Dawn

Dawn

Monday, June 14, 2004

Swimming against the rip tide of global commercialism, the new socialist government has announced that it plans to reduce the number of Sundays and holidays on which large shops are allowed to open. This is currently 12 and they are proposing a major reduction to 8. Not much customer orientation in evidence here and it will be interesting to see how things go. In case you don’t know, all shops except newsagents and pastry makers shut midday Saturday and open again on Monday. Nothing is open Sunday afternoon/evening.

Talking of legislation, there are now British levels of rancour and chaos in the Spanish education world, resulting from the new government’s decision to suspend a keynote reform of the last administration. This was called the Law of Quality and it was designed to improve university education. But it also strengthened the position of religious instruction in the curriculum and the rather more secular new government takes exception to this. The uncertainty that now surrounds this subject has been exacerbated by the refusal of at least one Autonomous Community [Madrid] to take any notice of the suspension of the law. A complete mare’s nest, then. Stuff the kids.

And still on politics, the ever-opportunist government of Catalunia has upped its demands for recognition of its separate status from the ‘Kingdom of Spain’. Its long shopping list includes recognition of Catalan as a EU language and, by analogy with Scotland, a separate football team for all international competitions. And there are rumours that Catalunia will emphasise its separateness by announcing - on behalf of Barcelona - a rival bid to Valencia’s for the Americas Cup venue. In the European elections of last week, several of the ‘nationalist’ parties got together to form a block that would press for greater local autonomy from Brussels. In Spain, though, ‘nationalist’ doesn’t mean ‘national’ but ‘regional’. In other words, they don’t just want greater autonomy for the Spanish state but for their own regions. Can this be what the EU founding fathers really intended? Of course, the demands of the Catalunian government are still only a pale shadow of those of its opposite number in the Basque country. Put briefly, this simply want absolutely nothing to do with Spain. One frequently wonders where all will this end.

Final political note – the government has announced that it will no longer be giving widowers’ pensions to those husbands convicted of killing their wives. This seems eminently sensible but one is left wondering how it could ever have happened in the first place.

Special WordWatch: I cited filibusterismo just before I went off to France. I’ve since discovered that this is derived from the English ‘freebooter’ and so originally meant ‘pirate’ in Spanish. By pure coincidence, I saw in France a very similar word – filibustier – in an article on Francis Drake, clearly also meaning ‘pirate’. So…. here we have a word [freebooter] which was corrupted into both Spanish and French as filibuster/filibustier and which then returned to English in its revised form meaning what it does today. As least that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. I trust you are all as fascinated as I am by these linguistic gymnastics.

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