Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Well, a minimum of four bloody C. de E. searches today so my abbreviation strategy clearly isn’t working. Perhaps time is needed for Google, etc. to get up to date with my revised blogs.

My compensation is that there were more than 50 hits on Friday, most of them from one individual I would guess. Another potential publisher?? Or just somebody who is very bored?

The Spanish love to see themselves as spontaneous. As, indeed, they are. One aspect of this is that they abhor planning and committing themselves in advance. You can see this at work at the English Speaking Society of Pontevedra. This meets 3 nights a week, including a dinner on Fridays. In the 4 years I’ve been attending these, there's been a hard core of 6 members who dine every Friday almost without exception. But none of them puts his name down on the list on Mondays; instead, they leave this until Wednesday, the last moment for avoiding the higher price that comes with a very last-minute notification. I, on the other hand, always put my name down on Monday and, if I can’t then make the dinner, call to cancel. We are all boringly predictable but more spontaneously so in their case.

In a recent Spectator article, I read of a town in Norway which removed all the warning signs from an accident black spot and then saw the incidence fall to nil. What happened was that drivers stopped distracting themselves by reading the signs and, more importantly, ceased making assumptions about what other drivers would do at the crossing. This reminded me of the advice from a Spanish friend that I should stop signalling at roundabouts [circles] as this was confusing other drivers. Far better, she said, to force them to stop by making them wonder what on earth I might do next. As in Norway, the strategy was a brilliant success. No longer do other drivers accelerate to cut in front of me when I've signalled that I'm turning across their path. All very simple really. If counter-intuitive to an Anglo-Saxon.

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