Who expects meaning?

Is it encouraging or depressing to find out that there are actual eternal verities? That your ordinary life experience leads you to believe that a unified theory of everything is not too far away? That life does indeed have a meaning?

That all of the above may be true because, wherever you are, anywhere in the world, banks, estate agents and insurance companies are self serving, incompetent, uncaring agents of evil.

Needless to say I can back up my assertion that the Gorgons, Medusa, Loki, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Bennett (I’ve always hated that oleaginous git) are the elemental motivating forces behind the life hating existence of the modern versions of the apocalyptic riders found in, you’ve guessed it, banks, estate agents and insurance companies.

It would be too searing an experience to relive in words my morning; and that was speaking to only two of the ‘horsemen’ – but their sheer unfeeling nastiness will live in infamy and my memory. [And, to cap it all, I’ve forgotten the name for the linguistic device which links two dissimilar things in a single sentence, like the combination of ‘infamy’ and ‘memory’ in the last sentence. But it will come to me. It will.] {It didn’t, but the internet helped and reminded me it was ‘zeugma.’ Interestingly I remembered that the word was Greek for ‘yoked’, but I couldn’t remember the word. Just shows how bad my Greek is: on a par with Shakespeare’s!}

At least this morning is over and I suppose there are worse ways to spend your morning than sitting in a chair in front of the Commercial Director of the Bank threatening to withdraw all your funds. If you can thing of those worse ways do please get in touch with me, as that will give me strength for the bureaucratic tussles yet to come!

For my reader in Wales, the day has been glorious and, if I had not been sitting in front of a Commercial Director of a Bank, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it.

Toni has informed me that the first days in any foreign country for someone trying to settle there are trying. I must learn patience and a Zen detachment. Given the fiendish reputation of Spanish officialdom I will need to develop this attitude in about 36 hours! Given a life time of dedication to instant irritation, my conversion to Patience will make Saul of Tarsus later life look like a slow evolution.

All things, as they say, are possible!

It is easier to find a Spanish film with English subtitles in Spain than it is to find an English Film with Spanish subtitles in Britain. So I was ‘fortunate’ in being able to see Santiago Segura’s “Isi Disi – Alto Voltaje” and understand what was going on.

With a plot that would have been rejected as hackneyed and unimaginative by the Teletubbies the usefulness of the script was made virtually redundant as any member of the watching audience over eight must have been here in similar stories many, many times before.

Apart from the language, this film was the stuff of children’s matinee cinema and was a clear commercial rip off of the characters created in the first AC DC presentation. The failed rock stars . . . ah, what the hell.

What’s the point in wasting time on a production that should never have seen the light of a single studio bulb? Santiago Segura should be ashamed of himself and I don’t know whether the film’s message of ‘not selling out’ is there as a completely cynical two fingers to the audience or a coded message to the viewers to have sympathy for someone hard at work making a lot of money by simple exploitation!

Did someone say, ‘exploitation?’ Are we talking about banks, estate agents and insurance companies again?

Calm! I must just contemplate this butterfly.

Ah!