There
was another celebration at Nice-but-Noisy Toni's house last night and
I suspect it was for the younger boy's birthday. Why? Because when I
finished reading at 1am, the kids were still running around the house
screaming. Thank Whatever for – doubled-up – ear plugs.
With
the aid of a bit of time and distance, I can now hazard an overview
of the Olympics Opening Ceremony. And the major question has to be –
How, in a era of Health & Safety mania, did they get away with so much
that would have been stamped on in another context?
You only have to think of all the flames. Perhaps all Britain's laws
were suspended for the duration.
As
for the future, I think I can predict without much fear of
contradiction that within 20 years China will be winning all
the medals in all sports except, perhaps, fox hunting and dressage.
Well,
I finally got to see the local Christopher Columbus museum today,
with my house-guest, Ian. Except I didn't, as it was closed. It
should have been open but it wasn't. Seeing a chap coming out of a
nearby bar – and not knowing he was the village idiot – I asked
him if he knew who might have the key. He told us – eventually –
that the girl who ran the museum lived somewhere else and came to
and fro, as necessary. Someone else advised us that she worked in the Poio Turismo offices. So off we went to their
offices. To find them closed too. On the door, alongside the
fallacious hours of opening, was a flier for guided tours round a
nearby fishing village. So our suspicion – to be checked tomorrow –
is that the young lady moves between three responsibilities, making a
mockery of the official horarios. And turning the challenge of
getting into the museum and/or the Turismo into a hit and miss
exercise.
Ian, of course, now has a better understanding of why my strike rate for getting things done down in town is around 50%. On a good day.
More seriously, it's
increasingly seemed to me over recent months that the Winners and
Losers from the mayhem of the last four or five years can be listed:-
Winners:
Bankers, Financiers, Politicians and Brussels Bureaucrats.
Losers:
All the rest of us.
In
endorsement of this, I cite this recent article from the estimable
Simon Jenkins, entitled:- The Eurozone Crisis: The Bankers are
happy to play Nero while Europe burns.
Spain
has two 'enclaves' in North Africa, Melilla and Ceuta. These, of
course, are not colonies or ex-colonies and so are completely
different from Gibraltar. You may not know this but Ceuta was
captured in 1415 by the Portuguese, who later lost it to the Spanish.
There is, then, a neat solution to the endless nonsense between
Britain and Spain over sovereignty of The Rock. Spain should return
Ceuta to Portugal, upon which Britain should give Gibraltar back to
Spain. Sorted.
Finally
. . . Last night I heard that Spain's President, Mariano Rajoy, was
ill. Given the rumours about his sexuality, I expected to be told he
was suffering from AIDS. But, no, it's Alzheimer's. If this turns out
to be true, you heard it here first. If it turns out to be a
scurrilous calumny, I was the first person you know to laugh at it.
And to ask that you don't breath air into the rumour by passing it
on. Especially as someone is almost certainly reading your emails.
Finally,
finally . . . Here's a bit more on Galicia's vanity projects.
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