Striking effects.

This weekend the grandchildren have come to stay while my daughter goes gallivanting in Ireland. So far we have been relatively incident free apart from an emergency run to the local opticians when the youngest grandchild decided to lose his temper with his big sister and take it out on his glasses. Result: one bent glasses frame that needed a little professional straightening. Apart from that, so far so good.

I have even found time to read today’s paper. There I came upon an article by Giles Tremlett who often writes about life in Spain. He was commenting on Spanish grandparents more than half of whom provide childcare for their children, looking after the grandchildren on a regular basis while their own grown up children earn a living. I know people in the UK who do a good deal of babysitting in this way but it’s nowhere near the scale of what is happening in Spain. There one in eight of grandparents looks after their grandchildren for more than eight hours a day.

Now the UGT is calling on these unpaid babysitters to go on strike on Wednesday as a way of drawing attention to the way they are propping up the economy in the current time of crisis. As long as people can rely on grandma and granddad the state has no need to provide a better childcare service than exists at the moment. It doesn’t sound as though they will get a great deal of support though. The general feeling is that you can’t just leave the grandchildren out on the street. This does seem to be rather missing the point. Surely what is needed is for los abuelos to say no and then the workers will have to take a day off and explain the situation to their employers. But in the current fragile economic climate it’s not likely to happen.

Onto other matters: Xulio Lago and Roberto Brañas have come clean as the perpetrators of the installation on the Moaña hilltop. They are the Grupo Labra and with the help of an assistant set up the giant chair overlooking the Vigo estuary.

Their aim apparently was to give people something else to talk about than the crisis, the state of the economy and the number of people who have been involved in accidents in the Morraza corridor. Well, they seem to have succeeded in that as TV crews from news channels have been around interviewing people ever since their artistic efforts appeared.

They also stated that they liked the idea of giving some publicity to a fine view. I can certainly vouch for the beauty of the view from up there. Unlike many artistic installations it didn’t even cost them a huge amount. They claim to have spent about 20 euros on screws. They don’t mention the wood and paint; maybe they had that already. I wonder what their next artistic endeavour will be.