Andy's Glasses

What the fuck is going on in France? They’re supposed to be cleaning the place up and getting ready for the Brits who will be arriving shortly in the same kind of numbers as the Normandy landing, but every day through August, as they take the kids for some sunshine and baguettes whilst they sip Bordeaux and Cab. Sauv, in the shade and load up their cholesterol levels with their annual cheese-binge.

But instead they’re setting fire to the place, burning cars, rioting, protesting, making a lot of noise and generally causing great unpleasantness all around. And for what?

Well, that’s the question. Ostensibly its about the killing of a 17 year old boy. But really, that’s just become a catalyst, a fuse, igniting long-standing malaise and dissatisfaction into a mass ‘je deteste France’ movement. The country, the government, the President, the police, the whole lot. Pretty much ‘everything French’. Which really brings those Frogs in line with the rest of the world, thinking-wise.

But the problems are many. Everyone hates Macron. Understandable. He wants them to delay retirement by pushing pensions further away. And there’s nothing the average French person loves more than work avoidance.
Other than perhaps shagging the wives of others. And the social problems they have there are difficult. And never more so than when the police shoot a kid in a car who, judging by the news film, was no ‘threat’ whatsoever to the shooter. The kid in question was of Algerian descent, thus the shooting was racially motivated, even if it wasn’t.

You should never give a gun to a Frenchman. A white flag, sure, but a gun? And in the banlieues, the hi-rise suburbs, over-crowded with high immigrant populations, the police are expecting trouble. And will consequently always find it. And that immigrant population, mainly from north Africa, arrived looking for a ‘better life’. And they were housed and fed and clothed by a resentful indigenous population because most were from French colonies with a ‘right to entry’. But there was no ‘right’ to go straight to the middle classes. And that’s possibly where the trouble starts.

They need another revolution. One’s never enough.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I’m pleased and quite frankly relieved to see that the Bank of England have decided to go ‘on message’ in the post-woke workplace. Rather than wasting their time sorting out interest rates which are at a pre-2008 high, worrying about inflation which doesn’t seem to be coming down as quickly as predicted/expected, or generally, doing what the Bank of Fucking England should be doing, they’ve sorted out their inclusivity policy. And although offering ‘leave to a birthing parent’ will not directly stop poor mortgage payers being made homeless, and the fact that gender reassignment is now part of their private health package is unlikely to reduce the average and punitive gas bill, I’m sure that people queuing at food banks will be greatly comforted to know that ‘all the toilets on the 7th floor are unisex’. Its not exactly ‘playing the fiddle whilst Rome burns’ but its kind’a along those lines. Kowtowing to the collective insanity whilst England goes bankrupt. And you’re the ‘bank’.

Wimbledon starts today. I just love Wimbledon. Even though Djokovic has returned and Emma Raducanu hasn’t. In honour of the world’s only proper tennis tournament, I didn’t play myself yesterday. Ok, I didn’t play because playing Saturday gave me bother of a hip, rather than hipster, nature. It fucking hurt. Trochanteric Bursitis. Nothing to do with age. Its something that all elite sportspeople should get to prove their eliteness.

Which is why none of the England cricket team suffer from it. Although to be honest, they were brilliant against the Aussies. Well, Ben Stokes was. Johnny Bairstow would have been but the Aussies proved, once again, what a bunch of cheating scion-of-convict low-lifes they are. I won’t bore with details, you either know or you won’t understand, but the spirit of the game of cricket, itself a metaphor for ‘doing the right thing’, was simply trashed in one blow of a metaphorical digeridoo. 200 years of gentleman-ness blown.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

As if Kier Starmer doesn’t make your skin crawl already, he just keeps upping the creepiness factor until, quite frankly, no-one else could ever get a look in. From being a horrible, anti-Semite-enabling do-nothing, sitting on Jeremy Corbyn’s shoulder for the ‘years of terror’, he’s now become the most negative, whingy-moany opposition leader ever, elevated to the top slot by virtue of not having anything positive to ever propose, seemingly content with demanding government sackings whenever a top Tory goes to take a piss during parliamentary session. Ok, part of that’s his job, but there must be MORE, you need substance, you Arsenal-supporting, charisma-free champagne-socialist reptile!

Yet on he bangs. This time an old and familiar drum. Which has no place in any drum-kit because its so irrelevant. “Rishi Sunak can never understand a ‘cost of living crisis’ because he’s so rich”. “Rishi Sunak can’t understand mortgage rate increases because he owns 150 million quids worth of properties outright”. And, best of all, just to really hi-light how totally free from understanding he really is: “I have a mortgage and the repayments have just gone UP!!!” Just like yours!!!, is the implication, whereas the reality is the mortgage on Starmer’s 2 million pound north London pad is probably about 27k and between his ‘paltry’ £150k a year plus his wife’s salary, they’ll barely notice the difference.

Starmer suffers from a chronic case of socialist guilt. The symptoms are an inability to accept that you are pretty well off, financially, because it might make you appear ‘less worthy’ a socialist than a homeless man. As if ‘socialism’ were a lifestyle choice rather than a political ideology. And by constantly banging on about Rishi’s never-denied wealth, he implies that he is ‘hard up; just like you’ whereas nothing could be farther from the truth. And furthermore, Rishi’s never been raped. Does that make him less empathetic to victims than a PM who had been? You don’t need to be poor to sympathise with the poor. A point sadly never grasped by the Leader of the Opposition.

I think therefore, that we need to add, to the growing list of failings and shortcomings of ‘the man who might become PM (God for-fucking-bid!!!)’, that he just isn’t very bright. Clever, in a bland and non-creative academic way, but dim.

A killer irony is that as I was googling Starmer a link came up about his actual name. And apparently ‘Starmer’ is an olde English derivative from ‘starre’ or ‘sterre’ which mean ‘bright’ and “…would generally be given to someone with a bright or lively personality.” He is, therefore, a disgrace to his family name.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

I love a flower as much as the next man. Possibly more. Though it gets a bit less when I come home from work one day in about May and Mel tells me she’s bought ‘a few bedding plants’. And I open the car to find 2,000 little polystyrene boxes of earth looking at me, all with tiny little shoots on them. Shutting the door doesn’t make them go away. I tried. They need planting. Petunias, daisies… errrr… flowers… shit-loads of ‘em, so we dig. And then its done.

But its not. Because bedding plants need watering. Every fucking day. All of them. Otherwise THEY DIE!!!! Which, after a few weeks of watering, wouldn’t be such a bad thing. And you never get a hose-pipe ban when you need one. But actually its a type of therapy, watering the flowers. Its cathartic. And feels great when it’s done.

The other night I was watering (“I’ll clear away the dinner stuff, you water the garden” is an irresistible division of labour) and I just managed to finish before it started raining. I mean, how lucky is that??? Phew, I thought, just made it in time.

And much as I love flowers, I really love metal. Not the music. Not just my new shoulder, but just metal ‘things’. Objects d’art. Objects d’anything. Objects d’metal. So when they fitted our new bathroom and intended to throw the old radiator out, I cried “NOOOOOOO!!!” because giraffes get lonely too, ya know.

I’m turning into my father. I called LBC radio. Talking about the NHS. Now the new, government initiative to create 300,000 more key workers in 12 years. Wow! That’ll solve ALL the problems. They’ll be doing hip operations when your 19, just cos they’ve got the time and man-power and you’re going to need a new one sometime. Right. But the government haven’t announced either how these new workers will be paid, nor how the old workers (currently on strike half the time) will get the pay increases they really deserve but the government can’t afford. And for ‘government’, read ‘us’. So my point was: isn’t this national obsession with ‘free at the point of delivery’ simply unsustainable and the NHS needs a new model whereby users possibly contribute?

So many problems in the world, I’m only one man ya know!!!

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

What is time? Yeah, fucked if I know either, but its such a good question. I like David Bowie’s definition best of all: “Time. Inflexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor…” Not because it explains anything whatsoever, but just because its quite gratuitously rude and vulgar, and I like that.

Another definition might be that time is always wrong. Which is why I’m always late. Not my fault, guv, my watch did it. But that’s just ‘the measurement of time’, which may be accepted by all of humanity, NOW, but that’s all to do with the passing of the Earth round the sun and dividing it into bite-sized bits because having a zoom meeting when Ecuador passes through 179 degrees of the passage round the sun is a bit vague for some people. Particularly pedantic people, seemingly obsessed with knowing precisely when ‘now’ is as described by Big Ben. Even though, by the time you’ve looked, that ‘now’ has changed.

You can measure time. But you can’t make it, change it, delay it or increase it in any way. Unless, according to Einstein, you can move as fast as the speed of light. And even a Ferrari can’t do that so we’ll leave that as ‘hypothetical’ for the time being (pun intended, or not).

But here’s how to make lots of time just disappear. You get Lila and Joey to stay at your house so their terrible, negligent, selfish, indulgent, entitled so-called ‘parents’!!!!! can go and lie in the sun for 3 or 4 days whilst drinking alcohol!!! and eating things. Because then, you’ll be woken long before Dawn has even gone for her middle-of-the-night piss by little people jumping on your head and demanding the unthinkable. Like movement or action. But heh! That gives you loads more of those man-made hours to enjoy, to utilise, to put to good use!!! I’m up really, really, really early, just think what I can achieve extra!!!

But then in steps ‘time’ and makes it all disappear in a whirl of breakfastS (one is never enough), colouring books, ipads and putting shoes on the wrong feet.

So there’s your answer. Time is all bollocks, but it CAN be extended by grandchildren, but not in any useful manner.

Happy exhausted Wednesday

A xxxx

Well that’s over. The coup in Russia. Possibly a ‘putsch’, maybe a shove. Almost a civil war. Its done with. You see, Mr Putin is such a nice, forgiving and tolerant world leader that he’s completely accepted the actions of the lovely Mr Prigozhin as ‘just a bit of an error, an over-excitement’, really nothing to worry about. And they all hugged and smiled and went out for an ice cream together. Holding hands. No foul, no penalty.

And Mr Putin even apologised for earlier, in an uncharacteristic show of aggressiveness, most out of character, for accusing the Wagner leader of treason. Prigozhin in turn smiled, in that way that people who earn their living murdering, raping and torturing people smile, and said he wouldn’t be naughty any more and upset his friend Vladimir.

Awwww.

However, just to complete the picture, just… ya-know, for ‘closure’, its perhaps worth noting that Putin’s stock on the international stage, as well as most definitely his ‘iron man’ image in Russia, has been severely damaged (the former) and dented (the latter). He has, for the first time in 20 years, shown weakness. Backed off. Gave ground. Did a u-turn. To allow anyone who opposed him in any way to simply walk away is absolutely unheard of. There is no precedent. Opponents just die, wherever they’re hiding, or they languish in a Siberian jail for 35 years.

Never mind, its hotter than hell over here and Wimbledon starts in one week’s time. The only tennis tournament in the world that actually means something. Not wishing to be parochial about this but other Grand Slams simply pale into the insignificance of Eurosport 3 and BT4, whereas Wimbledon belongs to the BBC. And we’ll need to see how the Russians ‘identify’ so we can decide whether to let them play.

Happy Sunday,

A xxxx

OMG! Have you heard??? There’s going to be peace in Ukraine. Putin will lead a flock of doves over Kiev whilst hippy Muscovites sing a medley of Bob Dylan songs, translated from the original Yiddish, hugging trees from Odessa to Donetsk and everyone will declare love and brotherhood forevermore…

Almost.

The good news is actually that there is some sort of quasi-proto-coup going on in Russia. And anything that is detrimental to Putin can only be good for every other human on Earth. However, its almost reminiscent to the Nazis being expelled from Berlin at the end of the war when the Russians (agaiaiain? Always the Russians) arrived. When everyone thought “anything’s better than Hitler” and in strolled Stalin, saying (in hindsight) “oh, ya reckon???”

Because the coup which is not a coup, just the taking over of a couple towns around Moscow, so far, is being headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the ‘Wagner Mercenary group’. Which is a seriously nasty, violent, sadistic and evil group of… well, mercenaries, many conscripted from jails in a kind of ‘Dirty Dozen’ moment, who have been fighting in Ukraine for Putin. And for money. Lots of money, but we’ll get to that later.

Prigozhin has been pissed off with the heads of Russian military for months now because his group don’t get the support they need. Like food. Armaments, missiles, tanks, uniforms, pretty much everything. So the group who were doing most of the damage in Ukraine on the Russian side, fell out with the Russians. Prigozhin is NOT opposed to the war. He’d like to escalate it, feels Russia have committed no war crimes and couldn’t give two shits if every school and hospital in Ukraine get blown up fully occupied.

And that really is the bad news. That should this coup unfold into a full-blown take-over and Putin is deposed, then Russia would be under the control of the original ‘Bad Mutha’. Who makes Putin seem like the Archbishop of Canterbury by comparison. And he only deals in cash. Hence the three truckloads of rubles found with about 5 million quid in cash at the Wagner office in St Petersburg.

Although instability in your enemy’s nation is normally a good thing, I don’t think Ukrainians should be uncovering their barbecues any time soon.

All we are saying is ‘Give Peace a Chance’. But it doesn’t translate into Russian.

God help us Saturday

A xxxx

So some geezer had an issue with online attack from vegans. Nothing unusual in that, there’s nothing as aggressive as an unprovoked, over-sensitive grass-eater. But this was in Perth, Australia. Land of the blunt and direct. And the man was restaurateur John Mountain and he responded in a fabulous way by stating ‘the vegan option in this restaurant: eat somewhere else’.

A young vegan woman claimed this to be ‘discriminatory’. I claim her to be a ‘fuckwit’. Even though she was rather lovely and surprisingly healthy looking for someone willingly deprived of meaningful proteins, calcium deficient and with a body lacking in so many basic vitamins.

And I thought: what kind of misplaced sense of entitlement gives you the right to expect every shop in the world to cater to your rather specific and generally unwanted needs? Its like me going into McDonalds and demanding strictly kosher food. (There is no less-likely scenario, I get that, but in a way that’s the point). I’m basically in the wrong restaurant. Its like going to Starbucks and ordering a new BMW in blue with black alloy wheels. In vegan world, I’d wait 3 minutes and it would just appear, lovely car with ‘Adny’ scribbled on the side in felt pen. With standard name mis-spelling, obvs.

So even though I have nothing but sympathy for the vegan sisterhood (ok, some contempt, but I think I’ve hidden that rather well) they seem to be the edible equivalent of the ‘trans’ generation where the ‘odd’ 99.76% of the population have to change attitudes, views, words, descriptions and behaviour so as not to offend a tiny minority bunch of beansprout-sausage-eating waifs.

Tragedy of the Submarine. There is not enough money in the world to get me on such a thing. My absolute nightmare. Even before it imploded ‘catastrophically’. Though find me a non-catastrophic implosion at three and a half kilometres under the sea and I’ll find you a tolerant vegan. But how could they let an unchecked, unregulated vessel with many safety questions unanswered, take passengers to their death? Its up-market people-smuggling.

Happy Friday

A xxxx

We were leaving the Promised Land. Even though we are ‘chosen people’, in this instance we decided to choose to be somewhere else. Not really out of choice, I’d have stayed on that beach or in the hummus bar, but holidays end, blah, blah, blah, don’t expect sympathy or compassion from YOU.

We left our dear friends in Netanya, filled up the car, cos otherwise the rental companies charge you even more per litre than the Shell garage in Highgate, as a punishment. And that went well. Possibly the last thing of the day which ‘went well’ for a good while. As you’ll see.

Because I know the way to the airport in Tel Aviv. I’ve driven it, probably, 25 times. I’ll tell you the way. Ready? You go down the 2 road, over the bridge to the 5 and follow the little airplane emojis all the way to Ben Gurion International. They’re everywhere you need them to be, and more. Right or left??? Just follow the airplane. Goddit.

They’ve really improved the roads too. Widened them, resurfaced them, brilliant. Smooth, even, fabulously freewayish in every way. Except… they didn’t get round to replacing all the signposts. The ones with the little airplanes on them. So we very soon found ourselves… fucking lost. Totally. Middle’a fucking nowhere. With not an airplane pic in sight. Never mind, turn on Waze. But the phones (both of them) wouldn’t pick up the airwaves. No idea why. Turned on ‘data’, had ‘4G’, but no function. Total fuckage. And the clock’s ticking.

Stopped the only person on any street and found an angel. Who looked up the way on her phone which we photographed to use. I’d buy her dinner, lunch and breakfast if I knew who she was or where the hell we found her. And thus we arrived at the airport. Not toooo late, but on the anxious side of mild panic, just before you scream.

Security, fine, check-in, fine, more security (this was Israel), pretty good and then…

I beeped the scanner. Ok, off with the belt, out with the loose change, I beeped it again. Ah, possibly the metal shoulder? We need to do a check. But only a man can do it. Even though the gorgeous babe in the uniform would definitely have been my first choice. And second. No, wait for a man. I tried arguing diversity, but she remained firm. But, like beautifully firm and…

Eventually I got the personal treatment (14 seconds) by some humourless automaton who confirmed that Osama Bin Laden I wasn’t, but after waiting 10 minutes.

Then just a minor hiccup because the automatic passport reader couldn’t believe my photo was so beautiful so it rejected it and made me go to see a non-automatic person.

Bottom line: we’re home. So what’s stressful in that?

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

We returned from the Golan. Fabulous up there but we missed the beach. The odd thing is; we don’t even like the beach. All that fucking sand everywhere, its awful. Hot, sticky, windy places, crowded like here in Netanya, terrible. But much as we protest our dislike of being on beaches, we just love walking on them. This morning we walked about 3 miles, there and back. Though where ‘there’ was, I have no idea. Just a rock. Near a hard place. So we turned and went back. We like pools really. Mel can do her lengths, I can do my length… width if I’m not quite up to it, and its all clean and nice and you don’t end up with sand on your testicles. But walking on beaches is simply magical. Especially this beach. Completely devoid of stones, shells and seaweed, the sand is soft silk and testicle-repellant. And with the sea over your toes, it goes on forever and is half a mile wide.

And we stay with my very old mate and his fabulous wife. We can’t stand them, but its free here so you can’t be that fussy. And the WiFi’s good, gotta give ‘em that. And its free. Everything’s free here.

Unlike my ‘data roaming’ on the way up to the Golan, where the m*thuf*ckers charged me 25 quid for using Waze for about 3 hours. Therefore I just spent half an hour having a ‘chat’ (one of those annoying little typing box ‘chats’) with a nice man with a completely unpronounceable name at Id-Mobile. Took about 3 minutes (after the inevitable 20 minutes of ‘security’ clearance worthy of MI6 and other assorted bollocks, to get £20 back off the thieving bastards. Because you know if you send an SMS message it will cost you £1.50. You know calls will bankrupt you within 3.6 minutes. But you don’t know ‘data’. Its so opaque and mysterious that “£1.50 per megabyte” is simply meaningless. To me anyway. Do they measure how many megabytes Waze is sending me as it mis-directs me up the toll roads??? Or does someone else with a different unpronounceable name just say… “hmmm, Andy’s on Waze, charge the fucker 25 quid! That’ll show him”?

Anyway, we’re coming home tomorrow. So its time to go back to the beach. Even though we don’t like it at all. We’re doing it for YOU!

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx