The terraced houses in this foto are the oldest of the new houses near me, built and sold
before the collapse began in 2008. One of them belongs to the judge
who has it in for his media-prone colleague, Báltasar Garzón. They're
said to be illegal. As are some of the others in the picture.
These
17-20 terraced houses, behind mine, were started well before the end of the
boom, in 2004, but they took 6 years to build. At least 4 of them are
illegal, along with the access road. That said, 2 or 3 of them have
recently been occupied - suggesting the illegality problem has
somehow been solved - but the rest remain empty and quite possibly
unsold. Given the poor spec of the houses - including a 'garden' the size of a
tea towel which backs onto a sheer granite escarpment - they may
remain unsold until the next property boom. They weren't really built
to be lived in, just bought and sold. Off plan.
These (even uglier) houses had a price tag of 90m pesetas, or €540,000, when they were
put on the market. When the developer went bust the builder, in
desperation, dropped the price to 70m pesetas, or a mere €420,000.
Despite this, only 3 of the 12 have been sold. And the original
feature of being able to control everything in the house via clever
electronics has been dropped. They are probably worthless right now.
Finally,
these houses are the most recently built and I'm not aware that any
of them are illegal. Built on an incline, they have a magnificent
view over the river and the city. Almost as good as mine, in fact. Despite
this, only 2 of the 6 are occupied and, again, the others could remain empty for another 10 to 20 years. And nothing rots as quickly as a house in a wet climate.
So,
Si monumentum requiris circumspice. Welcome to our local
version of the Castellón and Ciudad Real (non)airports.
And
now for something completely different . . . Walking into and out
of town, I very much enjoy the BBC's In Our Time podcasts,
with their discussions on history, literature, science and religion.
But there's a question which regularly recurs - Would the world be
any worse off if all philosophers had arrived stillborn? I mean, what
bloody use are they? Other than for amusing me on my pedestrian travels.
But
anyway, listening to a podcast on the History of History yesterday, I
learnt that in the 6th century, Bishop Gregory of Tours wrote "A
History of the World" which began with the wonderful sentence:
"A great many things keep happening: some of them good, some of
them bad". True as this is, I'm not sure he'd get away with it
these days. Too damn honest.
And
talking of historians, here - for those who remember them - are a
few more extracts from David Kynaston's Family Britain, which centres
on the UK of the 1950s.
Deference,
respectability, conformity, restraint, trust - these were probably
all more important than piety in underpinning 'the 1950s'. Despite
the egalitarian effects of the war, deference still ran deep in
British society, whether towards traditional institutions, or senior
people in hierarchical institutions or prominent local figures (the
teacher, the bank manager, the JP, the GP), or older people
generally, or the better educated, or that increasingly influential
phenomenon, the somewhat stern but more or less benign expert, for
example in childcare.
1950s
Britain was also an authoritarian, illiberal, puritanical society.
An
intrinsic part of respectability was what the film critic Penelope
Houston called "that celebrated English custom of ignoring a
disagreeable fact, on the assumption that if left alone it may
quietly go away".
Recalled
the novelist Barry Unsworth: "To carry an umbrella or ask for
wine in a pub was to put your virility in question. Suede shoes were
for 'lounge lizards'. Beards were out of the question"
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