Dawn

Dawn

Monday, November 25, 2019

Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 25.11.19

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.   
                  Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Politics
Spanish Life 
  • Keeping abreast of protests against Spain's neo-fascists.
  • Incidentally, it's hard to know who the neo-fascists are, as everyone who disagrees with you here is instantly labelled a fascist.
  • As I was mopping up the litres of water around the base of my toilet yesterday - after I'd failed to sufficiently tighten a connection - I recalled how horrified Spaniards are to see carpets in UK bathrooms. Aware, as they are, that water isn't the only liquid that finds itself to the floor.
  • Of course, there's a tradition of tiling in Spanish houses that doesn't exist in the UK. And, until the late 1960s, Spain was considered part of the 'developing world'. Not many folk could afford wall-to-wall carpeting. Even where it made sense.
Galician Life 
  • Not so long ago I was telling a visitor about the discovery, in 2006, of a small submarine in Vigo harbour, which turned out to be a novel way to get cocaine into the hands of our narcotráficos. Yesterday, came news of a similar incident, in a little bay (Aldán) where I tried to buy a house when I first came here.
  • Reading of Aldán reminded me of a bizarre aspect of that house deal. The seller's price was X, my offer was 0.9X and the seller's response was a counter-demand of 1.2X. Needless to say, I walked away, wondering what on earth his thought process might be. Perhaps that, if there was one stupid foreigner prepared to pay something near his high price, there might well be another coming along soon who'd pay even more. Astonishingly, it happened again with the 2nd house I made an offer on. I naturally wondered what universe I'd wandered into. Not for the last time.
  • The promised foto of the ugly O Burgo bridge railings:-

Will they be painted, I wonder.
  • P. S. After weeks of rain, the river is as high as I ever recall seeing it. Floods imminent?
The UK
  • Nice comment on the recent Q&A: Four leaders, one audience and not a brain cell between them . . . . .What is the point of these debates except to remind us how mediocre and unskilled our politicians have become? Do we wonder why everyone hates the political class when we allow the inadequate leaders of our four main parties to be ceremonially spat at by people who speak about them as if they are murderers and rapists?  The full article is below.
The EU
  • See the 2nd article below for an amusing view of eurotrashers.
The USA
The Way of the World 
  • Presiding at a landmark case in the UK High Court, a judge was confused about the police recording of “non-criminal hate speech”. He was thrown by the statement that a comment reported as hateful by a victim must be recorded “irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element”. Mused the judge: "That doesn’t make sense to me. How can it be a hate incident if there is no evidence of the hate element?". There came no answer, it's reported. So police are now recording not only hate speech that is not criminal, but also hate speech in which there is no evidence whatsoever of hate.
Finally . . .
  • Nice comment from the author of Middlemarch: “People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are.”   
THE ARTICLES

1. Four leaders, one audience and not a brain cell between them: Camilla Long

Sometimes I feel like Brexit is a painful experiment callously staged by television companies to find out the most stressful way of ingesting politics.

There can’t be any other reason for the past three years of feral audiences and eye-flaming television studio sets, the pale parade of dank anchors. In terms of sheer evolution of the genre, we are now just about walking upright, having decided against multiway bunfights following the great Maitlis horror of June. But judging by the second big debate of the general election on Friday, in which the four leaders took to the stage separately, we haven’t experienced anything close to increased brain capacity or the ability to grasp anything yet.

How dense do you have to be to ask Nicola Sturgeon whether she’ll still be up for a second Scottish referendum if she went into coalition with Jeremy Corbyn? And yet here was a man named Aldous Everard, asking the SNP leader if she’d still be “pushing for an independence referendum”. You could tell she was smiling, as if to say: are you joking? But the first rule of debates is that you can never, ever tell a member of the audience he’s an idiot.

And what epic idiots they were. Aldous Everard, Magdalen Lake — even the names sounded like something from the Hunger Games. During one exchange, they booed Corbyn so ferociously I thought: “Don’t bother replacing Jeremy Kyle on weekday mornings. We can just watch two hours of 20 power-tripping man buns/embedded activists clobbering the main political leaders instead.”

Fiona Bruce, encased in a dental nurse’s sheath, tried to gain control of the masses by shrieking: “I am in charge of this thing!” For a certain section of society, Bruce losing her rag and then saying “tank-topped bum boys” in the presence of Boris “Shagger” Johnson will be worth the television licence fee alone. For the rest of us, it was dismal TV.

What is the point of these debates except to remind us how mediocre and unskilled our politicians have become? Do we wonder why everyone hates the political class when we allow the inadequate leaders of our four main parties to be ceremonially spat at by people who speak about them as if they are murderers and rapists? “I’m terrified for my daughters,” was something someone actually said to Corbyn, who is leading the Labour Party at the age of 70. “Do you now agree how ridiculous you sounded?” sneered someone else at Jo Swinson.

I read during the week that “senior BBC executives” had claimed the organisation thought it was “wrong” to expose lies told by Johnson “because it undermines trust in British politics”. To which I say: no organisation that even considers broadcasting the rabid nightmare that is Question Time can have even the tiniest of qualms about eroding trust in our elected representatives.

In terms of basic presentation, Nicola Sturgeon was the only politician who came anywhere near the standard of David Cameron or Tony Blair. You have to ask yourself what’s happened to the business of being a statesman when three of our top leaders don’t even come close to John Major. Taking the podium in an ice-blue dress, Sturgeon felt the most confident by dint of having been five years in the job.

By contrast, Swinson has had less than five months as leader of the Lib Dems. Watching her being attacked or patronised by men with beards shouting “Jeremy Corbyn has been fighting anti-Semitism since before you were born” felt like watching a family solicitor trying to organise a pissed rural barn dance. And what of her mad policies? You do get the impression the Lib Dem leader really is daft enough to think that by pledging to revoke article 50, she’ll automatically get 50% of the vote.

Johnson appeared last, with the haunted demeanour of a man living in 2015 who’s just been shown the end of 2019. Is it just me or did the prime minister look seriously spooked? Or was that just months of Carrie’s merciless chickpea and labneh diet?

He submitted to the debates in the same manner as he always does, as if he’s holding his breath under water. For all their shrieking and mud-slinging, the audience failed to put him under anything approaching decent pressure.

There was one moment of glory, however. Challenged over his comments on the burqa, he launched into a wonderful defence of the right of women to wear what they want and a passionate diatribe on freedom of speech. Why couldn’t the whole debate be like that?

2. Private jet on the runway. Sweaty hand on your back. Say ciao to Andrew’s entitled Eurotrashers: Jeremy Clarkson

Shortly after Prince Andrew claimed he didn’t indulge in public displays of affection, we were bombarded with a million photographs of him doing just that. There were so many, it started to look as though he’d had his hand on the arse of everyone in London and had even gone into battle in the Falklands with his tongue in his co-pilot’s ear.

The problem is, however, that in the world he inhabits, this is the done thing. When you are introduced to a woman, you don’t shake hands. You run your fingers delicately up her exposed back and she responds by resting her head on your shoulder. And then, later, you mate.

The first person I met from this weird world was a translator we once used in Italy. She was idiotically pretty, all freckles and blue eyes — like a Cadbury’s Flake girl who’d washed up, under a mane of just-out-of-bed hair, in a Timotei waterfall. And she spoke about 17 languages. “Where are you from?” I asked squeakily. “Er . . .” she replied.

That’s the thing about these people. They’re not ever from anywhere. Her mum was an American diplomat in Buenos Aires, her dad was an Italian architect and she’d been born in France and educated in England, and lived mostly these days in Switzerland.

This is why most of her friends would have a “de” or a “von” in the middle of their name. To give them some kind of anchor. It’s why Andrew fits, because the man he calls Dad is Greek and his mum is German. But he’s the Duke of York. I’d be Jeremy of Doncaster. I actually call these people the “ofs and froms”. But everyone else has a different name for them: Eurotrash. And you can spot them at parties because they all have wandering Eurohands.

They emerge from their mother’s birth canal on water-skis, with a golden suntan. By the age of four, they are fully qualified helicopter pilots, and by six they’ve won several motor races. They never double-fault on the tennis court, never ski on a piste and, like Andrew, have no discernible source of income. The odd one may have an art gallery in Zurich or a private equity operation in Mayfair, but, by and large, they live an impossible life on invisible means.

It’s a carbon-heavy life of parties, mostly. They alight in Rome for Alain de Biarritz’s wedding to Alexandra von München and then, after a day of recovery by the pool, they all share a secret signal and whizz off to Moscow for Hugo von Duesenberg’s 40th. In many ways, they’re like starlings. And, like starlings, they socialise and travel only with their own kind — people who are in the same boat. Or on the same boat, usually.

Sitting at a dining table with these guys involves a lot of shouting, because each has such a long name that the place card is 3ft wide. Which means you are always miles away from the person sitting next to you. Not that they will talk to you, anyway, because of your miserably short name. And because you’re an insect in a room full of antelopes.

The men never wear socks. The women never wear much of anything at all. And while they are all able to converse fluently with waiters in any country on Earth, they all communicate with one another in English, but with an accent that sociolinguistic professors would place halfway between Milan and Kentucky. The word they use for “party”, for instance, has a “d” in it. And when we say “PJs”, we mean pyjamas, but to them PJs are private jets, which is what they all use when the lead starling suddenly decides everyone needs to be in St Moritz. Or Juan-les-Pins. These people, who are only ever photographed with a glass of champagne in one hand and a woman’s arse in the other, are all basically beholden to Peter Sarstedt.

You might think they’d never allow a girl from the back streets of Naples to join their gang, but that’s not true. Yes, the men must have private means, but they also need boat meat for the summers in St Tropez. And anyone will do, as long as she is visually striking and 7ft tall. Her only job is to appear at the dock in a bikini that’s two sizes too small. And to not suffer from heat rash. These are the mystery women who appear in the James Bond casino scenes. And in the background of all those Andrew pictures.

And it all sounds very idyllic for everyone concerned. The women just have to be pretty and they get a racehorse for Christmas, which they keep for a laugh. And the guys never have to mate with anyone who’s fat.

No one ever has to buy a washing-up bowl or fill a car with petrol. Which all sounds great, but none of them owns a dog — it’d be too much of a nuisance dealing with it when Air Starling decided to head to pastures new. They don’t have jobs for the same reason. And this means they have no concept of responsibility.

Marriages, in their world, are like houses. You move in and then you move out again. They do the wedding thing because they fancy hosting a party, but at the reception the bride will get a lot of Eurohand action, and the only reason the groom doesn’t notice is that he’s upstairs, snorting coke off the back of the girl from the back streets of Naples.

They never really had much of a connection with their parents, either, because they were sent off to boarding school four minutes after their umbilical cord was cut. And they only ever met Mum subsequently when they passed in the general aviation terminal in Nice.

All of which means that, while their lives are glamorous and exciting and filled with sunshine and princes, they contribute nothing and achieve even less.

Plus, they never experience the most important thing of all: love. It’s why so many of them are such enormous bell-ends.

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