I'll Drink All Day

Jeremy's at it again. At times, I do wonder if he tries a bit too hard at being contrary and offensive. Rather like Littlejohn, I'm not totally convinced that he believes half of what he says. But in Clarkson-land, the expat life is one, as he puts it, in which an expat has "a nose like a burst beetroot" and who wonders if "it's okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning". There is a bit of familiarity about this. Did not A.A. Gill, in the same newspaper ("The Sunday Times"), make a similar observation about the early-morning drinking habits of expats on the Costas when he undertook his character assassination of Keith Floyd? And when, what must be about three years ago now, Alexei Sayle (in "The Independent") demolished Leapy Lee, there was reference, to "some minor expat singer with a criminal record and views tailor-made for his audience of drink-sozzled, golf-playing Costa Brits".

For Jezza, any expat in Spain is, basically, a criminal. Weighing up the options as to countries to which the British might wish to emigrate in order to escape Peter Mandelson, he rules out Spain for his reader on the grounds that "you're not called Del and you weren't involved in the Walthamstow blag". In fact, he rules out everywhere, but for different reasons.

This crim and booze image might be all a tad tiresome if it weren't for the fact that it is quite funny and not without some element of truth. I can think of at least one Del. When his bar had to be evacuated and some of the contents dispensed with, there was some slight apprehension as to the exact source of some of the items on offer. Del is an appropriate enough name, given the ubiquity of "Fools And Horses" and of DVDs bearing the title, not all of which bring with them a payment to BBC Worldwide. All these Dels selling dodgy Del DVDs to some bloke called Del. But whereas one who had committed the Walthamstow blag might be residing in Benalmádena, he would be most unlikely to be in Alcúdia or Puerto Pollensa as only people from Leicester or Hull live in Alcúdia or, for some bizarre reason, from Kilmarnock in the case of Puerto Pollensa.

Now that the season has finished, and the Dels have either had to make swift their escape from Spanish territory and its coastal waters, or handed back the keys, or sold off the Sky system, or all of these, there is the opportunity for those who remain to take to the only bars staying open and indulge in a little 10am sharpening, which can go on to, well, 10pm. Normally, such intake would be curbed by a couple of hours in season, but now they can join the retired Dels and Mrs Dels (Raquels presumably) who make no concession to hours by a bar; summer or winter, they are the same. Actually, I exaggerate. There may be a few soaks and the occasional burst beetroot but other than the odd beer or glass of wine, it is not that common to see your expat imbibing much more than a coffee in the mornings or indeed in the afternoons. The Jezza (and Gill) image is overstated, as is the crim angle. Yep, there are one or two of them, but sadly, though it's a funny line, I'm afraid I have to tell Jeremy that it's not strictly accurate.


Those of a criminal bent may have discovered that they can no longer use their mobile phones. As of yesterday, any unregistered mobile was cut off. This means that all those pay-as-you-go mobiles, which had not been registered (all phones under contract were and are registered), are now useless except for 112 emergency calls. The thinking behind this was that the unregistered mobile was the communication device of choice for the crim or terrorist, neither of whom would be likely to be making 112 calls unless they are issuing a warning as to a bomb going off. Some 25% of pay-as-you-go phones, representing some four million users, remain unregistered, so the Spanish government has extended by six months the period in which registration can be effected, allowing the user to keep his or her number.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Abba, "Waterloo", performing on German TV, and it's still this bad (the TV that is), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1q17rUkVU. Today's title - line from something by one of the finest of indie bands. Very British, which is probably appropriate.

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