Andy's Glasses

I was always ‘proud’ to be something of a diversity. That I could include myself happily in the whole ‘LGBT’ thing, paint my hair purple, wear rainbows, march in a ball gown, the lot. Because I was under the impression that the ‘B’ stood for ‘bath’. And for so many years after expressing my love of this wonderfully relaxing cleansing technique, only to hear people reply ‘poof!’, I just assumed I was a deviant. When later I found out the ‘B’ stood for ‘bisexual’, I thought that was a plumbing term, you know, that lever that switches from the bath to the shower. And as I love showers too, it all seemed to fit nicely into my diverse, inclusive and politically correct lifestyle. To such an extent that when I actually realised the errors of my thinking, I had to cancel myself. Which led to communication problems.

When we moved into our house, 35 years ago (how is that fucking possible???), it had been untouched for decades, possibly centuries. So we ‘done a refit, innit’. And they’d just invented ‘power showers’. So rather than standing under a trickle, you could stand under the power of 16 Niagaras every morning. A shower so powerful that only those with really strong knees could turn it on. And that’s what I wanted. And it was brilliant. Ok, a bit ‘brutal’ in those days as, when you turned it on the sound coming from the loft was like a V8 dragster powering up. Oddly, I liked that too.

But every cloud has a silver lining so every dog has its, err, day? Whatever, there’s always a downside. And with every power shower comes a squeegee. Because with that much water, there’s spray all over the lovely tiles. Which obviously needs to be immediately removed or otherwise… errrr… well, otherwise, Golgotha will fall! Hell will freeze over!! The Martians will invade!! Or, the tiles will have spots of water on them. And no-one wants that!

I never realised the real value of a holiday until this morning, when I squeegeed my shower. Because for 2 weeks of showering in loads of different places, I never once had to squeegee. Wasn’t even tempted to rush to a little Indian market stall and buy one for a quid (everything’s a quid in India, except taxi fares, they’re 50p). I just showered and… and walked out! So as I dragged that horrible rubber thing squeakily down the walls this morning, I realised 2 things. Firstly, that I was home again. And secondly, that I am Pavlov’s dog. I didn’t even have to ponder it. As the shower went off, so the squeegee began its well trodden path.

Which probably accounts for why I like baths.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Mel and I went to Sri Lanka 39 years ago on what was to be the first of many ‘exotic’ holidays. For Mel, it was fantastic because she came home with jewels and had found the man of her (and everyone else’s) dreams. And for me, I got to ride on an elephant; you just can’t beat that. But whilst there we went to a spice garden. It was magical. You pulled a lump of bark from the outside of a tree, break it and it is cinnamon. I mean, really? We had loads of trees in Ilford but I’d never done that before. Pull this ‘thing’, all withered and dark brown and woody, from a branch and it is vanilla!!! And that may have become the word to describe the almost indescribably bland and mediocre, but vanilla was the cause and main reason for the entire ‘spice route’ which opened up, quite literally, the entire world, and is also the most expensive commodity on the planet, by weight, depending on the price of gold or 35-year-old single malt whisky. And here’s some berry things, pulled off a bush. Crush one up, and ahhhhhh-CHOOOOO!!!, peppercorns.

Life was simple back in the last century. Spices were spices and leaves were leaves. Ok, there were tea leaves, bay-leaves, other interesting tasting leaves, but mainly the leaves of the other trees were a waste product and the seed pods of the the desirable leaf trees were just so much ‘jungle’.

In the intervening years someone came up with the ‘science’ of Ayurveda, which was a brilliant, incisive and commercially revolutionary innovation. Because, it is, essentially, the science of taking useless vegetable waste products like leaves, twigs, seeds, petals, bark, and any other green shit you can find, and bestowing upon the most useless of leafage, life saving properties. Possibly greater longevity. Better health. Alertness whilst sleeping much better. Sleepiness whilst being more alert. An end to bad breath. A longer penis (just rub this cream, Sir…), stronger hips, better rotation in your shoulders, enhanced neck movement, mainly on Tuesdays.

A cream, balm, capsule or tablet for everything and anything, all backed up by the ‘science’ of Ayurveda, which proves statistically, empirically and laughably, that ‘any practice involving the ingestion, application or insertion of any old green shit on your body can only be good. Can’t it?’

Ok, it is an ancient pseudo-medical system over here and, as always, if you believe, and it helps, then it works. But you go to see cardamum pods growing in the wild and they’re trying to sell you a million tubes and bottles of snake oil.

Happy cynical Sunday, possibly Monday, cos we’re on our way home. And it ain’t easy.

A xxxx

This is a fish. (The thing on the left). You didn’t know they came like this, did you? You thought fishes came in ring pull tins, or little plastic, vacuum-packed pouches, or in thin, pink slices of wonderful smoky fishiness from the deli. But no, this is how they start life. Well, end life. And this one weighed in at 2.2 Kilos. A big fucker. Not quite a full ‘whale’, but on the larger side of edible fishes. And the deal in this restaurant was just brilliant. You pick your fish. You pick what spices, combinations, variations, whatever and then you choose whether you want it grilled on a… well, on a grill, or over coals or… baked in a tandoor. And the result is, in culinary terminology: fucking spectacular.

But that’s not the issue here. This is not just another ‘Andy’s eaten something fantastic and he’ll never share one bite with meeeee’, thing. No. This is about people. And how we behave, ‘in the wild’. From a purely behavioural standpoint. Like stepping back and observing the human animals like David Attenborough would, as they gather around a common ‘watering hole’, which in this case is a hotel swimming pool. How they claim their territory (and if you thought this to be just an ‘animal’ event, watch any German claiming his pool chairs at 5.45am). And whilst most animals mate ‘for life’, humans tend to buck this trend and go for 7 years or 3 kids, whichever comes first. Then they’re hanging it all out with their thong bikinis as they try to be alluring to the next potential mate.

And it all starts with observation. You see another ‘mating pair’ coming to a sun bed near you. And you have to make a split second judgment: do you smile welcomingly at them? Or blank them, scowl, do a lot of ‘tutting’ and just accept that as you’re never likely to be friends with these people, might as well get the hatred kicking off asap. You have to judge books by covers. And decide accordingly. The closest thing humans have to ‘plumage’ is my Spurs hat. But that’s only there to attract a ‘mate’ in the ‘pub crawl’ sense of the word.

And one couple, a few days ago, crossed by our hunting ground, where I was the ‘dominant male’, which is the one Mel’s yelling instructions at. And we didn’t like the look of them one bit. Blanked them totally. Unworthy to befriend. Both much too tall to be decent people; you can tell. But then they started chatting. In English. Even though she’s certainly not and he had lived in Germany long enough to speak to the Germans here fluently in their own tongue. Yet they live in Muswell Hill. So we went out to eat. To this fish place which they recommended. And may possibly now become our best mates EVERRRRR.

Ok, possibly not. But just goes to show. I just wish I knew what it was that it did show, so I might learn for next time. But I won’t.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

I’ve always viewed life as a series of movies, in which I play the hero. The saviour. The martyr, the lead singer, the quarterback, centre forward, the hand of God, Zorro, Christ the Redeemer, Florence Nightingale, Douglas Bader, The Cheerleader, Luke Skywalker and Kermit the Frog. Bruce Lee, obviously. But this morning we entered the set of…

Apocalypse Now!!!

You see, it’s about the tropics. Though obviously ‘that’ tropic was the Vietnam one and we’re living an Indian tropic down here in southest of south India. And yet… does it matter? Tropics is tropics, right? Because they are defined by: outrageous heat and stupid levels of humidity. Tick. A jungle view out of every window. Tick. If you mowed your lawn here on a Sunday, by next Thursday everything would be 70 feet up in the air with leaves the size of buses. And noises. Animal noises which tell you you’re in the tropics. Mainly insects and birds and, quite frankly, you wouldn’t want to be hearing anything else too close by. Or anything else bigger than parrots and grasshoppers. Or slitherier.

And so, as we took a boat ride into this fantastic mangrove forest on yet another wetlandy type nature reserve right by the coast, I could hear the Flight of the Valkyries playing in my internal soundtrack. I was lovin’ the smell of napalm in the morning, and I was looking for some ‘cong’ to shoot. Because that’s the soundtrack of the tropics. Forever ruined for me by a meaningless proxy war which killed thousands of American kids, then glorified by Francis Ford Coppola in between his Godfather years and immortalised by Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando (blessed be he).

I get that view, that ‘feeling’ of moisturised heat on my body, those noises, and I’m just waiting for the ‘dmp-dmp-dmp-‘ throbbing of the helicopters, with me manning the machine gun, Mel feeding the ammunition belt and making the coffee, with a Rambo knife between her teeth, and for the battle to start.

Happy Tropical Thursday

A xxxx

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