Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Ponters Pensées 19.4.16

Roll on The June Elections: To absolutely no one's surprise, members of the newish, very leftish, uppity-ish Podemos party have instructed their leaders not to do a coalition deal with the leftish PSOE and rightish Ciudadanos parties. I wonder if they're right to bet on getting increased support in June. And whether, if this does happnen, it'll be more than enough to counter-balance the increased votes now predicted for the caretaker/outgoing/very rightish PP party. Their sworn enemies.

Those Bizarre Brits: Here's The Local's list of what astonishes Spaniards – and there are a lot of them – who flee Spain to find work in the UK. There's nothing new but it's pretty accurate. They don't like the separate taps either, finding them less 'modern' than Spain's ubiquitous mixer taps.

A Priestly Defence: To the charge of child abuse . . . I felt I had a vocation from God and that God knew that I was sexually attracted to young children and accepted it. So I assumed it was OK. What faith can do to people!

A Brave Muslim Woman: A Saudi TV journalist. Which reminds me . . . I haven't seen this week the RT TV female reporter who got hammered by the Great Dane last Friday. Taking a well-earned break?

The Spanish Police: We seem to have 4 different forces operating in Pontevedra: The Guardia Civil (strictly, a military force), the National Police; the Regional police; and the Local Police. Sometimes you can see a car from each of these gathered in the same spot, like beauty contestants. When I first came here, I was told that the local force was formed from village idiots. Possibly not true but I had a run-in with an officious bastard yesterday, when I tried to park outside the scrap-dealer's place in town, just to drop off some stuff. He wouldn't even let me park on the 'drive' up from the road to the shop but insisted I drive around until a found a 15 minute space some distance away. I now await a fine. Sadly, I got rather less for the scrap than I expected – all of 3 euros – so this won't go a long way towards that. But I did have a laugh with the scrap dealer, who turned out to be half English. When I asked him if this were ever an advantage for him, he replied: Yes, the sense of humour. How we laughed.

Beggars: There's nothing like a bit of sun to bring out the panhandlers. I had 6 in less than 10 minutes yesterday at tiffintime. And all of them new to me. Do they come here in a coach? From Beggars Central?

Finally . . . Irritating TV Ads: Do you have one – or more – of these? Mine at the moment is the one where the dog talks to his owner about his bloody trousers and some sort of insurance. Maybe it's only frequent on RT TV but I have to reach for the Mute button as soon as it starts. As if RT TV wasn't irritating enough already!


Another cartoon . . .




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