Dawn

Dawn

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

The stamp machine in the entrance of the Post Office is even more irritating than I thought. After going through the initial 8 steps today, I was invited to put in 53 cents. So, one by one I inserted two 20s, one 10 and, finally, a 5, whereupon the machine promptly disgorged the coins and advised that it didn’t have the two cents change. It's hard to imagine how it could have been designed to waste more time. No wonder I’m the only person I’ve ever seen using it. Worse, when I finally got served at the counter, the clerk charged me double on the grounds that the envelope for my niece’s birthday card was 2.5% longer than the standard length. To arrive at this decision, she actually used a retractable tape measure. Standard issue, presumably.

Waiting at the bank today for one of those face-to-face meetings which are a staple of Spanish life, I happened upon a brochure from the Galician Nationalist Party. What was fascinating about this was that it recommended rejection of the EU Constitution. The reasons centred on the fact that Galicia didn’t have a seat on the Council of Ministers and so could not protect its own interests. Instead it had to leave this to the capitalist lackeys of the Spanish government. I can’t see the latter losing much sleep over this attempt to lift the No vote into double figures.

A Romanian girl has withdrawn a suit against her own father in which he was accused of trying to sell her baby to local gypsies for €7,000. She now says it was all a misunderstanding and that he was only trying to make kindergarten arrangements. Families!

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