I see that said
Belgian king was sworn in in each of the country's 3 official
languages. Which would be a nice gesture here in Spain, I believe.
Both for monarchs and for ministers. It would certainly help to
counter allegations of Spanish linguistic imperialism. And,
obviously, it wouldn't mean everybody having to be fluent in Euskera,
Galego and Catalán. But too sensible to be adopted, I suspect. Too much for the extreme (and powerful) right wing of the governing PP party.
President Rajoy's
latest response to demands he resign because of widespread illegal
funding of said PP party is to assert that:- A
government is legitimated by elections.
In other words:- Bugger off
until the next elections. If you vote for crooks, you get crooks.
Ahead of said elections - when the country might just chuck him out -
it's reported that even 90% of Rajoy's own PP party believe he's
guilty of receiving illegal bungs. But politics are tribal here and
it's impossible to see many PP voters changing allegiance to some
other party, least of all the socialist PSOE. No wonder historian
Paul Preston sees the Spanish Civil War still having implications for
modern Spain.
Talking
of Rajoy, I saw destructora
de papeles
being used for 'shredder' yesterday. Though the dictionary also gives
the shorter trituradora.
Which reminds me that I heard the phrase weed-whacker
used in a Family Guy cartoon for what I'd call a strimmer.
It seems the (American) inventor also called it a weed-eater.
Then there's weed-whip
and the prosaic weed-cutter.
Take your pick. I'm sticking with strimmer.
Or desbrozadora
in Spanish. And possibly estrimer.
Which has a mere 3 syllables.
Lightening
the tone . . . In the early years of the BBC, it went off the air for
an hour after the evening News every night. This was to allow parents to put
their kids to bed. As someone has written - It’s
now almost impossible to imagine a corporation, or a society, where
that sort of paternalism and cosy collective assumption would seem
normal, or desirable.
Last night I got
some petrol on my credit card, providing ID and signing the seller's
chit. Nothing unusual in that, you might say wearily. True, but this
morning I noticed that on my copy was written:- Operation with
PIN. Signature not necessary. That'll be the day.
There are very few
two-story houses left in Pontevedra, thanks in part to the
construction boom that now seems like a bad dream. This one (and the
one next door) escaped destruction as the plan to replace them with a
7-storey flat block came too late in the day. Though I doubt they'll
ever be restored as single-family dwellings.
It's interesting to
reflect on the fact that all of the city's streets were once flanked
by buildings of this design. And that, when cleaned, the granite
walls are a mellow yellow that glisten when it rains.
And here - to please Alfie Mittington - is another
of Pontevedra's café owls, the result - I like to think - of my
pioneering efforts.
Finally . . . The
British Foreign Office has a map of where around the world Brits have
been arrested for one thing and another. Mostly being drunk and
violent, I imagine. Anyway, here it is. One thing of interest is that
the numbers are lower in Portugal than Spain. But, then, they are
absolute, not relative, numbers and far more Brits go to Spain than
to Portugal. Nice to know we don't cause trouble in bits of central
Africa. And in Greenland. Though we still managed it in North Korea.
Publisher's
Note: If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may find the
easiest way to access it is via an RSS reader. I used to use Google
Reader for the blogs I read but Google killed this a month or so
ago. There are several alternatives, all free, but I've gone with Old Reader as it pretty accurately replicates Google Reader.
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