DOING THINGS THE EUROPEAN WAY

THE RECENT UNPLEASANT SPAT between PM David Cameron and António Guterres, former Portuguese Prime Minister, President of the Socialist International and current United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees proved interesting for more than the obvious reasons.

FOR THOSE WHO DO NOT KNOW, Mr Guterres criticised Cameron's plans for restricting immigration into Britain from the rest of the European Union. Cameron, of course, knows full well that nothing will come of these announcements, as unless Britain leaves the EU it will just have to put up with the vast numbers of people arriving in the UK every day, leaving the Republic of Ireland, Portugal and Greece virtually without any young people. The same will happen soon to Romania and Bulgaria.

THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY RESPONSE through its vice-president Bob Neill, was, “We are not going to accept lessons on how to manage our borders from a failed Portuguese Socialist transformed into an unelected UN bureaucrat”, and MP Douglas Carswell said Guterres’ remarks were “foolish” and should be “immediately filed in the waste paper basket”.

GUTERRES MAY BE A LITTLE UPSET by these remarks, despite the fact that they are completely correct, but what seems of more importance to me is the fact that British Conservatives do not seem to understand the European way of playing politics.

UNDER THE SO-CALLED D'HONDT METHOD, invented by the Belgian Victor D'Hondt in 1878, and widely used throughout Europe, rather than the "winner takes all system" we in Britain and our colonial cousins in Canada, the USA and India use, no one is truly "elected". In this system the grandees of the parties sit down at a table and draw up a list of their friends to be elected. The "people" have no choice in this matter, and simply vote for their favourite party without knowing who the candidates are. Those "elected" by the people have no responsibility to the voters, but only to the members of the party with political clout.

THIS IS NOT TOO FAR FROM TOTALITARIANISM, as Mr Cameron should understand, having criticised the system when Nick Clegg wished to introduce it to elections in Britain. But Europeans love it: it means they don't have to think; they don't have to remember anyone's names; all they have to do is tick a box next to a picture -- they don't even have to be able to read. (Which makes one wonder how they digested the party manifesto.)

THE EUROPEAN UNION EMBRACES this system and takes it one step further, through the "nomination" system by which the three most important people in the European Union were chosen. Catherine Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, was nominated the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission; Herman von Rumpoy is President of the European Council, and was elected by a secret ballot that is so secret that nobody knows who is allowed to vote; and the much-hated José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, was "invited" to take the position. None of them seems very worried about not having been elected.

 

THE TRUE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS ABOUT CHRISTMAS over recent years has been the delicate matter of trying to understand what it is all really about. When the modern idea of Christmas was expanded into its current form during the reign of Queen Victoria, who imported it from Germany and then exported it to many countries throughout Europe through her dozens of children and grandchildren who married into royal households, the spirit was simple, albeit a radical change from the past: the Christmas period was one for being with the family, eating well, exchanging modest gifts with those who came to visit and sharing in moments of peace.

THERE STILL REMAINED A MODICUM OF THE RELIGIOUS element, particularly for the poor, but it was soon cast into second place with the arrival of the Coca-Cola-Company-designed Santa Claus, a figure far more interesting than a little baby sleeping in a barn, particularly as hardly any urban young children had an idea of what a manger was.

SINCE THE NINETEEN-FIFTIES Christmas has morphed into a sort of shopping fever festival, in the early days mainly involving buying toys for children, but by the eighties this had boomed into buying at least one present for every member of the family, including close relatives whom we see every single day of the week. The notion of “peace” among men, however, has dwindled to the point that most Christmas meals involve a family row. This may be due to alcohol, the fact that we have to mix with relatives we hate or the fact that we didn’t get the present we wished for (as for some reason this has become a secretive business).

BUT THE LATEST TWIST IN CHRISTMAS is reflected in the joke made by the late American stand-up comedian George Carlin: “The main reason why Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.” Christmas has become a time for selling sex. In the old innocent days of TV perfume ads the selling point was a scene when a husband would say to his wife, “Honey, you smell so good”, and she would wink at the camera and a picture of a bottle of Chanel Nº 5 would appear at the bottom of the screen.

NOT SO TODAY. One brand shows us a semi-naked woman in a bath and then in bed with an answering-machine (do they still exist?) voice-off begging her for more sex “after yesterday afternoon” (sic); another shows a young couple stripping each other on the stairs on the way to an apartment and having sex before they even manage to open the door; one shows an elegant blonde walking through crowded halls and peeling off her clothes as she goes; a girl is pursued and (presumably) raped by a wolf in another, etc.

CHRISTMAS HAS BECOME LEATHER pencil skirts, black stockings with a line up the back, patent leather stilettos and desperate, violent, hurried sex sessions in any place or position except in a bed. And so, once again at this time of year, I would like to wish all my readers the very best for Christmas, hoping you enjoy it in the true spirit of Christmas 2013.

(Post Script. One chap has electronically mailed me asking whether this means that my desire is for everyone to get a good "shagging", as he put it, at Christmastide, and I suppose that is true. Happy holidays, except for students, who have to go home to their parents, and that is when the shagging stops.)

WHAT DOES THE EUROPEAN UNION SAY?

ONCE AGAIN THE UK is involved in a little spat over what the unelected European commissions and committees think they should be allowed to apply to a legal system that has been in some form "elected" or "chosen" by the people of England for over a thousand years.

 

NO ONE ELECTED DURÃO BARROSO, the much-hated leader of the European Commission (above). No one elected the putty-faced and brainless leader of the European Union, Herman von Pussy-Dumpty. And yet elected governments such as the UK, in this case in a country in which the representation by voter is the most simple and direct in Europe, have to put up with weird rules established by the European Court of Justice.

 

THE LATEST ISSUE WITH THE UK GOVERNMENT has to do with the right to vote by serving prisoners. Prime Minister David Cameron has said this will not happen, and I will personally protest if the idea is accepted by the British Government and the law in England and Wales.

 

IF EUROPEAN COUNTRIES WISH TO HAVE their laws made by criminals then that is their business. And I could, without any consultation, reel off a list of French, Spanish and Italian presidents, prime ministers and deputies who have all been found guilty of embezzlement, robbery, thuggery, corruption, pimping and sundry minor crimes of robbing the public purse.

 

SO PRIME MINISTER DAVID CAMERON has asked for clarification on this matter of the voting system, something incompatible with our "first-past-the-post" system. The language used by the European Union documentation is always difficult for us to understand due to the double-talk and off-key translations used by the Brussels authorities. When Prime Minister David Cameron asked the European Parliament about the issue of voting for prisoners, the response was:

 

 

Yaki-yaki-yaki-do Yaki-yaki-yaki-do Yaki-yaki-yaki-do Umm-baba-umm-baba

THE NEW KAISER CHIEFS

I AM FULLY AWARE of the fact that when one writes about the recently deceased Nelson Mandela without swelling fulsome with praise there will be a flurry of criticism similar to what happens whenever I write stating the fact that the absurd "global warming" protesters are just that: absurd.

 

NO ONE CAN DENY that Nelson Mandela suffered for his beliefs and stood defiant in his wish to see a new Republic of South Africa, and his acts were in many ways on the level of those carried out by the great Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was also given a hard time in South Africa by the obscurantist chaps who ran the country in the nineteen forties.

 

BOTH GENTLEMEN, so I am led to believe, went on to "improve things" in their countries and approached something near to sainthood in the eyes of those who grant credit to such entities as saints and angels.

 

SO WHY DO I SEE, when watching the week-long "celebrations" of Mandela's passing, images of young black children barefoot in ghettoes? Why did I see hardly any white faces in the 90,000 stadium which is the jewel in the crown of this "rainbow nation"?

 

AND WHY IS MANDELA'S natural heir, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, now President of the Rainbow, booed each time he appears in public? When even the true hero of the liberation of South Africans, President Frederik Willem de Klerk, was not given any prominence during the ceremonies? As I write, it looks like the nation may slip back into something worse than Mandela may have envisaged or even lived through. The time of the dictators seems to be returning.

THE BASHAR STREET KID

I HAVE BEEN MORE OR LESS UNABLE to keep up with my commitments of late due to a series of factors involving excess of work, illness to my good lady wife and a lack of anything out of the ordinary to write about, given that government incompetence and economic failure have become our daily bread, No one in their right minds expects to see a "recovery" (whatever that might be) for the next twenty years or so and so most of us who are living off accrued income and investments are forced to simply watch our income be reduced.

 

HOWEVER, ON THE FOREIGN FRONT, I have been paying some slight attention to the activities taking place in Syria. When, when what seems years ago, the soi-disant Arab Spring began, there were foolhardy journalists in the left-wing press in the United Kingdom, the openly socialist BBC, and the occasional article in the United States press (just to show balance) who heralded a "new dawn" of democracy in countries that had previously had a dearth of rights for the common man.

 

THE CURRENT SITUATION SEEMS to suggest that the new aurora has not been a great success. Tunisia has no apparent government at the moment, Libya is utter chaos with the only law being dictated by firearms, Egypt is a mystery even more unfathomable than Russia used to be, and Syria is, as I suppose everyone knows, a disgrace beyond belief in present times.

 

PHOTOGENIC BASHAR HAFEZ AL-ASSAD, the current leader of Syria (above), is relying on the fact that there has to be some limit on how many 19-year-old boys the United States of America and the United Kingdom are prepared to sacrifice in order to depose vile despots. This is particularly sensitive after we have seen over the last ten years that "the new guys" in power are usually not much better than the ones that we sacrificed thousands of our soldiers to replace.

 

YET, WHAT HAS PROVOKED me into writing this is the fact that Bashar stated last week to the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar that he deserved to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after it was granted to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) watchdog currently destroying his regime's massive chemical arsenal.

 

AFTER THIS STATEMENT, EYEBROWS WERE RAISED, as we sometimes say, but not mine. I cannot see any reason why the bloody hands of Bashar should not be given a Nobel Peace Prize. After all, last year it was given to the European Union, a much-hated organisation that has been destroying the lives of over a hundred million people through its idiotic Euro currency and common policies on agriculture, condemning most of southern Europe to poverty, misery and -- increasingly -- suicide or emigration to Germany, which is more or less the same thing.

 

BASHAR, IN MY OPINION, WOULD BE a worthy successor to the sinister Barroso, the vague and incompetent Von Rumpoy and the hated Angela Merkel at the EU, although at least Bashar and his assassins put their victims out of their misery very quickly.

EVIL REAL REVISITED

HAVING ONLY ON TUESDAY DECLARED my lifelong intent to never set foot in the vile city of Vila Real, it is a tribute to the powers of persuasion possessed by my wife that I found myself there once again, early last Wednesday morning. The justification was easy to understand: we travel without the burden of the modern automobile* – something which has ups and downs – and the stinking city of Vila Real is a major road (and previously rail) hub.

 

THUS WE BRIGHT AND EARLY LEFT THE HAVEN of the Upper Douro at Sabrosa once again; once again we boarded the bus with the gentleman who has been our driver on so many occasions recently, in the company of the same schoolchildren on their way to do exams as boarded the bus yesterday. Our bus driver, a man with the handlebar moustache of a master of ceremonies at a Victorian music hall performance, gave us our last feeling of comfort before we entered the hated “civilization” of sinister Vila Real.

 

WE PERHAPS DID NOT FEEL so comfortable about this gentleman last week, as we waited outside the railway station in the little riverbank town of Pinhão, where, feeling lucky after a good lunch, I left my wife stationed with the suitcase and bags and went off to a bar to try my luck at the new-fangled “Euromillions” lottery-style betting event, as well as to sneak a little glass of Port wine.

 

THE CHANCES OF WINNING THE PRIZE in this lottery are basically nil; but the chances of drinking an excellent, homemade Port Wine are one hundred percent in our favour in this region. Next to me at the bar in the tavern, having been served an enormous glass of red wine, was the man whom we soon after discovered was our bus driver. He then drove on a route unknown to us through mountains and on the edge of ravines that would probably make a Tyrolean sick looking down. Hearts still in mouths, we bade him farewell.

 

THAT WAS LAST WEEK. TODAY, HEAVY-HEARTED, we did the same as we arrived to change horses in the evil city at Vila Real bus “station”, with just over an hour to kill before our trip home to our country residence in Celorico da Beira, passing through Régua, Lamego and Viseu. The trip was wonderful, but that one hour and twenty minutes in the hated Vila Real was more than I could take.

 

MY DESCRIPTIVE AND ANALYTICAL POWERS are more than enough to relate what happened during that short time, but I would rather adopt a Brétonesque, Woolfian or Joycean cop-out style of writing to give one an idea of the events:

 

BUT INSTEAD: WE HAVE:

 

No left luggage office (which left us almost immobile)

No ramps outside the station for those with luggage

Imperfectly cobbled streets which were a chore for a wheeled suitcase

Spitting in the streets to a scale which suggested there might be some kind of municipal prize for the best spitter

Milk watered down with water at a breakfast café

Margarine instead of butter on toast

No air cooling system in the station

Mis- dis- and lack of information about bus times

Panic after our bus left empty and without us – without anyone explaining that there had been a change in plans and another one was on its way.

 

IN THE END, I CHECKED THE EUROMILLIONS results in a little tobacconists shop while we were still at a roadside café watching and listening to people spit on the pavement. Ostensibly I won nothing, but in the end, when the bus started moving, about to leave Vila Real behind, I felt like a millionaire.

 

*(My wife has her own view of life under these circumstances: www.acarlesslife.blogspot.pt . My picture shows the head offices of the local governor -- on the left) 

LAND OF GREATS

 

WITHOUT BEING FULLY AWARE of what was in store, I have found myself of late on a journey throughout the wine-rich lands of the River Douro in the north of Portugal. I have lived in Lisbon on and off for over thirty years; yet this area is a novelty for me.

 

THE TRAIN UPRIVER FROM OPORTO, then the short boat-ride to the waterside hotel at the confluence of rivers in the Porto Antigo hotel in Mosteiró, where the only sound that could be heard was the lapping of waves, the clanging of metal rope fixtures against flagpoles as the wind hit them, and then – in the late evening – the porcelain and steel noises of the waiters and cleaning staff in the restaurant below us as they washed up and closed down for another day.

 

THEN THE CHEERFUL HAPPY-SLAPPING and giggling of two couples of otters, coming to see what was going on after lights were dimmed, and to find out whether the restaurant had served shellfish for dinner today.

 

THE ORGANISATIONAL SKILLS involved in all of this was in the able hands of my good lady wife, who had wished to surprise me after almost six weeks of intense work, which is why I have not been writing of late. Despite being utterly and totally against this in my view unnecessary trip, I am grateful to her for being able to enjoy the stunning scenery, the wonderfully honest and real food, the spectacularly fresh white wines and the renewed tenderness that can only be brought about when one is away from reality and only hears otters and swallows during the early morning period when we wake up in a queen-size bed.

 

THE SECOND STAGE OF THIS TRIP was to here, where I am now, writing this, in the little village of Sabrosa, the birthplace of Ferdinand Magellan, the first captain to circumnavigate the world, and whose (ruined) house I can see from where I sit, on the second floor balcony of the Solar dos Canavarros hotel. A little further along the main road has brought me to the house of Miguel Torga, one of the most famous Portuguese poets and novelists of the last century.

 

BOTH OF THESE GREAT MEN are remembered by the local people through plaques and monuments of varying taste and quality, but there are other men of renown who hail from this region, and it would be wrong of me not to mention their names.

 

YESTERDAY MY GOOD LADY WIFE AND I took a trip to the city of Vila Real, often termed the capital of the north of Portugal. My opinions about the city of Oporto have been made clear in Sunday Mornings passim, but nothing had prepared me for the nightmare of the view of this soulless, centreless, heartless and, in the end, useless city. It appears that every local handyman, mechanic, plumber and electrician had been granted a plot of land on which they could build a construction of their choice, but never imitating their neighbour’s work.

 

THE RESULT IS THE WORST MISH-MASH of construction and urban planning I have ever witnessed over three continents. Without wishing to be didactic, I would like to suggest to anyone who reads this: Do not go to Vila Real. It appears that no one there has a clue about what is going on: we asked for directions to the centre. A young lady in a shop said she had no idea. We then found out we were less than 200 yards away.

 

THIS CITY IS THE HOME to the current Portuguese Prime Minister, Pedro Passos Coelho. You ask him from one day to the next what his policy is and he has no idea. You ask him the way to the future, for Portugal, and he will say it depends on the situation in the future. Or not. Thus we have a leader who is a reflection of the shithole from which he comes.

 

ON ANOTHER OCCASION MY WIFE and I decided to take a little excursion to Alijó, a small town close to Sabrosa which was the base for the famous Baron de Forrester, an Englishman who helped grant such greater visibility for the Port Wine trade that he was made a Portuguese noble. His table wine is delicious and costs about £1.50 even in restaurants. The best white wine I have ever tasted.

 

BUT I WAS NOT SO HAPPY about, on this journey from Sabrosa to Alijó, passing through the little village of Maçada do Caralho, which is the birthplace of the previous prime minister of Portugal, José Pinto de Sousa, also known as José Socrates.

 

THESE LATTER TWO GENTLEMEN have probably done as much damage to Portugal and the name of Portugal as the generations of explorers, poets, writers and chroniclers did it good. I am not sure what picture I should use to show the combined effect of Passos Coelho and José Socrates, but whatever I think of will be displayed above.