Andy's Glasses

So I’m not saying a show called ‘Guys and Dolls’ is up there in any woke list of ‘must-sees’ as its set in the 1930s? 40s perhaps, when guys were guys and those-identifying-as-women were called ‘dolls’. Which is a touch too binary for contemporary acceptance. Addressing some as ‘hey: Doll!’ is not acceptable in the workplace. Though a few of the actors looked decidedly less ‘binary’ than did either Marlon Brando or Frank Sinatra in the movie version. Yet I make no judgments nor guess at pronouns. Not me job. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the storyline, but its a great one. Scumbag ‘gangsters’ all wanting to gamble away whilst a bunch of evangelical Christians go marching by singing hymns and begging people to ‘reform their ungodly ways of liquor’n’gamblin’ for the sake of your eternal soul. Amen’. I’ll add ‘a-whorin” to that just because I want to. Normally, the gangsters would just roll over the Christians, steal the collection boxes, rape the women and put the big bass drum on ebay. But this is a musical so we give it a bit of license. And one of the gangsters acherley falls in love with the Christian babe/doll… woman. Who’d’a thought?? And then… no, no spoilers. You simply couldn’t imagine nor guess. Probably.

But that somewhat simplistic precis doesn’t do the show justice. But like, REALLY doesn’t do the show justice. Because it is simply fucking brilliant. The songs… remarkable, the lyrics brilliantly, award-winningly witty, written back in the day by Frank Loesser, and in this case, the production is a wow. It really is. The cast are fabulous (a word chosen very carefully and in considered manner) and the sets are just… just…

The Bridge Theatre is relatively new for London. Where most of our acting spaces date back to Shakespeare. The world of stage performance didn’t begin with ‘Wicked’ on Broadway, ya know, some of us have been thesping for centuries. And it feels like it in most West End venues. Cramped, overheated, Tudorish, horrible. And the Bridge is a revelation. Also, the ‘stage’ is different, mainly because it doesn’t have one. Just an amazing central floor area with sections which rise and fall depending on who’s standing on them and singing at the time. And they let the paying public ‘mingle’ around the unlifted areas for the full ‘immersive’ experience. I might have considered that if they let you gamble down there but opted instead for a seat.

But here’s the funny thing; The Bridge theatre is, like, right next to Tower Bridge!! I mean, coincidence or what?? So when you come out, this is the view. Which is shit, I grant you, but there were no really good car parks or cranes around.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Whilst we were positively glued to yesterday’s ‘budget statement’ by the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself!, Jeremy… whassissname, over in Holland they were busy voting for a new Prime Minister. Yes, it was election time in the land of the free, the tolerant, the nice, liberal and obviously a bit stoned. And the winner was… (pause for effect, like on Bake-off)..
Geert Wilders!!! The most intolerant, not-nice, un-liberal and possibly not even stoned man they could find in the whole of Holland. He is horrible. He is the bastard love-child of Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson and Marine le Pen. He hates dark-skinned people generally and muslims in particular. He wants no immigration, sealed borders and the banning of the Koran. Which, whatever you think of the Koran, is a bit much. You either ‘ban all religious books’ or none, you don’t just pick your least-loved minority. Burning books is something he should consider too. Always a positive move for any liberal democracy. Anyway, good luck to the Dutch. (They’re gonna fucking need it.)

Because we have bigger fish to fry. If we can still afford to do so after the ‘most tax friendly budget in the history of glossing over the small print and robbing people blind’. Fish may become a once-a-year treat. One sardine at Christmas for a family of 9 to share. Awwwwww.

Hunt gave us some ‘huge benefits’. A whopping 2% off national insurance!!! That makes the average wage better by 350 quid a year!!! My pension (yes, I get a fucking pension!!!, what of it???) is going to rise by £21 per week! That’s huge! It’ll pay the dry-cleaning bill for my butler. Put a quarter of a tank of gas in the Bentley. Almost cover the entire cost of my morning coffees!!! (croissants not included). But seriously (ish), I mean, ‘tax breaks’? WTF??? We pay more tax than those any other nation. And due to clever and nasty little ‘things’, like freezing the tax threshold, the level at which we start to pay income tax, we effectively get a tax rise every year. The paltry benefits offered yesterday, as if we were each being presented with our own palace, go nowhere to even offset the immense burden we’re already saddled with. He did a good thing for business, has to be said, which should be good for ‘growth’, but for those of us earnin’ wagiz, with ‘raging’ inflation and increasing fuel costs, we’re not going to be feeling ‘rich’ any time soon. Thanks, Jeremy, thanks a lot. Maybe I’ll move to Holland…

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Every time I watch the news I get annoyed. Whenever the radio’s on I get violent tendencies. I won’t open the newspaper until delicate objects have been removed from my vicinity. Including any family members. And it all stems from, basically, one word. A word so simple, so basic, so important and yet so tragically misunderstood by apparently everyone except me, that I alternate between wishing to vomit when I hear it, to wishing to inflict pain and suffering on the utterer. That word is ‘ceasefire’. Which is the new battle cry of the ignorant.

Of course, its not the word itself, words carry very little baggage, but the context, the assumptions and the implications. The word itself means a ‘mutual truce’. An agreement between two (or more) warring parties to… errrr… to cease firing on each other.

So the cries go up. Along with ‘Free Palestine!’, though from whom no-one mentions because it all gets a bit messy and ‘from the river to the sea’, which is even messier, the shout is now ‘CEASEFIRE!’, as if the IDF are going to hear and heed immediately the cries of people who really have no understanding of what is going on. Or if they do understand, they choose not to demonstrate that. Even Kier Starmer gets it. Or says he does so he can continue to tread a really fine line between siding with ‘the murderers’ and demanding ‘peace’.

There was a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on October 6th. It didn’t last a day. 5,000 rockets, 1400 brutal murders, 240 hostages taken. Which was not only in breach of the ‘ceasefire’ and any and every ‘international’ fucking ‘law’ you can imagine, but was done with a totally cynical disregard for the people of Palestine who were always going to bear the brunt of any retaliation. Hamas knew that. Yet went ahead.

I know, its unfashionable to even mention October 7th now, or the hostages, you’re only allowed to talk about ceasefire. Those murders and kidnappings have somehow been retrospectively justified by the might of Israel’s response. And yet what Israel is doing is not only clearing out Hamas but showing up their abuse of the Palestinians they’re supposed to represent, by putting their most vulnerable out there as human shields. And yet, the BBC are so quick to point out, correctly, that ‘the videos of Hamas taking hostages INTO the hospital, in full view of all the staff, are ‘not validated”. Yet every statement from Gaza, all the figures, incident reports and tales of bombings come from Hamas. No caveats. A terrorist organisation with not a scruple nor moral consideration between the lot of them. Yet BBC, ITV and Sky all treat the news with equivalence.

I don’t like Benyamin Netanyahu one little bit. But he represents a democratically elected government and is their spokesperson, not their dictator. Hamas are ISIS. Same plot, same methodology, same ideology. A death cult. Who, as even Kier Starmer has pointed out, have stated many times that they would take any opportunity to ‘repeat’ the events of October 7. Which a ceasefire would give them. Which would make the stance of both the United Nations and the Scottish Parliament decidedly questionable, if they had any credibility on the world platform, which fortunately neither do.

People watch the reports and they are horrible. The bombings, the deaths, the parents crying for children. And so they cry ‘ceasefire’. Meaning ‘stop Israel from bombing’. And I get that, I really do. I also get that it will not stop Hamas from doing anything, other than getting stronger, re-grouping and trying again.

The only way to ‘free Palestine’ and get a ‘ceasefire’ is for Hamas to be gone. Totally. And the hostages returned safely. Only then can the innocent civilians of Gaza be free of their barbaric overlords who care not one little jot about how many of them die in their cause, or at their swords.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

This is Mandy Patinkin. We know him from ‘Homeland’. He was the boss CIA or FBI or whatever acronym they were. He was fab. Strong. Experienced (euphemism for ‘older than everyone else’s). Watched the first 3 series, all brilliant, then got bored, as you do as plots get thinner, more stretched beyond credibility, as it all gets a bit ‘same shit different day’.

Then, what, 5 years later, Mel sees that Mandy is doing a show. Oh. What’s he gonna do, relive Homeland? Interrogate a few jihadi suspects in front of a West End audience? Shoot three people dead? Bit of water boarding? Who knows.

That was ages ago. Then, suddenly, months after booking, we’re off to Shaftesbury Avenue to see the ‘show’. Whatever it may be.

But you see he had a life before Homeland. His ‘experience’ wasn’t in fact in ‘enhanced interrogation’ but in shows on Broadway. Films. Tv shows. First and foremost as a singer in musicals. He was best mates with Stephen Sondheim. Starred in everything for decades, belting out tunes in his very deep voice. As he did yesterday. Show songs, none of which we knew, but most were amusing. He’s amusing. And he is also a fantastic raconteur. Not tales about ‘show biz’ but about his life growing up in South Chicago. And he ended his show, the theatre absolutely packed with real fans who gave him his first standing ovation just for walking onto the stage, by singing ‘somewhere over the rainbow’. In Yiddish. As it was originally written.

The music was fine, the stories wonderful but really worked for me was someone who was so comfortable just being a Jew. Not ‘in yer face’ with it, just part of what he is. A very American way to do it.

I still don’t know why we go the tickets, but I’m glad we did. Other than Saturday afternoon in the West End, which is as revolting as life gets. Unless you are a party of 78 Serbian bargain-hunters, a hen-troupe from Huddersfield or pub-crawl from Putney. They all seemed to enjoy getting in my way. And blocking Tottenham Court Road station. All that was missing was a few ‘from the river to the sea’ banners to make it a perfect end to a lovely afternoon.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

Wow! Everton football club has been punished. Penalised. Some might say ‘crucified’ (that’ll be the Everton fans), by the full might of the Premier League. And deservedly so. They know the rules. They know how keen the League is to implement those rules and come down hard as fucking nails on those teams which break them. And yet still they blatantly and (almost) intentionally overspent the allowable overspend by 7.9 million pounds!!!! Holy shit! That’s enough to buy… a footballer. Like, a non-league one maybe, not a good one. That’s enough to refinance the entire… shower room at one end of the ground. So it’s a lot of money!! And Everton fucked up, BADLY, which earned them a 10-point deduction. Plummeting them to the (2nd) bottom of the table. Where they’ve been lingering for the last few years anyway. So they’ll probably get relegated, get sued by a bunch of horrible clubs who felt ‘unfairly relegated by Everton’s excessive spending’, spend a year in the Championship before getting fined again because they can’t unload their expensive players and their income’s reduced by 90%, whilst their brand new stadium (they’re cheap) hasn’t even opened yet. Everton in 2025 will mean just a particular kind of mint. No-one will remember the club. It’ll be gone.

And you get exactly what you deserve in this world. Especially under the vigilant and watchful eyes and immense powers of the… The Premier League!!!

Unless you happen to be Manchester City. Or Chelsea. In which case the rules are different. They have to be. Because they use much cleverer lawyers and forensic accountants than Everton could ever afford. Or that the Premier League could afford. And they’re just too rich to ever receive any kind of proper punishment. A financial punishment would affect neither club, however many hundreds of millions it was.

All clubs are allowed to overspend (ie have a loss) of £109million over 3 years. Everton exceeded this by 7.9 mil. Because of hiked interest rates on their new stadium, and the loss of a 200million pound contract for naming rights because it was with a Russian company who were obviously banned one the shit hit Kyiv.

Manchester City’s don’t have such an issue. Their naming rights are owned by the company which owns the club. Oh no, that’s ‘illegal’. Sorry. What was I thinking? The naming rights for the Etihad stadium are with Etihad Airlines, who, amazingly coincidentally, kind of, like, ‘share’ an owner with the company who own the Football Club. What are the chances?? And no-one can find in the Man City filing cabinet the actual naming agreement. So how much they pay for ‘naming rights’ can vary every year. And it does. To an amount very close to the amount of debt the club has in excess of what its allowed. Again. Just a coincidence. Correlation is NOT causation. And there are 115 such ‘irregularities’ about to come to court in the new year.

And you know that whatever happens, City won’t lose points. By applying simple maths, they should receive a deduction of 473 points. But no-one said life was simple.

Unless you’re Everton, then it’s easy peasy. And very depressing. If grossly fucking unfair.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

I come to bury Suella, not to praise her. Rishi thought he’d rid himself of the curse, only to have her pen a 3-page, full-frontal, hardcore assault on the little twit the very next day. Not exactly a ‘love letter’. And yet… and yet…

Suella Braverman said a lot of horrible things which upset ever-such-a-lotta-people. Nasty things about foreigners. Rotten things about (allegedly) peaceful marchers. She had radical things to suggest about all sorts of groups and individuals, including the police.

And the ‘correct stance’ to take on Cruella was one of righteous indignation, disgust and affirmation of a lot of values to which many people think they should agree but most privately hate. Making many people a touch hypocritical for holding a private view which they’d never utter in public.

But Suella did. She was, for all her rather numerous faults, honest. She called it as she saw it. There were no gilded lilies in Braverman-world. She didn’t like the boat people; send them to Rwanda. She hated the ‘hate marches’, so name them so. She questioned the police tolerance to radical left wingers? Call it out.

She spoke for the ‘Tory Right’ but not only for them. She resonated with a lot of people and what they really thought. I’m not saying ‘nice people’ necessarily, but a lot of them. And if you upset the entire Labour Party you must be doing something right. Right?

And here’s the thing about Rwanda. It is horrible. Nasty. Totalitarian. Tortuous. And they send refugees to third countries of unspecified human rights records. Not that their own are so marvellous. Yet isn’t that the point? We don’t actually want to send loads of people there every week, the air fares alone would be punitive. We want to stop the boats from coming. Stop the traffickers. And Rwanda is there as a deterrent to do just that. We tried threatening refugees with putting them on a barge in Dorset, but when that fiasco sank in a sea of Legionaire’s Disease, we got nasty and threatened to keep them in horrible hotels in Hastings. And that failed to stop the boats coming, or worse, sinking, so Rwanda is the ultimate threat. You just have to get it past the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations, the Supreme Court and everyone else who knows me. How hard can that be?

The answer to which is: Suella was hard enough to get it done, Rishi isn’t and hence didn’t.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

Its funny how you can read a whole article in a newspaper and then, from a two page spread, just one tiny little, seemingly inconsequential comment leaps out, jags you in the eye, sticks in your teeth and punches you just above your testicles.

Our new Health Secretary is Victoria Atkins. It’s now her job to spend the next 12 months apologising for the NHS and making promises she can’t keep. That’s what the ‘health secretary’ does. But wait! There’s an ‘issue’!!! Her husband!!! The bastard!! He’s the CEO of a massive sugar producing company. SUGARRRRRRGGGHHHH!!!! The food of the devil! The total cause of our nation’s obesity!! Which, of course, is the Health Minister’s job to sort out. How hard can that be? There’s only 57 million fat people out there, slim ‘em down before they start to drain more resource from the NHS. Start with the kids. CUT OUT SUGARRR! Oh, but that might affect my husband’s income (probably well into seven figures) so I’ll just approve Tescos new ‘all you can stuff’ lunch package of one processed meat and strawberry jam sandwich, four packets of high fat/salt/sugar crisps, three Kit-Kats and a Mars bar, PLUS… an almost free litre of full-fat Coke!! Because the more sugar you consume, the richer I am.

I think it safe to say that ‘the world needs sugar, and always will’. Whether we reduce the amount consumed in sweeties and treats and chocolates and puddings is irrelevant, because we need it in everything else too. Just in smaller doses. Which I really don’t think will massively affect the profitability of the world’s largest producer.

So why would the press make implications of almost ‘impropriety’ or ‘conflict of interest’? Why? Because they’re a bunch of tossers fed up with vanilla politics perpetrated by chronically beige politicians who generate about as much interest as the cement drying on my new black brick tower. So they create ‘excitement!’, they manufacture ‘interesting’ in the dullest of dull and they love nothing more than a bit of ‘conflict’ where none exists.

I think, having banned tobacco, Rishi should now ban sugar. Alternatively, when you go for a bag of Haribos, they should quickly weigh you, work out your BMI and only let you buy it if you ‘qualify’.

And I’m only posting this photo today in protest. Because Lila & Joey’s parents’ seemingly never-ending but oh so desirable photos of MY GRANDCHILDREN!!!, seems to have ‘dried up’. Have the kids turned into the vampires they always wished to be and hence no longer cast an image? So this pic is a protest.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Suealla Braverman is no longer the Home Secretary! She’s gone! “Resigned” (sacked) after a minor difference of opinion with, pretty much, everybody. She upset the Prime Minister, pissed off the police, made enemies of the Pro-Palestinian marchers, royally aggravated the Labour party (most things do that) and only made friends with a group of neo-nazis. A step to the right a little too far for even her own party’s hard-liners.

The police ban far right wing marches, but not ‘far lefties’, was her point. Therefore it has bias. Which is odd because most people see the police as one step removed from the English Defence League anyway. Then she accused the Pro-Pally marches as being ‘hate marches’ as they descend into virulent antisemitism, but only a minority of the participants. Dressing up as Hamas fighters, using the star of David in a lot of horrible ways, singing ‘from the River to the Sea’ without accompaniment, nasty, but definitely a minority. Yet the fact remains that all the other, non-extremist, either totally committed to this (and pretty much any other) cause, or blissfully ignorant of the full meanings of what is shouted out or written ‘in their name’ marchers are happy to share the proverbial platform with these extremists.

The police were right not to ban the march. You simply can’t because then we no longer have the rights to free speech and protest which we should all protect with our very souls. But the marchers should themselves be sensitive to their environment and should have called it off. March next weekend. Tuesday morning. Thursday night. Because to insist on a march on Remembrance weekend is exceptionally disrespectful to pretty much the entire country. Other than those opposed to King and Government on principle in every way, who relish the opportunity to spit in the face of authority as well as ‘making their point’. And as that really describes the fundamental demographic of those marchers, it went full steam ahead.

The Right Wing extremists were there ‘to protect the Cenotaph’! Which they did by drinking 14 pints of lager each and singing football chants, then trying to engage the police in a big fight. They were basically there because they don’t like Muslims. Oddly, they used to not like Jews so we must presume a policy change in Nazi Central.

The irony being that the EDF feel suddenly ‘protective’ of Jews and Jewish sensitivity and accuse the hard left of anti-semitism. Which is weird because when Moseley and his blackshirts marched against the Jews in 1930s, it was the trade unionists and dockers who stood against them.

Never mind; Suella’s out now and David Cameron is in. In a new role as ‘Foreign Minister responsible for avoiding foreigners’, following his Brexit success. Even though he never wanted it himself. John Major is to be Ireland Secretary, Ted Heath is Welfare and Pensions and Winston Churchill gets the Ministry of Defence.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

I tried to mis-spend my youth, fairly successfully really, because it seemed more fun than the alternative. But only with the wonder of hindsight do I realise I had some kind of dyslexic ailment/affliction/disability/disease? Yet because dyslexia wasn’t invented until 1993 (Ronnie Dyslexia, et al, ‘Plobrem pselling in chlidrne’), I was just called ‘thick’. Although I was great at maths and pretty good at any science subject which didn’t have too many words in it. I hated English. History. Too much reading, too many words. I’d rather watch Dixon of Dock Green, thanks.

The retrospective irony, of course, is that I truly love readin’ and writin’ now, obviously, which is why I’m here every bleeding day with an outpouring of words. All checked by someone in the Apple ‘cloud’ before you read it. Yet I never picked up a book to read until I was about 21. Not for pleasure. Because it wasn’t. I loved comics, but never books. Since that first book (Exodus by Leon Uris; bit relevant today really), I haven’t stopped reading.

But so what?

What was worse that I grew up in a house with the two most ‘capable’ people alive. Although my mum was incredibly capable in a very pragmatic way, my dad and my brother were truly exceptional at ‘doing things’ which to me were impossible. My dad built fitted wardrobes. Not from a flat-pack, but from… like… wood… nails… paint. He paved our front garden, beautifully, then built a fabulous low-level wall around it. He could do anything with his hands. And he was an optician, not a builder.

Whereas my brother was a world expert at the nascent ‘solid state electronics’ (when it got ‘small’; going from valves to transistors, moving from massive to really small and neat), when he was 10. He taught his physics teacher. He built the first stereo I ever heard (Sargeant Peppers; the first album produced in ‘stero’) and, given a ‘wiring diagram’, or, if there wasn’t one, just drawing his own, he built amplifiers, mixing units for his rock band, absolutely anything up to and including his first computer. When he started driving he would just service his car himself. Got a book, followed the instructions, how hard could it be?

I looked at those ‘instructions’, those ‘exploded diagrams’ with 7,000 components, washers, valves, bolts, cylinders, and saw nonsense. Confusion. No meaning whatsoever.

My talents were less useful really. I was good at football, a world champion at lusting after beautiful girls and I could generally make people laugh. I was simply fucking useless at anything more practical than turning an album over on a record player. Didn’t stop me trying, but I always had my dad around to put it right afterwards, and my brother there to laugh.

But we needed a new plinth in the garden for our iron sculpture. And the only ones available were really dull and boring or ridiculously expensive (360 quid for a pile of tiles). So I built my own. Bricks and tub of cement: 35 quid, and from that, from NOTHING, I produced… THIS!!! I’m not saying it’s like the 7 days of The Creation, mainly because it took me at least 14 days of procrastination and rain before I started, but wow. I built it, laid those bricks, used a spirit level (I love tools, have literally a shed full, I’m just not very good at using them) then abandoned it because it must have been broken, telling me my bricks weren’t straight, when they almost were, and I did it. If it’s still standing in 3 months time is yet to be seen, but for now? It awaits our ‘Dolly’!

Happy cement drying day

A xxxx

I’m marching today for peace. Well, actually, for a ceasefire in Gaza. That’s the headline cause for the march. Ceasefire. Yeah. And 50,000 of us misguided tossers parading round the streets of Westminster shouting for ‘jihad’ (no idea what that means but it sounds great) and ‘from the river to the sea!’ (I asked three people which river and sea but they couldn’t tell me) and calling for a ceasefire so loudly that the IDF over there bombing innocent children in Gaza will immediately stop. And furthermore, Hamas will definitely listen to me and my group of data processors from Milton Keynes when we make our demand. Cease-fire!!! Hamas are good at diplomacy. My mate told me. Ok, I know they killed a few people in Isreal the other week, but that was… errrr… that was different. From a humanitarian perspective. Because… well, there’s history. Apartheid. Oppression. Held in the ‘prison’ of Gaza. By the ‘nazis’ of Israel. My mate Nigel told me and he once shook hands with Jeremy Corbyn, so he must know. Someone told me that 20% of Israelis are Arabs! I mean, that’s obviously fake news, right? Otherwise they’d have the right to vote, access to healthcare, education, even for women!!, and be soldiers in the IDF and part of the judiciary!!! I mean; can you believe that? Rubbish. Even though I’ve never been to Israel, or Gaza, and couldn’t really find it on a map.

We’re also really opposed to ‘the West’ so we’d like to go to the American embassy, because they need to hear our cry as they are… they are really West!!! So we hate them. And then we’re going to try to get to the Cenotaph. Because it represents Western war-mongering and Imperialism. Nigel said so. Though my great-grandad lost a foot in Flanders, so I’m a bit conflicted. Though don’t suppose they’ve got the foot at the American embassy.

However, for today, I’m a Palestinian first and British just by virtue of birth, upbringing, culture, education and all my entire life except for 2 weeks in Magaluf and a weekend in Berlin in 2016 with Nige. That’s why I’m holding a ‘Free Palestine!’ flag and another which shows Jews being marched into gas chambers. Because Jews are the problem. Not sure what that problem is, but getting rid of Jews seems a good place to start. Then we can have our Ceasefire!!! Like the last ceasefire which was on October 6th. Well, Hamas broke that one but only because of the force of ‘history’. It was an awful thing that happened on the next day, but you can understand why it had to happen. So we’re marching for peace. And that’s a ‘peace’ as defined by Hamas, which may differ from classical understanding of the word.

Ceasefire NOW!!!

Rupert xxxx