining couple of East London’s proudest, these emblems of true Cockneydom in fact came from Hertfordshire. Weren’t true Cockneys at all. Way less so than me, in fact, who was born at the Southern End of Hackney, just about within the sound of the Bow Bells, if you have really good hearing and there’s no traffic noise. My mum and dad were both born within a mile of those bells, I’m ‘proud’ to say.

And now they want to redefine ‘Cockneys’. Make it more ‘inclusive’. Spread it out a bit. Like, anywhere within the M25. What??? You mean… even… SOUTH London????? Even as far north as Tottenham!! Just so we can make an excuse for Adele to keep strangling her vowels when she speaks. She sings in total beauty yet speaks like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Dick van Dyck in Mary Poppins (pass the bucket, please) or Paul Merson any time. So to re-classify ‘cockney’ as they wish to do as ‘non-posh Londoners’ is just a pathetic way to excuse educators within a 60 mile radius of Trafalgar Square from making children adopt a decent mode of speech. We’re condemned to speaking with people who adopt speech patterns which are lazy, hard to understand and often jarring to hear.

And I’d just like to mention Frank Lampard (Jnr) at this point, as a case in point. He was born in Romford, which is definitely ‘non-posh London’, even though it was formerly just ‘Essex’. But he went to a very good, fee-paying school where they would have smoothed out his vowels, beaten the last glottal stop out of him with wooden canes and forced him to use every ‘H’ available and every final ‘T’ that he spoke. Yet when he went into football, within 3 weeks he’d reverted to ‘total scumbag illiterate-sounding Cockney filth’. It was a ‘lifestyle choice’. One of many very bad ones he made. Like playing for Chelsea.

I’m no snob, nor really do I judge people by their speech (NOT FUCKING MUCH!!!!) but this just encourages loads more people to speak in the horrible way that some of us grew up hearing at school every day.

One must aspire to self-improvement in every way. Or just fuck orf and be praaaaard to be a Cockney!!! From Hampshire. Tossers.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

I love words. And this one is possibly my favourite. Old and almost forgotten, but I chose it yesterday, from the list I keep scribbled across the kitchen walls (as if I’d be allowed!!!) because its funny. ‘Being idle, lying around, dawdling, lazy’. And possibly the only worthwhile addition the Americans ever made to OUR language. The rest of it they ruined but for lollygagging, I’ll give them some credit. I love a word that you simply know what it means when you first hear it because it expresses itself perfectly. And to use it yesterday to refer to my own brother was even more perfect.

Because I first heard it in the movie Blazing Saddles. My ‘ultimate’ film. Hilarious, insulting, offensive and about as politically correct as raping a one-legged Palestinian trans woman whilst in black-face. And as subtle.

The truly wonderful Slim Pickens uses the word on one of his black slave railroad builders who had just hauled himself out of quicksand and was lying exhausted and just about alive. ‘Stop lollygagging around getting a suntan and get back to work’.

That movie came out in 1975. A year after the other ‘most perfect movie of all time’, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

And sometime after that, a year maybe?, they were showing, for one night only, a ‘double bill’ at the ABC Barkingside, of those 2 films. Together. This was ‘an event’. Remember ‘double bills’? The 20th century version of ‘binge-watching’. Life before Netflix. But it was the most irresistible combination. So resist we didn’t. I went with a bunch of mates and Richard went with a bunch of mates. Which was quite a common occurrence in those days. Being the younger brother by 3 years meant that in the period between going out on pushbikes together with him ‘looking after me’ and me becoming ‘an adult’ (something I still aspire to), I was beneath contempt. But at 17 and 20, our interests began to converge once more and our ‘gangs’ kind’a blended together. So for a ‘big event’ like that double billing, we’d be 20/25 strong. Because everyone wanted to see those films again. Even though we pretty much knew every word in both films from previous viewings.

It was therefore ‘the funniest night of my life’. Until that night Arsenal lost 4-nil to Yeovil Town in the League Cup. Which I might have dreamt, but still hilariously funny.

Now I’m going back to doing more lollygagging.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I’m worried about my mental health. Think I need to be included in that disability group. Then I can get one of those ‘park anywhere you like’ badges for the car and a government grant to pay for… errrr, well, there’s whisky, that’s not cheap and… and more whisky, when the first glass is empty. And why have I ‘hit the bottle’? Well first there’s the brother. And then there’s the whole ‘Israel thing’.

So a recap on the brother. He’s still lying there all day and night as if he’s on holiday and is frightened that if he gets up a family of Germans will steal his bed. So I said to him: ‘enough of this lazing around, lollygagging on life support, as if you’re life depends on it! Time to get moving!’ The problem is that if I make him laugh it’s not a great thing. Although today it became a slightly greater thing as they took that horrible fucking tube out of his throat. And that is a very big deal indeed. The nurse said: ‘that will make him much more comfortable’. I said: ‘it’ll make ME more comfortable, why is it always about HIM???’ Because, trust me, you can’t accessorised a ventilator to make it a ‘good look’. I tried. It’s horrible to see. And now, hopefully, no more. He’s had a tracheotomy instead but that’s relatively small fry. That we can decorate.

And thus begins, we hope, the long haul back to… something better than what we have now. They’ve reduced his sedation, which means he can communicate non-verbally, to a degree. Which means he can’t answer back. Which means I’ve won every argument I’ve had with him for six weeks.

The nursing staff are beyond wonderful. And tonight I spoke to his consultant, Professor something-or-other, head of the ICU. Lovely little man. Who told me ‘it’s going to take time… a long time’. Slowly take him off life support. Like we didn’t know. This evening’s nurse was a super Filipina who last year visited Israel. She’s a Christian (proper one, capital ‘c’), and they all love Israel. They get it.

And there’s Israel. Gaza. The mess. The outrage over here causing ructions everywhere. From Rochdale to Westminster. Democratic outrage. Parliament in fear. The ‘general public’ following the horrible, Hamas-driven rhetoric like moronic sheep, following it… from the river to the sea.

I asked the consultant about my problems, he said I need the psych wing. Plus some strong medication. And whisky. Always whisky.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

The question for many Jews now is not about the current war being raged in Gaza. But about the war being raged here, in Britain. America. France, Belgium, Germany… About our safety on the streets. About our children’s safety at universities or in Jewish schools. About our synagogues, our cemeteries, even our butchers’. Where we buy our chopped liver!!

MPs have had their private residences subject to shouting, baying mobs. Demonstrations justifiably protesting the war, descending into a more radicalised paradigm of anti-Zionism, inevitably descending into full-blown antisemitism, and then to calls for Jewish genocide. Without people seeming to even realise. That when you shout ‘from the river to the sea’, which was actually illuminated onto the side of the Houses of Parliament the other night, you are calling for death of all Jews in Israel. And then, ironically, if there was no ‘Jewish state’, where would we have in our minds as the ultimate refuge? When all around is looking more and more like Berlin in 1936 and there’s nowhere to run?

The farce in parliament the other night was a case in point. And yet ended up as just a shameful mess. With the only justification being that our ‘Speaker’ was ‘trying to save MPs from ‘assault’, whether that assault be physical, verbal or online. And thus does extremist culture pervade even the very apex of our democratic process, when our MPs need ‘protection’ from speaking their mind for fear of reprisals. How soon before a retired dental nurse from Reigate moves from wearing her kefiyah on march days to actually beheading someone?

There is no Hebrew equivalent of the word ‘jihad’. Its not in our culture. Instead we have 17 words for ‘run and hide!!!’ And our nearest equivalent to ‘holy war’ is ‘broigus’. Which is like a holy war, but normally with your wife. Or cousin. Perhaps your sister-in-laws step-mother’s cousin who sat you at a shitty table at her niece’s wedding. Broigus normally stops short of blowing up buildings, but only just.

The war has factionalised the nation. And moved from Gaza to Golders Green and Greenwich. From Palestinian suffering to sympathy for Hamas. An extremist death cult who sacrifice their own people for ‘the cause’. Thus the ‘free Palestine’ marches start as ‘demonstrations for peace’ but end up supporting murder, rape and torture. With most of the participants either willing to join the crowd, or dimly oblivious to the truth of the sentiments being expressed.

As they said in Marathon Man; is it safe? Is it safe??

Happy Friday

A xxxx

The Post Office Tower was built in 1961. It was the biggest thing in London since… well, forever, because it became the tallest building in London. At that time. Of course we’ve had all manner of gherkins and walkie-talkies and shards and other architectural abominations since then which dwarf our little tower. But I loved it when it was built and I love it now. Everyone went to see it. Obviously in black&white, but they queued round the block in their sports jackets and ties and frocks and slacks, to visit this most fab of buildings. I think I liked it because it looked like Thunderbird 1, but I was 6, so gimme a break.

My dad was a clever man. And a bit of a closet philatelist. That’s not a perversion. Well, not in the normal sense. But his ‘thing’ was that in reading the stampy magazines he learned that what made stamps ‘collectible’ were the differences. Not the fabulous photos on the ‘commemorative’ stamps which came out four or five times a year, but the tiny differences on the ‘definitives’, the boring, everyday stamps with just a Queen’s head and ‘2d’ written in the corner. These stamps were run seemingly unchanged for decades. Seemingly. Because they did change. Invisibly. They changed the ‘gum’ (ya licked stamps in those days), and they changed the phosphor bands. Which were almost invisible bands used by the automated sorting systems. And that was my dad’s ‘niche’.

He worked out that all the stamps from vending machines, little ‘books’ had different phosphor bands than those bought on sheets. So he would go to the post office and buy 100 stamp books. They cost about £1 each, had lots of different stamps in, most of them useless. Except the smallest value one. A ‘halfpenny’ stamp. Which only came with some odd variety of some tiny deviation in those books. And he’d sell them, through ads in the stamp mags, for a fiver. And he couldn’t buy them quick enough for all those grubby little men in Peterborough with their tweezers and magnifying glasses, desperate to add such a thing to their collection. (Peteboro’ may have had grubby little women too, but they didn’t do such things in the 60s).

The Post Office Tower had a vending machine. You bought two lovely, pretty, ‘commemoratives’ in a Post Office Tower envelope for a pound in the machine in the foyer. And the ones bought there were overprinted with extra words which weren’t on all the ones in the nation’s post offices. Oh my. Extra words!!!! Which made them unique. Which caused virtual erections in Peterborough and beyond.

So every Thursday (my dad’s day off) when I wasn’t at school, we’d drive to the Tower, (you could park anywhere in 1962) with a sack of money. Because the machine didn’t take notes and the pound coin didn’t get invented until 1981. And we would, quite literally, empty the vending machine of its entire content. It was the best fun ever, endlessly pumping two shilling pieces into a machine and enhanced further my love of the building.

And having sat empty for decades, it’s going to become a hotel. There’s talk that the once famous ‘revolving restaurant’ up high will return. I hope that the hotel and restaurant don’t take credit cards. Nor paper money. Just coins. That would be perfect.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx