Justice?

Every day, when I come back home from my daily swim, I turn towards Toni and ask, “Carcel?” which is the Spanish for, “Prison?”  This does not refer to my esteemed partner, but rather to the multitude of miscreants who were, are, may be members of the Spanish conservative party called PP.

PP is systemically corrupt and corrupting.  The number of members of PP, or ex-members of that degenerate party who have been or are in the process of being condemned for corruption is astonishing.  Astonishing, that is, in terms of a British view of the political situation in Spain: whatever you Brits who might be reading this think about your government, you have to come to Spain at the moment to see real corruption in operation.  Teresa (or however you spell her name) May might be a fairly worthless piece of self-regarding, opportunistic, political self-seeking cowardice, but compared to the filth-in-depth that “rules” Spain, she is of thrice-refined gold!

For what seems like years (and actually is) we, in Spain have been watching a slow implosion of decency, as member after member of the ruling party of PP has been accused (with what appears to be 24 carat gold evidence) of astonishing culpability in a systematic (I make no apology for repeating the idea) defrauding of the public purse of this country. I have watched in half-fascinated, guilt-ridden disbelief as this country seems to accept venality as a necessary component of government.  Now, at long last, my repeated question is being answered in the affirmative.

We are starting to see a sad (from their point of view!) procession of lying criminal thieves take the drive to their cells.  Unfortunately, they are all going to prisons in Spain, and not as I wanted, an open dormitory prison in the deep south of the US of A!  But at least they are going.  God knows, there are positive armies of potential inmates to join them, if the justice system keeps this up!

What is fascinating from my point of view is exactly what the ruling party is actually going to do now.  The criminals who have been put away have deep and historical knowledge of exactly what the good and the great within the party have been doing over the years.  They may be in prison, but they must know that if they cared to open their mouths and tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then they would be joined in secure accommodation!  So, how is PP going to keep their mouths closed?  What sort of offer can they make to these people who have been used to the high life and now find themselves in rather more cramped conditions?  Even in the relaxed open-type prison that we have seen illustrated on the television for some of the more highly placed thieves, they are going to be chaffing thinking about all the resources that they have salted away and which they will not be able to use!

All of these proven liars keep harping on about their innocence, they haven’t even the good grace to admit their manifold mistakes and thefts, they will never appreciate what they have done until all the money (with interest) is taken from them.  They have shown that they have nothing but contempt for the people whom they have defrauded; their only god is cash and that is where must hit them.  Between the lot of them, they have probably stolen enough money to build tens of schools, hospitals, parks, swimming pools, libraries: to finance the building of roads, bridges, tramways, metros, you name it.  Instead of which, these bloated thieves have raided the public purse and enriched themselves at the expense of the people of Spain.

Watch this space to see exactly how the ruling party manages to mitigate the sentences of their corrupt friends.  The one thing that I am certain about, is that these miscreants will never serve their full sentences.  PP will find a way to make their lives just that little bit different from those of the “ordinary” criminals.  Watch this space indeed!

On a more personal basis, I am still trying to teach my fingers to deal with the placement of the shift and return keys on the new computer.  It is amazing how difficult trying to come to terms with a new stretch for the little finger can be when years of previous typing are working against new skills!  The computer, however, is far too expensive for me to do anything other than adapt!

I have also reverted to old habits, as this typing is my usual displacement activity.  Next week (and frighteningly near) is another test in my Spanish class.  I should be cramming with a desperation that is a function of my lack of specific grammatical knowledge in the areas of language that the next two units demands, however I fear that the relationship is something of the inverse variety than anything useful.

I could always write poems!

A New Toy

There is a price to be paid for being picky!

The accumulated money gained from delaying my grasping hands getting a spendthrift hold on the cash has now been splashed out on a computer.  A new computer.  “Why do you need a new computer,” a friend asked.  I responded that I didn’t understand her question.  For me the key red light in her enquiry was the casual use of the word “need” I have spent my life combating those people who can use that word as a form of fiscal assault and I am immune to the implied condemnation.

I have suffered for this new machine. 

Which is to say that I have done precisely nothing, except fret of course.

The specs. of the computer are so high-end that the model that I wanted did not appear to be available in Spain or indeed in any surrounding European country including the UK and Germany.  The only available market that sold what I wanted was in the US of A, so I bought it there.

That was the start of the story.  For the first four days after purchase my computer moved through California, the continental United States and the Atlantic Ocean at the rate of 1,500 Km a day.  And then it got to Madrid.

From the 23^rd of January to the 10^th of February it was held in customs and went nowhere.  OK, they did have to get in touch with me and explain that there would be duties to be paid, but the delays were inexcusable.  Especially for someone like myself whose life-blood is the use and abuse of gadgets!

I am, of course, inclined to be more mellow now that my highly expensive piece of technological bling is at the end of my fingertips, but it does not take much for me to rile myself up again at the thought of the denial of something which represents the culminating perk of a working life!

The USP or at least one of the features that I like, is that the laptop configuration is only one aspect of the computer, as the keyboard is able to be rotated 360 degrees, transforming the machine into a sort of tablet.  The keys are backlit, though dark at the present time of typing: the SSD is 1TB and all the other bits and pieces are equally impressive and, as yet terra incognita.

Well, that was easy enough: I’ve turned the backlight for the keys on.  Something of a triumph.  Petty, but a triumph.

Now on to the aspects that are not quite as positive, or so easy to resolve.  The layout of the keyboard is problematical.  The usual hunt for odd keys is absolutely normal in any new machine; what is not so easy to cope with is the actual physical layout of some of the keys.  The shift key for the right side is a single key placed further to the right than I am used to.  The enter/return key for the right hand is directly abutting the backslash key!   An odd choice and one which is going to take some time to get used to.  But get used to it I will.  The computer is far too expensive to find it a difficulty!

I hope that this will be the first of a new series of inconsequential blogs in which I will refine my technique: whether it be for stylistic niceties in English or in the decreasing number of times I push the wrong keys!

The search for Truth?

There is something invigoratingly refreshing (as well as totally humiliating!) about discovering that your use of one of your favourite quotations has been inaccurate.

            I cannot pretend to have read Francis Bacon’s Essays, Civil and Moral in full.  Indeed apart from the opening sentence of Essay I, Of Truth I don’t think that I have read any more of them, unless I have unconsciously read them as isolated quotations.

            To test the point I have just made I have traipsed upstairs to get a couple of my dictionaries of quotations: Encarta Book of Quotations (2000) London, Bloomsbury and Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1996) Edinburgh, Chambers.  If you read through the selected quotations drawn from the Essays (1625) you realise just how much and how far Bacon’s thoughts have penetrated our everyday lives.  Sometimes the wording is somewhat different in their modern form, but his witty, perceptive and profound understanding has found its way into common wisdom.

            My own favourite of his thoughts, here written correctly with the verbs in their original form rather than my own choice is something which has troubled and stimulated me in equal proportions:

         What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

The question (which you note Pilate ironically states rather than asks, he neither wants nor expects an answer) is perennially relevant and we too often follow ‘jesting Pilate’ and live in our refusal to face the demands of what Bacon goes on to describe as the “difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth” and the lure of the preference for its opposite is because, “a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure” it shuns the “naked and open day-light” of truth because “that doeth not show the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights.”

Although Bacon’s prose is perhaps too dense for a modern reader, it is worth persevering with because it puts you in contact with a liberal understanding of the human condition.  

I have made myself a promise to read more of the Essays because I see a connection with the prose of someone like Sir Thomas Browne, 

a writer I have always enjoyed reading – and another person whose writings may not be universally well known, but whose thoughts have made their way into our intellectual expression.  

You have to like a writer who can think up, for title of whose second (?) most famous work, Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial, and it has pictures!  

Both Bacon and also Browne are easily, and productively, searchable on the Internet 

If you have not read them before, you might well be surprised to find out how familiar their thought is to you.

Obviously, the quotation from Bacon has been going through my mind as I look at the situations in Spain, Britain and the USA.  

Truth seems to have become an even more slippery concept in modern political life than usual.  Brexit was conducted with “candle-lights” so dim that Truth appeared to be living in some other debate; truth, honesty, integrity and all other positive virtues are signally lacking from the bunch of chancers who have taken the government in Spain, and Trump has found new depths of duplicity and prejudice that actually manage to throw a glimmer of probity on the mismanagement of Britain and Spain!

I have ever found consolation in Literature.  Thank goodness I have a goodly selection of reading glasses to make my contemplation of so many politicians “poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and disposition, and unpleasing to themselves” as something that can be accommodated within the liberal confines of pages of value!

What price sight!

It all depends on choice.

            When you are not only short sighted, but also long sighted, you are presented with a number of way of responding to your blurred needs:

1               Do nothing and enjoy the blurred world that only really comes into focus when you are up close and personal with what you are looking at.  This approach makes driving, um, challenging and deeply illegal.  It also forces you to be clear about identifying people from shaky outlines, otherwise you are soon tagged as arrogant as you ignore people, or as I prefer to say ‘cut’ them – not through choice but because you have not worked out that they are there in front of you!

2               Use glasses.  This option gives you further levels of choice:

a.     Two pairs of glasses, one for shortsightedness and the other for long distances.

b.     Bi focal glasses that; with a tilt of the head give you (in theory) the best of both worlds in one pair of glasses.

Neither gets away from the fact that you have to wear glasses to achieve some semblance of sighted normality.  Which I hate, have hated and will always hate.

3               Use contact lenses – which also give you a couple of options:

a.     Bi focal contact lenses.  I put these in the same mythical category as Conservatives for Social Justice and Equality and Trumpist Feminism – they exist but they have no absolute reality.  I have tried these lenses and they did not work in a spectacular way.

b.     Lenses for each eye doing a different thing.  In this use of contact lenses you have one lens for reading and the lens in the other eye for distance.  Apparently ‘the brain sorts it out’.  Or not in my case.  In my case I had poor sight in both forms.

c.      Have lenses for short sight or lenses for long sight and use glasses for the one which is not catered for.

I have decided to go with the last option.  I now have lenses to give me good distance vision and I use glasses to read and for close work.

From my consumerist perspective I have been able to indulge my love of spending by buying various forms of reading glasses.  The ones provided by my optician are of the broken-magnetic type which snap together when needed and otherwise life in their dependant parts around my neck.  This is a good gimmick but they are still glasses and I dislike wearing them, but on balance they are some sort of solution.

And as for laser treatment?  I would have to have my eyes sculpted for distance and always have to wear glasses for reading, whereas now, if I choose not to wear lenses or glasses I can always read close up!

And, as I have said before, one set of my reading glasses has little lights built in on both lens frames!  

When the fury about Brexit and the current political situation in Spain gets too much, I can think about the gadgets attached to the next pair of reading glasses to keep me calm.  Or something.

Still don't believe they've allowed it!

Toni is now suffering his own version of Brexigret, as the horrible realization of the action of the so-called ‘socialist’ (sic.) party of PSOE has, by abstaining, facilitated another four years of the systemically corrupt PP (Conservative) party in Spain.

            Neither Toni nor I believe (for a single, solitary second) that either the Cs or PSOE are going to ‘hold PP to account’ because of their own selfish self-interest.  PP may be a minority government, but they can always threaten another General Election which would almost certainly see a reduction in the seats of both Cs and also PSOE.  And since neither Cs nor PSOE have been noted for their dedication to anything other than the continued existence of their respective parties and their illusions of power, it is hardly likely after their prostitution to PP that they will suddenly find a new belief that they might actually have been elected to consider the wellbeing of the country rather than their worthless selves.

            Cs – the sluts of Spanish politics – have shown themselves equally ready to accept the attentions of the ‘socialists’ in the form of PSOE and to vote with the repressive conservatives of PP.  As long as they have a whiff of power Cs will be rubbing themselves around you!  They have mouthed their support for greater transparency and dealing with corruption; it will be interesting to see how far they press their ‘tricks’ in PP to follow their stated policy which apparently makes them a viable and more wholesome alternative to the

            PSOE have wound themselves in logistical circles to justify their support for a government to which they had previously said, “No is NO!”  If another member of that traitorous party uses some unconvincing variant on the, “it is for the benefit of the Spanish people” mantra one more time, I really will throw up.

            PSOE is also terrified of another election, when the “benefit of the Spanish people” might actually result in even more of those so-called ‘socialists’ being turfed out.  So PP can do whatever the hell they like because all they have to do is threaten another election and the Cs and PSOE will scuttle into line.

I have taken my depression with the political situations in Spain and the UK to justify my drinking a bottle of Cava with my meal: a brut nature by Heretat El Padruell.  As any fule kno, Cava is a product of Catalonia, a region of Spain that I confidently expect to see much further down the road to independence as the prospect of four more years of the odious PP in charge sinks in and the reality of an astonishingly corrupt central government calling the odds hits home!

The sun has been shining.  I have swum my metric mile.  The Cava has gone down a treat.  Tomorrow is another day.