My qualms about Google continue to
grow. Within hours of me placing an Amazon order for garden items yesterday, my
(Google) spam filter picked up an email offering me all sorts of
things for the garden. So, thank God for Google then. Without it I'd
be deluged with ads enabled by Google.
I'm always banging on about how much
easier it is to pay for goods with a credit or debit card in the UK.
And, doubtless, elsewhere too. But things just got even easier here.
The amount you can spend without putting your card in a
machine, entering your pin and/or signing a screen or a piece paper
has risen from 15 to 20 pounds. Back home in Spain – where I'm
returning two weeks today – I'll have to readjust to the prospect
being asked to do ALL of these if I buy so much as a toilet roll. The
UK ('contactless') option is called “wave-and-go” and you can
read about it here. It's used a lot in the Far East. But how about
Spain? Barcelona? Bilbao? Madrid?
Which reminds me . . . In the Welsh
town of Aberystwyth, they decided to do without traffic wardens,
assuming that drivers could be relied on to obey the rules and not park
on yellow lines, chevrons and zebra crossings. After they proved an
irritation a decade or so ago, we don't have wardens in Pontevedra.
And I'd have been delighted to tell the council what would happen.
Anyway, after a year, wardens are to return to Aberystwyth for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who lives in Spain.
This is the caption below a picture in
one of the UK's leading newspapers this morning. The mistake it
contains is the sort of thing one expects from a 3 or 4 year old
trying to get to grips with the logic of a language which has only a
modicum of it. But not from a major newspaper, surely:- Greece in
turmoil: but its significance has shrinked in comparison to the
possibility of a spectacular crash in Spain, the fourth largest
economy in the EU. Actually, there's a second mistake but we'll
let that one go, as being minor in comparison with the first.
But, anyway, it gives me a nice lead-in
to the eurozone crisis. Out of virtually nowhere, the Spanish banks
are suddenly the world's cynosure. It almost makes one laugh. Some of
us amateurs are on record for having said for years that the Spanish
boom was phoney and that the banks were fishy but no one seemed to
hear. Now, though, the state of the Spanish banking industry
threatens to bring down the entire euro project, dwarfing - as it
does – Greece and sucking Italy in its wake into the maelstrom. As
has been said by many over the past few months and more – There are
essentially only one of two futures for the euro:- It has to be backed by full
fiscal and political union or it has to be (will be) destroyed. And
there ain't much time to put the first in place. Worse, there is
neither the political will nor the political capability to do it. Or
not democratically at least. I've said for years that the eurozone
would one day collapse under the weight of its internal incongruities but I
really never expected this to happen quite so quickly. Here's an
article which makes much the same points, albeit with more style.
Ultimately . . . I finally tracked down
some ginger beer and found it tasted just like the stuff I used to
quaff in my grandparents' pub. Except this time there was an alcohol
content of 4%. I had to ask my mother where her bottle opener was
and she must have heard me cursing the fact I had to get down on my
hands and knees to get it. (I don't know how, as I have to repeat everything I say at least once, as she says she can't hear me.) But, anyway, I say this because,
when I went to open a second bottle tonight, there were no fewer than
five openers laid out on the table. Point taken.
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