Something rather strange has just happened in this wi-fi café. A group of four or five young men came in rather raucously, en route to the pool room at the back of the bar. Whereupon the lady of advanced years at the next table told them to quieten down. And they, being Spanish teenagers with a respect for age, responded accordingly. Which rather lifted my spirits, after a depressing ten minutes at 8.15 this morning listening to Toni next door bawling at his nine-year old boy for being a puta coño, burro, tonto, etc. Isn’t life funny sometimes? Unless you’re nine years old and have Toni as a father.
There was a report in one of the Spanish papers today about the British traffic police fining drivers for being too close to the car in front. The tone was one of incredulity but I guess it’ll happen here one day too. Hard as this might be to believe right now, as tailgating is the second favourite national sport to bullfighting. Actually, that’s not true; it’s far more popular.
I occasionally allude to aspects of Spanish society which I fear I will never understand, no matter how much longer I live here. One of these is the law around the use of land and building approvals. As a case in point, there are 52 houses in O Grove, just along the coast from me, which were built in 1991. Very close to the sea, they were put up in flagrant disregard of a coastal law passed in the late 80’s forbidding such construction. Nineteen years later – and with incontrovertible logic – Galicia’s Supreme Court has finally declared them illegal. Though without making a demolition order. This, of course, is just one of many, many such examples throughout Spain. And I have no idea whether the root cause is a (convenient) greyness in the law arising arise from the overlap of competing regional and national jurisdictions or whether it's unscrupulousness made possible by a slow and inefficient legal system. Or both. But it all adds to the, at times, surreal nature of this society.
It seems that the government’s habit of flying kites and then hauling them down quickly is catching on. As this week’s contribution to the debate on a new social contract, the representatives of the business community proposed that people under 30 could be offered contracts that paid them little and allowed them to be fired on a whim, without any sort of compensation. Being charitable, they may have seen this as a useful jobs stimulus at a time when unemployment continues to soar here. But, to say the least, it was not well received by the government or the unions and was promptly withdrawn. Having first served to confirm the view that Spanish businessmen are red-in-tooth-and-clay capitalists who would have been eschewed by 19th century US robber barons.
Finally . . . Back to property mysteries and the law – The building in Pontevedra’s main square I featured a couple of days ago has now had a fence erected all around it, to stop bits of masonry falling on us. This is because the owners have failed to comply with a court order of three months ago ordering them to make urgent repairs to the place. I guess things would be different if anyone stood a chance of living long enough to make millions from a lawsuit in respect of an injury arising from such culpable neglect.
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