Dawn

Dawn

Monday, March 15, 2010

Censorship; Corruption; and Travelling Poets

Spain’s television company, TVE, has produced a documentary on the despoliation of the coast over the last ten or twenty years. Possibly because they part financed it – but possibly for other reasons – the government has demanded that a two-minute section dealing with corruption be cut out. Their rationale is that this played no part in the rape of the coastline and that anything they finance must be free of errors or tendentious assertions. Just like government announcements and predictions, I guess. Anyway, the director disagrees and had refused to make the cut, meaning the program won’t be aired. He sees it as censorship of the worst kind and it’s hard to disagree with him.

Which reminds me . . . It seems the Spanish courts are now getting very close to disallowing the wire-tapping evidence which would be fatal to members of the PP right-of-centre party accused of financial skulduggery on a massive scale. It all seems very surreal to an Anglo observer. Especially when the results of some of the taps are printed in the papers, as they were in El País today.

I’ll bet it’s not often you’re travelling on the London tube and a chap gets on and recites a poem in, first, English, and then Welsh. But this, more or less, is what happened tonight when someone entered my carriage on the Madrid metro and treated us to a short poem by Rosalia de Castro in, first, Castellano and then Gallego. He didn’t actually get round to asking me for a donation. Which is just as well as I was going to tell him his Gallego accent was crap. Probably not true, of course, but it would surely have impressed my fellow travellers.

Finally . . . A word of advice about driving in Spain. Don’t do it between, say, 3am and 10am on Friday, Saturday or Sunday mornings. For this is when young men here feel most compelled – “for reasons yet to be determined” – to crash into cars coming in the opposite direction. Failing any of these, into walls, trees and house-fronts.

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