Dawn

Dawn

Saturday, July 17, 2004

Among many others, Ashley Cole has written to advise me it was him – and not Andy Cole – who'd been included in the Best European soccer team as Left/Right Back. Sorry, Ashley. As Andrew has pointed out, Andy Cole was left back in the UK.

 

I had a surreal experience on the plane from Madrid last week. After some delay in taking off, the pilot came out to explain that we had lost slots in, first, Madrid and, later, the UK. He asked for someone who spoke Spanish so that everyone could be told of the situation but, just as the volunteer was about to speak, he re-took the microphone and announced ‘For those Spanish passengers who don’t speak English, this young lady is going to tell you why we are delayed’. Touching. But even more worrying.

 

Prior to this, while waiting in the departure lounge, I had listened [several times] to an announcement – in very correct and plummy English – that asked smokers to refrain from the habit so that the airport could ‘have another air’. Since the speaker was clearly British, I wondered why he hadn’t objected to this bizarre usage and suggested, for example, ‘better air’. Equally odd was the dual-language sign that advised of the “Ult. Llamada/Last. Call” for the previous flight. My guess was that, taking the translation rather too literally, some non-English speaker must had decided that both ‘Ult’ and ‘Last’ were abbreviations. Or possibly the plummy but stupidly supine Brit.

 

After using the Merseyside underground for a week, it was unsettling to travel on the Madrid metro last night. Whereas the Merseyside carriages were old, filthy and full of rubbish and dried vomit, the Madrid carriages were new, clean and air-conditioned. And occupied by slim, well-dressed, un-menacing passengers who hadn’t felt the need to shave their heads so as to appear even more aggressive. And not one of them had a Rottweiler in tow. How utterly unprogressive Spain seems at times. What a price they have paid for missing out on the 60s [and most of the 70s] under Franco. And another thing - they still don’t seem to have realised that obesity is now compulsory in an advanced society.

 

Two brief comments about the Madrid Planetarium – It probably isn’t worth visiting unless you speak Spanish and have a keen interest in the heavens. And I doubt that all the rather garishly dressed women in the car park were waiting for their husbands to rejoin them with their kids. Even at 5.30 in the evening. Actually, I rather doubt that they were all women.

 

A classic bit of bureaucracy on the night train from Madrid to Pontevedra. They take your ticket from you as you leave and return it the next morning. When I handed the attendant mine, he demanded the outgoing ticket. ‘What on earth for?’, I asked. ‘Because,’ he said ‘it’s written here on the return ticket that it must be presented along with the outgoing ticket’. I was too dumbstruck by the simple genius of this response to do anything other than meekly hand over the ticket that I had luckily not thrown away. ‘Because I say it is’, said the Red Queen.





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