According
to a letter in El País, there's a two kilometre stretch of
road up near León which is never completely cleared of snow and is
thus unusable as an approach to the town throughout the winter. The
reason is that the Junta of Castile y León is responsible for one
third of the road, the provincial government is responsible for
another third and the town council is responsible for the final
third. And they can't coordinate their respective snowploughs.
Assuming this is not an apocryphal tale or an attempt to initiate an
urban myth, it must rank as a comment on Spain's increasingly
unworkable Constitution.
On
this subject, it's good to see the Madrid is doing something to
attack the excess layers of government in the country. However,
rather than get rid of, say, the fifty provincial governments
(diputaciones) they've announced they're going to eliminate
some mancomunidades. No one seems to know what these are, and
they certainly don't get voted into power, but the dictionary has
them as free associations of town councils. So their abolition won't
actually involve any reduction in numbers or complexity. But it's a
start, I guess.
A
couple more silly car names:-
The
Mercedes Ener G
The
Smart Forjeremy (Yes, that's right – Forjeremy. Perhaps he
was killed in the making of the car.)
Not
having a Twitter account – actually, I do but I've forgotten what
my name is – I didn't witness Thursday's spat between Donald Trump
and Alan Sugar over wind farms in Scotland. Neither man has ever had
the slightest appeal for me so I was pleased (and amused) to read in
the Daily Telegraph
this morning that they were “two
of Christendom’s more grotesquely inflated egos”.
Finally
. . . The winter of 1962-3 in Britain was one of the coldest in
hundreds of years. Why do I mention this? Because a TV program last
night had Aker Bilk's Stranger
on the Shore and this beautifully evocative tune and that winter will forever be intertwined in my mind.
Along with a (pretty unrequited) love affair. How powerful such
musical stimuli can be. Incidentally, another program had as its
musical theme Peggy Lee's Is
That All There Is?,
which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
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