Continuing stories!

After my abject failure to collect the parcel which was not delivered to our house, despite our being home at the time, Phil went along to the designated Royal Mail office early yesterday evening and successfully picked it up. (As I suspected, it was a chess book; it was appropriate, therefore that he collected it?) There was quite a queue of people collecting parcels. The staff complained that their workload had gone up this week, largely due to a management decision that parcels unable to be left at Delph Post Office should be redirected to them for collection. There is a perfectly good Post Office at Dobcross, the nearest Saddleworth village to Delph. Sending undelivered Delph parcels there would have been more convenient for just about everyone. Nobody told management that!

En route for the Royal Mail office, Phil has a little misadventure: a contretemps with a dog. As he walked down the road in the pouring rain, umbrella up, he noticed a man about to unlock his front door. The man in question was accompanied by a young Alsatian dog, rather bouncy and perhaps not well controlled, so Phil gave them a wide berth. Not wide enough, however. As he passed by the dog lunged at him and grabbed him by the arm, hard enough to cause bruising and some scratching. The owner of the dog failed to apologise. Indeed, he berated Phil for carrying an umbrella. The dog does not like umbrellas feels threatened by them and reacts accordingly. Understandable ... to a certain extent.


I know dogs who object to people in hats. My daughter's dog thoroughly dislikes vacuum cleaners and sweeping brushes. However, he does not attack the welder of such implements. Oh, no! He alternates between cowering at the other side of the room, growling furiously, and harassing the vacuum cleaner, preventing cleaning from taking place. He has to be shut in another room or put out in the garden. When your dog is unreasonable you take measures to prevent it causing problems. Training is a really good idea!

So today we have been checking the address of the dog owner and making reports to the police, what the Spanish would call a "denuncia". After all, had Phil been a less robust individual, he might have been knocked to the ground. Had the passerby been someone with a child under an umbrella, what might the consequences have been? So steps have been taken!

Meanwhile, on a rather more serious note, during Theresa May's coughing speech yesterday someone called Simon Brodkin handed the prime minister a fake P45, claiming he was following the instructions of Boris Johnson. Indignant comments have been made about security measures. How had this happened? How was it possible to sneak a piece of paper past security checks? More importantly, perhaps, how had he got credentials to be in the conference at all and been able to worm his way to the front and interrupt the PM.

She appeared, by the way, to be unaware of what it was at first as she just accepted it, put it on the floor and continued with her speech, before she recovered enough to make jokes about giving Jeremy Corbyn a P45.

Mr Brodkin was arrested, dragged from the conference hall indeed, but will not be charged with anything. It seems his alter ego is a character called Lee Nelson, well known as a prankster. In 2015 he showered the then Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, with fake banknotes, and last year at the reopening of Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland he hijacked the then US presidential candidate’s speech with golf balls emblazoned with swastikas. None of this came up in security checks! How could that be? Fortunately so far in this country you don't get a criminal record for plying practical jokes on famous people. No doubt that might change now.

Even more seriously, the Catalan situation rumbles on. Spanish, and non-Spanish but Catalan-supporting, friends of mine have been posting evidence of police violence in Barcelona and other cities. Others have been posting stuff from a different point of view.

One post included this: Cataluña no está "oprimida". Es una de las regiones más prósperas de España y sus ciudadanos disfrutan de un alto nivel de vida y uno de los más altos grados de autogobierno de cualquier región de Europa. Roughly translated: Catalonia is not "oppressed". It is one of the most prosperous regions of Spain and its citizens enjoy a high standard of living and one of the highest levels of self-government of any region in Europe.

My Spanish niece, an Andalusian, posted something about Grazalema, a town in the hills not far from where she lives, which once had a thriving woollen industry but lost it when investment in Catalonia led to the work moving there.

Another friend published a letter from a 30 year-old Catalan living in London, in which he expressed his feelings of having been brainwashed from an early age by separatists. Going to London on an Erasmus scholarship made him realise that there is a wider world that Catalonia. And besides, he went on, some of the Catalan traditions were invented at the end of the 19th /beginning of the 20th century. These included even the "sardana"', the "national" dance which was invented by someone from Alcalá la Real in the province of Jaen.

Oh dear! Who to believe?

None of this excuses police violence or makes Rajoy's mismanagement of the situation any less serious. But it does does give you food for thought.