Dawn

Dawn

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Here’s an interesting and well-written take on the Jacko madness du jour . . .

On this, did anyone else see Sky news reach a nadir this morning, when one of their star reporters vamped by speculating on which door or window of his house MJ’s body might be brought out of? Thank God for France 24 so I could switch over and find out all about Sarko’s trip to the Caribbean to stamp on some revolting natives. Caraille, presumably.

Actually, I was impressed to see that France has no colonies, only ‘overseas Departments’. Surely this is the way to go for Gibraltar. It could simultaneously become both a county of England and an autonomous community of Spain, with shared sovereignty. An immediate end to all the emotional arguments about a British colony on Spanish soil. Even better than being an enclave. This, I have to say, is the sort of brilliance for which I’m never paid.

Anyway, inured as I am to low levels of concern for risk and high levels of inconsideration for strangers in Spain, I'm still occasionally taken aback. Like today, when I saw that the zebra crossing down by the new bus-stop was blocked at both ends by vans which were presumably delivering stuff to the nearby shopping centre. The poor pedestrians were reduced to playing peek-a-boo with their lives in the gap in the middle.

Here's a series of 3 fotos, to illustrate my occasional inability to understand Spanish priorities . . .

Firstly, some new tiles down near the houses of my neighbours in our community. Incidentally, my suspicion is we're all going to have to pay for these, as we did for their snazzy new entrance.


And here is the walkway behind my house, down to the communal gardens and the pool.


And here are the steps at the end of the walkway.


Why am I showing these banal objects? Well, the walkway planks were replaced about 2 years ago - as part of a project that took 4 years - after one of my legs had gone right through a rotten plank and I almost fell 20 or more feet to the concrete below. As you can see, they haven't been treated against Galicia's rain and damp. Unlike the (red) steps going down into the garden.

So the question arises - Why is it more important to replace perfectly good tiles while woodwork remains dangerously untreated? Is it simply because the President of the community lives down at the tile end of the development? Or is it because everyone knows none of us has a chance of successfully suing anyone if we do actually fall to our death or serious injury? Especially in the former case.

To end more positively, here's a foto of my resurgent jasmine . . .

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