Dawn

Dawn

Friday, December 16, 2011

Rumour has it that the A4-size sheet of paper which we Brits have to carry around to show our identity number - and which, lacking a foto, is useless for proving your identity - is to be replaced by a small card that will fit in your wallet/purse. But as this won't bear a foto either, you'll still have to carry a driving licence or a passport for this purpose. Unless, like me, you've told the police you've lost your original Tarjeta de Residencia so you can't hand it in. In which case, you can carry on using your expired card. Only one person in a hundred has checked mine and told me it's useless. And this was the notary being used for the sale of my house in the hills. It would have be a real coup if he'd accepted it. Or a profound comment on Spanish bureaucracy. It was no accident that I tried to get away with it.

But back to Europe's existential crisis . . . Will the ECB print the euros required or not? Well, the Bank of America believes it will, predicting that the ECB "will be forced to print money on a large scale but only after deep recession and months of drift have pushed the eurozone to the brink of disaster." One sincerely hopes not.

Reverting to earlier attempts to Germanicise Europe - well, Britain anyway - I've done some digging (OK only in Wikipedia) and come up with these nuggets of information about the genetic make-up of the English:- Sykes and Oppenheimer [around 2005] argued for significant immigration from Iberia into Britain and Ireland. However by 2010 several major studies presented more complete data, showing that the oldest-surviving male lineages had mostly migrated to Britain from the Balkans, and ultimately from the Middle East, not from Iberia. . . . That there are relatively clear signs of Germanic contact in parts of Britain is accepted but the stimulus, progression and impact of the Germanic settlement of Britain is subject to considerable disagreement, prompted by varying accounts and evidence. The Anglo-Saxons supplanted Celtic culture and society in much of southern and central Britain and contributed to the creation of Anglo-Saxon England and the use of the Old English Language.

Movement was not all one way, of course:- Many groups of native Britons even resettled on the continent, principally in Armorica (Brittany) in France and Britonia in Spanish Galicia, the homes of pre-existing Celtic communities.

Click here and here if you want more on this.

Finally . . . My sister's kitchen has an unusual feature - a tap which dispenses an instant jet of boiling water. I've long viewed this as inherently risky and yesterday I managed to prove this by scalding my left hand when making her a cup of tea. Shortly thereafter - when seeking to douse my painful hand in cold water - I also discovered that her cold tap dispenses hot water. And the more you turn it towards the blue button, the hotter it gets. Which is not good for a scald, I can assure you. I am now suing my sister, of course.

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