Andy's Glasses

Every day my ipad presents me a random photo from the 62 million of mine which Apple keep for me. In the clouds, allegedly. And they send me a ‘bill’ for ‘extra storage’, about 70p a month. That’s the cost of having grandchildren. Ok, part of the cost. But I’m going to get them to pay me back at some point. When Lila’s the Prime Minister and Joey’s just about to go to jail for blowing up a bank with a rocket-launcher. Not to steal the money, just to see what it does.

Anyway, I generally ignore the ‘photo of the day’, often don’t even notice it. Nice when its my dad, or the brother, most often its just ‘the kids’ or Harry Kane, Son Heung Min, Taylor Swift or some pic of a massive, supercharged muscle car which took my fancy at the time.

Then this came up today.

It’s an advert for the banning of ‘baby led weaning’. That’s when, rather than feeding a baby with a spoon, you just put it out there and led them go feral with it. And this was the result with Joey in late 2019. I mean, you wouldn’t want it banned if you’re the grandparent taking photos with tears of hysterical laughter rolling down his face. But then the realisation. That’s MY kitchen!!! I have to clean it up!! I have to clean HIM up!!!! And 6 years later, he still eats like that. Like his grandfather.

An amazing thing happened on Tuesday night. Spurs played a football match, and didn’t lose! Having temporarily suppressed my football gland activity with special drugs, which have to be distilled in the Highlands for at least 10 years, I didn’t watch it. Didn’t even know it was on. Didn’t look. So disgusted with ‘last week’ that I took a ‘hiatus’ of 3 days. For a ‘re-set’. It was either that or take a sub-machine gun over to the Crews Hill training ground and do a Michael Douglas in Falling Down on my team. So I went to Tibet, took my oaths and became a monk for 3 days, sitting on a mountainside, contemplating man’s place in the grand scheme of God’s eternal landscape. I looked great in orange. Like a skinny Buddha wearing glasses. It was ‘a moment’. But sadly, I got bored after 20 minutes, remembered that I haven’t believed in God since we lost to Luton in 1983 and booked the first Avios flight back, returning just in time to see Liverpool fail to beat Sunderland.

But I feel much better. Ish.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

If you want a curry, just go to your local ‘Tandoooori’, or the ‘Light of India’, which you can find on every single high street and most side streets, in the land. But if you do that, what do you really get? You get a wonderful meal (I love curry; if you don’t, best you read something else today), after strolling in, or booking if you like, it arrives quickly, you eat, you drink, you’re full to bursting and the bill comes for 30 quid. Including ‘service’ and drinks, for two. (Note: if your ’plus 1’ happens to be the boatman, make that 60 quid. Pig).

Who fucking needs that?

Because if you go to Dishoom, you are signing up to ‘an experience’ of the curry variety. And as we all know. Experiences don’t come cheap.

The boatman in fact left his boat for an evening, to face the tides and the waves and the… River stuff, alone, whilst he came all the way into town. From Kingston. Or Hampton. Somewhere ‘down there’, probably on the River. And we went to Dishoom in Covent Garden. I’ve been there before, but only for breakfast. Which is quite spectacular.

First thing to note: they don’t do ‘reservations’ and no-one ‘breezes in’. You see the queue from half way up St Martin’s Lane. Oh. I’m really not one of life’s queuey types. My impatience and horribly questioning nature (ask Mel how annoying I can be; she’ll be honest) mean I just can’t stand there. So I went to find ‘how long’. And the ‘queue gel’ came over. And we grilled her. They don’t do reservations because its so difficult… blah, blah, blah… no room for walk-ins… would be booked for months…
I just mentioned that EVERY OTHER FUCKING RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD MANAGES THAT JUST FINE, but subtley, and so she asked if we’d like to wait our allotted 35 minutes at the bar? Oh. Let me think… outside… in the rain… cold… or bar… warm, comfy, beer…

No-one else was at the bar. No idea why they didn’t offer it immediately. So we sat, we drank and enjoyed the atmosphere. Because the place is spectacular. It really is. Massive, on 2 floors, and just ‘buzzin’. Yet I couldn’t help notice that probably 35% of the tables were empty. And when we eventually took our table, about 40 minutes later, we sat at a table which had been empty that entire time. No-one else was sitting at the bar in all that time either. We were ‘special’.

The whole ‘queuing thing’ is to increase desirability. To enhance the myth. No-one wants to eat in an empty restaurant. Unless it’s the Tandoori down the road, obvs. So the queue serves as a statement as to how desperate loads of people are to eat there. But heh, half an hour at the bar, Indian beer, we were happy. I asked the barman if he had any urine-encrusted peanuts or something to accompany the beer, like they do at ‘bars’. He said he’d get the menu for me. I told him to fuck off.

The food is simply wonderful. Not necessarily ‘cheap’ but wonderful. The staff are fab. Everything there is slick and superb. The mutton curry was ‘to die for’. As that sheep obviously did.

We befriended the manager. She was delightful. Or she befriended us. It’s her job. And when the bill arrived, I looked at it, stared in wide-eyed shock, but just before I started crying, Mya (the manager) whizzed past, grabbed the bill and said, ‘oh, let me just take this back a minute…’ Our waiter brought it back with a £25 reduction. It still had the service charge, but the total was reduced. I was so thrilled I chose not to tell the boatman and charged him half the original amount. Well, we were both a bit pissed by then, so who cares?

If you haven’t been, you simply have to. Though after the budget…

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Good morning Britain.

As your chancellor, I’d just like to explain to you why I said some things wot may have not been strictly, 100% accurate, at the time of saying. Because the right wing press seem to think that my friend, Kier, and me, have been somewhat ‘economical’ with the truth in our pre-budget panic-rousing. As you know, all kind of ‘economics’ is a bit beyond my sadly limited comprehension, which is why I have teams of people doing da maffs for me. Even truth type ‘economics’.

The Office of Budget Responsibility told me a month before the budget that our much-vaunted, constantly-levelled, incessantly mentioned ‘black hole’ in the nation’s economy, of ***** billion quid (feel free to insert any number in there that sounds impressive and scary; its what I always do. Consistency not required.), was in fact just, kind’a ‘not there!’. What was there instead was a surplus. Money in the bank. 4 billion quid. Oh.

And there’s me been telling everyone that we’re FUCKING DOOMED TO DESTITUTION AND HOMELESSNESS because of hole which ain’t there. And I didn’t want to look any more stupid than I look now.

So, having spent the last 15 months as the ‘chancellor-of-doom!!!’, and ‘fucking gloom!!!!’, Kier and I re-jigged the numbers a bit. Or, rather, we ignored the numbers. Bloody OBR, gettin’ in the way of a good story. So we could appease our noisy back-benchers who all wanted to lift the ‘2-child-benefit’ cap, which costs a few bil a year to do. And we thought that while we’re there and everyone’s gritting their teeth to discover what punishments I was going to impose on them, be a shame to disappoint, when there’s loads more ‘welfare’ we can give away. Not just to the 17 year-old, drug-addicted mothers of 5 kids in Bradford, but to all manner of skiver, work-shy, sick-note types, probably with long-term ‘mental health issues’, who could do with a few bob. And we are Labour, its what we do.

Might as well take all the money from the workers. Both ‘working people’ type workers, who we’ll re-name ‘ordinary people’, and also from… ‘extra-ordinary!!’ types who can pay ‘extra’ taxes for their work, so that the non-workers can all get an bonus, an incentive, if ya like, never to come off benefits.

And if we had to tell a few little ‘porky pies’, if we needed to ‘ignore a few facts’, so we could appease our party members, it was all part of a big plan.

What we don’t want to do is cheer people up. We’re not fucking entertainers, we’re the government. And our job is to increase the perception of misery in the nation. Something I think we’ve been very successful doing, in no small part due to the budget.

Now let that be an end to the idle speculation, and the latest round of calls for my head, if not just my resignation.

Rachel from Accounts
xxxx

If there has ever been a worse week for any football fans anywhere in the (un)civilised world, I’d like to hear about it. I won’t necessarily sympathise, we don’t do that, we laugh and gloat, but I’d like to hear anyway.

It started last Sunday at the Emirates where arch enemies, local rivals, most hated of the hated (except for Chelsea, obviously), Arsenal, demonstrated the massive gulf that exists between our two teams as they thrashed us 4-1. Then we went to European Champions Paris St Germain and fought valiantly, even scoring 3 goals in our champions league match, only to concede 5. And then last night. Last night…

Since when do we have 8 o’clock matches on Saturday night? ‘We’ are out. We’re eating. We’re in the pub. At the theatre. Out on Hampstead Heath looking for stray men. We’re BUSY. But Sky say: we can cram in one more advertisement stream; play at 8, and that’s what they do. So the players cancelled their dinner bookings, gave away their tickets to the opera (as if) and turned up to play Fulham at The Lane. How hard can that be? Fulham. Worst away form in the league. One point only away from Craven Cottage. How can they turn their fortunes around? Well, send them to Spurs, the team with the worst home record of every team in the whole world. Ok, there are worse records. But not many. We’re 3rd from bottom in the ‘shit teams at home, all of 2025’. See, we do feature in the records!

I would say ‘the match started badly’ but that really doesn’t cover conceding 2 goals in the opening 6 minutes. But heh, you can overcome that. We can’t. But YOU can. If you’re Sunderland you did. If you’re Leeds you almost did until Man City did a big ‘cheat’ so they could have (literally) a Pep talk on the sideline. Spurs can’t. Its difficult if you lack a decent attack, struggles with creativity on the pitch and generally, find it more beneficial to ‘roll over and play dead’ than mount any kind of concerted effort.

I said it last Sunday. I repeated it on Wednesday. By yesterday it just needed repeating: THE WORST WEEK OF MY LIFE!!!

I hate football. And I hate Spurs. I’m done with it. Forever!!! As usual.

Sunday

A xxxx

Joey is in his ‘men in uniform’ phase. Not like when his mother was, that was different. Really different. This is the innocent’s obsession with uniforms which he wants to then wear. And, fortunately, Amazon, as in all walks of life, can provide. So some days he can be a soldier, others, a US ‘cop’, or another 6-year-old’s aspiration, a fireman.

If he was on the other side of the Atlantic, he might want to be a ‘firefighter’. But he’s not. He’s here. And over here, we have firemen.

Except one. She’s a firewoman. A firefightress. Anything but a ‘fireman’!!! To such an extent that she took her wing commander, or fire chief, or whatever he’s called, to court for persecution. Abuse. Misogyny. Mental stress brought on by constantly being called a ‘fireman’, just because she was dressed like one.

Ok, strictly speaking she has a point. I can’t bring myself to call it ‘discrimination’ because rather than using discriminatory terminology, they used the word to include her. Similarly, it would be ‘sexism’ if she was treated differently from all the… errrrr… from all the firepeople-with-testicles.

I’m sure there was banter going on. Offering her an iron or a mop, all the usual silly hi-jinks that boys do when there’s pressure on them to act in a civilised manner for which we’re simply not constructed.

I have a very simple rule of thumb for whether an issue should be brought to court. One question. Does it matter?

Obviously, we need to know to whom it might, or might not matter; that’s quite important. So, for consistency and ease-of-use, we’ll go with ‘does it matter to me. To Andy?’ And in the case of this fireperson, I’m; afraid it fails the test. It’s like suing Burger King because you weren’t served by a royal. ‘Fireman’ is just a name. It’s not a literal description.

And talking of names, today we’re naming ‘my party’. The political one. Currently called ‘Your Party’ but we’ve realised that such a name is almost as pathetic as those in it. So me and Jezza (Corbyn) and Zarah (Sultana) and a few other misfits, retards, simpletons and Arsenal fans are having a naming today. We need something that represents our ideology. We’re socialists, anti-imperialists, anti-zionists, anti-rich, anti-poor, anti-white, anti-social, anti-education and anti-freeze. We basically fucking hate everyone. Except Palestinians. Especially Hamas. We love them. As they represent the kind of tolerance, decency and inclusivity every political party should stand for. We like the IRA for similar reasons. In fact, any bunch of ‘freedom fighters’ works for us. However much murder and torture and sexism and discrimination and general death they stand for.

So please vote now. The front runners for the name currently are:

The Moronic Party
The Useless Party that will never win a seat anywhere.
The Supporters of Terrorism Party.
Bunch’a C**ts. Party!

Happy voting

A xxxx

They went for ‘London’. In the budget. If you live outside the M25 you have no idea what a “2 million pound home!!” looks like. You think its a mansion, in 45 acres of grazing land with a lake, horses and… well, lots of mud and stuff. But its not. Its a little house in Chelsea. Its a flat in Highgate. Its a 2-up-2-down in the better parts of Islington. ‘Better parts’ being ‘away from fucking Arsenal’. So, yet again, when Labour refer (ad-fucking-nauseum) to ‘broader shoulders’, they actually mean ‘London shoulders’. Once again, the ‘northern powerhouse’ is actually to be powered by southern cash.

Do I mind that? Do I mind that my pension is being penalised (if I can work out precisely how) and that my ISAs are… doing something sinister, and my life is being ruined!!!! by this government so we can pay millions to Scotland so they can mount a campaign to leave us? If the money was going to paid to try and do something with their rugby team I could get that fully. But claiming ‘independence’ when you’re still funded by Westminster is like an aristocrat going off to ‘live by himself’ whilst totally funded by ‘daddy’. It’s all a bit ‘Prince Andrew’. As he used to be known. When he was a royal parasite. Rather than an almost common one.

They’re stealing money from me ‘by stealth’, the sneaky shit that HMRC do to make you poorer than you should be. And what about electric cars? They going to tax their mileage. To make up for the lost revenue in petrol. Whilst encouraging you to ‘buy electric’, yet providing very little in infrastructure, and now, even less incentive. Yet they want you weaned off petrol. There’s such a ridiculous circularity of the nonsensical in that, it takes a Rachel Reeves to propose it.

And then there was the football yesterday. Which I don’t want to talk about really, but feel I have to. Because seeing Arsenal on top of both the League here AND the Champions League table as well is arguably a worse punishment than anything our Chancellor did yesterday.

At Spurs, we don’t count points in the normal way. Basically because we rarely get them. So we define our season by the nature of the losses. There are ‘bad losses’, and yes, there are ‘good losses’. Bad ones, like Sunday at Arsenal (arguably, ‘the worst possible of bad losses), are when you play like a North-Western, relegation-bound team managed by Sam Allardyce. Good losses are when you play like the delusion all Spurs fans hold dear and attack with style. Like last night in Paris. We lost 5-3 but firstly there’s not much shame losing to the European Champions, and secondly, we got 3. And played like we wanted to score. Rather than like: we’re waiting to take a shower, is it ok if I hang round here for 90 minutes whilst the water heats up?

All in all, it wasn’t the best day of my life.

Happy Thursday (can only be better)

A xxxx

(Fucking) Nigel Farage is a RACIST!!! Oh no. I won’t be voting for him then. There again, I had no intention of voting for him before. But Farage, alleg-ed-ly, abused a Jewish person and was nasty to Indians. Allegations which, firstly if true, and secondly, if they occurred in a restaurant in Mayfair last week, would be positively horrendous. But they weren’t. They were ‘allegedly’ perpetrated in a school playground 50 years ago. Oh. Furthermore, they are being made by The Guardian.

The Guardian accusing someone of ‘antisemitism’ is like Kier Starmer accusing someone of being wet. It’s like Gordon Ramsay accusing someone of swearing too much. Like an Arsenal fan accusing you of being smug.

The Guardian has, since October ‘23, become the most anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, so close to anti-Semitic newspaper that it could possibly get away with. It follows the hard-left narrative on everything, including effectively supporting Hamas. Offering ‘justification’ for October 7.

And here they are, accusing far-right hate-figure Farage, who represents the absolute antithesis of everything they hold dear, of the anti-Semitism which, when spouted by the Corbyns of this world, they applaud and agree.

I don’t like Nigel Farage, certainly don’t trust the man, but I fucking hate The Guardian. Which, like all ‘left-of-Labourites’, fears the Reform party’s progress and successes in all the polls. Leaving Nigel with the obvious defence of ‘political motives’ to the allegations. Trying to discredit a man who’s past is always viewed as a bit shadowy.

But, like it or not, even the most super-woke, PC-obsessed, probably HR consultant, dickhead, simply HAS to realise that there are places, and times, when all types of verbal abuse happen. It certainly did in the 70s and 80s. I was there. I was guilty. And the ultimate banter-arena is a school playground. And if, in the sole quest of ‘scoring points’, the lines which would be drawn in 2018 were crossed, no-one gave a shit. No-one knew how the world would develop. Thus they didn’t care. Some of us don’t care now. And seek out un-PC environments. Not to abuse. Not to hurt anyone, or cause offence but just to say what you like without tossers like The Guardian taking humorous ‘banter’ as ‘opinion’, taking ‘taking the piss’ as ‘offensive’. Not understanding the context of such comments.

So whatever Farage said when he was 14 years old in a school playground is simply irrelevant. Why waste the print space on that when Spurs are in such deep trouble?

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I’m sure you all remember the golden rule: ‘all statistics is bollocks’. I have it tattooed on my right arm, just in case I’m ever tempted to think, “ooooh, 95% of people under 52 whose names begin with Q find tying their shoelaces difficult; that’s amazing”, it reminds me to ignore it. Someone pays for all statistical analysis, therefore it has a ‘bias’. A bit like the BBC but possibly more subtle. ‘Subtle’ here being an euphemism for ‘underhand’. That’s how we get VW car exhaust and economy statistics, that’s how new drugs, ‘trialled and proven’, manage to kill half the people taking them.

But some statistics you can’t question. They’re paid for by neutral parties. And they can’t be ‘manipulated’ in the way that industry and economists distort them for their own wicked ends. (cyinical? moi???)

In football, where you used to say: ‘ere, Portsmouth are on a good run, played really well and have won about 4 games out’a their last 6’; you now say, ‘ere (because you have to when starting any type of football mansplaining), Portsmouth have won 4 out of 6, the highest win ratio of any team in the top 12 of any league, they have an average goal difference in excess of that of PSG and Barcelona and their xG figures are over 7, whilst maintaining a consistent 62.4% possession.

Yes, it IS still all bollocks, but it is accurately and precisely quantified bollocks. No-one wants to be mansplained inaccurate rubbish.

Its now all about the “xG” figure. Stands for ‘expected goals’. Which is basically a measure how many times a player/team is in a position to score and the likelihood of him/them scoring from that position. So, basically, it is just one more method of persecuting my football team. Another rod for their back. Like we didn’t know how bad we were before they let a bunch of actuaries loose in the analysis box.

And so to the disaster which occurred at the horrible Emirates stadium yesterday afternoon. When our ‘expected goals’ dropped to an insanely low 0.07. No teams play with that. In fact, arguably, you’re not actually ‘playing’, but just turning up and standing still.

Therefore we shall now invent a new metric. uG. For unexpected goals. Like Richarlison’s. He had to score it from pretty much the half way line, as Thomas Frank had insisted that the team spend as little time in ‘their half’ as possible, so they can all stay back to defend ineptly. The expectedness of a goal from there is minimal. The expectedness of our errant Brazilian ever scoring a goal is minimal.

Thus his goal, as totally unexpected as it was, perhaps because of that, stands as a beacon of minor contentment (we were way beyond ‘joy’ by that point) in an afternoon of abject misery. A real uG.

Happy miserable Monday (how many Arsenal fans have YOU spoken to today?)

A xxxx

Well yesterday was the outdoor tennis player’s nightmare. Rain. More rain. Then more rain. The worst of all worst days. When it never even got properly light. I don’t suffer from SADS, but on days like that, I wish I did. Glad it’s over. So I can enjoy today. Which may be a bit limited… by the football.

So I shall enjoy tennis, now it’s stopped raining this morning. And I shall definitely enjoy lunch. Then the football’s on. The nakba. Usually. There again, I don’t usually speak Arabic. But when Spurs play Arsenal, my mind leads me to catastrophise. I try to think positive, try to imagine great outcomes, try to convince myself that ‘you never know with derby matches’. But you do know. About this one. When Stephen King wrote ‘Misery’, I thought it was a history of North London Derbies. I was wrong. As it happens, seriously wrong. Not the first time.

The north London derby creates ‘bragging rights’. And as Arsenal fans do ‘brag’ better than the Gallaghers after a sell-out concert, better than the Aussies after an Ashes win, better than Donald Trump after… well, anything he does, it bodes ill for the immediate future. And I’ve been to my fair share of Arsenal games. Some good, some wonderful (the 4-all game at the Emirates the day after Harry Rednapp joined us) and some so horrendous I needed therapy for a year afterwards.

So even though I do not ‘hate’ Arsenal (when they’re playing other teams), like I ‘hate’ Chelsea, West Ham, all the others, this is match I dread. Basically, if you offered me a draw now, I’d bite your hand off.

Went to see the movie Nuremberg last night. Whilst not exactly a ‘fun flick’ it’s good. Russel Crowe as Herman Goering is unrecognisably wonderful and exceedingly fat. And Remi Malik, as ‘the psychiatrist’ (a real life character, as they all are), looked like Freddie Mercury doing ‘shrink’. He always looks like Freddie Mercury. Or he just looks like another really odd-looking bloke. It’s actually distracting. But the movie was almost as good as the pizza we had ‘pre-match’, with ‘Lovely Lynda’ and ‘not-so-lovely-Jeff’. Certainly worth a view. If you’re not necessarily looking for ‘feel good’.

Happy (GOD HELP MEEEEE) Sunday

A xxxx

What a brilliant deal! Struck up by Donald Trump. The great peacemaker. A man so keen on acquiring the Nobel peace prize next year, that he’d sell his own mother if she gets invaded by rampaging Cossacks! And the tragedy of that metaphor is indicative of the great unfairness, the moral disgrace and the complicity with a murderous tyrant, which Trump has condoned so he can ‘do the deal’. The only ‘deal’ which Russia would be prepared to accept. When they said on the news that ‘Russia is keen on this deal’, you immediately know that it was drawn up in the Kremlin and that Ukraine is going to get stuffed.

Trump presented this to the world, and to Ukraine, who’d been given no input whatsoever, obviously. They don’t count. And he presented it just after a really positive and friendly meeting with Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, who Trump has been slagging off for the last 3 months. Calling him a ‘communist’ (that’s not a political comment in America, it’s the gravest insult you can level at anyone. The shadow of J.Edgar Hoover is long and deep.) Threatening to cut off funding for NY City. And now they’re bffs.

The problem with Ukraine is that there are very few options. You give Russia what they want or they just keep going. They don’t care how many of its young men die in that process. They’ve never cared about that. It’s always been the way Russia does ‘war’. By massive sacrifice of its next generation. In fact Russia are shit at war. Always have been. They just do ‘war by swamping’. Wave after wave of kids getting slaughtered until the enemy run out of bullets or fall asleep.

Russia invaded in the first place because Ukraine had aspirations to join NATO. Basically, American military on the Russian border. Also, having ‘stolen’ the Crimea a few years back, Putin had designs on the Dombas region because it spans a lot of the border. So it would create a ‘buffer’. Vlad was also never keen on having nuclear NATO so close they could lob a bomb across the border by hand.

So here’s ’the deal’. Give Russia the Dombas, promise that Ukraine will NEVER join NATO, and have it reduce its army significantly. Great deal for Ukraine.

They don’t have to agree, of course. But if they don’t, America will ‘cut them off’. From arms and more importantly from ‘intel’. Without which, you can’t fight a war.

‘Europe’ is in deep disagreement with America on this. Which is akin to a flea on a dog going on strike. Because unless Macron (wimp) and Starmer, temporarily included in ‘European’, just for the duration of this fight, and Georgia Meloni (bit of a babe, but, like all Italians, better at running than fighting), intend to put boots on the ground, which is tantamount with declaring war on Russia, it just becomes so much hot air. As usual.

Basically, Ukraine is slowly but inexorably becoming swallowed by its evil neighbour. And Putin is rewarded for starting the war. Great message to China, Iran, North Korea…

And we lost the fucking cricket in Aus.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx