Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, March 09, 2014

Academy fears; Carnaval; The EU; & A new paff.


I mentioned the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy the other day. This illustrious body made the news yesterday. It's unhappy that Spain's Eurovision Song Contest entry is in English. I'd have thought they had rather more important things to worry about. Do they really fear this will cause fewer young Spaniards to speak Spanish? Correctly or otherwise.

With a temperature close to 25 degrees and beautiful evening sunlight, last night was perfect for the postponed parade of Carnaval dancers and floats. But it wasn't a good night for visiting my favourite tapas bar, where the queue for tables was almost as long as I've ever seen it it. But friends are friends in Spain and we only had to wait 3 seconds for ours. An added joy was the 3 free pancakes and, as ever, the free liqueurs. As for the parade, this was my first viewing since the one I wrote up here, several years ago.

Britain's recent floods have brutally exposed the immense power of unaccountable EU bureaucrats, augmented and implemented by self-serving international agencies and willing national bureaucracies. And this is (long) before Brussels becomes the centre of a true supranational government. Or, in truth, a supranational bureaucracy, similarly unaccountable. How such animals act in crises has been demonstrated perfectly by the chaotic response of the EU 28 member committee to the Russian invasion and de facto annexation of the Crimea. O Brave New Future World.

Finally . . . Two of my Spanish friends have advised me of the imminent opening of a new pub in Pontevedra. Or paff in Spanish pronunciation. One of these has warned the owners that 4 places I've patronised regularly over the last decade or so have since closed down. Indeed, one of these was on the very site of the new pub. Being, she says, superstitious, the owners would like me to stay away. And so the question arises of how much they'll pay me to do so. Incidentally, the place is to be called The Bassett. Since this makes no sense in English, I assume it's meant to be either The Bassett Hound or The Bassett Liquorice Allsort.


Note for Mac users: By accident, I've discovered that you can increase the size of the Gmail Compose page to very close to what it used to be by pressing fn and D

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