Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Prostitution is a difficult issue and different countries take different approaches. In Italy, it seems, provided you’re rich and powerful enough, consorting with high class whores can actually increase your popularity. At least if you’ve seen 72 summers. And, here in Spain, I rather doubt any male ever lost respect for admitting he preferred to ejaculate into a fee-charging stranger than into anyone or anything else. In the UK, prostitution is a ‘grey area’; whereas here in Spain it’s rather more of a vivid pink hue. This being the colour of the neon-lit signs which advertise the thousands of ‘clubs’ that line the country’s principal roads. And about which no one at all – certainly not the government or the Catholic Church – seems to give a tinker’s cuss. But at least we get the occasional tut of disapproval from a TV station, via a “gritty” documentary about Spain’s disproportionately vast and massively exploitative sex industry. Or an article like that in today’s El Pais, which provides pictures so graphic they’d surely be seen as pornographic in most other countries. Here in this more robust culture, though, they probably rank with gore, entrails and splattered brains in their capacity to increase readership. Personally, I’d prefer the lovely Letitia. Or even Princess Di. As a readership lure, I mean. Not as a five-minute consort.

Crossing the be-trenched Alameda in Pontevedra this morning, I had to give way to a young woman whose shoes had the highest heels and the pointiest toes I’ve ever seen. Below the slinkiest-possible dress. And she was even carrying what my mother used to call an ‘evening bag’. Since it was only 10.40 in the morning, her elegant sexiness struck me as rather incongruous. But, as she was heading for the headquarters of the Provincial government, I guessed she was going - possibly a tad over-dressed - for a job interview. However, when I later read the El País article and realised that the compulsory civil-servant coffee break had been imminent, I began to wonder. I’ve heard rumours that salaries are not being paid by the cash-strapped councils. Can they really be making payments in kind?

Anyway, next weekend both the Alameda and the entire old quarter of Pontevedra will be given over to our last fiesta of the summer – the Feira Franca. Or Medieval Fair. If you pay us a visit, you’d be forgiven for thinking this event is decades, if not centuries, old. But, in truth, it was initiated only 9 years ago, to become what is now one of the year’s pre-eminent ways to have fun without chucking any goats or donkeys off church steeples. Well worth a visit if you’re anywhere near. Even if you’re a nervous quadruped. After this, you’ll have to wait until the end of October, for the Seafood Festival in O Grove. When the sun may shine or the rain may pour. But the percebes will still taste like salty rubber. And cost you a prince’s ransom.

Finally . . . The Voz de Galicia yesterday took up the theme of the region’s three under-performing airports and asked why they’d all been outstripped by Oporto’s in the last 5 years of so. Then it answered its own question with this list of six gaping deficiencies:-
1. Long term planning
2. Stable management with shared objectives, undiluted by political/localist in-fighting
3. A commercial outlook
4. An international vision
5. Concentration on low-cost flights, and
6. Effective marketing to the target clientele.

Well, quite. And, if this sort of rank failure is a national rather than just a regional feature, then it does leave one worrying about how Spain will drag itself up by its bootstraps once her deep recession is finally over. In more than a year’s time. And in a much-changed and ever-more competitive world. Worse to come before then, though.

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