Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain
- A macabre discovery in Madrid. Almost certainly not the last.
- My elder daughter and her fellow residents in Malasaña will be happy about this. Things have gone too far there. And elsewhere, of course.
- So, not just a storm in a teacup?
- Social mobility/immobility in Spain.
Local
- The Pontevedra library has dozens/hundreds of films on its shelves and on 27 Feb I took out one for the Noche de Cine with my 2 neighbours. I returned it on 18 March and was told I'd lost 2 weeks' loan privileges because it was late. Arriving home last night, I found a letter from the library - undated - telling me to return the film. It's stamped with the seal of library so obviously involved human intervention, some time after the due date of (midnight on) 7 March. Admittedly, the last line is: If this notice arrives after you have made the return, you can forget it, but I still wonder why this was sent after I'd returned the DVD. But perhaps it wasn't. Maybe it was issued on 8 March and took more than 10 days to reach me in the mail. BTW . . . The letter is only in Galician. Gone are the days when official communications came in both official languages. P. S. My neighbours rejected the film as my choice for an evening's viewing.
Brexit, the UK and the EU
- Hey, it's Brexit Day! Except it ain't.
- Richard North senses that the EU is now more than ready/willing/anxious to see the back of the UK and is frantically preparing for a No Deal Brexit.
- In the UK, though, prominent Brexiteers seem to think the contrary, viz. that the game has been lost and that eventually there'll be either a very soft Brexit or no Brexit at all. Meaning, in the latter case, a betrayal of the millions who voted for a Brexit.
- The rest of us - having suspended belief - just wait on events and get on with life.
- Meanwhile, an alarming a development in Brussels?
- Britain’s leaders had been shown to be both inept and dishonest, and had been humiliated before the world and, perhaps more. Importantly, before their own people. . . . . No, not 2019 and Brexit but 1956 and the Suez crisis.
- See below for a nice article from a disappointed Brexiteer who shares my view that the Establishment has won and that Brexit should be abandoned. Before we stumble into a No Deal exit.
The EU
- Interesting to see that on the EU's home patch - Belgium - an even-further-right party is gaining significant popular support, meaning that the electorate is now severely divided 2 ways - Left and Right and Flemish-French. A dangerous recipe that is surely worrying Brussels. How long before it realises its key policies are responsible for right-wing populist backlashes in Western as well as Eastern Europe? And that Brexit is a harbinger.
The UK
- If there's anything worse than the prospect of the Spanish media being dominated for a month by the end-April elections, it's the prospect of weeks/months dedicated to a leadership election in the Conservative party. Witness this disheartening paragraph: The mêlée has started. Campaign teams are being assembled and activity grids drawn up. Donors are being tapped, headquarters rented, attack lines polished and signature policies devised. The canvassing of colleagues, until now discreet, will soon break into the open and every media interview will become an audition for the top job.
Spanish
- Word of the Day: Hortera.
Finally . . .
- Lugging a heavy suitcase, an (empty) child's buggy and a loaded shopping bag, with a full rucksack on my back from our rented flat to my elder daughter's place was hard work yesterday. Once again, I was impressed by - and grateful to - the 5 young people who offered to help me on the metro. Not so the older woman who walked right across me as was dragging everything up a hill, forcing me to stop in my tracks. At the risk of ruffling feathers, I'll add that my impression was that all the young folk were South Americans. And the woman, a pija madrileña. Who probably didn't understand my non sotto voce "FFS!"
THE ARTICLE
Tonight we should have been toasting our independence - instead we face more time-wasting by the House of Clowns. Alison Pearson. Daily Telegraph.
I dearly wish we could be toasting Britain’s freedom with champagne at 11pm on Friday, just as we’d planned. Under the circumstances, half a glass of Tizer and Nurofen is more like it.
Two years and nine months ago, on a day that was shocking and euphoric in equal measure, our country decided that the European Union had intruded quite far enough into our affairs, thanks very much. In the biggest vote in our history, we voted Out and March 29, 2019, was to be our designated Independence Day.
As midnight chimed, we would know we were a sovereign nation once again, with the right to make our own laws, fish our own seas and control our borders. It would be a moment of trepidation, undoubtedly, but also a new dawn of excitement and possibility. Three cheers for democracy!
Instead, we are confronted with a powerless prime minister who has had to promise to resign to command the support of her own party and a Parliament so useless that they can’t even organise their own coup this week against that referendum result of June 23 2016. What was meant to be a great crossroads in the story of the United Kingdom has turned into Swindon’s seven-circle roundabout of Hell.
It could all have been so different. Had David Cameron, the man who gave us the referendum, decided to stay on to implement the result I have no doubt he could have used his expansive powers of persuasion, that emollient Etonianness, to build a cross-party consensus. But Cameron left Downing Street within hours, causing a Conservative leadership contest. Obviously, the winner had to be someone with enormous enthusiasm for Brexit, a charismatic strategist who could buoy up the country through the fraught negotiations while overcoming the reasonable doubts of the 48% who had voted Remain.
It turned out to be one of those freak contests, like Wimbledon women's final 2013, where the strongest contenders knock each other out and the weaker player takes the prize. A Brexit with Boris Johnson on the bridge would have been very different from the drab, defeatist process the lukewarm Remainer Theresa May made of it. From the moment Mrs May entered Number 10, Brexit was in trouble. A calamitous general electionwith a Tory manifesto which managed to repel even its staunchest supporters pretty much sealed its fate.
The Establishment, which was accustomed to getting its way, did everything in its considerable power to clip the wings of that great, existential leap of daring made by 17.4 million people. We were too thick to know what we had voted for, apparently. Nobody voted to be poorer, they claimed, although we had been warned repeatedly by Project Fear that we would soon be destitute if we voted Leave.
The Brexit people thought they were voting for soon became Hard Brexit, a very bad and undesirable thing compared to Soft Brexit, which was favoured by the BBC, the majority in a Remainer Parliament and all the civil servants in the secret, parallel Brexit department set up to undermine the Exiting the EU Department which was, you know, run by actual elected politicians.
See how they wore us down? Over the months and years, with their backstops and their tariffs and their Customs Union. What felt like a simple human right, to have control of our own affairs, was ensnared in complexity. That wily silver fox Michael Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, said: “I will have done my job if, in the end, the deal is so tough on the British that they’d prefer to stay in the EU.” Brilliantly played, monsieur. Our team were rubbish.
So, today, on this much anticipated 29th of March, this is what it has come to, ladies and gentlemen. Here we are; disbelieving, disgusted, slack-jawed at the antics of MPs who granted themselves the pick of eight indicative votes on the shape of our future relationship with the EU. All eight options were rejected.
Britain deserved so much better than this. Anything has to be better than this mess. No Deal. Revoke Article 50. Replace the entire Labour frontbench with the professional dancers of Strictly. Put Bercow in a straitjacket and escort him to The Priory’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder Unit. Anything, dear God, literally anything except a “longer extension” and another two years of time wasting by the House of Clowns.
So, no champagne toast tonight. No three cheers for democracy. Not even half a cheer. Brexit, you were betrayed. Most people now just want it to be over, one way or the other.
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