I saw several old fotos
of the Elephant & Castle today. I was reminded that this
strangely named barrio of London is thought by some to reflect the
wedding of Spanish princesses to English notables. "Elephant and
Castle" being a corruption of "Infanta de Castilla".
But some wiseacre on Wikipedia says this is fanciful and that the
origin is a pub's name. Well. maybe.
Readers who live in or
visit Spain will know that passing people coming towards you on
narrow streets is an art here. Nothing seems to happen until almost
the last moment, in contrast to the British custom of each of you
starting to manoeuvre 10 metres away. Yesterday, my daughter asked me
if I knew what the Spanish rule was. I said I wasn't aware there was
a rule; you both just execute a pasa doble the second before you bump
into each other. No, she said. The rule is that the person walking
fastest (faster) gives way. "So, if you can't be arsed to move
out of the way, just slow down as you see someone coming towards
you." I'm not convinced but will give it a try.
Talking of said
daughter . . . Somewhere in England we passed a coffee place called
SIPS. She laughed and said that she and a boyfriend had once joked
about a coffee house being called this. A week or so later, things
got worse; I passed a place called GOS-SIP.
The EU: The German
Bundesbank has criticised Brussels for being too lenient towards
France and Italy in respect of their continuing flouting of the rule
about 3% being the maximum allowable budget deficit. But I think we
can safely assume this will be ignored. One rule for the big
and one for the small. And don't the French know this.
BTW - The headline on
the front page of the Times paper of 1994 was "Eurosceptics
renew threat of defiance". Plus ça change . . .
Finally . . . A foto
of the spider I mentioned yesterday.
And a foto of this
morning's dawn above Pontevedra.
Two relevant quotations:-
Omar Khayam (per Fitzgerald)
Awake! For morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight
And lo, the hunter of the east
Has caught the sultan's turret in a noose of light.
Shakespeare
Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
Romeo. Shame he got his forecast wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment