Product placement.

Oh dear! The French are unhappy because Spain has been exporting wine into their country. Cheap Spanish wine! How shocking! Wine tankers have been stopped and emptied onto roads in southwest France. Surely French wines are sold in Spain. That's fine but the French claim that Spain is flooding the market and undercutting them pricewise. Some people just can't stand competition. 

Having written that, I remembered a conversation in the Italian conversation class. We had been talking about "Made in Italy"- all the range of stuff that supposedly is made there. My contribution was about something I had heard on the radio or read in the newspaper about leather goods. Someone had commented that if all the leather goods which claim to be made in Italy were actually made of Genuine Italian Leather, Italy would need so many cows that you would see them drinking from the Trevi fountain. Much of the leather comes from elsewhere, of course. This does not stop the shoes and bags being made in Italy though. But some of them might just be finished off in Italy, like all the "hand-made" clothes and "hand-knitted" sweaters that are all machine produced but finished off by hand. 

Our teacher went on, however, to talk angrily about the oranges that are thrown away in her native Sicily because they can't sell them. Cheaper oranges are imported from Morocco and sold at less than half the price that local orange growers can afford to sell them for. A bit like British steel, I suppose. 

So perhaps the French wine producers have a point. But surely, if they want to export and sell their wines in other countries, such as Spain, they must accept some importing as well. 

While I'm going on about selling stuff and consumer goods and so on, what about the iPhone? 

After the initial thing of mobile phones getting smaller and smaller, replacing the bricks that the first mobile phone users carried around with them, suddenly the smart phone began to get bigger. Some say it was because people were using their iPhone like a mini-tablet and wanted a bigger screen because of all the apps they used. Call me sceptical and suspicious but I think that maybe it was so that people could show off that they had the latest gadget. 

Anyway, there is now a new iPhone SE, which has gone back to being small again, the same size as my old iPhone - not old in the sense of "the one I used to have" but in the sense of "the ancient bit of technology which nonetheless continues to serve me well". 

Now, here is an excerpt from a review of this new gadget in today's paper: 

"In the hand the body feels sharp and hard, with unforgiving edges which are only acceptable because of the phone’s diminutive size. The hard edges are easier to grip than the slippery rounded sides of the iPhone 6S, and particularly the large 6S Plus, but they hurt my palms after clutching it for an hour or two." 

Really? Who "clutches" their phone for an hour or two at a time. Pockets and bags are useful for putting your phone away when you have finished whatever you were using it for. Work tables and desks are good for the same purpose. And who "clutches" their phone anyway? Don't these people know how to simply hold things? 

 Of course, as phone users grow younger and younger - our daughter is talking about her almost eleven year old needing one, especially when he goes to secondary school next September - children will go straight from the dummy and security blanket to the phone, which they can clutch all day to make them feel safe!