Monday
Fans of FC Magdeburg clearly have a sense of humour. Back in 2012 when their team was lying bottom of the fourth tier of German football and had gone five successive games without scoring, supporters gathered behind the goal with a banner saying “Don’t worry, we’ll show you where the goal is” and hundreds of large, luminous arrows all pointing to the back of the net.
Amazingly it worked, with Magdeburg managing to score, though not, alas, to win as they conceded twice. Still, small steps and all that. I may be impatient but I felt like doing something similar at Stamford Bridge on Sunday when I watched Spurs lose to Chelsea for the third time in as many weeks – the fourth in total for the season – without scoring a single goal in the process. Worse still, a disallowed goal for a foul on a defender aside, Tottenham only had three shots on target in the entire game, two of which were scuffed straight at the keeper, and never really threatened to score until the 88th minute, when a Harry Kane header was well saved.
It wasn’t quite as dismal as my earlier trip to Chelsea for the Carabao Cup, in which I can’t remember us once looking like scoring, but it was still hard going watching Spurs consistently giving away possession and having to endure the home fans singing “It’s happened again”. Which it had. Just as all of us had expected it would. I’ve been going to Stamford Bridge for decades and only once seen Spurs win. Even the players now seem to expect to lose. Nor is the pain necessarily over for the season. It will be sod’s law, if we manage to beat Brighton in the fourth round of the FA Cup, that we draw Chelsea next.
Tuesday
At the beginning of the week it felt as if all of Westminster was in a state of more or less peaceful limbo, with everyone waiting for the publication of the Sue Gray report. That lasted less than a day before all hell broke loose.
First, on Monday night, ITV broke the news of yet another party at Downing Street, in which Carrie Johnson and 30 members of staff had commandeered the cabinet room to surprise Boris with cake and to sing “happy birthday”. Come this morning, the story had moved on, with the Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, announcing there would be a police investigation into various parties that took place in Downing Street and Whitehall.
Bizarrely, some Boris apologists spun the fact that Johnson was now facing a criminal investigation as good news for him. Almost immediately it was then announced that Gray’s report would not now be published until after the police had concluded their own report. This soon changed to parts of the Gray report that the police weren’t interested in could be published immediately, with the rest withheld, before, later in the afternoon, word slipped out that the entire report could be released after all.
Come the evening, though, Downing Street had still not had sight of the report nor said whether it would make the whole thing public when it did. In short, Westminster was in chaos with no one knowing what the hell was going on. The evening ended with Jacob Rees-Mogg on Newsnight pledging his unswerving support to the prime minister no matter what he turned out to have done. Moral relativism was alive and well.
Wednesday
For years now I’ve considered myself to be one of the worst ever financial advisers. Before I cleaned up my act in the later 1980s, I worked for a company whose main business was selling life insurance linked to monthly savings policies, which even I could see were hopelessly bad value for money as they mainly seemed designed to make as much money for the company as possible. When I raised this with my manager, he just shrugged and said it was better for people to be saving something rather than nothing. Not entirely convinced by this, I passed on my doubts to prospective clients, with the result that I hardly sold any policies at all. I even managed to mis-sell myself my own endowment for our mortgage.
But it turns out that I might have done some good after all. Last week my friend Alex reported back on a pension he believes I must have sold him in 1986. Now, it goes without saying that neither of us has any recollection of me selling him this pension, but the dates fit and he can’t think of anyone else who might have sold it to him. Anyway, he must have paid in £50 a month for four months before stopping, presumably on the grounds that by then he had worked out I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and had, in any case, already been fired from the company.
Mysteriously though, since then the £200 has grown into a healthy £8,000. More remarkably, Alex found that when he came to draw down the pension it was paying an annuity of £1,000. Quite why it was offering such a generous return, he didn’t ask. In case it was a mistake. So if he had had more faith in the pension and stuck with it, he could have been a made man. If he had just continued to pay in for another four years, he could have got a pension of £10K. So just think what he might have got if he had stuck with it for even longer. I only wish I had been dumb enough to buy one of the pensions I was selling.
Thursday
With everyone still waiting for the publication of the Sue Gray report, I’ve taken to filling the time by collecting some of the excuses Conservative MPs have been making for Boris Johnson’s behaviour. Less than a month ago, the standard defence of most Tories was to say “Let’s wait to see what Sue Gray finds”. Now everyone who bothers to defend him in public has long since given up pretending that Boris – or The Suspect, as he should be more accurately known – has told the truth and has been busy constructing their own realities.
Pride of place goes to the Northern Ireland minister Conor Burns, who tried to convince Channel 4 viewers that Johnson had been “ambushed with cake”. That Colin the Caterpillar can be a right bastard. Meanwhile, Andrew Rosindell said it wasn’t as if The Suspect “had robbed a bank”. Imagine having such low expectations of a prime minister. Edward Leigh thought it absurd that Johnson might be brought down by a piece of cake when we were on the brink of war. A claim that might have been more compelling if Boris had either been to Ukraine or spent any time negotiating a peaceful solution for the country instead of firefighting a sleaze scandal at home.
Theresa Villiers thought it was fine for The Suspect to go to as many parties as he liked because he had been prime minister while the vaccination programme was underway, Mark Jenkinson thought the parties were all a media conspiracy, while Richard Bacon thought lying about what you were doing was too trivial an offence to be worthy of a mention.
Crispin Blunt had the most unusual take. He was certain everyone else had been breaking the law, so there was no harm if the prime minister did as well. Way to go, Crispin. Insult the vast majority of people who did obey the law and didn’t see their families. Even when they were dying. Keep it classy.
Friday
Our dog, Herbie, is now older than me and my wife. In dog years, at any rate. In September he turned 10 and he’s beginning to show his age. He’s still up for a walk every morning and is an enthusiastic chaser of squirrels and sticks. In the past he would still be quite lively when he gets home, but now he just wants to curl up on the sofa or the bed and nap for the rest of the day. Come the evening, he perks up and dashes round the garden a few times to see if any foxes are about, but he’s then happy to come up to bed when we do.
Not for the first time, it has occurred to me that Herbie is showing me how to grow old gracefully. For a start he’s in better shape – he has no signs of arthritis, while I have an artificial knee and a creaky back – and he doesn’t seem to moan or worry at the things he can no longer do. He just gets on with things.
I, on the other hand, still miss not being able to go running, despite not having been able to do so for over 10 years. The cross trainer in the gym just can’t replace the freedom of exercising outdoors. In short, I’m just not that accepting of my limitations. I can see the future and it’s not pretty. There’s no way I am ever getting a Stannah stairlift in the house; I’d rather drag myself upstairs on my hands and knees. I say that now, of course. Watch this space.
Digested week, digested: Grayja-vu
