Note:
Last night's post wasn't published until this morning. Scroll down if
you missed it and want to read it.
My
mother was 15 when World War II broke out in 1939 and, by the time it
was over in 1945, she was married. Without, I should stress, becoming
pregnant in the interim. Most of these years she spent at the large
pub in Birkenhead which my grandparents ran and which I used to visit
every weekend as a kid. At lunch with my mother yesterday, I asked
her to refresh my memory of a poorly-recalled anecdote she'd once told me about the public phone situated behind the largest of the pub's five
bars. She told me that the phone there had had a box with two buttons
marked A and B. You put your money in the top of the box and called
the number. When someone answered, you pressed button A and the money
dropped down into the bowels of the box. If no one answered, you
pressed button B and your coins were returned to a niche at the
bottom of the box. Except that the American soldiers who patronised
the pub didn't know the system and usually left in frustration
without pressing button B, when the call didn't go through. Allowing
my mother and her sister to make a small fortune by pressing it, on
the off chance, every time they passed the phone. You had to put in a
lot of coins to make a trans-Atlantic call. Or to try to.
Those
readers familiar with this type of phone - still in use for many
years after the war - may or may not know that it was possible to use
it without inserting any money. The handset rested on a cradle that
rose and fell as the handset was taken off and put back. If you took
it off and then tapped the number you wanted on the cradle, you were
connected without any of that A and B nonsense. God knows how much
money the relevant government department lost because of this design
weakness. Or strength, as we viewed it.
Earlier
this year, a Spanish ballet dancer, Tamara
Rojo, was appointed Artistic Director of English National Ballet.
Today I heard of a telling comment she'd made a couple of years ago,
when the Spanish government was trying to tempt her back
home to set up a national company - “I’ve
said the only way I would direct a company in Spain is if they set up
an arts council. The government have to reassure me that this is a
long-term project. If I’m going to sacrifice my dancing career, I
have to know that in three years’ time some politician won’t come
along and put his cousin in my place."
Which
is a good lead into this article on the level of unemployment in
Spain. It endorses the view several of us have had for years, viz.,
that "The size of the underground economy means that more
Spaniards are working than it might seem, and that the official
unemployment figure may be overstated by as much as five to nine
percentage points."
Finally
. . . I was almost saddened to hear that, after the non-Germanic
performance of Bayern Munich in losing a penalty shoot-out against an
English team, their disconsolate supporters making their way home in
the early hours of Sunday were hit by a non-Germanic breakdown in the
city's metro system. Just not their night.
Finally,
finally . . . My apologies to reader Moscow, who wrote a week or so
ago that "I
think you and your fellow countrymen should consider some day stop
living in the past and making references to Germany and the war. It
is really tedious."
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