Opinion
On the weight of one Sunday
By V. Aldama·2 min read
It is the lot of an editor of a certain age to notice when the calendar is asked to carry more than it was built to carry. This Sunday is such a day. Before the sun is well up, the Cardenal will name the absent at Sant Joan. Before it is down again, the Sanitation Council will file its preliminary report on a vessel at berth seven. Between the two, Crown Councillor Rourà will have spent the afternoon in rooms whose occupants are listed in no programme, conducting business whose results will be felt long after the ambassadors have gone home to dinner.
And then, at ten on Monday, the Chamber will vote upon the Fuel Stabilisation Reserve.
The four front benches placed their positions on the record some days ago and have not asked, any of them, for the calendar to be eased. This is, in its way, a credit to them. A vote postponed because the week was crowded would have set a precedent the Kingdom does not need; weeks will be crowded again. Better to let the Chamber sit at the appointed hour and the members read the Council's pages overnight, as members in earlier decades read the budget overnight.
What I would ask, from this desk, is only this: that the four matters be kept four. The cluster on the inland border is not the Estrella; the Estrella is not the corridor; the corridor is not the eastern basin, though the eastern basin shapes its price. Each will yield to inquiry in its own register and in its own time. The temptation, in a crowded Sunday, is to fold them into a single drama and a single villain. We have, on this masthead, declined that temptation before. We decline it again today.
The gout is bad in spring. The pages are short. The vote is at ten.
