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Showing posts with label RTAs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RTAs. Show all posts

Monday, November 19, 2018

Survived again!




After a night or rain, weak sunshine at lunchtime.  I’ll settle for that!  Travelling along a busy motorway, early morning, in the dark, in the rain, is a truly depressing experience.  And a frightening one.  I am always amazed by how little Spanish/Catalan motorists modify their driving to suit the conditions, and, in spite of myself, I find myself drawn into their lunatic dicing with death manoeuvres until a more sensible me takes control again and argues that the gain of a few seconds is not worth the risk.

I have actually measured the advantage semi-scientifically by observing the behaviour of car drivers along certain stretches of the urban and urban motorway roads around us during peak traffic times.  In urban situations, traffic lights and zebra crossings stop traffic, so any gains made are usually wiped out within a few hundred metres of road.  On motorways, slow travelling lorries overtaking each other and entrances and exits from the motorways are the major causes of traffic slowing.  If the motorway is being used as a way of skirting a short stretch of urban congestions then the traffic gains of the death-welcomers is usually marginal.

St Boi is, and has been for years, a bottleneck and place of frustration for traffic trying to change from one motorway to another.  I sometimes think that I can hear the deep rumbling sounds of hundreds of motorists’ teeth being ground simultaneously as they wait in seemingly never-ending queues!
One of the links that we take every day goes from a three-lane major motorway to a single lane turn-off link road with consequent slowing.  In theory.  In practice the speed that motorists take the curvaceous, unlighted road is terrifying.

Added to all this is the Spanish/Catalan use of the indicator.  Here a flashing light means that the driver is executing the turn or movement, not that he intends to.  If you are driving along a road and there is a junction with another road joining yours with broken white lines, that is just an indication to you of where the other cars will join your part of the road, there is none of that namby-pamby waiting for a safe space to make the move.  As these two things happen all the time, there is a sort of safety in continuity.  As you know that it is going to take place you make allowances, and therefore no deaths occur.  What happens when, say an unsuspecting Brit drives along the road expecting the courtesy and safety standards at home, I do not know.  Though I would point out that the number of RTAs in Catalonia are astonishing and would occasion questions in parliament if they occurred in Britain.

Still, I have been driving on Catalan roads for a decade now, so, while I am still constantly astonished, I am also fatalistic and make sure that I allow for what I know is going to happen.
But still, none of this driving gains anything.  The most that criminally reckless drivers can hope for is a couple of car lengths advantage before they are slowed down by the built-in limitations to carefree driving!

I am obviously typing all this to reinforce my own (perceived) considerate driving and to make me feel morally superior as some cretin overtakes on the inside and veers across a couple of other lanes.

-oOo-


Resultado de imagen de fear and loathing in la liga

I have just finished reading “Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid” by Sid Lowe (2013) London, Yellow Jersey Press It was actually recommended by the Local an English language internet magazine that concentrates on Spain.  I had already taken out a subscription before I realized just how right wing the political content of the thing was, but it is useful for recipes and inconsequential information about my adopted country.  “Fear and Loathing” was one of the books suggested as “essential” reading to get a flavour of what it is to live in the country.


Resultado de imagen de ss nevassa

I am no real fan of football but I am a Barça fan.  I can name more members of the team than I was ever able to do for any of the British national teams up to and including the World Cup winning team of 1966 – where the broadcast of the match I heard on a school trip aboard the Nevasa somewhere in the Baltic!


Resultado de imagen de barça independencia

Living in Catalonia and surrounded by a family who are ostentatiously Catalan, my interest in Barça is as much self-defence as anything else.  My interest is of course increased by the fact that Barça’s motto is famously “mes que un club” – more than a club.  This can be taken in a number of ways, but it has also been, and is now, a focus for nationalism and Catalan independence.  Politics is inseparable from the games, especially los clássicos, the games between Barça and Real Madrid.

This book, all 432 pages of it, takes what I think is a balanced view of the “loathing” and attempts to put it in a social, political and historical context.  Sid Lowe attempts to take many of the myths surrounding the game and especially these two teams and find evidence to assess them.

Although I am not interested in football, you might say the same thing about piloting a Mississippi Steam Boat or whale fishing, but it did not stop me enjoying the work of Melville or Twain.  There is something exhilarating about entering a world about which you know little relying on the competence of an expert who wants to communicate – and Sid Lowe is definitely an expert!

In his ‘Author’s Note’ at the start of the book, Lowe writes, “Part of me wanted to include footnotes throughout” in the event he did not do so, but the book reads as though he could have and the reader feels that he has documented evidence to back up everything he says.  The book also passes my ‘academic’ test by having a proper ‘contents’ page together with a bibliography and index and it has two sets of photographs in the middle!

The rivalry as revealed in this book is much more nuanced than fans on either side would have you believe.  Real Madrid was founded by two Catalans, and Barça by a Swiss (in the official history) or and Englishman in another book I’ve read, but by a foreigner at any rate.  The rise and fall and rise and fall of the clubs is more complex than I had ever realised and iconic points of conflict between the two, for example the notorious signing of Di Stéfano, are explained with new information making the final assessment much more interesting.

I read this book like a novel and when you think about it the two clubs combine money, power, glamour, politics, nationality, language and virtually anything else that you can think of in melange in which there is a fair amount of sport as well.

I recommend this book without hesitation even, or perhaps especially, for those who think that they have little interest in two over-paid bunches of kick-ballers pretending to do something important with their time!

A lot has happened in the five years between the publication of this book and the present.  I for one, look forward to Lowe’s next book with some eagerness.

-oOo-

The sun has now been shining brightly for longer than five minutes so I will go for a short bike ride (to show willing) and also to see a new sundial that has been set in place ten or so streets away from where I am typing this.
If I find it, I will include a photo of it in the next blog.

-oOo-

Please feel free to visit my poetry blog at:

https://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com/2018/11/daily-run.html