Brothers, Sisters, Where Are You Now?

Does Mallorca never get snow? To see some of the reports the past couple of days, you would be forgiven for thinking that it is a once-in-a-generation event. Except it isn't. It is an at least once if not several times a winter event. But no, somehow space is there to be filled, so let's do so with some photos of those grey peaks, looking slightly less than grey and fairly white. Big deal.

It's also not as though it has hit really low temperatures or as though it has snowed at sea level. I have known it to be minus one and to be snowing (after a fashion) in Alcúdia and Playa de Muro. It was something of an apology for "snowing" - squalls of big sleet, if there is such a thing as big sleet. We have yet to experience anything comparable with that, but one thing that can be said, though, is that it does seem to have been a colder and wetter winter than normal. Even the locals are saying this, so it must be the case, I suppose.


Elsewhere, and rather less trivial than the nature of the weather and a few shots of some snowy mountains, there is news that the crusading judge - Balatasar Garzón - is stirring up the Francoist pot once more. This is the same judge who had wanted graves to be dug up as part of a campaign against former members of the Franco regime and era who might have committed crimes against humanity. A stop was put to that, so now it would appear that Judge Garzón has turned his attention to children of Republicans who were taken away from their parents. Perhaps you were unaware that this was another of the rather unpleasant aspects of the Franco period. They couldn't have the poor children of Spain growing up, tainted by left-wing thinking. Oh no, so they handed them over to the Falange and the Church, that double-header of liberal-minded orthodoxy, in order to get them thinking in the right ways. And of course many of the children and parents have never been and were never re-united.

Something you might also have been unaware of, until this was all reported yesterday in "The Times", was that there was a fair amount of racial purification knocking around in the post-Civil War era. Rather like the Nazis, there was even a manual devoted to the "eugenics of Hispanicity" and to the "regeneration of the race". So there you go, a thoroughly unpleasant bunch they truly were. I wonder, though, back then, if they were aware just how much Jewish and Muslim DNA lingers in contemporary Spaniards (and indeed Mallorcans). No, they almost certainly weren't.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Tremeloes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVz0-tD5d44). Today's title - from a political song in a different context to that of Spain and the "stolen children".

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