Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Going for a Viking; Brief details; Masonic matters; Rubber bullets and a bendy Minister; & Garmin agony.


I've occasionally poked (gentle) fun at the Spanish practice of forming nouns from English gerunds - parkings, footings, joggings, liftings, etc. But it seems the English may have got there first. For Harar í viking means in Norse 'To go on a hike'. Or ' To go on an expedition'. Or, more correctly, I suppose, 'To go on an expedition with menace'. Out of which the English formed Viking to mean something like 'An invader disguised as a day-tripper'.

Talking of English . . . A new word seems to have entered the language, perhaps through the world of text messaging and tweets. It's 'deets', for 'details'. Be the first in your world to use it.

As I recall, Franco was obsessed with combatting, if not actually slaughtering, communists, socialists, Jews and masons. The last of these were banned during his time in power and imprisoned, tortured or exiled if they were found. So perhaps, it's not surprising that, even though the dictator went to his eternal reward/punishment in 1976, the masons have continued to kep themselves to themselves. But now the female half of the membership has come out in public and revealed member identities - in the cause of the protest against government plans to withdraw rights from women under a new abortion law. An interesting change in Spanish society but politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows. The Spanish masons, by the way, form a unitary movement, men and women. I don't have much experience of the masons but my impression is that there's normally a wide divide.

When Spain's Guardia Civil was accused of firing rubber bullets as South-Saharans trying to swim into the North African 'enclave' of Ceuta, the Interior Minister said the police had acted impeccably and angrily told the rest of the world to mind its own business. Well, 15 people died and the rest of the world was rather interested in this, including the EU that punts so much money Spain's way. So now the Minister has come over all conciliatory and admitted that rubber bullets should not have been fired. This contrition will presumably help him get the huge sums he's demanded from Brussels to help Spain deal with the tides of desperate men trying to climb over the razor wire into both Ceuta and Melilla. Or am I being too cynical?

Finally . . . I knew I never should have tried it . . . For 4-5 years - since not long after I bought it in the UK - my satnav(GPS) has only been giving me Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar. Not the Europe-wide map it came with. On Sunday, I decided to pay for and download the latest Europe map. Suffice to say, things didn't go well and I still have the old Iberia map. And am 80 quid out of pocket, facing a long battle to rectify the situation. I should have gone with my instinct and left things alone. With age comes wisdom. Or should do. 

Update: I wrote to the Customer Service people yesterday. In English, of course. This morning I got a reply. It's long, technical and in Spanish. Presumably sent by a computer. Hey, ho. I will now resend my message, in Spanish, pretending I live in the UK. 

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