Andy's Glasses

Jamaica wants to have a new ‘head of state’! In the most controversial snub since… for a long time, the Prime Minister told William and Kate that ‘he wanted no truck with that bejewelled old hag in Buckingham Palace’. In so many words. They want… a different head on their stamps! Possibly Usain Bolt’s, probably Bob Marley’s as it adorns every building, pavement, poster board, t-shirt and cup and saucer on the Island already. Bob Marley has been the de facto head of state since he shot the sheriff. Jamaica has been independent since 1962 but now wants to dissociate itself from the Commonwealth and dump Her Maj. And I for one am appalled with this development. Which totally broadsided Wills and Kate when they went to meet with him yesterday. Kate’s perm-grin almost slipped. Almost. Not to the ‘consoling war-torn children’ levels of unsmiliness but almost, just for a second.

And I can’t see why the Jamaicans would want to distance themselves from the Royal Family who gave them their independence 60 years ago, having deemed those savages ‘almost fit to govern themselves’, and thus were they liberated from our Empire. Where they’d lived, for hundreds of years, as slaves. Albeit freed slaves. Yet still under the yoke of the Empire and under the control of a landlady 3000 miles away. Why would you not want that? For the privilege of putting her head on your postage?

There’s really no need to despair about the cost of living: Rishi Sunak’s here. The man who invented ‘furlough’ payments for an entire nation for 18 months now brings us proof that he is our saviour. Once again. He’s cutting the fuel duty by a whopping… 5p per litre!!! Holy shit. That brings it down from its current price (when I filled up yesterday) of £8.40 per gallon to the new, super-Rishi bargain knockdown of just, merely, only… £8.15 a gallon!!!! But you see that’s per gallon. And you don’t buy just one, unless its been a really shit week. You buy lots. So filling up the car could save as much as £2.50!!!!! Even though petrol is about 30% more than it was last week anyway. And that 2.50 can be put towards your heating and electric bills. Currently set to rise by £400 per month. Or to buy more food! We all love more food. Though with an average weekly shop rising by about £25 its not really enough of a saving. So the only answer is: then fill up your car 100 times a week!!! Then you’ll be saving £250! And that will be a massive help.

Glad to be of help in these difficult times.

A xxxx

It used to be that ‘you are what you eat’. Which made me chopped liver and Cadburys chocolate. Which in turn I had difficulties conceptualising. But now, in the UK, it is more a case of ‘you are how you speak’. Because how you act can only get you so far, particularly in Britain, the rest is down to your regional accent. From which stems opportunities, slammed doors, ridicule, misunderstanding and career-deciding preconceptions.

And its all about those preconceptions. Presumptions. Assumptions made on the most fundamental of things; accent. So there are moves to include ‘regional accents and social status’ as part of the ‘diversity statements’ of large companies. Scuse me while I just take a moment to vomit. I personally would find that a touch ironic coming from a government made up of Eton-Oxbridge alumni and staffed by an entire civil service of white men with university degrees wot speak posh. Maybe that’s just my preconception.

In case you are that rarest of rare people, so rare that they can’t actually exist in the real world, who makes no automatic and instant judgments based on the very first syllable coming from someone’s lips, I need to help you. To guide you through the vast range of possibilities that arise from England’s regional accents. (Next week I’ll do Scotland and Wales and Ireland so for now they can just be included in the ‘foreign: so no need nor point in talking to them at all’ category).

Normal speech. Proper. Not plummy, not affected, just pronouncing nicely and clearly with no use of ‘at-da-enna-da-day’ or ‘yeah-no’. Basically: London. Good people, possibly intelligent, nothing to presume here.

Yorkshire accent. Thick.
Lancashire accent. Thicker.
Midlands accent. Thickest.
Geordie accent. Unintelligible.
East Anglia accent. Thick due to inbreeding.
West country accent. Same.
Cockney. Make your ears bleed. But good, hard-working, honest-to-goodness thieves, crooks, con-men and throat-slitters.
‘Estuary’. Same as cockney but for people who have trees where they live.

So now you have it, the definitive guide to pre-judging people by their accents. And I suggest you use it in all your social interactions. So you can always remain superior.

Yours loftily

A xxxx

Everything has levels. That’s rather profound. Equally, meaninglessly generalised and without context, worthless. So we’ll think of some contexts.

Firstly, Spurs. Yesterday. West Ham. 3-1. That was a next level. I’m just not sure if it was a next level up for us, or one down for them. Don’t really care either way, in that context. The good guys won, the scum of the earth were vanquished and hung their sorry little heads as they plodded back home to the East End and a step nearer to their rightful place in the relegation zone. Just one little step but the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. Or, at least, one taxi ride to the airport.

Then came Boris. He has many levels. All of them more stupid than the previous one. On Saturday he equated Ukraine’s struggle with Russia to Brexit. Huh? This statement maintained Boris’s position as the cleverest stupid fuckwit in the world. His point was that both Ukraine’s plight and the fight for Brexit were about ‘freedom’. And the ‘vast number of British people who wanted that’. Yet our esteemed PM obviously forgot that Brexit was voted in by 51% to 49%. So for every quasi-racist, isolationist Europhobe intent on sealing up our borders, there was 98% of a person on the other side, willing us to be part of something bigger, better, more internationalist. But Boris being Boris, he’s prepared to throw us 49% under the bus to score some stupid point by ridiculous analogy. Apparently, je suis Putin. Tosser.

Then, cometh the hour, cometh the man. Or cometh the missile, perhaps. Russia, despite reducing half of a previously pretty country to rubble, aren’t doing very well. They can’t get their tanks and soldiers past their enemy. And the longer the war continues the more chance of normal Russian people actually finding out what’s going on and killing him. As they should and possibly would if they had any proper information. So Vlad, who, by his standards, has been rather ‘restrained’, given the vast wealth of military power in his possession, deployed a Kinzhal missile on a military base. The Kinzhal travels at 10 times the speed of sound. 7.6 thousand kilometres per hour. Making it quite hard to aim at with your slingshot to try and knock it out of the sky. It wasn’t carrying a nuke warhead, just a ‘normal’ one. It is the cleverest missile in the world, as well as the fastest and only Russia have them. (Though you can get one in a dodgy pub in Stockwell if you ask for ‘Kenny’.) They cost 4.5 million quid each and do 20 times that in damage. At which point you just have to ask: WTF???

So we’ve done levels.

Happy Monday for Spurs fans and… that’s it really.

A xxxx

Hi, my name’s Andy.

Hi Andy.

I haven’t worn a white t-shirt for 3 weeks now! 21 days, ‘clean’.

Yaaay, whooop, whaaaaa, all that pseudo-American celebratory bollocks.

But today, as you can see, I fell off the wagon.

Oooooohhhhhh.

The thing is, I pretty much live in white t-shirts. I wear one for tennis, I wear one for Tai Chi, I wear one under every working shirt in winter, spring and autumn and I just wear them all weekend. If I have to do ‘black tie’, I put that tie on a white t-shirt. Almost. I have, quite literally, hundreds of them. Some are pristine (for best), some have lost that glacier whiteness we love (for sports), some are a bit grey (gardening) and some are just a mess of spilled coffee and yeuch. These become our household dusters and car cleaning cloths. Then when they’re beyond even that, we eat them. Nothing is ever wasted in white t-shirt-land.

But my new shoulder was a bit beyond the rotation, gyration and stretch-ation required to don my favourite item of clothing. I had to use ‘shirt-shirts’. Proper ones. Which are easy to attach to the body and no contortion is required. Which is fine. But it didn’t ‘look like me’.

So this morning, after my bath (amazing what you have time for when you take sport out of the equation for a while) I thought… I thought… hmmmm… why don’t I just… and I did, and the rest is HISTORY!!!

And I just knew you’d be as thrilled as I am. I can be a scruff once more!

So although doing sport is off the agenda temporarily, watching it ain’t. And this weekend provides a virtual feast for the eyes. Spurs are playing hateful West Ham tomorrow. In my mind West Ham are Putin’s Russia and Spurs are Ukraine. Arsenal play today so likewise, whoever they’re playing (Aston Villa but its really of no consequence), Arsenal are China. Possibly North Korea.

There’s rugby. England play France tonight and the only glory my country can achieve is in preventing the French from winning the Grand Slam. We can be spoilers. (France don’t need a metaphorical hate-nation attached, they are one). And then tomorrow the new Formula One season starts. Not that I’m that engaged with it, but after the last race of last season ending so dramatically, I have to keep half an eye on a sport I barely consider a sport. I’m that desperate.

Have a lovely weekend. Whatever you wear.

A xxxx

What happened to all the leg-warmers? I don’t mean ‘why aren’t they available?’, that’s fairly obvious. They were about as useful as a wind-deflector on the boot of your Vauxhall Viva. I mean where did all the old ones go? There were millions of pairs knocking round the world, always within 3 metres of a Jane Fonda Workout video. So what happened to them? Were they recycled into… other things? Were they ceremonially burned along with all those hair bands? Or did they go to Oxfam? So they could be sent to warm the legs of starving children in Ethiopia, where its 45 degrees most of the year? And one single leg-warmer donated by a great big yenta from Golders Green could warm an entire family for a year. I simply don’t know…

But leg warmers were around at the time of the ‘fitness video’. A large and lumpy plastic cassette filled with tape which pushed into a machine attached to the tv and which basically evolved into Joe Wicks. It was just a primitive method of ‘getting fit’ by leaping around and sweating. But whereas now, due to ‘elf-n-safety’ there is a duty of care and consideration for the perspiring masses, back then the motto was ‘no pain, no gain’. You lunge til heart attack, you squat til something rips, you push up until you fucking DIE! Anything less committed and they confiscated your leg-warmers. Which brought shame upon your whole family.

I have my own motto: ‘No pain’. The end. Why torture yourself? Why put yourself through misery and suffering for an illusion? For a ‘dream’ that you might end up with a body like La Fonda, who got hers from the collective attention of LA’s finest surgeons and two million dollars.

And these thoughts arose because yesterday I went to the physiotherapist. The direct descendents of those Spanish Inquisitors who wore masks and held pliers heated in a fire, used a ‘rack’ and who made waterboarding seem like a carnival ride. But you get a new shoulder, you need ‘physio’. Because the new shoulder doesn’t know what to do. So to become a fully-fledged cyborg, I need physio. And with the mindset of a man facing the gates of hell, that’s how I entered the session. Ready for pain, for suffering, for agony, all for the cause. But it didn’t happen. We both adhered to my ‘no pain’ imperative. And she was gentle. Tender, even. I was ready for a walk through Mariupol and I got a stroll in the hanging gardens of Babylon. All I have to do is shrug. I’m Jewish. I was born shrugging. Few other gently, gently movements, and more shrugging.

I can handle that. Things may change.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

So here’s what they said: if you’re over 60, there is No Benefit in walking more than 6000 steps on your daily/weekly/monthly walk. 5000 is not quite enough, but 10,000 is worthless. Ok, maybe they didn’t use the word ‘worthless’, but reading between the lines, as I spend most of my time doing, that’s what they meant. And how do they arrive at this? Because in a test, albeit a massive test, 50,000 people, were followed over years. So presumably, that then becomes 100,000 people, if you count the ‘followers’? And they found that once you’re over 60, there is no difference in likelihood of dying, whether you do 6000 or 12000 steps. Whereas there was a big difference between 3,000 and 6,000. The 3,000-ers were dropping like flies and the 6000-pounders were climbing over their corpses as they strutted the extra yardage. But only up to 6000. Then they stopped and called an Uber to take them home. Anything beyond is a wasted step.

Surely there are other benefits of walking that bit further? Strength, stamina, muscle tone, lots of good things. No idea why they implied that anything beyond their ‘optimum’ is just a waste of good living time. I realise that ‘not dying’ is quite high on most people’s ‘goal for the day’ but just because something’s not making you live longer doesn’t mean its bad for you. The study was done in America so was probably dependant on how far it was to the nearest Burger King.

And football was all rather disappointing this weekend. Spurs lost to Ronaldo, Arsenal won, bloody Leeds won! And Watford!! But most disappointing of all was that Putin’s team won as well. Chelsea managed to win the battle of the morally dubious derby against the Saudi Misogynistic Homophobes of Newcastle. Who are currently occupying the high ground, FFS.

Abramovich has apparently identified wife number 4, a stunning Russian babe, big surprise, 25 years old. Note to the Times: WHO GIVES A SHIT??? We may care about his ownership of Chelsea. We certainly care that he is Putin lackey who refused to condemn the ‘war’. We care that he’s been money-laundering his riches over here for years. But its really not relevant who he wants as his next obsession. In fact that almost dilutes all the truly bad things as it becomes just another bit of petty gossip to ‘throw into the mix’.

His reign at Chelsea may come with a bigger bang than his arrival as the team currently has no accessible funds to pay salaries. Nor will be allowed to earn any in the near future. Insolvency? Loss of points? Relegation?? Humiliation? Just desserts?? It’s good to see something good coming out of this awful war.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

Ok, this blog thing, this is how it works. How its always worked. My burning need to ‘share’. My internal imperative to inform you of the ways of the world because otherwise, quite frankly, you’d have no idea. Not a clue. Or you’d get it wrong. Like usual. So as an act of altruism, of education, and of pity, I try to keep you informed of very important things. And it works like this.

I wake up, drink tea and read the paper. The Times and only the Times. And during the course of that enlightenment, some things will interest me, some will appal me, a few might even astound me. But one thing will make me smile. Not because its inherently amusing, but because its inherently stupid. Contradictory. Nonsensical. This often appears in the ‘self help’ type pages. Anything to do with ‘new, improved gender options for your children’ is always going to start the day well. As will food ‘revelations’, particularly about green food. How much broccoli do we ‘really’ need in our lives? Equality matters are very important to me and, like ‘diversity’, produce a riches of amusement. Football, politics, anything. I just need something that ‘flicks a switch’, makes me smile, smirk or angry. Ok, most things make me angry. And that when you need to know about it. And it is pretty unfailing.

Until covid. Which produced very odd symptoms in me. No snotty nose, no cough, no temperature, loss of appetite (NEVER) or taste and smell. No wheezing and the only heavy breathing I did was on the phone to those who paid me £1.30 a minute. I was ‘symptom free’. Except I wasn’t. There were two rather profound symptoms.

The first was exhaustion. Just total, absolute and devastating. Most of the day I was tired. If I sat down, I slept. Like the dead.

The second was even more profound. Nothing I read, saw or did amused me. Nor stimulated me. To ‘share’. My mind had ‘gone into neutral’ and wasn’t coming out. It was like being you. A horrible thought. Nothing amused, stimulated or excited. And that was truly horrible. Fortunately, just before Kiev/Kyiv gets invaded, I appear, so far (I appreciate its still quite early) to have recovered some sense of the ridiculous.

And realised as someone sent me yesterday, that having spent 2 years studying for my PhD in infectious diseases, I now have to abandon that to become the world’s expert on military strategy geo-political warfare. And after 2 weeks I’ve reached my decision. We need to stop Putin. Now. Don’t care what it costs. Idle threats and sanctions (which will really ‘bite’ by Christmas!!) are doing nothing. It’s getting worse in a very predictable, Russian offensive way. And the bullly-boy is winning because everyone believes his threats. If ‘we’ do nothing, it’ll be Poland next. Or Finland. Estonia. And we’ll still be standing aside working out where to buy our gas and wondering when the absence of Big Macs will cause a revolution in Russia. It’s time for big talking tossers like Biden and Boris to actually ‘man up’ and offer real help to Ukraine and end the ever-increasing atrocities happening there. How many fucking hospitals have to get blown up before they realise that nothing else will stop that horrible man.

Otherwise, have a very happy Saturday

A xxxx

Who knew how much they disliked Frank Lampard until last night? As his sad and sorry excuse for a football team crumbled and cracked self-destructively under the might and power of Super-Spurs, I wanted to feel pity for him. I thought I would. Sat in the dug out with no mates. I wanted to think ‘awwww, Frankie, it’ll get better’. But I didn’t. And it won’t. All I could think of was his smirking visage running round arm-in-arm with John Terry, together holding up some silver chalice or other in some European city or other, smirking smugly in his Chelsea blue, often with Abramovich (!!!! Boooo, hissss) in the background.

Everton are dire. And pretty much gave up after the first (of many) goal(s). And the goals were lovely. Fast, flowing, things of extreme beauty and creativity. Each one a little Picasso. Without having tits where your left ear should be. Each one constructed instinctively by players all singing from the same sheet and, most importantly, allowed to punish by horrendous defending and goalkeeping. They couldn’t keep up with the Spurs attackers, they certainly couldn’t cope with Harry Kane, now the single most important football player in the world. Possibly, ‘that the world has ever known’. He is the country’s best number 9 and also the best number 10. Which makes him a quarterback who can make a 60-yard pass then catch it himself and run it in. He IS that good. Something we can only really enjoy whilst the transfer windows are closed.

I missed the fourth goal last night, I was getting out of the bath. So re-winding the program to see the fabulous Reguilon effort, I got a text telling me I’d now missed the 5th one, too busy watching the 4th. This is Spurs. Try to keep up. But I missed it because I am a man who now needs help. Bathing. Form an orderly line.

In fact its not bathing so much as one specific thing whilst bathing. Or showering. I’ll show you. Fold your right arm in a right angle, holding it against your belly and don’t move it. Sit in a bath and see which parts of your body you can’t reach with your left hand. I’ll give you a moment…

Ok. You can’t wash your left armpit. That’s it. Everything else is within reach and accessible. I can’t go 6 weeks with a dirty armpit. So I have friends. Helpers. Nurses. Just to wash it for me.

Spurs next game is Manchester United. The one team possibly more inconsistent than we are. Though when we’re good we’re fantastic. When they’re good it just means they’re not conceding at that precise moment. So I can be hopeful.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

The world is united in its condemnation against Russia and its near-universal support for poor Ukraine. ‘Near’ universal? Nearrrrr???? Yes, only near. Because there’s a little corner at Stamford Bridge football ground where the otherwise universality falters. A little zone in which there are other considerations in the matter, other than the ‘mere’ slaughter of innocents, invasion of sovereign territory, ignoring ‘humanitarian corridors’, murdering children, other than any considerations under the umbrella ‘morality’. There’s football. And the cost of disloyalty to Roman Abramovich in the eyes of a ‘certain type of Chelsea fan’ (that ‘type’ being the ones who wear blue scarves) is worth more than their seen to be jumping onto the bandwagon of global indignation and blanket support for Ukraine. There is a corner of every foreign field, that is forever… Russia.

And I totally get it. You just have to put yourself in the shoes of the average Chelsea fan. The shoes aren’t that comfortable but the empathy gained is worth a blister. And its back in 2003 and Ken Bates has your football club on the verge of insolvency. Massive debt, poor deals, its the culmination of a decade of mismanagement and a total descent into abject mediocrity, where ‘our’ (empathy, remember?) football team has languished pretty much forever. The odd FA cup win, but realistically, its all shit. Go to the pub, shag the wife’s sister in the car park, beat up a tosser cos he looked at me ‘funny’, go home, take it out on the kids and throw up in the bed. And then, when all seemed doomed, bankruptcy, relegation, humiliation, there comes a reprieve of positively Biblical proportions. In the guise of a man we’ve never heard of. A 36 year old Russian ‘Oligarch’. He’s going to buy Chelsea, pay off all the debts and create a billionaire’s wonderland in the Premier League. I looked up ‘oligarch’ and it means ‘shedloads of cash’. I didn’t read the rest of it, I’m a Chelsea fan, we don’t do ‘readin’. So I missed the ‘tainted’ bit and never questioned how one so young could possibly have accumulated such vast wealth so quickly. What I didn’t miss was the 15 trophies in the following 18 years. Everything. Champions Leagues, Premier Titles, UEFA Cups, the lot. All down to one man and his money. I looked up the word ‘oligarch’ and it said, basically, in league with Putin. Not the premier league, different one.

So whilst the rest of the world, including now vast numbers in Russia itself, is totally opposed to Putin’s actions in Ukraine, he has but one area of support, one place where he, and his team of hyper rich scum, are welcomed, loved, revered. Where the murders are secondary to a nice shiny cup.

Love you Roman, love you Vlad.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

So its been a week. A whole week, since they gave me my new shoulder. To be honest, its a bit disappointing because I still can’t take a serve properly, but I’ll try to be patient. A patient patient. And furthermore, I have no grounds for complaint as it really hasn’t been very painful. Hardly at all. Bit of ache, bit stiff, the bruising has ‘come out’ but in a big way, in a ‘Graham Norton’ kind of way of coming out. My shoulder, arm, chest, all one big bruise. And I get it, because the surgery was brutal. Joint replacement surgery is a bit like Russian ‘peace-keeping’ in that respect; the intention is honourable but the journey fraught. So my arm’s in a sling, I can use my hand normally but the arm must remain pretty immobile. And I’m coping with that. I’m not going to work, not playing a violin, its all good.

Then I got Covid. I mean, WTF??? For the first time since the pandemic started I haven’t been anywhere, done anything or met people. No tube trains, no interactions, nuffink. But then Wednesday Mel felt a bit ‘like she had a cold’, I just felt like someone who’d fairly recently had half an arm wrenched off whilst under the influence of very strong drugs. Friday we both tested positive. Mel coughed a bit, I didn’t. I just couldn’t stay awake. Kept falling into a massive, deep sleep. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I really wanted to be.

But heh, that was yesterday, today I feel fine. Mel’s ok and we’re home together. I’ve been home all week so I’m struggling to get my head round whether that’s because of my arm or the Covid. All I know is I have to avoid upset and disappointment, so they’ve moved Spurs match to Monday for me. To give me an extra couple of days without turmoil or stress.

And life goes on…

Happy Saturday

A xxxx