Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, May 22, 2011

The passive revolt of 'indignant' Spanish youth includes corrupt politicians as one of its prime targets. Talking to friends over Friday dinner, I was assured that no politician here would ever resign for anything. Whether the offence related to sex or money. So, I wonder what the young would make of the media campaign in the UK against a (bound-to-resign) cabinet member who's committed the pecadillo of asking his wife to take some of the points he earned for speeding. Would they go so far as to demand his head on a plate? Or would they draw the line further along the corruption spectrum? Or have they never thought about things in this (not-so-deep) depth?

Incidentally, my Spanish friends seemed a tad stumped by my question of what would happen to the leader of the next government (Pontevedran Sr Rajoy of the PP party), if it was proved that he really is as homosexual as he is 'known' to be in these parts. Whilst not qualifying as corruption (except in the perverse religious sense), this might well prove fatal, it seems. So I guess we can expect a whispering campaign at the very least.

Anyway, here's the official(?) list of the demands being made by the Indignants, kindly provided by reader Diego. It's such a mixture of the sensible and the loony that I'm compelled to use one of my favourite (but ever so slightly modified) quotations, Samuel Johnson's dyspeptic view of the work of John Donne:- "The most heterogeneous elements are yoked together by (non)violence". See the end of this post for the whole quote.

It's standard practice in Spain to Hispanicise any foreign name. So, last night on the radio Osborne became Oz-bor-nay. Though in this case there's the added factor that it's also a Spanish surname, at least around Jerez ('sherry'). But, strangely, a few seconds later, Shakespeare's name was pronounced correctly and not Shack-ess-pay-a-ray. This is a singular honour and one not even accorded to Mozart.

Well, Deportivo La Coruña needed just a draw at home against Valencia last night. But they lost 2-0, with the second goal coming in the 6th minute of extra time, as they strove for the equaliser. So, they join Pontevedra FC in going down. It's a long, long way from winning the Primera Liga around ten years ago.

Which sort of reminds me . . . I'm still not inured to hearing the word coño shouted between friends in the street here. It means the same as an English four-letter word also beginning with C but carries no taboo here. You have to resort to 'old goat' (cabrón) to get an equivalent reaction here. Right on cue, Nice-but-Noisy Tony this afternoon hailed me as Coño in the front garden. When I told him this was a very bad word in English, my neighbour on  the other side - the lovely Ester - commented that it was in Spain too. Which came as a surprise to me. You'd never guess.

I mentioned a week or two ago that we always get new panhandlers in Pontevedra during the spring and early summer. This year there seems to be an abundance of skinny, dreadlocked, dog-dragging 'musicians', who appear to operate on the principle we'd all be happy to pay them to piss off and inflict their pipes on someone else. As sure as night follows day, I see them wandering back from the gypsy encampment on my side of the river. In the middle of the road and as high as a kite in one case last night. My thought was that he'd probably be hit by one of the cyclists (i. e. all of them) who never have a light on, no matter how dark it is. Or fall down one of the drains, he was so thin. Presumably, grass is a higher priority than food.

It's a Spanish custom to change the title of Anglo films for no apparent reason. Last night I watched "It's Complicated", which has become "No es tan Facil" - It's not so Simple.  Why? By the way, was anyone else as irritated by Meryl Streep as I was in this film? Waste of a talent. And as for Steve Martin. What the hell was he doing playing a love-struck architect.

If you've read the mini-post below this one and need to know more about this scam, click here. Essentially, you have to call your phone company and have them block the number. You won't get your money back on messages already sent to you. At least not from Orange. From whom I shall soon be moving.

That quote in full:- "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased."

Finally . . .  I may have mentioned that my faithful old dog, Ryan, passed away during my absence, whilst in the kind care of my friend, Dwight. In his posthumous honour (Ryan's, not Dwight's), here's a poem about him which my younger daughter, Hannah, wrote about ten years ago. If it can't be read, I'll type it up for a future post . . .

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