FIAT LOOKS

ALTHOUGH MANY PEOPLE may believe that the present state of affairs in Europe is somewhat unpleasant, with thousands of (presumed) innocent people in countries caught in the hiatus of the “pre-post Euro” zone freezing to death in their vehicles as they attempt to drive to town to beg for food as we simultaneously witness the coldest Winter on record and the most serious financial collapse strike chill in the hearts of good people everywhere, there are still those who consider this a blessing.

A BLESSING BECAUSE we may finally be saying farewell to a few of the most irritating myths that have been getting on everyone’s nerves over recent years. (Well, at least mine and those of Baron Nigel Lawson of Blaby.) Now surely those people who harp on about overheating our planet can relax a little – or perhaps we should send some of these bearded pessimists off to dig up snowdrifts to uncover the frozen villagers in the Balkans, the Ukraine, and the Crimea and tell them to stop using hairspray and eating meat because we risk increasing the temperature of the planet by 1ºC over the next fifty years.

THE OTHER ANNOYING MYTH was that the Euro would bring equality to the member states of the EU who joined it. Nothing of the kind is possible in a million years, and surely we will now hear no more of the absurd rhetoric of the defenders of a “united” Europe and their lunacy in suggesting that one day Greece and Portugal we be on a par with Finland and Germany. Perhaps when people in southern Europe start turning up for work on time, start working and stop fiddling the books we might have a shot at this ideal, even though I am not sure I would like to live in a world where everyone acted like Germans.

HOWEVER, THE MAJOR ISSUE OF THE MOMENT for me involves the fact that my 100-watt light bulbs are all starting to pop. Having installed them all into my city residence in Lisbon at the time I moved here, some six years ago, they are dropping like flies, and my world is becoming darker as I, due to a European Union directive which was a personal project of our glorious leader José “Stalin” Barroso, can no longer buy 100 watts, but only 60, or else those ludicrous “energy-saving” light bulbs that only really start to light up my study or my living room after a couple of hours, when it is time to go to bed. And reading in bed is out of the question with my new “4w = 55w” “long-life”, energy-saving bedside lamp. Now I use a halogen torch to read in bed.

THIS FOOLISH POLICY finds some sort of symmetry in what has been going on this year at the CERN “Hardon” Collider as our scientists continue in their commendable search for the Higgs boson particle. In September last year these good people happily announced that they had managed to get neutrino particles to travel faster than light. At the time I wrote, and I quote, “‎30 seconds faster (than light) over 800 miles. And measured in Italy. In the afternoon. That doesn't impress me much.”

WE HAVE TODAY DISCOVERED that our world had not come to an end after all, as the discrepancy was due to “a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer." At the time, however, Antonio Ereditato, the Italian scientist responsible for “breaking the speed of light” stated, “We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing.” Why does this discourse remind me of so many Italian car mechanics?