Gibraltar:
The excitable Spanish Foreign MInister appears to have taken leave of his
senses and launched into an impersonation of either a Franco minister
or an Argentinean president. Can he really believe his bellicose
nonsense is going to achieve anything but alienation of the Spaniards
who work on The Rock and a siege mentality among its already
Spain-averse residents? No, of course he doesn't. The Spanish
government, as I said the other day, is in several types of deep
doo-doo and this is a classic distraction technique for the
holiday-bound Spaniards,who can now lie on their towels muttering
about British imperialism and forgetting about Spain's 2 colonies on
Moroccan soil and the 6 or 7 islands off her coast. I think it's called cognitive dissonance.
Talking
of Morocco . . . .You couldn't make it up - The child rapist
pardoned by the Moroccan king last week - allegedly under pressure
from the Spanish secret service - has now been arrested in Spain. We
now wait to see whether he's extradited back to Morocco or just
disappears from the scene because of some bizarre security connection arising from his alleged Iraqi origins.
On
Sunday night, my daughter and I found ourselves down in Pontevedra's
old quarter on one of the post-bullfight nights when the place is
overwhelmed by the city's youth for an ever-astonishing bacchanal.
When I commented to my daughter that the rather under-dressed young
women looked younger than ever, she replied, gnomically, that there
were men as well. I'm still trying to work out what she meant by
this. But, anyway, over coffee at the end of the evening we were at
pains to point out to the visitors that, in contrast to the UK, it
was very unlikely the drunken revelling would result in any violence. So it
was a bit of a shock to read in yesterday's papers that - along with
the 4 people who'd been hospitalised with alcoholic poisoning - there
were 18 who'd been injured in fights. All males, I'd guess.
The
visitors where 4 lovely ladies from Guadalajara who'd driven north to
tackle the Pontevedra-Santiago stretch of the Portuguese Way. When
they kindly asked if my friend Dwight and I wanted to join them
yesterday, Dwight was wise enough to decline but I was foolish enough
to accept. Which, after 17km of rapid walking, is why I can hardly move my
legs this morning. Still, I must have lost a bit of excess fat, I
thought. Not a bloody ounce, said my scales this morning. Though my daughter
tells me it doesn't work like that and the weight will fall off me in 2 or 3 weeks' time. Vamos a ver.
Finally
. . . Courtesy, I think, of my fellow blogger Lenox, I understand
unemployment in Gibraltar is just 3%, compared with 27% in Spain and
37% in Andalucía, which is the region The Rock would join if Spain
got it back. Additionally, the average income per head in Gibraltar
is more than double that of Spain, and three times that of Andalucía.
All of which makes it rather easy to understand why the Gibraltarians
have no wish to be assimilated. None of which is to deny that Spain has something to complain about if 7-8,000 of its citizens
are somehow evading taxes they should be paying by declaring
themselves resident in Gibraltar. Which is surely something that could have
been discussed by the regular three-party commission that the PP
party scrapped the minute it came to power. You reap what you sow, they say.
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