Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

I’ve mentioned that El Mundo has been waging a campaign to prove the government is manipulating the enquiry into the Madrid bombings of March 2004 in order to hide any ETA link. This has descended into something of a slanging match between the country’s two great newspapers – El Mundo and El Pais – with each of them referring to the other as ‘a newspaper’. The arguments are arcane and [for me, at least] hard to follow. The latest spat concerns a document about boric acid which may or may not have been changed for political reasons. There was a short enquiry into this by Spain’s celebrity judge, Baltasar Garzón, but he is now being investigated himself for over-harsh treatment of the police lab technicians involved. I suspect I’m not the only person in Spain very confused by it all. But it certainly sells papers. Or El Mundo, at least. My friend Fernando in Ferrol has asked me not to allow the fact that the police make mistakes to give the impression something more serious is going on. I suspect he meant these are so common as to be meaningless in themselves and I was reminded of his request when I saw a cartoon in today’s El Mundo. This showed two men sitting on a park bench reading the papers. One of them is saying to the other “11-M, police technicians, experts, judges . . . If there were a Nobel Prize for bodging, we’d carry it off every year.”

Having watched someone in my regular bar/café pick up and flick through my Prospect magazine, it struck me – possibly not for the first time – that it’s a Spanish trait to act first and then - if there’s any indication any offence has been caused – to apologise later. In this case, there was neither offence nor apology, just a pleasant chat about the guy’s inability to understand a word of English. Which raised the question of why he picked it up in the first place.

It was, of course, a false dawn. I’m again receiving 10 spam messages overnight and another 20 or more during the day. I don’t suppose this is abnormal. Which reminds me – it’s now Day 11 of my wait for the new modem that would be with me ‘in 2 or 3 days’. It’s just a suspicion but I doubt that my monthly charge will reflect this downtime. It was a smart decision to invest in a back-up modem a week ago.

Giles Trimlett claims the only thing that hasn’t changed almost beyond recognition in Spain in the last 30 years is the Spanish male. Things, he says, are still very unequal between the sexes, especially in the home. But I’m pleased to say that, in one area at least, there is complete equality. Both female and male whores are given the same chance to advertise their services in the small ads at the back of the newspapers. Small? ’20 x 10’ . . . Or ‘8 x 4’, if you prefer.

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