Mar-2013 Buenos Aires

(not e-mailed to friends & family)

Went to Lima to visit my sister for 10 days at New Year. They live in opulent style, with a magnificent house and gardens in town, and beach houses 50km down the coast at Quipa, and another one at 250km at Paracas, where the famous candelabra sand dune carving is, and close to the Nazca lines. They taught us Burraco, a card game, and now we are hooked. Not a lot of skill, but fascinating development of fortunes. Also saw the start of the Dakar car rally, which has moved to South America because of Saharan instability. We were in Peru some years ago, and did Machu Picchu then, so had a relatively peaceful visit this time.

Watched the Australian open tennis on TV sponsored by the Korean car maker Kia. Their slogan, over and over, in a heavy Spanish accent: “The powarr to surrrprise…” became our catch phrase.

We were in a restaurant in Buenos Aires and I had finished with my pizza. A girl of about 10 came in to the restaurant, looked around, and then asked if she could take the rest of the pizza. I thought “enterprising girl...” and said yes, and she started to gather it up in her hand. The waiter saw this and approached, saying ”No no no!” . “Oh sod it” I thought, now he'll tell her off and chuck her out. “Not like that, in your hands!” he said, and wrapped it up in a paper napkin and gave it to her. That sort of thing is quite the norm in Argentina. If you have something to spare, and if you can help someone benefit from it, then that is obviously a good thing. If someone has a pack of cigarettes on the table, then someone passing, rich or poor, can ask for one, and it would be rude to refuse, and the practice is never abused. In UK we would tell them to “Naff off!” and feel quite self-righteous about it.

We were at a restaurant eating outside. A couple with a dog, a Labrador, came along and wandered in to the restaurant. The dog knew he wasn't going in, so he just stood by the door watching his owners go to their table. Then he wandered about, never more than a few yards from the entrance, lying down, sitting, watching people walk past, watching other dogs walk past, paying polite interest (and they in him), till eventually his owners came out, gave him a slight nod of the head, and they all three wandered off quite happy together. Typical Argentine dog behaviour. We have a friend there whose dog is not at all like that. “Ah, yes, but he is never allowed outside.”

They have dog walkers here, and you see them with up to 15 or 20 dogs of all sorts and sizes, holding their leads in both hands, sometimes negotiating the traffic in the street. And all the dogs are well behaved, and appear to be perfectly happy. Delivery is quite time consuming, so they all get tied to a railing along the way while the walker calls at a house or a flat. There seems to be a certain amount of hierarchy going on among the dogs, and perhaps the walker has established himself as leader of the pack in a way. But to British eyes the degree of animal good behaviour seems quite extraordinary.

Children and youths seem to be lacking the rebellious streak here, and don't seem to need to test their parents or society with inconvenient behaviour, and reckon that being polite is generally best. So if you are with kids or youth, there is no worry about taking them to a public place, and you expect them to be fully involved in the experience. I have observed the same in Spain. Is it a Latin thing? Very young babies of course are just the same when uncomfortable or bored, but they haven't learned how to behave yet.

Go on, say something nasty about the Argentines! Well, if they say something will happen at such and such a time, it is pedantic to expect it to do so, and it may not happen at all. They can ask “Argentine time or English time?” when wanting to be serious about appointments. Apologies to Argentine friends, by the way, they are not all like that, but they will understand the mood.

Just got back to London and opened a pile of mail a foot high (not including magazines). One was a local rates bill of £1,600pa (yes, I know, we live in a cheap little house in a deprived area). Now the bill for local rates in BA is £65pa (sixty five pounds). Basically for the same level of services, except that in BA they collect the rubbish once a day, instead of once a week as in UK. Schools, parks etc. are comparable. Even allowing for higher wages in UK, higher wages does not explain it. It must be, I reckon, for the number of zombies latching on to the public payroll and hand-outs in UK, a level of sophistication not yet reached in Argentina. It makes you think, though, just how widespread zombie-fication has become in UK. Oh, shut up, you are becoming a typical right-wing expat bigot! But £65 vs £1,600! For 6 collections per week! Shut it!

I have realised why a lot of things, like web pages, even from large organisations, work amazingly badly (like BBC I-player for instance). It is more and more common for organisations not to have in-house experts (eg programmers), but to sub-contract all such work. So when they want a web page, they get together a committee of managers to write the specification, and then contract a sub-contractor to do the work. Some of the specification may contain illogicalities, which only become clear as the development work progresses, but the sub-contractor does his best to achieve the tick-box goals in the specification, logical or not, and get paid. The managers then either publish the web page, including its illogicalities, or admit that their specification was wrong and get the subcontractors to do some more work, which will include delays. Often the managers do not have the technical expertise to properly test the web page, so they do not even realise how defective it is. Or it may be teacher-managers, with very little teaching experience, hiring incompetent teachers, and then hiring even more because the results are not good enough. Managers' first duty is to themselves, to increase their number, and to blame everything on not being given enough resources.