Andy's Glasses

Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the 2nd, has died. Did you hear? Possibly not. If you were buried in a hole in the garden with no sound available and limited WiFi, you may have missed it. Otherwise, you already know and thus have started your very own outpouring of grief, sorrow and despair. If you’re a foreigner or tourist you’ll already be outside Buckingham Palace, camping on the pavement in the pissing down rain, as part of a vast crowd of mourners and monarchists who don’t know (the tourists) and don’t care (the monarchists) that the demised monarch is in fact in Edinburgh. Possibly, its just a symbolic gesture, and possibly because they’re too mean to get on a train to Scotland to do it properly.

The Queen was reaching the end of her long, dedicated and exceptionally wonderful life, so they called up, among others, Andrew and Meghan and when she learned they were coming, she chose what we’d all do in those circumstances and rushed off to the Palace in the Sky. Given a choice between Prince Andrew and the Angel of Death, we’d all do the same.

And thus we need all learn the lyrics to our new national anthem. God Save The Person With a Crown. To allow for future pronoun issues. Although on all emails from Her Majesty, her pronouns of choice were always ‘one, one’s, one’.

Prince Charles has been promoted to King Charles. Camilla is taking over temporarily as Queen whilst William is caretaker manager of Wales. In the royal re-shuffle.

Charles was given the option of his kingly name. Ok, Charles would have been a shoe-in, so you’d think. But royals do it different. He could have used any of his names. And he has many. Because previous king Charles-es have not done very well. The first beheaded for treason and the second exiled for most of his life. But Charlie chose Charlie. On the principle of third time lucky.

Tomorrow I shall track every moment of Elizabeth’s life, from the first photo with a dummy in her mouth (gold one) and nappies (hand-woven silk), through the years. Oh, sorry, every newspaper has already done that. Almost as if the obits were already written and ready!!!

The Queen is brown bread. Long live the plonker.

Happy, but sad, Friday

A xxxx

The women won the European Championships and it was the best thing ever for women’s football. Not for football in general (read: men’s football), because in that respect it was fairly meaningless. It was a different game. But in politics, they all play the same game. And in keeping with the football-led theme of the year, there’s a gel in charge this time.

Liz Truss hasn’t gone to 10 Downing Street to do the ironing. She’s gone there to save the world. Well, to save my world: England. Scotland, Wales, Ireland? They’re on their own. Liz has come to save ME. I’d be happy if she just concentrated on London, really, but appreciate all that Boris-talk of ‘levelling up’ and ‘red walls’ and stuff must enter into her plans somewhere.

And I think I’m fairly alone, in my house at least, of feeling pretty good about Liz taking the helm. I like her. She’s no looker but you don’t enter politics because you’re gorgeous. You’d get a proper, important job, like being an influencer. But she has ideas. Big ideas. Which she’s going to need because other than during a war, there has never been a worst time to take charge of this country. Everything’s gone to shit, is going deeper that way, and toilet paper is fast becoming unaffordable.

But Liz is a woman. I’m allowed to making passing reference to that without offending too many. And thus she wants to spend her way out of the crisis. The political version of “I know we have no food in the house and you don’t get paid til next Tuesday but I just bought a handbag on eBay cos it was only 320 quid”.

And yet she really has no choice. We either look at ‘bail outs’ or we’ll be looking at total economic disaster for 90% of the population as the energy prices soar higher than any American rocket (much, much higher in that case) and inflation continues to cause constant increases in all other prices.

Yet she has a bottom up approach to restructuring. Cut taxes. A move the Kier Starmers of this world (and thank God there’s only one or we’d all be dying of boredom) simply love to hate. But it actually makes sense. Reduce taxes, increase the nation’s productivity (which is horrendously low, currently) and worry about the rest later. Because if the nation prospers, we all prosper.

But even that is relatively long term because gas prices go up next month and people need to feel secure right now. So tomorrow she’ll announce the help package. Rumoured to be in the region of 100 billion pounds. That’s a ‘1’ followed by 11 zeroes. And in maths, zeroes really don’t mean ‘nothing’. By this morning that figure had casually been raised to 150 billion. At which point even the most inured to these ridiculous figures has to have a ‘WTF???’ moment. I can remember when a 50-pound note made me feel rich. It still does, in fact.

So good luck Liz. I’m with you all the way. And starting with a Cabinet almost devoid of ‘rich old white men’, I’m feeling confident. But why break that with Jacob Rees-Mogg FFS?

The future starts… TODAY!!!! (Just like it always does, but bigger)

A xxxx

We get a new Prime Minister today. In all likelihood Liz Truss. Based only upon Rishi yesterday, who, suddenly, after months of slagging off, became really nice and conciliatory and flattering about her. Because she can give him a good job. But neither of them qualify for ‘genius’ status. Only my wife does that.

For years I’ve been making lamburgers. In all modesty, they are probably the finest lamburgers in the world. If there’s better, I’m yet to sample it. Others lack the taste, the dedication, the skill, artistry, the texture, the… the very lambiness required for perfection. I would give you the recipe but then I’d have to shoot you. Like Coca Cola, like Big Mac special sauce, this is top secret and kept in a safe in the Kremlin. Though, to be honest, it ain’t rocket science. Even though, unlike present day American ‘rocket science’, my lamburgers don’t leak. Ok, they drip a bit but that’s desirable.

So I go to our local butcher and buy lamb mince. The butcher is kosher so the mince is very, very expensive. But that merely reflects the fact that kosher meat is so kind and gentle that it almost qualifies as vegan. No, really. The sheep are kept in a 5 star hotel, grazing on a golf course. They are ‘euthanised’ by gently going to sleep. (Do sheep get to sleep by counting humans? Deep question.) And butchered with… errrr… love. Anyway, buy some fucking lamb. But then come the list of ingredients to turn a heap of pink mush into a revelation of taste and wonder!!! And it is time-consuming. I use onion, obviously, garlic and (secret ingredient number 1) fresh mint leaves!!! Which all need ‘chopping finely’. No-one wants twigs in their burger, or a big lump of onion. So I deploy the mini-food-processor. Ahhhh, that turns fingers to stumps in mere seconds, so onions and garlic? No problem. Yet there is a problem. You put the stuff in, hit the motor, the blade spins and hurls all the onion, garlic and leaves to the sides. Where they stick, remaining untouched by the blade. Shove them back to the middle, hit power and it repeats. And repeats. And…

Then Mel showed me a trick that she invented all by herself whilst making meatballs and encountering the same problem. And it is so brilliant, so simple, so… it works.

Put all the stuff to be chopped in the processor. Then add a raw egg. (Vegans may use a substitute to add to their lamb). Because any burger recipe needs eggs. And when you spin that lot, you arrive in heaven. The food processor becomes the holy grail. Filled with really finely chopped stuff. And a beaten egg. Which you needed anyway.

You’ll thank her forever. But I’ll take the credit and patent the process in MY name.

(The other secret ingredient is honey, so vegetarians can eat them too).

Happy Cooking

A xxxx

VAR has ruined my life. I’ve survived Brexit, well, I am currently in the process of surviving it, the jury’s certainly still out on that one. And I’ve definitely survived Covid because I’m beyond caring about it. The cost of living crisis we’ll cope with, we have no choice. I’ll cut down on the caviar and vintage champagne if I have to but I’ll never stop buying diamond jewellery. There’s no gas, we’re on the verge of a world war, China’s gone maverick and the pound is currently worth about the same as a Burkino Faso centime. But VAR??

You just can’t cope with it. Don’t get it. Don’t need it. Hate it beyond my hatred even for some of my wife’s family. That much. And yet, why? Spurs have had a few decisions go against them, like yesterday’s terrible removal of our 3rd goal just because… well, because he was offside. Not even in that annoyingly, ultra-pedantic, VAR-type ‘offside’, but actually, you know, offside. But I reckon, in the few years of VAR, we’ve had far more decisions go our way than against. The outrageous decision 3 years ago against Manchester City in the Champions League which went in our favour should have been a forewarning of what lay in store with the ridiculous new system. That has since become ‘the best night of my life’. If not, 2 weeks ago at Chelsea exemplified everything that was and is wrong with VAR, all to Spurs benefit.

VAR was introduced to clarify ambiguity and to right wrongs. Instead it has proven to be ludicrously inconsistent, increasing the ambiguous and misreading the obvious. But of course, the implication is that this mystical acronym V.A.R. is some kind of magic box into which you put information and out of which comes definitive clarification. And its not. It is a camera. The output of which has to be viewed by a man. Sometimes a woman (but not yet, I think) and often a blind imbecile. Who takes so long to make his decisions that the entire nature and balance of the match is subsequently altered.

And then there’s the emotional. To have a goal taken away is devastating. After 4 or 5 minutes of Mr VAR agonising over his indecision, the impact is 100 times worse for the whole team. Which affects the way they then play.

We need a rethink. Until we can instal a system that is totally computerised (we can send a man to the moon FFS, how hard can this be? Ok, America can’t, currently, but they will one day soon, I’m sure, once shit has been bound together in Florida) we should abandon VAR as a tragically failed experiment which has had far more negatives than positives.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

I was back at sea. Ok, at canal. The Boatman had made it all the way to Leighton Buzzard in the two weeks since we went to Milton Keynes. That’s four motorway junctions in two weeks. But you don’t buy a boat for speed. Not that boat. You buy it because its by far the easiest way to start fights with stroppy canal bastards who don’t like their boats being banged. Tossers. Shouting, screaming, moaning, horrible tossers. We left loads in our wake on Thursday as we sailed peacefully through the countryside.

Mel stayed home. Not for her the life of a sea-farer, even for a day. It’s a man’s world. Other than the women who do it. But most of them are passengers. On little boats. And I encountered a new thing. Locks. Those funny, quirky things without which boats would have to be sailing downhill. Or possibly uphill. Which the laws of physics prevent, even though it might be quicker to change those laws than to ‘do a lock’. There again, everything on the water happens at ‘boat speed’. So no-one’s in a hurry. Only the ones coming to start a fight.

You arrive at the lock and moor up. (10 minutes). Then you check out to see if the lock is currently high or low. The rule being: whatever you want it to be, it ain’t. So you wait a bit for a boat to come the other way, because that’s protocol. Locks waste water and two boats, like two heads, are better than one. (20 minutes). Then you give up and go fill the lock. Or empty the lock, depending which way you’re going. (Another 10 minutes). Then you open the gates and pull the boat in. (10 minutes because although its floating, its still 38 tonnes of floating). The the lock fills/empties again (10 more minutes), then you open the gates and you’re away!!! Wow! In a flash. A 2 hour, 46-minute flash. There’s lots of knobs to pull on and levers to operate and winding up (not other boaters, that’s too easy) but I don’t think you’re ready for the technical stuff yet.

And then we moored up so The Boatman had a nice slot for the night and I just had to get back to the Tesco car park where I’d left the car. Which was about 3 miles upstream. Oh. and there were no roads in sight, just fields. Uber had ‘no cars available’ because Prius don’t make tractors. So we deployed the electric scooters from the hold (like a loft, but lower, and on a boat) and rode along the tow path to arrive back to the car. With 2 electric scooters. And a very small car.

Ironically, electric scooters are illegal on the roads (other than rental ones) and on pavements. Both of which are kind of flat and smooth and straight and nice. Riding them on tow paths is probably less illegal but they’re bumpy, bendy, lumpy and you have a canal about 3 feet away.

Happy Saturday. You landlubber.

A xxxx

Ok, I get it. Finally. It’s taken a while. I want to be a Manchester City fan. Always loved them (never), my favourite city in the world (loathsome, dank shit-hole), forever in my heart (hated them from my first ever football match, against… Manchester City). They are team with a full, rich history (rubbish) and act always with dignity and integrity (yeah, right). Oh, and Kevin de Bruyne and Erling Haaland. Who, along with the club’s owners, epitomise the essence of being British.

See? Lots of good reasons. So I can convert. I’m allowed. I have the relevant history, the required commitment and the utmost desire to… to… to just beat every other team without ever considering the prospect of defeat other than as a freak and random ‘one-off’ event that will never happen again so long as me and Pep both shall live, amen. ‘We’ even give most teams a 2-nil start, just for fun and the challenge, and still win. And I’m sure winning every game must get a bit boring, but not as much as losing. Nothing like as much as losing. Or even drawing against teams who you really should beat. The shattering of hope, the dilution of ambitions, the never-ending catalogue of tragedy that YOU Spurs fans have to endure, season after season.

Arsenal can (hopefully) delude themselves after winning 5 in a row, but you simply know that when they go to the Etihad (Praise be) or even in the clash of the airlines when the Etihad goes to the Emirates, there will be only one winner.

Manchester City are beyond any former notion of merely ‘a good team’. When Haaland arrived, possibly the only true ‘number nine’ that Pep has ever been associated with during his long and fantastically successful career, it elevated City immediately and with extreme prejudice. He may be ugly but 2 hat-tricks in 2 games?

So now I just have to get my head around the fact that some rich fucking Emirate dude bought ‘my’ club, which was always shit, and pumped billions of his personal trillions into it, flaunting all rules and regulations of any financial nature, turned the entire league into a competition of dick-measurement measured in dollars and ruined my PREVIOUS life forever. And then I’ll embrace my new love.

Come on Cit-eh

Shoot me now

A xxxx

I love it (read: ‘fucking HATE it’) when people of strong political leanings encompassing a whole manner of negativities, choose to conflate all their betes noires into one little package of out-of-context venom.

So I’d like you to introduce you to Sandrine Rousseau. Here’s the shocker, with such a name: she’s French. And she’s ‘green’. In fact a Green Party MP in Macronland because we’d never have such a person here. She’s an ardent feminist. Which is NOT saying she’s a lesbian at all. She’s ‘green’, obviously, but the entire package. Not just switching off lights when you go out and buying an electric vehicle for this lady. Oh no. She’s green to the core. And although its not actually a requirement for any ‘feminist’, I suppose its not unusual for them to hate men. Sometimes I hate men too. Because I’m a feminist too. Moi aussi.

The ‘storm’ currently unleashing its power in our neighbouring country is that Sandrine added all her pet hates together: that’d be men, deforestation for grazing, men, carbon emissions, men, the evils of meat, both personally and globally, and men. She divided that by the sum of her core values: don’t eat meat, don’t fuck up the planet, don’t be a man; and arrived at the answer to her equation. The sum total. The final symbol of all the evils on the planet.

Barbecues.

Arranged by men, done by men, for men, who eat all the meat. Far more than women do. Probably eat it more messily too.

Meat is definitely a problem. She’s a ‘green’, therefore probably eats how she votes: green. And apparently men do eat more meat than women, but banning barbecues? She feels that grilling a slab of entrecote is the ultimate insult to global warming, to women in general, to the entire planet and is on a par with waving your nob at a bus-load of nuns. Whilst slaughtering 12 chickens in front of a Golf Diesel.

I’d vote for her.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

The new, American super-space rocket was launched yesterday amid the usual fanfare. It’s the biggest rocket ever built, in true U.S. style, it has a 7-litre V8, supercharged… well, it has the rocket equivalent of ‘outrageous excess’ in that it is basically one rocket with two extra ones (‘boosters’) strapped to the sides for more power, more thrust, more ooomph, more fucking EVERYTHING!!!! It produces more carbon emissions than 92 million Greta Thunbergs all burning together.

But it didn’t take off. Oh. The crowds had been gathering around Cape Canaveral for days, in their rolling homes, ready for the long wait, eager for a good slot. Which, for people in Florida is not so much ‘with a view of the launch-pad’, but in fact ‘near the barbecue and beer stalls’. And they waited, and counted down, as ya do, and when it was just T minus 40 minutes… they abandoned. The rockets were leaking fuel. One leak was repaired but the others were a bigger problem, then they couldn’t cool the engines properly and they had to call it to a halt. You don’t send $xxxxx,000,000 of rocket to the moon and not get it back. They need to put it on eBay next week to recoup some of the cost.

And my first thought was ‘WTF???’

Because how do you do ‘leak’ in something that costs billions? Ok, as they said, ‘it’s new and we’re still snagging’, but holy shit, a fucking leak? They ran out of sealant? If Elon Musk had built it it wouldn’t leak. This is deeply embarrassing. A ‘Titanic moment’ was averted, but without the iceberg. But really? I mean, really??? Is that the best they can do? In 1969 they managed to put two men on the moon in a rocket built from washing up liquid bottles and sellotape. And this is what its come to.

Bournemouth lose 9-nil to Liverpool and sack their manager. Why would they do that?Ok, it was something of a ‘bad day at the office’ but to sack Scotty Parker? The man who just a few months ago had brought them the glory of a return to the Premiership. Loses a game, ok, rather catastrophically, but does that move actually do any good? The players will hate it, the fans will hate it and pretty well all neutrals hate it too. Sometimes… sometimes…

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

What a fabulous wedding we went to yesterday. My dearest oldest mate ‘gave away’ his daughter (no idea why, she’s gorgeous, he could have sold her for a fortune) in matrimonial betrothal to her lawfully wedded person of groom-like status in a ceremony dating back hundreds of years (the secular bit) and thousands of years (the Jewish bit). And it was in Middle Temple Hall in… The Temple. For those who don’t know it, that’s the mediaeval area where barristers keep their rooms. It’s virtually car-free, but what cars they do have are really really expensive ones, as barristers drive. The Temple sits between the River and Fleet Street and is simply beautiful. And in its centre sits Middle Temple Hall. Built in 1572 (it was) by Sir Leopold Artichoke (it wasn’t), the early neo-Tudor interior cleverly disguises the fact that it could have been built using loads of laminated MDF from Ikea and would look pretty much the same, and much cheaper. But it wasn’t. MDF wasn’t invented until Edward the 4th so they had to use real wood. With no consideration to deforestation or carbon footprint.

But despite being a very-un-Greta building, I decided to leave my eco-warrior suit outside and enter the wedding venue in my underwear. Metaphorically speaking.

The actual ceremony took place in the gardens which, again, are magnificent and gorgeous, but unlike most ‘gardens’, these are right in the heart of the City of London, which really resonates for me. And for all gathered. Particularly as the bride was raised in France and the groom is half-Israeli. Quite a big half too, because he’s really tall. The photo is of the ‘chupah’, or canopy, under which all Jewish weddings take place. It has to be open and it has to be temporary, nothing which can’t be carried away if a marauding band of Mesopotamians come riding in with swords waving, or a bunch of Cossacks having a Sunday afternoon pogrom. The imperative of the ‘temporary’ nature of the wedding structure in no way represents the contemporary custom of marriages being rather ‘temporary’. Jonny Depp and Amber Heard didn’t marry under a chupah.

And then inside into the Hall itself for dinner. I refuse to call it a wedding ‘breakfast’ unless it contains bacon, eggs, sausages and pancakes with maple syrup. Which it didn’t. But despite the apparent gravitas of the venue, the almost forbidding magnificence of one of the homes of the British legal system, you’re allowed to eat there, drink there and even dance. Perhaps even because of the seeming austerity of the surroundings it makes you want to have fun.

Fab wedding,

Happy first day of married life.

A xxxx

We have a problem with our utility companies. They’re not doing what we need them to do.

The energy companies have to provide us with energy. Electricity and gas. And as electricity can’t be grown on trees, but needs to be made, normally with gas, they are in fact supplying us with gas and more gas. And the price of gas has definitely gone up recently. We’re currently blaming Russia, but any nation will do. We buy it from Norway, we buy it from anyone. And it has definitely risen in price. Probably doubled.

But that does not mean our household energy costs need to double. Think of petrol. The price went up massively. Because ‘of the cost of crude oil’. But only about 10% of the cost of a litre of petrol (possible more in a gallon, cos its bigger?) is the oil. The rest is taxes, duty, surcharges, vat and profit for the oil companies and petrol stations. So when the price of oil rises, everyone else (including the fucking Chancellor) rubs their hands in glee. It’s pay-time. Whereas really, none of those other 90% of charges needs to rise at all. It explains why the oil giants all announced massive increases in profits. And I know they need to ‘explore green areas’ which costs a lot, and I hate the idea of a ‘windfall tax’ to claw the money back, but the whole thing is so cynically opaque that I might be prepared to accept a few bill. Just as a one off.

So should the energy companies announce immense profits next year, that will simply show what a fucking farce the whole business is. Gas prices rise, its a boom time for Bombay call centres.

Yet the water companies are the worst of all. They lose 25% of our water through leaks they can’t fix and dodgy old reservoirs that aren’t sealed properly and they moan like fuck when it hasn’t rained for 3 days and ban hosepipes if the ‘drought’ goes on for 6 days. Then as soon as it does rain, they empty the sewers into the sea. Well they have to open the ‘storm drains’ or heaven knows what might happen!! Because the empty reservoirs and dried up rivers will all burst!! Thus they ‘have no choice’ but to empty a few thousand tons of shit into the coastal regions where we swim. Even the French were complaining about it and you know what a generally filthy bunch they are.

Nationalise everything. Whatever it takes to stop ‘Mike’ from Delhi phoning me up 16 times a day trying to flog me gas.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx