Well, I’m sitting here in this cyber café, with a long post written earlier today on my MP4. And no connecting cable to my laptop. So, I will publish it later tonight or tomorrow morning, depending on events.

You may not be surprised to learn it was a longish rant about one thing and another and, as luck would have it, I have on this laptop the last two paragraphs. The first is an extract from an article about the problems caused by snow on the UK’s SouthEastern Trains network, which I thought relevant to the problems we’ve been having recently with the regional electricity companies. This quotation, though, echoes the wider criticism I regularly make of Spanish monopoly suppliers who major on screwing their captive customers – “SouthEastern is a prime example of the mentality that grips New Labour's Britain - milk the hell out of customers when times are good, and let them whistle when times are bad. Because there are no penalties for this kind of behaviour, there is no will to provide the average citizen with any kind of service if there's money to be lost.” Good to know we are not alone in our suffering.

And the final paragraph . . . .

And I’ve cheered myself up even more by reading Swift’s “Modest Proposal”, downloaded from the Gutenberg Project. As everyone will know, he proposed that the problem of poverty in Ireland be solved by fattening up babies and selling them for the table at 12 months. His logic is, of course, impeccable. So one wonders whether it isn’t happening in China to solve the problem of unwanted female babies. Not to mention recession-driven poverty.

Click here if you want to read this short pamphlet for yourself.

Hasta cuando.