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A very lazy day spent reading the newspapers and watching Poirot on the TV. In the evening we eat at the Rock Hotel which
only has three occupied tables including ours.
Back to the UK! This is the Pyrenees ... very cold
My rubber plant is feeling very sorry for itself but is pleased to see me.
I always complain about towns that are so self important that they just assume you know where you are. So it is a pleasant surprise when we drive over the Penines to find a town that not only tells us where we are but the day of the week as well - very handy.
We have to go right up North and on the way back we pass a shop for sale. I have to say that 99p for a shop seems very cheap but we are in the most serious depression since 1929 and this is Scotland so maybe it is about right.
We go out to eat with some friends - this is Paola practising before the meal arrives.
Back to Malaga. When the plane lands we all climb into a bus that has a very clever triple pole to hang onto.
On the subject of grasping hands, according to
The Times,
the chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, Seán FitzPatrick, has resigned because he lent himself €87
million of the bank's money and then hid the loan from regulators by doing clever year end transfers. Where the money is
nobody seems to know but I daresay he has some idea. Frankly, he should go down for twenty years for that even though what
he did was totally legal.
Bent bankers have a long tradition. According to John Kenneth Galbraith's masterpiece,
The Great Crash 1929,
the Chairman of Chase National Bank, Albert H Wiggin, made over $4M (about $60M in today's money) selling
short the shares of his own bank, using the bank's money! That was legal too but in due course he resigned because he was
exhausted from the years spent "promoting the growth, welfare and usefulness" of the bank. No doubt they gave him a gold
clock.
The tragedy of this kind of behaviour is that it gives Capitalism a bad name (OK, a worse name) but really this has
nothing to do with Capitalism or any other "ism" for that matter - what we are looking at is human greed untrammelled by
any sense of what is reasonable. Having said that, I suppose it is no different than taking home a pen from work - just on
a somewhat bigger scale.
The test of behaviour should be "would you want this on the front page of your local newspaper"? If not, then don't do it.
Or if you do, have a good alibi and an escape route planned.
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