Andy's Glasses

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

I have no idea why I found myself thinking about this event, whilst soaking in the bath after tai chi last night, but, sometimes things just, ‘spring’ to mind. So I’m gonna share. Because that’s what I do.

It must have been the summer of 1974, possibly 75 and I found myself a job for the summer holidays. Driving vans round the country delivering consignments of watches to jewellery stores. My dad’s mate was a director of this importers in Clerkenwell and they needed help in the ‘despatch department’. What those pretentious fuckers would now call ‘logistics’. We spent all day posting shit around the country but then, every couple of weeks, there’d be ‘a run!!!!’ Like that. With exclamation marks. It meant that the sales people had sold sufficient quantities of stuff to justify getting someone into a big white van to deliver it all. And it would load up with maybe 15 or 20 big packages, in each being a load of watches, a stand, display stuff, all the paraphernalia. I can’t even remember the name of the watches. But they did work. I think.

So we’d map it out. ‘Ok, you leave home at 5.30, be in Manchester by 9.30 (it was a van, remember, and in 1975), first drop. Second in Stockport, then onto Liverpool, the Wirral, back up to Carlisle… and so it went. As near to a loop as you could arrange. Overnight in Burton-upon-Trent, then Derby, Nottingham… and so on. And I loved doing them. Despite the damage I managed to perpetrate on both the vans. It’s a contact sport, driving. But it allowed me to finally understand what ‘up north’ meant and also to add the word ‘squalid’ to my vocabulary.

We also used to send lots of things by ‘red star’. Ooooh. This was popular and meant taking a package to the station and, almost literally, putting it on a train. To be collected by the recipient at his train station. In the ‘red star office’ because all stations had them back then. And yeah, you had to go to a station but Amazon make all that fuss about NEXT DAY DELIVERY!!!! and we did it SAME DAY. So fuck you, Bezos.

One day my dad’s mate came rushing into our office. “You gotta get this to Waterloo red star for the 3.10 train to… somewhere!!!” It was 2.45 and we were in Clerkenwell. “Ok, Ivor, no problem (ever the optimist)”. “The van’s too slow”, take my car, he said, throwing me the keys to his BMW 2002 Tii, super-bollocks, mega-testosterone, ultra racer, penis-extension thing. “And take Eddie”.

Eddie had a cab-drivers head for roads and short-cuts, quite amazingly so. Thus, with images in my mind from ‘The Sweeney’ and ‘The Professionals’ of precisely how to ‘get a car somewhere really quickly, we fired up the Beemer. Following Eddie’s directions I was flying through Smithfield’s meat market (afternoon, so shut and pretty empty), at some ridiculous 1970s speed (45 on a 30mph road was NOT ‘fast’ in 1974) when there was a long and loud screech. A van. White. Just avoided hitting me. But like ‘just’. As I slowed I noticed the sign on the side said ‘POLICE’ at precisely the same time my mouth said FU-U-U-UCKKKKK.

I would never get out of prison. The twelve occupants of the van all came over to me. And in their lovely navy blue uniforms, they didn’t look particularly ‘happy’.

Basically, I’d gone through a ‘give way’ sign at a junction. They had right of way, I ignored that, at probably about 60. Holy shit. But… but…

There was no ‘give way’ sign. And, more importantly, the double lines at the junction to show me to do so were not there. Smithfield was old (still is) and too busy to maintain. So the dozen of the Met’s finest plodded over to investigate. And found, unanimously, that the give way lines had in fact disappeared completely. Probably about 1953 and no-one had re-drawn them. No signpost either. Thus, they let me go. I would not face the gallows. And they were actually nice about at that point. Something I’ve never understood, considering I was basically an obnoxious boy-racer in a flashy car.

But I learned a valuable lesson that day. Though, even with that delay, still made it to Waterloo in time to get the package on the train. Thanks to Steve McQueen in Bullit.

Happy Friday, drive carefully

A xxxx

Apparently we all have a doppelgänger. Mel definitely does because she’s an identical twin. Which is cheating. The point being how difficult it is to find your double, not phoning them 6 times every day to make sure you’re both wearing the same clothes. They’ve found some in a Spanish study. People who look probably more identical than identical twins (who always vary a bit). And they’ve also found a tendency for those seemingly duplicates, to share actual characteristics too. Like right/left handedness. Long/short sightedness. And whether they eat their peas first or save them to the end of the meal. Ok, I made that one up for interest and intrigue.

I want a good doppelgänger. I want Bradley Cooper. Paul Newman (not sure whether being dead for decades affects the doppelgänger standards). I used to think I had a striking resemblance to Arnold Schwarzeneger in Terminator. Then I started shrinking a bit so now I’m a bit more Danny DeVito. Hopefully not the version in ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. I’d really like to be Jennifer Lawrence’s doppelgänger but that’s not really a conversation to be held in public. Though I reserve the right to ‘doppelgänger identity’ as I fucking choose!!! My mate Mark always thinks we look ‘identical’ even though I’m gorgeous and he’s dog ugly. The similarities end with ‘grey… lots of grey’ and glasses.

So I’ve searched and searched for this illusive double, my alternative lookalike and finally found him (safe presumption of gender in this case). And that’s his photo above. Could be twins.

And in my nightly (Mel’s bathtime) series of ‘watching tv programmes that everyone else ignored when they came out 5 years ago’, I’ve been doing a Sky Arts series (cos I’m very fuckin’ arty, ain’t I?) on movie directors. The Coen Brothers. Not doppelgängers but they do resemble each other and most other Jews in the world. And there were those movies. Blood Simple. Raising Arizona. Wonderful films, always different, always classy, always funny. Then, possibly… even though I hate to say it, its probably true, the best film of all time (!!!!!!!) Fargo. The movie which ‘got me’ when it first came out and has never let me go. Bit like William H Macy’s wife who they kidnapped. And then: The Big Lebowski. Possibly the coolest film ever, but I don’t know why, it just is. And now I want to see them all again. And again. And again.

Lucky Mel.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx