Thank goodness the weather is improving. We have had a very messy spring here in the Algarve. Winter really lasts for only a few weeks, and that was quite warm this year, while spring presented us with two or three weeks of summer weather, and then the slide from spring to summer was downright cold. But the summer flowers are out. The oleanders are in bloom, and the streets are lovely with the jacaranda trees also in bloom. For the moment the flowers are covering the canopies, but before long these blue flowers will have turned into a lovely carpet on the ground.
Last week was the romeria of El Rocio. A couple of years ago I went to this amazing fastival, but the crowds are difficult to cope with, and I decided to give it a miss this year, but I do have plenty of photographs of the event. It really is something else.
This next picture doesn’t really fit into my usual blogs (I suppose it doesn’t fit in to this one either, but it is from the Algarve, so I thought you’d be amused to see this particular tinned soup. It sold out rather quickly, so presumably the girls are happy.
Rapidly changing gear…..
I used to update my comments on real estate markets whenever there was a change in circumstances. The trouble is, everywhere is in such chaos these days that is no longer possible. Usually, I could make sensible comments on what was likely to happen in the near future. These days I haven’t a clue. In short, there doesn’t seem to be a way to think and plan ahead.
Only a couple of centuries ago life was so much slower that coping with the future was relatively straight-forward but that is no longer the case. Life is changing from generation to generation, and even from decade to decade.
There is an even more difficult situation for those of us living in the Western world. Western values have changed out of all recognition over the course of the last generation that I no longer recognise the civilisation and values I was brought up with, so how on earth do I chart a way forward in my life?
There is one other factor in all this, and that is the problem that one cannot make any useful decisions about the future unless one has some information about where we are now, and what is just around the corner. With the resources available we are bombarded with information, so we should be in a much better situation than we have ever been, except that we are bombarded with seemingly endless misinformation. So how do we tell which is which?
On the micro level I think as far as Europe is concerned I am probably living in the better part of the continent. The weather is benign. I live in a basically agrarian society which is not heavily dependent upon energy, though where we are likely to get our imports from in the future is unknown. Portugal is basically poor, with a badly educated population. But then what I can gather from the UK, the kids there are just as bad. Take away their mobile phones and they would all waste away.
But things at the moment are at least relatively calm here, which is better than being in Northern Europe where everyone seems to be uptight and screaming.
I have said before that Europe, as it currently is heading, is going to the dogs, and doing so rather rapidly. But, as I have said above, I cant see where we are headed.
Do I assume revolution is heading our way? Are we approaching political collapse, rescue, oblivion? How on earth can one tell? The fight in Ukraine has been appalling, but already the US neocons are stoking up the next one, this time in Georgia.
Why the heck cant the yanks go home? I left university because of Vietnam. I was press-ganged by my friends into attending the Oxford Union debate ‘That This House Deplores the use of Chemical Weapons’. A delegation of Washington war hawks came over to refute the argument, telling us they were fine fellows, and they were making the world safe for democracy. And did it really matter if they shot people, drowned them, or dropped chemical weapons on them? I can even remember part of the speech.
“If you want to get possession of that hill, does it matter how you do it? Your job is to take possession of that hill. Does it really matter how you kill the people on that hill?”
I need to stop this before I get upset again.
I drove home that weekend and told my mother I wasn’t going back. She couldn’t understand, and I couldn’t explain.
The trouble is the neocons have been at it almost non-stop ever since the end of world war two. Eighty-one regime changes since the end of the second world war. That’s insane. No wonder there is finally a massive move to reject US hegemony. Unfortunately, Europe is still wedded to the US, and is treated as a vassal state. Until that changes, Europe is doomed.
The trouble is, there is the possibility that things will get worse.
If we had politicians with at least a grain of sanity, they would back off. But this is the problem. They seem hell-bent on destroying the world.
I think ultimately this will all die down again. The ultimate problem with the US is that they have no follow-through. They ran away from Vietnam, from Afghanistan, Syria, and the rest of their failed projects, and shortly they’ll run away from Ukraine, and hopefully Israel. But at the moment there are far too many lunatics over there who think dropping nuclear bombs is the answer.
The conclusion to this ramble is that once again I shall be putting off any predictions about the future. But if things get much worse I may move back out to the Canary Islands.
In the eighties Julie and I lived there. What the heck possessed us to move?
The Weather, the Summer Flowers & Cock Flavoured Soup