Dawn

Dawn

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

I see that the self-imposed restriction on showing gruesome pictures of the victims of the Madrid bombings, doesn’t apply to Chechen guerrillas. We had a nice close-up of the bullet-riddled corpse of their leader in all the papers today. No local sensitivities, I suppose.

What chance Damage to Catalunia? Buildings are collapsing in central Barcelona, local politicians are competing with ever-larger accusations of illegal commissions and now their football team has been booted out of the Champions’ Cup by Chelsea. I doubt, though, that the rest of Spain is too disappointed with all this. Quietly laughing, more likely.

The new President of the Episcopalian College has been elected and this made front-page news today in all the papers. And even the leader column in several. As I’ve said, it’s hard to imagine this being newsworthy in many other western countries. Only 20% of the population may still attend Mass here but the Church retains a powerful grip not only on them but also on their sinful brethren. The government has promised a constructive dialogue with the new incumbent about such horrors as gay marriages and a school curriculum without Religion as a key subject.

I’ve been asked to play the part of the Captain of a British ship in a docudrama being made by TV Galicia about an 1890 shipwreck on the local coast. The Spanish text was clearly written by somebody educated to modern British standards of punctuation so it took me some time to figure out what I was actually supposed to say, unhelped by such archaic niceties as commas and full stops. But this is done and filming is next week. I will tell you when they have sold it to the BBC.

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