What Shall We Do Now Then?

The Chinese state media has branded online games “spiritual opium”. and this week announced that on-line gamers under the age of 18 will only be allowed to play for an hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays between 8pm to 9pm . China’s video game regulator has also instructed gaming companies to prevent children playing outside these times China cuts children’s online gaming to one hour – BBC News Why do the Chinese consider on-line games as opiates? British writer  Tom Fowdy   believes that China  “ is locked in a new ‘Opium war’ against the west, with a series of countries wanting to impose their ideological, economic and strategic preferences on them ” but what about those western countries, is the gaming culture harmful to us? Webster’s defines a gamer as “a person who regularly plays computer or video games”. Although I know that our 4-year-old grandson is obsessed with Pokemon, his 5-year-old sister has an iPhone (all be it a hand-me-down from her dad without i...

It is bank holiday weekend here and a stroll down past the beach was quite an eye opener. The large number of people both on the beach and waiting in line to get on the beach, with access being controlled by citizen security officers, was in sharp contrast to the “Marie Celeste” scenes we witnessed during lockdown. Depending on your perspective visitors are Grockels-who-left-their-brains-at-the airport-so-stand-in-the-middle-of-the-road-and-almost-get-hit-by-a-car-taking-pictures-of-the-cliffs, or valued guests come to sample the delights of our island. As in many other places in the world, our hospitality industry has suffered greatly during the Covid pandemic and although some hotels have still not reopened, it does feel like things are starting to move a bit more now, even if some of the tourism is down to staycation-ing. July 2021 figures showed 20.7% of workers in the Canary Islands were still on ERTE ( Furlough ). Lives have been changed, forever in some cases, and I totally unde...

This week mostly I have been shredding: sacks and sacks of paperwork and other memorabilia going back years and all of it my own! If you have been following events so far you will know that I was an administrator/ translator of other people’s paperwork for years, which, even if I say so myself, was always carefully kept and catalogued and returned or weeded out as and when required – my own documents – not so much. On the basis that I would get around to it at “some point”, my personal filing system consisted of shoving everything into huge plastic boxes (the giant kind that are intended for bedding) and never throwing anything away of course- this is Spain after all! Well now I have the time and “some point” has arrived and what a voyage of discovery it has turned out to be. Box one was the most recent, old tax returns, vida laborals, old passports – wow did I really travel around with THAT photo for ten years? By box two we are further down the strata of the archaeological dig of my ...