Thanks for your kind words all of you. It's not that I/we are thinking of going anywhere, but we are personally involved with many dear friends who see terrible aspects of history repeating themselves. And I'm not talking distant history, I'm just sixty so I was just eighteen when Franco died and my peers over here had their childhoods blighted during the repression. The situation isn't new, it's just gone atomic in the last year. In fact the PP govt. have been attacking Catalan rights ever since they got into power - more so after they failed their attack on women when repealing the right to abortion got quashed, actually just watered down, back in 2015 (when the European parliament was all against them!).
Pete, we have
always thought of ourselves more 'European' than British for a lot of reasons, not having any kind of settled life in the UK being the main one I guess. But although we're not personally affected by the Independence issue as such, because we're not Spanish citizens, with the Brexit that's something we've had to think about. But you
are affected when you see grown men crying on the street when they realise that forty years of positive change has simply been taken away almost overnight.
Sadly, I don't see that anyone outside seems to be getting the message, the BBC reporting is worse than pathetic and I don't suppose the papers are much better. You read editorials asking whether there will be a new civil war. Well these days there are more ways to wage war than guns and tanks, and in fact the economic war has already begun with the govt. pressuring, successfully, thousands of companies to move out of Catalonia, taking their tax revenue with them if not actual jobs. Moreover the direct control the Catalonian budget has starved medical research labs of essential funds, doing critical damage not just to research itself but the song term future of the sector, in which Catalonia excels. Even worse on the human rights aspect, charities supporting literally hundreds of thousands of people in poverty, the homeless, disabled, mentally ill, etc. etc. have had their core funding frozen ...
As for cyberwar, well it seems to have cooled off a bit since the Referendum and UDI but the Guardia Civil shut dozens of the Generalitat's web sites, including essential public information, and in fact this is still going on ...
I could go on all night, but life is short. As you guys say Spain is great - and most Catalans still feel that - it really is a small minority of s***e pelicans and some racist, and fascist it has to be said, bigots out there ... But - the £-€ exchange is shifting - at long last!!! - and my mortgage interest rate has just dropped to less than 0.5%!
and thanks to Will and the Haute-Pyrenees boys I've had some great days out in the mountains ...
Regs
Simon
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