I can’t fathom why Denmark is marked ‘Bitter’. Any idea why?

In my view, having very good Danish friends and having been there not so long ago, is that the Danes [and the Dutch, too] are what the English [and I do mean the English, not the Celtic lot] would be like if the English were a great deal better behaved. Vomiting tourists indeed.

But then, has a Dane ever gone into rock folk-lore for driving a car through the plate glass wall of the foyer of a hotel that would not take his custom? Or bought a giant mechanical chicken from a supermarket and towed it around LA, dispensing eggs on the highway? A rock violinist friend told the guy producing his album that he wanted it to sound “like Deep Purple in Frankfurt, with the mounted police charges and the tear gas…”

It’s the Saxon genes. Snelling – that’s a good Saxon name. Deep down, I bet you too can be as badly behaved as Keith Moon.

The bit of the Euro map that struck me as weirdly accurate is [roughly] Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. They are labelled ‘toilet cleaners’, ‘diaper changers’ and ‘radioactive nannies’.

I saw a piece in a UK paper about the executive/professional classes, particularly in SE England, handing over their children to the full-time care of Eastern European/Balkan states nannies and au pairs. One woman guiltily confessed, “We are outsourcing the upbringing of our children to Bulgarian teenagers.”

A good friend of mine has had a succession of Slovakian, Slovenian and Romanian au pairs looking after his two daughters since the girls were born. I remember his wife, who had just come in from shopping, handing the 6 month old to the 18 y.o Slovakian girl with “I’m going out to lunch – her bottle’s in the micro”

Dad leaves home in the 911 at 06:00. Now mum is back at work, she doesn’t get home till gone 19:30.

I think this is why it would be reasonable to have confidence in the UK economy coming back from being run on the smell of an oily rag, courtesy of Messrs Blair, Brown, Goodwin et al and not in the economy of Spain, for all the obvious reasons, “Cafe por todos” being one – and very charming, too. Mine’s a cortado doble, p.f.

European map IS hilarious and probably has more truth in it!

that’s a gloomy read, if ever I saw one. My first thought, on getting to the end was “O gawd! Maybe the military will step in, one way or another…”

Interestingly, I had an email last night from my BA, now MA, ex-lodger. Due to ‘el enchufe’ operating nicely for him, he has been working in Oracle’s Madrid office, where his sis is a hot-shot. Now his MA is done, I quote, “In Madrid and Barcelona crisis is not too big, but in Valencia is horrible, it`s imposible to find a job there.”

He mentioned coming back to VLC to do “investment advice” with a pal. My advice as to what he should advise his clients was “Take yer money and RUN!”

Ted Heath, back in the mid-70s made two memorable statements. “…the unacceptable face of capitalism.” which everybody remembers and “We can’t all be tour guides and video salesmen” which I remember, even if nobody else does. I’ve done a bit of tour guiding ….

Spain looks as if it will turn into a sort of European India – small pockets of world-class enterprise surrounded by huge areas of what passes for subsistence living, in European terms.

As perceptive and accurate as ever and it is, as John Hooper (New Spaniards) mentioned to me last week when I was interviewing him (to be posted on Books4Spain soon), Spain’s inability to create sustainable employment is a long term feature of the economy which goes back centuries.

In my experience, some is related to geography, topography and (lack of) natural resources but also, as pointed out in my article The Underlying Causes of the Spanish Civil War, also to do with the dominant Castilian nobilities disdain for commercial enterprise (in turn encouraged by the Church) – hence over reliance by land owners on sheep farming and agriculture.

Like you, as a long term resident of Spain, I fear that the country is in permanent reverse after the (false) boom years – lets hope we are wrong!

Rod

This thing with the Greeks is never gonna fly. And, to anything the fragrant Ms Lagarde might say, I say she would say that, wouldn’t she? Her job is to whistle loudly in the dark to keep the heebie-jeebies away while Merkozy do their fandango round the ruins of the Euro project.

I’ve thought for some time now that the German electorate will call time on their hither-to magnanimous acceptance of bank-rolling this game. Their southern neighbours have been playing fast and loose. Up with it I do not think they will further put.The chickens – I hear the flapping of wings and the squawkings of the flock – are coming home to roost.

Also, a book your readers may be interested in is Fabled Shore, from Pyrenees to Portugal by Rose Macaulay – reviewed for us this week by Michael Eaude (Catalonia, a cultural history, Barcelona, the city that reinvented itself):

The novelist, Rose Macaulay, toured the coast of Spain, from Portbou to Huelva and along to Cape Saint Vincent at the South-west tip of Portugal, by car in the late 1940s. Thus she was a visitor who caught the country just before the massive changes starting with the 1960s economic boom. “We got to Marbella, which had a large, hot, quiet beach,” she reports. She drove onto the beach and swam alone.

Macaulay’s eye darts rapidly from people to landscape to buildings and she is erudite on history and architecture. These are the coasts that saw Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans. She has a strong feeling for the past in the present and wears her learning lightly, moving the book along through vivid description and an ironic jauntiness of tone. Here she is at Ronda (she makes several inland forays from her beloved Mediterranean): “I looked down into the gorge, which is certainly very singular and noticeable… whether it improves the look of the town or not might be argued”.

Rose Macaulay is an eccentric. And if she’s not, she acts as one. She uses the rarity of a woman driving a car and her age -she is in her late 60s- to chat to people. One criticism, and curious in someone who was a pacifist: you would hardly know that Spain was suffering impoverishment under a cruel dictatorship. In this, Fabled Shore is inferior to Brenan’s The Face of Spain, published in 1950, a year later.

http://books4spain.com/book/detail/fabled-shore-1

I don’t think you need worry about being swamped by Ch 4′s P. I. T. S. viewers. Think about all those telly cooks knocking out stuff – how many of the multitude of viewers end up cooking any of those recipes?And all they’ve got to do is include the ingredients in their regular shop and then do the business in their own kitchen.

To infest Gandia with hordes, a great many punters would have to part with serious dosh, amongst other inconvenient demands, at a time when there’s not a lot of spare about.

Like the cooking and house make-over progs, A Place In The Sun is entertainment. It certainly is when the toothsome Jasmine is on screen. Graham H says she’s 6’2″. I saw somewhere she claims to be 5’9″. We demand the truth! ‘Fess up!

She married one of the prog’s cameramen, John Boast. If ever a man warranted his surname – he has a lot to boast about.

I expect the prog will go out just as Spain goes into melt-down, gets thrown out of the Euro, Merkozy and the ECB/IMF mob have kanipschins….