Telephone Line

1485. Some of you will recall that I lay claim to being a history scholar. Scholar is perhaps an over-exaggeration, but one I can live with. As a result though, show me certain numbers in combination and I am likely to be suddenly transformed into a weird beard with leather-patched sports jackets, i.e. a history tutor. 1485? Come on, you must know it as well. Kingdom for a horse and all that. Yes, you know it, of course you do. War of the Roses - Battle of Bosworth Field, 22 August 1485 to be precise, and Richard III begging for a horse while his crown hung on a thorn bush, or so said a certain playwright. 1485. It was also the year of birth of the unfortunate Catherine, she of Aragon and later the first missus of the lunatic Henry VIII. Well, I have to give some sort of a Spanish twist, do I not? There is another Spanish twist. 1485. The war of the mobile phone companies. How many times have I received a call from 1485 in the past week or so? I contacted Vodafone. Not because I hadn't anything better to do, but because they are the ones to whom I pay good money for the privilege of some twat pestering me with calls I don't want. "I've been getting this call from 1485," says I. "1485? Must be costing the caller a fortune." (Actually, they didn't say that.) "Do you know who it is?" asks I. "Is it a scam, a hack or what?" "None of them," comes the reply. "It's Movistar," they say with the hint of a laugh. "Marketing", they add; marketing being a word the Spanish (and not just the Spanish) tend to use, erroneously, to mean selling. "Movistar!?" "Movistar," they repeat.

For those of you who don't know, Movistar is the mobile wing of Telefonica, the national phone company. Movistar is making unsolicited calls to my mobile and to many others, if what I'm now seeing on the internet is anything to go by. There are many here who will have nothing to do with anything that is vaguely to do with Telefonica, and that includes Movistar. I am not one of them. I don't get upset by all-powerful organisations, though there are those, including the European Commission, who do: Telefonica is not unfamiliar with huge fines for uncompetitive, anti-trust activity. But I don't want them being a damn nuisance and calling my mobile with their automated system that repeats its call after half an hour, every day, when you don't bother answering, which is every time the number rings. Consequently, and very politely, do you mind sodding off?


There are many gifts that keep on giving here, as in being basically daft and continuing to be so. One such is, of course, the gloriously ridiculous projected golf course in Playa de Muro. My, what fun it has given us over the months and now years. What will we all do when they've actually built the damn thing? Not play golf on it, that's for sure. Anyway, as noted recently, Muro has managed to publicise the course as an attraction, despite it still being no more than a series of bunkers on an architect's plan and the winsome look of an endangered species on an environmentalist's sentimental propaganda. Mere bagatelle, implies the mayor, when it is pointed out that the course has neither been built nor fully approved. Bagatelle. Now that's a game where small balls are struck into numbered holes, is it not? A bit like golf, and just as pointless, or certainly just as pointless as the course in Muro.

One of the many problems for the golf course is that there is an apparently endless supply of environmentalists who emerge from the undergrowth and are willing to keep the whole debacle being debated. Step forth, therefore, the advisors on flora and fauna to the Balearic Government's environment department. They reckon that not enough is being done to protect the rare orchid on the Son Bosc finca; the rare orchid that has been the main subject of the environmental objection to the conversion of the finca. Now, given that this orchid is so rare and apparently so damn important, might it not have been an idea to ask these advisors before? Maybe. However, even had they been, what they have to say is not "binding". In other words, it doesn't count. So, why did they bother asking them? The point is that the course design has already been changed to accommodate this orchid. The eighth hole has been shifted as, originally, it would have meant some high handicappers trampling through the rough and hacking the orchid to pieces as they tried to get back on the fairway. Now, the enviro champions, GOB, have found that there's a problem with the seventh hole, too. Well, what a surprise. I wonder how long it will be before someone reckons there is a rare ant (or dec) breeding on the site of the green of the sixth hole. This can just go on and on, can't it. And it probably will. Maybe they could just build the first 16-hole golf course and have done with it. Or 15-hole. The gift that keeps on giving.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDgq10Rsb-0). Today's title - perms and probably the alleged cello scrotum.

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