What can I say about Britain? The Labour Party is trying to reinvent the British Empire, the Conservative Party is as stupid as ever (it was John Stuart Mill who first called them the stupid party), and the LibDems have the misfortune to have a leader who is not only older than the tabloid press approve of, but actually appears to know what he is talking about. And that’s the last thing that the media will allow in a politician.
I am, of course, talking of the British media that have still not recovered from their horror and consternation at discovering that the Portuguese authorities intended to investigate the disappearance of Madeleine McCann all by themselves and in their own way, with typical Latin phlegm and serenity, instead of handing the case over lock, stock and barrel to the ‘Anglo-Saxon media’ for them to investigate it with typical British hysteria and emotiveness. For example, the other day the Portuguese police came out with the quite unremarkable comment that they couldn’t be sure that they would ever find Madeleine’s body. And every journalist in Britain who has ever touched the McCann story immediately came in his/her pants. Nor is it only the newspapers that have always been known for their sensationalism that write drivel about the woman who reported the disappearance of her daughter to Sky News (at 22.11) before she reported it to the police (at 22.40) and then blamed the police for being dilatory in handling the case. When a neighbour offered to call the police for her, Kate said that she had already done so. That was not true.
I boarded a service bus in Wrexham. There were two narrow, steep steps to get on, you pay the driver cash, then a sharp turn into a narrow gangway. Then the bus set off with the door open and the driver chatting to his mate, who was hanging on just inside it. A woman sitting just behind the open door was holding a baby. The baby dropped a dummy. The mother got out of her seat, holding her baby, and retrieved the dummy from the top step just by the open door as the bus rounded a bend. No-one seemed to regard this manoeuvre as at all strange. Radio Brainless was blaring from the speakers. What a change from Barcelona, where all buses are adapted for wheelchairs, you have a prepaid ticket to stamp in a machine, no bus ever moves a centimetre with its doors open, the notices about not distracting the driver mean what they say, and background music is non-existent.
Barcelona airport was designed for the Olympic Games by a top-rate Catalan architect, Ricardo Bofill. It is a light, airy, well-appointed structure with glass panels and open views over the airport runways. From the door of the terminal to the waiting area is perhaps a hundred metres. On arrival from the UK, EU passports are examined cursorily by uniformed police officers who seem pleased that you have chosen to visit their country. On arrival at Liverpool airport, on the other hand, it is as if the plain-clothes functionaries who scan every single passport are doing you a favour by actually letting you into their country.
Liverpool airport has been enlarged with a view to Liverpool’s year as the European Capital of Culture 2008. I do not know the name of the architect, who will have gone into hiding if he/she has any sense of shame. The waiting area is windowless, the monitors showing departures are placed precisely so that they cannot be seen from the seating area, and once through the boarding gate passengers are held on a staircase (there is no lift or escalator) that is made of metal girders bolted together in open view and with the stairs made of those metal footplates with raised criss-cross patterns that you find in factories. We were greeted at the entrance to the security area by a man whose obsequiousness suggested a previous career as a third-rate head waiter or doorman at a strip joint. Having scrutinised my passport, he called me Peter and enjoined me most earnestly to have an enjoyable flight. Things became a little confused and instead of both of us going through the same checkpoint, as we should have done, I went to a different one. This meant that I had no bag to put through the machine while Jane had two. Despite all the notices about only being able to take one piece of cabin baggage through security – and we saw a man being told to put his bum-bag into his suitcase before entering the security area for that reason – no-one said a word to her.
As we waited, a fellow passenger was informing the world at large that, while the official population of Britain was put at fifty to sixty million (he said thousand to start with and had to be corrected) there were in fact some fifteen to twenty million illegal immigrants – and what problems they cause! ‘Look at London with its congestion charge. If we didn’t have all these extra people in this country that wouldn’t be necessary for a start.’ This, as a modern-day Dr Doolittle might say, is what the British population call a comprehensive education.
Is there really any point in Britain continuing with the pretence that it is capable of running a livestock industry?
My house sale is completed and the money arrived in my Spanish bank on Thursday. Fortunately though, it had been converted into euros on Monday, before sterling started to slide following the run on the Northern Rock. I am very pleased indeed to have my assets safely out of sterling and in euros.
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