Sunshine Superman

So May has arrived with its promise of sunshine and butterflies, and I can almost smell barbecue burgers burning, see the ants in my beer, feel my nose burning from pollen and hear the wasps buzzing over my ice cream already. Now picnic blankets will be getting used as God intended rather than being draped over knees in the TV room through winter.

Perversely, to celebrate the arrival of the season of hope and suntan, the UK is drowning in nonstop rain and the British Olympic Swimming Team is training in the streets. I’m sure I ran over someone doing the backstroke in Kingston High Street a couple of weeks ago, and I’m certain that was Tom Chambers diving off Wimbledon bridge last week.

I don’t do rain. That may sound odd coming from someone born in Scotland, a country where rain is like deep fried pizza -ever present. Here every traffic warden is called Moses, and I believe it was driving through Glasgow’s deluged streets one summer that gave God the idea for parting The Red Sea.

I left the land of my birth because of the crummy weather, so the current climate in London suits me about as much as having piles suits someone with hopes of being a tennis umpire. It’s time for me to escape to the sun.

Last week I travelled to the Algarve in Portugal, scene of many glorious holidays and groggy mornings, looking for weather that was vastly different from the UK. And boy did I get it. The place was colder than a polar bear’s bum and wetter than a goldfish’s steam room. It was awful.

But poor old Portugal is suffering from more than just bad weather. Everyone is pleading poverty. So what do the authorities do to help? They have installed tolls on the main road through the Algarve, which was greeted enthusiastically by people setting fire to the cameras and even firing shots at them. Anywhere else in the world these toll booths would be well thought out and done properly, but not here.

Someone has sat down and thought of every single way to make this as difficult as possible. Like the labour market in Portugal, it just does not work.

In Britain, America, and anywhere else I have used toll roads there is a machine you chuck money in or someone in a little booth who takes your money from you with a polite smile and a “thank you”, but that’s too normal for this part of the Iberian peninsula. Here, cameras take a photograph of your number plate and you then have to wait two days and go to the post office to pay. Every single time!

Not to labour a point, but when I did eventually take the car back to the airport and asked how I was to pay the tolls for that journey, the car hire man didn’t know. Apparently no one had thought of this and so no one pays. The computer cannot cope.

In The Algarve almost no restaurants will accept credit cards. They want cash so that there isn’t a record of any money that the nasty tax man may want to get his hands on. But the shop owners are clever. In case an official happens to visit the restaurant you will always find a sign up saying “Sorry, our credit card machine is broken today”, or more accurately “Sorry, our machine credit not work. Broked.”

Is it any wonder the Eurozone is in such a mess? I love Portugal but it, and Europe, need someone very clever to sort this mess out. I think it must be a woman, and here’s why.

A single guy living at home with his father found out he was going to inherit a fortune when his sickly dad died. One evening he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and said, "I may look just ordinary, but in a few weeks my father will die and I will inherit $200 million". Impressed, the woman asked for his business card and three days later - she became his stepmother.

See? Women are so much better at financial planning than men.