Dawn

Dawn

Friday, February 05, 2016

Local trivia

Football: Sad to see that the (alleged) dirtiest player in the English Premier League is a Spaniard. Details of this claim here.

Suicides: Even sadder to hear that last year's UK total of 6,083 divided:-
Women: 1,460 24%
Men: 4,623 76%
As someone who's contemplated this most selfish of acts a few times, I suspect I can believe this more easily than most.

Spanglish?: Yet another criminal investigation has brought into the limelight the president of a company called Funnydent – one of Spain's new, glossy, high-street dental operations, I guess. As to who was the clown who came up with the name, there's no indication.

Imputado: This is a legal term which suddenly seems to have disappeared in favour of investigado. This makes sense but only seems to have happened because of EU forensic homogenisation.

News from Poio: I have to confess that I don't actually live in Pontevedra but across the river in the large municipality of Poio. Near the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, in fact. Four things have happened here in the last week:
  • I've been ordered to go to the town hall and prove I still exist and can stay on the register. For this, I will, of course, take every possible identification document I can think of and several copies of each. Interestingly, the letter refers to my foreigners' Residence Card(the NIE). They don't seem to be aware the national government scrapped these years ago in favour of a 'certificate' that no one accepts as proof of identity. Last time I did anything at the town hall they insisted I didn't exist. So I demanded my taxes back. Sadly, it turned out to be the usual surname complication. Spaniards have 2, against only 1 for most other people in the world.
  • The whole of my barrio has been given the latest communal bins they've had down in Pontevedra for years. See the foto at the end of this post. This is great news for my street as we missed out on the last model because our road was up when these were issued. So we'd been stuck with the  smaller, hard-to-use even earlier model for at least 15 years.
  • The town hall advises us that, though the property market remains in the doldrums, they're raising the Valor Catastral of our properties. This is the notional market value of our houses, on which municipal taxes, inter alia, are based. It looks like the increase in the VC is only 0.5% but we wait to see whether they also up the percentage applied to it to give us our annual 'rates', in British parlance.
  • The council has warned that the wolves inhabiting the hills behind us are getting closer and closer to town. As a lupusphile, I look forward to meeting a pack in the woods one day.
Finally . . . The one-day cricket international in South Africa yesterday opened with David Willey bowling to Quinton de Kock. Where was Brian Johnston to collapse in helpless laughter while trying to get out: It's Willey bowling to Koch at the Pavilion end.

BTW . . . I stole the core of this from The Times.

The splendiferous new bins, which we can open with our feet . . .


Incidentally . . . You can see from this foto that the council has moved the bins from a pavement that no one uses to the road on the opposite side, thus depriving us of a valuable parking space. Thoughtful.


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