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?

ARSE AKIMBO

ANYONE WHO WISHES TO TAKE a look at the history of the most recently designated “Liberal Democrat” Party, also known as the SDLP, SLP or simply “Liberals”, will know that the history of this political agglomeration is one of bringing together miscreants of all bents who seem to think that the mere fact of not being Conservative and of hating Communism (both capitals are deliberate) should afford them some truck in the sphere of the perceived vacuum in the “middle ground” of United Kingdom political debate.

YET THE FACT THAT SINCE JEREMY THORPE, the last “pure” Liberal leader, who was more or less forced to stand down from office after his political career was “damaged” when it was alleged that he had raped and threatened to kill an acquaintance, Norman Scott, at a time when they were supposed lovers, we have had a list of misdemeanours from the Liberal camp (no pun intended), including MPs found to be paying (public) money for homosexual prostitutes on a regular basis.

OUR LATEST LIBERAL EVILDOER appears to be the slimy Chris Huhne, who has been vilified over recent times in the press not simply for the fact that he managed to lose a free-vote, two-choice election to Nick Clegg, which should surely make anyone with a smattering of intelligence realise that he is in the wrong career, but also has lost the plot in terms of doing the “decent thing” in politics, which many Liberals have never understood.

YOU DRIVE TOO FAST, YOU GET FINED, YOU ADMIT and you pay. This tends to be the way in Britain. Of course in Portugal, where I am as I write this, none of this would happen. No policeman would dream of taking a politician to court. Mister Huhne, however, does not live in a country where uselessness is accepted as ability; lies need to be punished in the UK. And arrogant Huhne still seems to think that he can contest this issue and “return” to politics.

HUHNE MAY THINK THAT HE IS ON the side of the common man, like other Liberals, when he puts two fingers up to the police, but the fact is that he belongs to a party of grey-suited chaps who have two fingers up each others’ arses as soon as they get the chance to slip back to their little bed-sits in south London and put the kettle on and turn their phones off so that they can’t be bothered by their wives back in the sticks.

(My picture shows the future of Liberalism in the Western World)

COSTA PACKET DISCORDIA

AN UNUSUALLY FULL SCHEDULE of work over the Christmas vacation, coupled with an episode of enforced absence during which I had to deal with issues involving my property in the United Kingdom, have meant that it is over a month since I have been able to claim what I believe is now called “down time” (although in my student days this expression had a different meaning) and set out some of my thoughts about the state of the world as I see it at present.

IF ONE SENSIBLY IGNORES the hoo-hah over who will be the next Republican Party candidate for elections in the USA against hapless, doomed President Barack Hussein Obama, then it is clear that the only two newsworthy issues at the moment are the fate of the Euro currency and the mysterious sinking of the cruise ship Costa Concordia, which by all accounts was set to take its passengers from many countries into a wonderful world of enjoyment based on their sound economic and financial situation and consumer confidence.

INDEED IT WOULD NOT BE UNFAIR to detect a certain symmetry between the two news stories: the “Costa” took a cast of frivolous, carefree folks into a supposedly bright future; little attention was paid to thinking about the course charted ahead; the “captain” of the enterprise was an irresponsible socialite; the whole shebang soon revealed it was on the rocks before it had gathered a proper head of steam; and as soon as everything “listed”, no one accepted responsibility.

BUT THE GREATEST OF PARALLELS among these events of an uncannily similar bent has to do with the underhand activities of some of the people involved in this disaster. Whilst those in charge may by nature be corrupt and mendacious, one does not expect to hear of situations such as that of Father Massimo Donghi, an Italian priest who informed his parish of devoted old ladies that he was heading off for a week of contemplation and prayer, but instead joined the luxury liner for fun not usually found at Catholic retreats. Damning is his statement after he found out that his parishioners knew of his deceit: “I will talk to my parishioners in church. The judgment of others is not important to me.” This is the difference between the Protestant north of Europe and the Catholic south.

YULETIDE CHEER

MY TRADITIONAL END OF YEAR wishes of health and happiness to all men and women is being written this year in the poker room of the Inatel Palace Hotel in Termas de São Pedro do Sul, a charming little natural hot water spa town in the northwest of Portugal. For the interregnum between Christmas and New Year I have decided to spend a few days here in the company of my good lady wife, enabling us to lazy about the town during the day, eating in excellent restaurants where two people can eat a three course meal with wine for less than thirty of the dreaded Euros.

OTHERWISE WE SPEND OUR TIME standing about near the geysers and bubbling waterholes that abound, sniffing at the sulphur-choked fumes and drinking the rotten-egg tasting water which forces its way up through solid rock from miles below the ground. All of this in the name of health.

AND UPON WHICH MATTER I imagine I should rectify my initial statement. When I wrote “all men and women” I did not, naturally mean all of them. We may eliminate practically all of the European Parliament, most politicians as a whole, bankers, insurance brokers and salespeople, estate agents, ecologists, global warming bores and the devil’s own triumvirate of Humpty Rumpuy, Joseph Stalin Barroso and the hideous Merkozy couple.

INDEED, BEING WHERE I AM NOW, surrounded by the smell of the scalding lava of the underworld and the fire and brimstone that produces these curing waters (although, admittedly, the smell does not reach the games room of the hotel) reminds me of where these fiendish criminals all belong.

PASSOS HIS SELL BY DATE

THE FACT THAT a Prime Minister feels that he can come on television and advise his people to emigrate might appear unreal for most people in the civilised world. Yet it was this that Portuguese Prime Minister Passos Coelho, the charming, soft-spoken and unaccountably inept leader of the governing coalition made up of previously proven incompetents, felt he could do yesterday. In advising 15,000 unemployed teachers to go abroad he admitted that he, his government, and his country, was rubbish.

GET OUT OF PORTUGAL, was not exactly the statement made by Pedro Passos Coelho, but one can easily see how this could solve his worrisome economic issues. Portugal owes enormous amounts of money to abroad; most people are buying houses made of cardboard at 30-year mortgages; hardly any of the young people can find a “proper” job; and we wait and watch while the plughole sucks the Euro into the bubbling mire of a future in which there are more beggars sitting on the streets outside the sliding doors to supermarkets than teachers. Perhaps Portugal could send them to foreign parts.

CLEGG’S REVISED HISTORY OF ENGLAND

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, we hear from Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, the very long novel by James Joyce, Ireland’s favourite writer and sexual pervert. The sentiment, however, may be better situated in the mouths and minds of Nick Clegg’s political advisers. Our leaders usually make horrendous mistakes when they attempt to square today’s events with those in history; this is because they – Boris Johnson excepted – have little or no knowledge of the matter.

WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL one took history and geography lessons, although I believe there has been an attempt to “fuse” these subjects into one, a government policy which I imagine to have been disastrous, and of which I see that Mr Clegg must be a result.

IN STATING THAT DAVID CAMERON’S recent bit of harmless badinage with “Fifi” Sarkozy over the signing or not of some useless bits of paper involving Germans and the lebensraum countries has brought Anglo-French relations to “their lowest point in history”, I am afraid that Mr Clegg more than reveals his educational lacking.

THE LOWEST POINT IN ANGLO-FRENCH history is a tad difficult to point out on a chart. One may start by stating that over the last 1,000 years in which we both have been recognisable as nations we have mainly been at war of one sort or another. For six hundred years after 1066 (and all that) this war was about what was de facto England and de facto France; this medieval discussion continues in the halls of St Pancras Station in London and in every seaside ferry port at this moment.

BUT SURELY CLEGG must know of Waterloo? If only from listening to the ABBA vinyl records that he surely must have in his living room, half a dozen classics nestling against the little table upon which rests his TV “set”, including records by Phil Collins, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Julio Iglesias and Shirley Bassey, all standing against the non-offensive, “light cream with flecks of brown” wallpaper which was on offer at the local DIY store.

OR ABOUT AGINCOURT, TRAFALGAR, POITIERS and Calais? La Corunna, Vigo or Grijó. Perhaps, being a victim of the new form of combining geography and history, Clegg only sees the fact that Belgium is linked to Holland, is linked to Germany, is linked to Poland, et caetera, in the same way that the toe-bone is linked to the foot-bone, is linked to the leg bone, is linked to the arse-bone, presumably.

SAVE THE WORLD

NOT A GREAT DEAL HAS BEEN HEARD of late from the good people who make it their business to trot the globe and tell us that we are doing untold ill to our planet by merely being here and depositing what they call our “carbon footprint” on whatever it is that they deem should not be carbon-footprinted.

INDEED, GIVEN THAT OUR VERY OWN Prince Charles, darling spokesperson of the “speak to your vegetables and they will be good to you” brigade, has had myriad things to do of late and thus has not been forcing his vegetable philosophy down our necks too much, the eco-warriors have had little to do in the light of the press being more concerned with the fact that the world economy is about to be deflated up its own anal cavity.

THIS IS DISTRESSING NEWS for yoga “teachers”, vegetable “healers”, sparkling stone “readers” – all of whom discover that their clients were really-not-what-you-might-call-a-hundred-percent convinced of the curative powers of the “let’s all face the sun and say ‘Hello’” approach to health, now that money for sending Jeremy and Jemimah to private school is at the top of the list.

BUT OUR STOLID AND SOLID defenders dither not. And such determination has resulted, as we all now know, in the “ten minutes that saved the planet”, recently voted at the United Nations summit on climate change in Durban. The event had taken place over six days, involving delegates from 194 countries, all of them, as well as their wives, mistresses and sundry children and hangers-on (in the case of some of the Asian and African and Arabian delegates) struggling to come up with a way to save the world from utter destruction, which they did in the countdown of mere minutes to the end of the conference before a positive vote was agreed upon, saving my life and your lives.

WE ARE NOW ASSURED, after this summer meeting in South Africa, that the agreements suggested at the last meeting in Bali, as well as the one in Cancun, Mexico, may be carried forward to the next meeting in some other splendid resort capable of housing 977 delegates as well as their entourages so that they may discuss how to reduce our carbon footprints even more.

YET WHAT, PEOPLE MAY ASK, are the resolutions that will save us so? What is it that will make me feel safe about my grandchildren’s futures? What will 190-odd world leaders sign to make sure we don’t end up a burnt ruin like those things we see on the Discovery Channel.

NEVER FEAR: HERE is that resolution which, so I am told – and for which you are paying – will guarantee the future “on this planet” for eons to come: “All United Nations parties commit to a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force that will be decided in 2015 and come into force in 2020.”

Photo: Delegates at Durban celebrating the fact they have saved the world