Dawn

Dawn

Friday, April 07, 2006

Moans from Merseyside: Day 7

So airlines are being urged to enforce their own rules about hand luggage. I wonder if this will make any difference to things in Iberia. In contrast to the UK, even Easyjet and Ryanair staff there currently make no atttempt to check the size, weight or even number of carry-on bags. The consequences for the cabin are pretty obvious.

The author J K Rowling has, understandably, inveighed against a media which promotes skinniness in adolescent and even pre-pubescent girls. The question that springs to my mind is - If this pressure is really so great [and I believe it is], why are so many young women in the UK so overweight? Or 'fat' as we used to call it. Perhaps the only ones affected are those who figure among the increasing number that leave school here without the ability to read the relevant magazines. Though merely looking at the pictures would probably be just as effective, I guess.

Talking of illiteracy in the UK, within a few years it should only be permissible to use 'amount' instead of 'number' in the last paragraph. This is what 'people sovereignty' really means. Even a upmarket newspaper such as The Independent is prone to such phrases as 'A substantial amount of technical details...' Though they didn't compound the error by referring, a few lines later, to 'the huge number still to be done by the government'. I am saddened by this but, as a supporter of people sovereignty, have no right to complain. So this is merely an observation.

I have to say it's very relaxing approaching roundabouts in the certain knowledge the traffic in the left lane will go left and the cars in the right lane will go right. And not in any one of the various permutations on offer. In the week left to me, I will be taking to the roads as a form of therapy, prior to returning to Pontevedra's urban anarchy.

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