Firstly can I welcome my new followers and thank you for taking the trouble to sign up, though I have to think there must be more things to look forward to in life than my weekly ramblings’. Having been recording my thoughts for nearly two years now it really is re-assuring to know that people are actually reading them, so to celebrate I have changed the blog title to reflect the broader field I seem to be straying into now, and posted a more appropriate picture which a passing Japanese tourist was kind enough to take of us as we rambled in remote woodland recently.
As you hopefully all know by now if you’ve been paying attention, Bulgaria is the only EU country which shares a border with Greece, so it’s hardly surprising that people here are keeping a close eye on what our “live now, can’t pay later” neighbours are up to now that “later” has arrived with a bang in the form of eye watering fiscal demands from the dreaded Hun, as paymasters of the Euro Zone. I don’t mean “with a bang” in the same sense as starting a war with a bang, as I obviously don’t want to mention the war here, nor conjure up images of a Panzer Division lined up along the Greek borders firing salvos of “Final Demand “ notices at the Greek parliament. On the other hand, this would probably be as effective at sorting out the mess as any of the other bright ideas the “leaders” of Europe have come up with so far.
Luckily there aren’t many similarities between the Greeks and Bulgarians as regards present life style or their history, which is certainly an advantage to the Bulgarians at the moment. After seventy odd years under Communism, which followed a history of little more than feudal rule, Bulgaria has yet to discover the short term joys of living on credit cards with most transactions still taking place for cash. For those of you who have forgotten what cash is, it’s those dirty pieces of paper which shops don’t want to accept from you because if you pay by card it saves them money, and scrap dealers pay you with if you drive up with rolls of railway signalling cable or a Barbara Hepworth bronze you found in the back of your garage in your rusty Transit pickup.
Consider if you will, that Greece was one of the cradles of civilisation two and a half thousand years ago, at a time when an upwardly mobile Briton was the one with the wheel and woad was the only colour to be seen in my dear! As Plato wrote his Republic, The Sun wasn’t even a twinkle in the young Rupert Murdoch’s eye. Sad to see then that the Greeks now make the news for being an example to the world of how political ineptitude, corruption and basic human greed can bring a country to its’ knees in just a few years. The site of hundreds of rioting Taverna waiters and impoverished ship owners beating hell out of Athens would surely be enough to make poor old Archimedes turn in his screw. (For those of you who don’t understand this intellectual type of humour, please refer to Google - screw archimedes). As the great Greek scholar, Wilkinus Macorbaritise so wisely said “Annual income twenty Euros, annual expenditure nineteen Euros ninety cents, result happiness, annual income twenty Euros, annual expenditure one hundred and thirty billion Euros, result, you’re right up the Corinth Canal without a f…ing paddle Stavros”.
Obviously one can’t blame the entire Greek population for the total shambles their economy is in as there must have been a few of them who had their head permanently up their arse over the past few years and didn’t have a clue what massive self-indulgence was going on around them, but most of the adult population must have known it was a massive rake handle waiting to come up and smack them in the face. Can they really have believed that their economy was the only one in Europe which could afford to let people spend their working lives driving empty trains around the country, being paid for fourteen months a year, (presumably some form of “Greek Baker’s Dozen”), and retiring at fifty two on ninety percent pensions. Surely that dreamed of Utopia will only ever exist if Alex Salmon gets full independence for Scotland?
The other farce has surely been the negotiating pantomime over the next €130 billion bailout loan which has been going on for months, even if it does seem more like years. If the Greeks had any sense they would have eagerly agreed to all the conditions laid down by the Euro Group straight away, had a good piss-up on the Liebfraumilch and legged it back to Athens to think of ways of blowing it all. As they still haven’t brought in many of the economies they promised when they got the first €110 billion bailout in 2010, surely no one actually expects them to keep to plan A this time around? And how about the Germans? Could they really be stomping up all this money so that they get priority passes for the sunbeds for the next thousand years, or are there more trivial reasons I haven’t thought of?
I’d hate you to think I have no sympathy for the ordinary Greeks who will bear the brunt of the financial tsunami which is hitting them, but it is an entirely self-inflicted injury which they are suffering from, and most of them seem very loath to admit any responsibility for it at all. In fact some of their politicians seem to think that it is their right to be let off the massive debts which they have racked up, and are amazed that Germany are refusing to bail them out without cast iron guarantees that they will be paid back. As Virgil wrote, (para-phrased), “Beware Greeks bearing gifts”, and he was a Greek for God’s sake, so if you can’t trust them when they’re giving you something, you’d surely be totally mad to trust them when they want you to give them a multi-billion Euro hand-out. They would probably find that a change in their own attitude, like a frank admission that they are an idle, ungrateful bunch of spendthrifts, would bring a more understanding response from the other Euro countries and sarcastic sods like me, though possibly not. The Greeks have become addicted to living the high life on other people’s money, and like all addicts, are finding it hard giving up, so possibly the only sensible thing for the Euro Group to do will be to cut them loose to do their “Cold Turkey”, though what Turkey will say about it I wouldn’t like to speculate on.
On a different note, we’ve had several weeks of rather horrid weather with snow and very low temperatures here, but today we woke to bright sunshine and a thaw setting in, accompanied by the sound of the village death bell tolling to announce the demise of an elderly resident who had just managed to struggled through the entire cold spell before giving up the fight. Talk about a good example of “life’s just one damn thing after another and then you die”.
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