Counterfeit life!

Down near the port here in Vigo you see once again groups of Africans selling sun hats, useful for people off on a boat trip to the Islas Cíes, having forgotten to pack something to protect their head. They also sell replica handbags, copies of expensive brand name goods.

We saw them first, I think, in Venice years ago. There they were referred to as the “vu compra”, a garbled version kf the Italian for “do you want to buy?”. They displayed their wares on a blanket so that they could pick up the four corners and convert it into a holdall and do a runner if the police appeared.

Here they seem to be quietly tolerated, although they did disappear for a while.

I read yesterday that the British fashion label Burberry destroyed more than £28m worth of its fashion and cosmetic products over the past year to guard against counterfeiting. Such counterfeiting as the products sold by the Africans down at the port! Burberry’s annual report said that they burned £28.6 million worth of products.

Apparently it’s a common practice across the retail industry. They claim that this measure is “needed” to protect intellectual property, whatever that means, and to prevent illegal counterfeiting by ensuring the supply chain remains intact.

Burberry said that they for the burning of their products only worked with specialist companies able to harness the energy from the process in order to make it environmentally friendly. How very reassuring!

What a prodigious waste of resources! I wonder of it has occurred to anyone that they Re producing too much stuff. Or that if they brought the prices down more might be sold and there would be less waste.

They sell men’s polo shirts for up to £250 and their famous trench coats go for a silly £1,500. Even Burberry shareholders questioned why the unsold products were not offered to private investors.

This is a completely different way of living to what ordinary people experience!

Maybe the big fashion brands CEO’s convince themselves that their version of the truth is the correct one, rather like a certain American president who last week said in an interview recorded in Scotland: “Don’t forget both of my parents were born in EU sectors – my mother was Scotland, my father was Germany.” It seems his mother, Mary MacLeod, was indeed born in Scotland, on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. But his father, Fred Trump, was born in New York City, in the United States of America. Not Germany.

Fudging origins may well be a family trait. Fred’s father, Friedrich, was born in Germany, but when Fred took over the family real estate business he apparently used to maintain he was from Sweden. This was in order to be more “palatable” to Jewish tenants!

A little lie to make life, and money making, easier.

How the other half live!

Then there is the thing about repeating a lie often enough so that it becomes a version of the truth. And sometimes even when the lie is brought out into the open, as with the cheating that they Brexiteers were involved in, it seems to be too late to do anything about it. And people accept a fait accompli.

What a topsy-turvy world we live in!