Well, maybe there's
really going to be a sea change in the way the Spanish government and
judiciary treat corruption here. A major offender (Fabras) has been
denied the standard avoidance of prison. Someone in Madrid is finally
getting the message. And is, by the by, demonstrating again just how
politicised the judicial system is here.
As expected, the promise of the Spanish PM to clean up politics has been greeted with scorn from the opposition parties. As has his claim that Spain is not corrupt, just has some corrupt people whose misdeeds are coming to light. I'll say! But, anyway, his reforms will 'go a long way to preventing future scandals', he says. With some justification, the leader of the PSOE opposition replied that Sr Rajoy lacked both the capacity and the legitimacy to renew democracy. True, but a bit of a cheek from the leader of a party also embroiled in corruption scandals. So, who can do it?
Hard as this may be to
believe, the Happy Planet has produced an index which puts the UK
higher than Spain as a happier place in which to live. At positions
41 and 62, respectively. A big clue for this comes from the fact that
1 of the 3 criteria is a county's 'ecological footprint', the
others being life expectancy and wellbeing. Taking this to its
logical extreme, if you lived surrounded by wind turbines, you'd be
the happiest person in the world. Just in case you're asking, the
worst place to live is Botswana. No turbines at all. And the best -
Costa Rica. Of course.
A countervailing bit of
news is that the number of Spaniards signing on to the UK's national
insurance scheme fell 9% in the year to September. There are even
suggestions that those already there are beginning to leave.
But can this be to return to Spain, where youth unemployment has just been labelled the worst in Europe? Well, yes in the case of those who went to the UK ill-prepared to do anything but the menial jobs which don't give them the chance to improve their English. Said youth unemployment rate in Spain is now 54%, higher even than that of Greece and 7 times that of Germany.
Talking about the UK .
. . My (superficial?) observation from my stays in 7 places is that
the old (i. e. my mother) can afford to heat their houses to furnace
levels, whereas the young can hardly afford to heat them to adequate levels. Or am I just less hardy than I was when I lived
there?
Maybe young Spaniards can
take comfort from the fact that both building permits and mortgage applications
have recently shot up here. That said, the construction industry is
still languishing at 4% of GDP, against 12% back in the 'fat cow'
years.
Back home, I can again
watch Moscow's TV channel, RT. This has allowed me to invent a new
expression to replace "When Hell freezes over". It's "When
RT reports on Russia".
Spanglish: The word 'toffee' has made its way into Spanish, as part of a dessert.
Technically, it should have been transmuted into tofi but we saw it
as toffe. Which is a nonsense really. Neither fish nor fowl. But maybe it
was just a typo.
A puzzle: Should there be any punctuation between Thieves and Beware? If so, a full stop (period) or a comma? And does anyone know what Police Aware means?
En route to the Nuptial Mass:
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