The Prestige oil lawsuit; A bad press; Protest v. Revolution; UK cities; Homophones; and Odd birds.

Having recovered from their shock, several national and international parties are appealing in the Spanish Supreme Court against the long-coming verdict that absolutely no one was guilty of anything in the Prestige oil tanker disaster that devastated our coast 11 years ago. These include the Spanish government, the French government and the Galician government. One wonders, firstly, why there isn't a class action and, secondly, whether they're going against the same parties or against new parties such as the insurers of the ship and the company which chartered it. I believe its the former, meaning the captain, his chief engineer and a Spanish maritime official. One also wonders whether this will take another 11 years.

It's been known for a while that even serious UK newspapers are reducing costs by farming out their sub-editing challenges to low paid people in, say, Australia. Perhaps this is what happened with a Daily Telegraph article on recent developments in Gibraltar. In which Spain's Guardia Civil is referred to as the 'Guardia Seville'. That said, the article is quite sensible in its thrust: Tensions have been growing for some months between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar. Both in terms of rhetoric and physical incursions into Gibraltar's territorial waters, the Spanish seem to be intent on provoking some sort of crisis.This is extraordinary behaviour for a democratic European state in the twenty first century and more akin to that of a Fascist dictatorship or banana republic. More here.

According to news reports, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in 55 of Spain's largest provincial cities and many of its towns last Saturday to protest against austerity measures (including cuts in education, healthcare, social welfare, unemployment pay and pensions) and against increased taxes and the recently-introduced legislation that includes six-figure fines for unauthorised demonstrations or for photographing police. While all of this is valid, one feels it won't be anywhere near enough to cause the (Brussels-whipped) government to change tack. And so one despairs not so much of the Spain's government but of its people. Who really need to take a leaf out of the book of their trans-Pyrannean neighbours. They really do know how to be revolting.

In an article in El País on the British Isles, the accompanying map included only 4 cities - none in Ireland, none in Northern Ireland, none in Wales, 2 in Scotland (Edinburgh and Glasgow) and 2 in England (London and Liverpool). No Manchester, no Birmingham, no Bristol and no Newcastle, for example. And I thought, Yes, that's about right.

There are homophones in English, of course, but one of the more confusing in Spanish is móbil, which means 1. Moveable, 2. Mobile(cell) phone, and 3. Motive. And one or two other things as well, such as a mobile above a baby's bed. Leading to the question of how you'd write a sentence about a baby's motive for playing with a toy phone in a mobile above it's head.[P. S. Don't write in: I've just discovered we're talking homographs here, not homophones.]

Finally . . . I saw an unusual solitary bird in my garden yesterday and eventually identified it as a black redstart, which seemed to be a bit of a contradiction in terms. Anyway, I saw this article on the net, containing text in both English and Dutch. The latter was totally incomprehensible - despite the Dutch (Fresian) origins of English - but I saw the word insecten and decided it was the plural of insect, just as 'children' is the plural of 'child'. Actually, this is a double plural, as it goes 'child', 'child-er' and 'child-er-en.' English plus German plus Dutch.