Lavengro in Spain

Happy whatever to all my readers

I am off to Britain to eat turkey and mince pies for ten days. Back for the new year.

Enjoy whatever you celebrate at this time of year.

Saudi Arabia and Switzerland – two intolerant countries

Among the many reasons why I loathed living in Saudi Arabia was the intolerance and hypocrisy that I experienced there. Although Christians and Jews are Peoples of the Book like Muslims, and although I taught one boy called Isa (the Arabic for Jesus), the fact is that non-Muslims are despised and not tolerated. At Christmas and Easter a very few of the (non-Saudi) Arab teachers in my school wished the English teachers appropriate greetings – having first made sure that there were no prying Muslim ears within range. There are no churches or synagogues allowed in all of the Kingdom, and it was an open secret that the big oil companies clandestinely employed priests and rabbis as executives.

Although Switzerland likes to present itself as cosmopolitan and international, home to several UN institutions, it has shown itself to be backward and intolerant in regard to Muslims. The claim that they have merely voted against minarets on architectural grounds will not stand up. A simple look at the posters shows that.

Islam, especially the form of it that I encountered in Saudi, is a particularly loathsome religion; like any totalitarian philosophy it excludes and discriminates against just about everyone. Unlike Christianity and Judaism Islam has never had to come to terms with the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, which in fact coincided with he decline of Islam from its artistic and intellectual heyday in the Middle Ages. One way of understanding the present world is not as a clash of civilisations but rather as an internal conflict within Islam between those who would modernise its outrageous tenets and who are willing to see it coexist with a secular state, and those who believe that the Koran is literally the word of God and thus cannot be changed or interpreted (except in the intolerant, theocratic, fascist way that they choose).

In this conflict it surely behoves those of us who believe in European values of tolerance and intellectualism (and I specifically reject a mention of Europe’s Judaeo-Christian origins) to encourage liberalising trends in Islam. The Swiss have gone in the other direction.

I have written about the nasty barminess of Saudi Arabia here, here, and especially here: I have not previously had any reason to write about Switzerland, regarding it as a place where five hundred years of brotherly love, democracy and peace had produced nothing more threatening than the cuckoo clock. It seems that I was wrong.

Buying a Kindle

There has been quite a lot of fuss in the media here in the last week about the Amazon Kindle ebook reader. Oddly, amazon.co.uk doesn't seem to recognise its existence, while amazon.fr and amazon.de lead their home pages with a link to amazon.com, where it is available. There is no amazon.es.

Calypso

Spanish radio (RNE3) has taken it into its head to play (as I write) West Indian calypso music. Fine, great, but what will a Spanish audience make of this for example:

Ochroes sellin' five dollars for five
Six dollars for celery, four dollar for sive
Dey raise currants, and dey raise raisin
Egg is 12 and 14 dollars now a dozen
Eddoes is now five dollars my frien'
And is 10.25 a pound now for melongene
A lime long time was ol' talk and fun
But now a lime is 1.25 for one

Master and captain

We would hope that the Liverpool Daily Post could, even now, get its maritime terminology right, and I am pleased to say that it does.

The question of how to refer to the officer in command of a merchant vessel is a thorny one. My uncle, himself a master mariner with Cunard, used to get seriously cross when he heard people talk about the captain of a ship (he did admit that the Royal Navy could do what they damn well liked, but that was not expressed in a spirit of generosity and tolerance to his fellow seafarers). Yet, Wikipedia tells us that the Titanic left Southampton ‘with Captain Edward J. Smith in command’ and is right to do so. What is going on?

The clue is in the term ‘master mariner’. A merchant ship can only be commanded by an officer who has his master’s ticket, i.e. who has qualified as a master mariner (and in fact, for safety reasons, the first officer must also hold this qualification). Thus the officer in charge must be a master mariner and is the master of the vessel. Quite apart from that, the Merchant Navy has its hierarchical rank structure, which includes the rank of captain. So, Edward Smith, the master of the Titanic, had attained the rank of captain. We see this photo on Wikipedia, correctly captioned:

Unfortunately, the link from the picture leads us to this page, where Smith is described as the captain of the Titanic.

So what about the Liverpool Daily Post? Yesterday the Queen Mary 2 sailed into Liverpool, and the Post reports correctly (my emphasis):

QM2’s gross tonnage is 148,528 and her master, Commodore Bernard Warner, said: “You could fit Cunard’s very first ship, RMS Britannia, into our Britannia Restaurant onboard.”

So, a very big ship is commanded by an officer with a rank higher than captain. But he is still the master of the vessel.

The Post is also right to speak of gross tonnage. Wikipedia again:

Gross tonnage (often abbreviated as GT, G.T. or gt) is a unitless index related to a ship's overall internal volume. Gross Tonnage is different from Gross Register Tonnage. Neither Gross Tonnage nor Gross Register Tonnage are measures of the ship's displacement (mass) and should not be confused with terms such as deadweight tonnage, net tonnage, or displacement.

What the BBC means when it says

[Cunard’s] flagship vessel weighs 151,400 tonnes

is anybody’s guess. QM2’s mass (displacement) is 76,000 tonnes (Wikipedia). Now please excuse me while I go and weigh the anchor.

According to Commodore Warner in the Post (my emphasis):

“Although a new ship, QM2 is a traditional liner, not a cruise ship. A liner is a ship on a regular service across the ocean from point A to B. This ship is built for transatlantic service and we’ve done 25 return crossings this year. The other difference is this ship is designed to go faster. She has a very streamlined hull to slip gracefully and elegantly through the water, like her predecessor QE2 which was a ship in a million. Queen Mary 2 has 40% more steel in her hull than an equivalent-sized cruise liner, which means she is strengthened to cut through the Atlantic waves at speed, in all weathers all year. When you are crossing the oceans, you want to be on a proper liner. The ride and stability of this ship is amazing, even in a large ocean swell.”

What does the BBC have to say in its headline?

Huge cruise liner visiting city.

Brilliant!

I noticed this too:

Post: WITH repeated long blasts on her throaty whistle echoing off the Cunard Building, she boomed out notice of her Mersey debut.

BBC: One of the biggest passenger ships ever built - the Queen Mary 2 - has made its maiden visit to Liverpool.

but I’ll leave that one for another day.

A couple of bars

A bar I spotted in Barcelona the other day.

And a bar I didn’t go into in Sabadell in July.

Contactless payment functionality

I have just received a new Barclaycard. The covering letter tells me that it comes with ‘contactless payment functionality’. Now if I only knew what that meant, I’d be laughing!

Playing the trumpet

I have only just become aware that the Lesbian Teacher in Sex Scandal Shock Horror Sensation is a trumpet player. So pity poor old Dr Bowdler, who changed* Shakespeare's

Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the strumpet in my bed (Cymbeline III, IV)

to

Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the trumpet in my bed.

*OK, allegedly.

Roman Polanski

From Spiegel, a long and thoughtful piece well worth reading.

Victim or Perpetrator?

The Tragic Case of Roman Polanski

(…)

The truth is that the case is far too complicated to simply sign a petition in a moment of initial outrage or to rashly demand Polanski's release from prison. The legal procedures are confusing enough, but even more confusing is the bizarre and tragic life of a Holocaust survivor whose heavily pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered in 1969 by supporters of cult leader Charles Manson, a man with a swastika tattooed on his forehead.

The case revolves around many questions that do not lend themselves to quick answers, questions about the freedom of art and its limits, about the loss of perspective in the days of the sexual revolution and the drug culture, and about society's fascination with its stars, who are idolized and demonized at the same time. The case is about very important issues, issues of morality and law, atonement and justice and, most of all, about exactly how guilty Polanski is and whether his actions can even be excused.

(…)

Hairy Bikers: top TV chefs to tackle NHS food

If only. Traction man is a long-term patient in an NHS hospital. He has a blog on which he posts pictures of what he receives as food, and comments on it. For example:

The soup course never turned up... thank goodness for the main course. It's amazing what you can dredge up from the bottom of a septic tank. Bon appetit! Anyone know what it is?

He has been running an online vote for which celebrity chef should take over the NHS catering. The winners are The Hairy Bikers. Good luck to them. As Traction Man himself says, ‘Something has to be done because the NHS still serves up appalling food and the meals just aren't balanced or nutritious enough to help sick people recover.’

I once found myself in the hands of the NHS in 1982. I had a sprained ankle that left me totally immobilised, and I was put in a men’s surgical ward in Liverpool’s Walton hospital. I ate practically nothing that I was given and survived on care packages smuggled in by relatives, but I remember that the orderly who brought round the food exhorted me most powerfully to eat his suet pudding and custard. ‘It will build you up,’ he said. At the time I was 31 years old, reasonably fit, healthy, and totally immobilised. ‘Do I look as if I need building up?’ I asked. He had to admit that I could probably do without his pudding.

A few years ago I met a leading British cardiologist who had once worked in Papworth Hospital in Cambridge. He told me that he was horrified to find that everything ion the kitchen was fried in beef dripping. After much complaining and arguing and saying that things had to change, he finally found the truth: the hospital had signed a ten-year contract with the dripping supplier and was stuck with it. That precisely wouldn’t happen now, but from what I see the NHS still has a long way to go before it gives its patients decent food.

And, I wonder, would the medical and nursing staff put up with their canteens serving what the patients get? Of course they wouldn’t.