Dawn

Dawn

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Governor of the Bank of England recently torpedoed the British Prime Minister by publicly doubting the wisdom of his fiscal measures. No doubt Mr Brown fumed in private but he refrained from, say, caricaturing the Governor as a lackey of the Secret Society of Baby-eating Plutocrats. Or at least as someone keen to terrify the country’s actual and future pensioners. Things are a little different here, where lèse-majesté is seen as akin to treason. As it would have been by Franco, I guess. Click here for more.

In each of the two wi-fi cafés I use down in town, there’s an electric socket in the corner which is used by the first person to get to it. I suspect - perhaps wrongly - that this wouldn’t be looked on kindly by café owners in the UK but it’s clearly acceptable here. Anyway, I was rather surprised a couple of evenings ago when a young woman – seeing I’d commandeered the socket – asked for an extension cable. And I was even more taken aback last night to see we’d arrived at the logical extension of five surfers plugged into the café’s electricity supply. Very pragmatic and sensible and, as I say, hard to imagine happening in the UK.

Here’s how the new bus-stop is taking shape down at the large roundabout at the bottom of the hill.


As you can see, the construction has temporarily swallowed the bay in which the bus stops. So, does this mean that the people who normally park in it have stopped doing this until things are back to normal? Of course not. Now they occupy one of the two lanes of the roundabout. Which means, of course, that drivers can’t obey the primary rule of only using the outside lane. So, if the police were to park nearby, they could have a field day, fining not only the large percentage of people who negotiate the roundabout while on the phone but also every single driver forced to use the inside lane. At a pinch, they could also fine the folk who illegally park on the roundabout itself. Now, that would be revolutionary.

By the way, the above photo accidentally captures an example of a van parked half on the pavement, just before the zebra crossing, and obscuring the latter in the process. Just after I’d taken it, another van drew up and completed the job by parking right on the crossing. Both drivers clearly felt this was a better alternative to using the car park of the shopping mall they were visiting. I suppose the police could fine these too but now we’re talking serious implementation of the law - not to mention regard for safety - and this may be going too far. It could only end in the local police chief being prosecuted for being drunk of an afternoon.

Finally . . . Gorrillas are clearly newsworthy this week.

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