What money will buy

There being nothing wrong with my mobile phone, I have bought another.

That sentence has all the simple elegance of Austen; though she might have used a semi-colon rather than a mere comma. And it is a sentiment that all gadgetophiles might read and think it states nothing but a completely understandable and ordinary sentiment.


I do not yet have the thing in my hot little hand as it is the “phone of the moment” and, before you ask, not anything as vulgar as an i-phone, but something which is, allegedly, bigger and better.


That remains to be seen, as does my use of the thing. My present phone is woefully under-used with my attempts to delve deeper inflicting no more than surface scratches on the goodies packed inside. On the frustrating basis of ineptitude I have bought something even more sophisticated and powerful. There is a certain sort of twisted logic there if you search for it. At least if you are me there is!

Even the Spanish and Catalan papers had pictures of a couple who had just announced their engagement. The disinterested part of me that tries to be fair is happy that they are happy: the rest of me (the vast majority of me) is appalled that such an undistinguished pair have achieved international, world-wide notoriety because the male part of the couple is the son of a broken marriage of an adulterer father and a publicity seeking mother; whose almost completely talentless grandmother (married to an insensitive, accident prone, bigoted Greek husband) achieved prominence because her diffident, stuttering father was forced into prominence by the selfish philandering of her arrogant playboy uncle . . . I could go on, but you get the general idea.


I understand that there was journalistic over-kill in the UK about this essentially empty event; at least I was saved that by being in Catalonia, but it was nevertheless depressing to see photos on the front pages of respectable newspapers.


I can only assume that with the world wide crisis in the financial world; cholera in Haiti; a growing critical situation in Morocco; the continuing (alleged) corruption in FIFA; the election campaign in Catalonia; the disaster of unemployment and one or two other stories that come to mind, it was, nevertheless a “slow” news day which gives two nonentities the absurd level of coverage that they have been given.


Let’s face it, the monarchy of Great Britain has been, since The Glorious Revolution an increasingly empty institution having all the rhetoric of authority but none of the real power.


All its existence demonstrates is the effective negation of the reality of a meritocracy in the United Kingdom. It is a living contradiction of what democracy is all about. It has no place whatsoever in the modern world.


When Big Ears and the only “noble” virgin over eighteen that the authorities could find were married I went to the USA to escape the maudlin, sycophantic, grovelling and suffocating coverage that was given to the great non-event. To my horror I discovered that there was actually more television coverage in New York than there was in London!


I hope that Barcelona will have much more restraint than that!