Dawn

Dawn

Friday, March 04, 2005

The Spanish government has rejected the long term EU budget on the grounds that it’s unacceptable [to them at least] that Spain should become a net contributor to EU funds by 2013. Who said the Spanish are averse to forward planning? One wonders when they think it would be fair for the increasingly wealthy Spanish to stop being the biggest takers from the Brussels coffers and start giving something back.

Travelling on Spain’s wonderful highways and in the country’s comfortable, modern trains, you could be in no doubt that you were in the 21st century. But pop into a copistería and you might be forced to review your opinion. These are high-street shops with wall-to-wall photocopying machines that restlessly feed the ravenous appetite for paper of Spain’s infamous bureaucracy. Here you stand in line while those in front of you have the entire contents of bulging briefcases duplicated, at the cost of at least a small Scandinavian copse. And the astonishing thing is that a few years ago, they say, it was even worse. Back then, you also had to buy a different stamp for each document you were having done. At different offices. So there must be hope for further progress towards sanity. Though not today and not for me; tomorrow I have to photocopy at least 6 documents to attach to a simple request for a credit card. I’m convinced that there are people in Spain who spend their entire working lives telling applicants they haven’t attached the statutory minimum number of documents to their forms.

The phone scam mentioned yesterday appears to have been a family affair. And the take was in the region of €5 million. Which is an awful lot of gullible punters. But I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing in the dock the producers of the televised Tarot card readings, as these are surely as honest as the day is long.

The rainfall in the west of the Iberian peninsula this winter has been so low that the Portuguese have taken to firing chemically-loaded missiles into the centre of clouds. Beats having anything to do with Iraq, I suppose.

No comments: