Aug 01 - Oh Yeah, Remember That?
A reminder of everything we’ve forgotten
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
Humans are funny. One day the Speak Freely ‘está que echa chispas’ and the next we’ve forgotten it completely, on to the next one, like nothing ever happened. I suppose this has always happened, but in this day and age I am seeing constantly more and more pressing issues just forgotten or conveniently ignored; so I decided I would remind you all about a couple of things that were all over the place and in everybody’s mouths not long ago and are now dust in the wind (all we are is dust in the wind).
Remember Zone 2?
It was only a couple of months ago that everybody lost their minds over the new Zone 2 Parking thing. Some people were like “this is an injustice, where am I going to park my car now?” and some others were like “personally being able to park with half of my car inside the entrance to my block on Governor’s Street and mess up the whole traffic flow without getting a ticket feels great!”. Gibraltarians thought this was the end of the world, because we cannot walk anywhere, we need to drive places. At the end of the day Zone 2 is there, Zone 3 is coming in soon (I think) and nobody cares about it anymore. I must admit is affected me for like three days, but after that, and like everything, I got used to it.
Remember Bitcoin?
This happened a couple of months before the Zone 2 thing, if I remember correctly. All of a sudden, ‘de la noche a la mañana’, Gibraltar was the hub of cryptocurrency. Experts everywhere! Everybody was pretending they knew what the hell the were on about. Every free magazine and newspaper was running articles about it, and I got way less likes than I should’ve on a Facebook status that said “Bitcoin? More like shitcoin”. I think the whole cryptocurrency thing was quite possibly the most annoying thing to have ever happened in Gibraltar and I’m sure not even a handful of Gibraltarians made enough for a lime Calippo.
Remember Shite Mountain?
I’m talking about that huge mount of absolute garbage (literally and figuratively) between Eastern Beach and Catalan Bay. There was a time, a few years ago, where people were truly concerned about it. There were people shooting ideas about on how to get rid of it; now it’s just a little brother to our famous Rock, overgrown with weeds and probably infested with rats the size of middle school children that the residents of Catalan Bay have to fight every night. We seem to have forgotten this mound of crap but it’s still there and nobody seems up to the task to get rid of it.
Remember Reefy?
Remember that time somebody came to Gibraltar and stole a block of concrete straight out of the water? Well done mate, what the hell did you want a block of concrete for? Could’ve stolen anything else, including a monkey. If I remember correctly this happened approximately four years ago, and Gibraltarians have never been prouder of anything as they were of their stupid mascot Reefy; which some people decided to parade around Casemates on the following National Day. What an absolute load of rubbish that was. I would put all of it in the sea: Reefy, the guy that stole the concrete block and the concrete block on top, to make sure they stay down.
Remember the Queen’s Theatre?
No, I don’t mean the Theatre Royal, that was a whole other issue. I mean the Queen’s Theatre, what the Queen’s Cinema and Queen’s Hotel plot was meant to become. Some state of the art theatre with all sorts of fancy features, including some impossible redirection of traffic going on the road that goes past the entrance of the Queen’s Cinema. Remember that? We all thought we were going to get some great new music and theatre venue and didn’t get any of it, we just forgot about it as if it never happened. We still have a building that could potentially be used as a concert hall but instead is rotting and a closed hotel serving as some semi-permanent lodging situation.
Remember the Runway Tunnel?
I think, no I know, we’re masochists here in Gibraltar. We like to suffer, and the more we suffer the better we feel, because we can complain and we love to complain but not enough that things get done, enough that it’s annoying for a little while; and that is exactly what happened with the Runway Tunnel. It was necessary then, but now all of a sudden it isn’t. It was probably a good three or four years ago now that I was at Eastern Beach and the machinery being used to dig the tunnel was spitting dirt out into the air, getting all our stuff covered in doodoo. Now, had I known it would take this long I would’ve put in a proposal for half the money but all the spades I needed, and done it myself. It would’ve taken a lot less and we wouldn’t have to be sat in traffic on Winston Churchill Avenue watching planes idiots in private jets take off. And we didn’t even hear about it for a good couple of years until some people living in Beach View Terraces complained the works were noisy. Do we want it, do we not want it? We haven’t even seen photos, is it a tunnel yet? Who’s seen that photo on the internet of how a huge hole (really huge) on a road somewhere in Japan got fixed within a day or two? What’s happening?
Remember Abortion?
This is the most recent one, and one I hope people really haven’t forgotten and they’re just too messed up by the summer heat. But remember when abortion was a huge thing for the internet in Gibraltar? The whole abortion debate really brought out all the monsters and brought together all the good people in the city. It taught us to not trust certain characters and strongly cemented opinions we had of others; but sadly it seems to have died down. Like I said, it might just be the summer and people feeling lazy but I do hope it’s a debate that once again picks up momentum, preferably without the haters, who should be thrown in the sea with Reefy.
I’m sure there’s a bunch more things we have (maybe conveniently) forgotten over the years, some deserving a good revisit, some that should be forgotten forever and never spoken about again. Well, except by me, so feel free to email me your suggestions to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and let’s talk ‘em out.
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