I am not celebrating the death of Baroness Margaret Thatcher. The passing of the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 was announced this morning. It has been said that she is one of the most vilified and controversial of leaders of our time as well as one of the most socially divisive.
She was responsible for the privatisation of several state owned industries and was in Power when the UK went to war with Argentina over the invasion of the Falkland Islands.
I spent Monday morning sitting outside our local council tribunal in Odemira waiting for a civil case to be heard.
I came face to face with one of the few things in this life that makes me physically and mentally uncomfortable. Unusually for a tribunal on the civil circuit as opposed to the criminal circuit — the local GNR (Guarda Nacional Republicana, the Polícia de Portugal) were “tooled up” — yep I was in the same room as a gun — in fact not just one gun — but four.
I wonder if Justin Bieber’s marketing and production team ever read the news beyond the current chatter about their teenage star. I would love to know what they made of this morning’s juxtaposition of articles on the BBC about young Mr Bieber keeping his very young audience waiting for nearly two hours at London’s O2 Arena last night and a rather interesting piece about Insight Marketing which explore some of the techniques used by some advertisers and companies to deliver added value about their products and services.
Notwithstanding all the emotions involved the hardest part of moving several thousands of miles to a new country is what you take with you. Many people who undertake moves of this distance move en-masse as a family, often with the assistance of an outside agency such as work that will ultimately pay for your removals and help you through the last frantic months in one location and assist you at the other end. Large organisations have their own relocation services, either their own in-house or a specialist company contracted to do the same.
I am cheating a little and using the Four Corners concept to quickly introduce to you people and ideas so that future articles on Portugal make a lot more sense.
Introducing Mr P — who does not really wish to be on the internet at all. Ironically, I met Mr P online playing a rather silly game called Tribal Wars. Mr P was born in Morocco of French parents and has been living in Portugal for most of his life. He has a degree in Biology from Pau University. He speaks French, Portuguese and English extremely well and has knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German as well. He has a strong sense of history and of culture. The mix of our cultures and our language brings a lot of humour to our lives. We love to travel — not just in the broadest sense — but in the everyday sense of exploration; not only of ourselves and our lives but in the beauty found all around us. We have adventures everywhere! This picture was taken at our handfasting where we took our vows in front of friends and family.
If we are lucky in our lives, we get unexpected windows of opportunity, a chance to do something totally different, to change tack or to travel a different path. Two years ago this month, I was offered an impromptu visit to Portugal – it was to change my life for ever. I knew if I missed this opportunity I would regret it for life. Six weeks later, I relocated here.
I moved from South West England to South West Portugal. As one of my best friends rather quaintly put it, “I moved from the ass end of nowhere to the ass end of the ass end of nowhere.”
From Here to there:
Two years ago, I moved to Portugal. I moved from a culture where kissing and hugging as a greeting was reserved for family and close friends to one where kissing and hugging are a far more widespread form of greeting. This is further complicated by the fact that my partner is French and that our social circle includes family – English, Portuguese and French, friends – English, Portuguese, French, Danish, German and Dutch and business colleagues and acquaintances which include all of the above plus Spanish and Italians as well. They all have different rules for social greetings!
A crime is committed. The police are called in on it or discover it in some other way. They are going to pursue it until they discover the person or people behind the crime — or so would have been my understanding of how the police works. I knew that the police abandoned certain cases that were just impossible to solve for whatever reason — perhaps the criminal involved covered their traces too well. What I was not aware of was exactly the extent to which the police simply give up on cases. In the UK that number is shockingly high — and even higher in London — as many as half of the cases, according to an article in the Daily Mail:
It was something disturbing I noticed as a teenager — seeing the small stores I loved going to as a kid shutting down and being replaced by cookie cutter stores owned by a dozen companies that were all uniform in appearance and in product. You could be on the inside of one restaurant and think that you were in a completely different state — there was no unique quality to the establishments and no feel of what some might call a company’s soul.
I am completely and totally in love with Adele — in the most honorable and humanistic way — and it is my delight to review her latest 21 album. Yes, Adele is a SuperGenius SuperStar from the UK and, yes, she is only 22 years old. Her voice is a throaty, smoky, raspy mix of the Bluesy heartache made famous by Fiona Apple, Rihanna and Janis Joplin.
There is no screening process involved in becoming a parent — all it takes is two people, not even necessarily in a relationship, and a sexual act that can take as little as a couple of minutes. From the act, nine or so months pass and a baby is born — and then you can get champion mothers like the one I recently observed on the train, yelling at her child while at the same time mostly ignoring her and listening to music on headphones and looking anywhere but the direction of her child.
In London, two Austrians were detained because they were taking digital images of buses. The police invoked “fighting terrorism” as the reason they required the deletion of the images from the tourists’ camera.
Jamie Grace wrote this article.
The e-governance initiatives that Anderson et al deplored in their Database State report are not, as I’ve argued previously here in Panopticonic, malicious works of a totalitarian state – they are about deploying information in a timely and accurate manner, about citizens in need of healthcare or social care. The true risk to information security and privacy comes from individuals working to intrude illegitimately into these databases and caches of personal data. I term these individuals, rather abstractly, ‘malicious agents.’
Jamie Grace wrote this article.
The Database State report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, written by the UK authors Anderson et al and published in March 2009 gives a sweeping – and damning – overview of databases, IT frameworks and general ‘e-governance’ initiatives concerned with managing (and hopefully improving) public health in the UK.
