Summer games

(picture from here)

1. Introduction

This Summer has been long. And eventful.

During it, it took us a while to understand the state of the game but once we thought we did we opted for silence.

We think this year was the first one we did not interrupt our Summer Break.

In terms of the game – it really sickens us to call it that but unfortunately in reality that is what it has become – things are really heating up.

Before we left for our break we did 2 posts on Bilton’s BBC Programme marking the 10th anniversary and we promised that we would continue to analyse it.

We didn’t continue before the break because we thought the Grenfell tragedy was more than reason enough not to do it.

But we must say that it was only during our break that we understood the full importance and meaning of Bilton’s programme.



2. Maddie and Brexit

What showed us its importance was not only its content but also what preceded it – almost all of which we have already spoken about in previous posts – and what followed it.

For example, we have already spoken about why after the Acórdão of the Portuguese Supreme Justice Court, it was important for the other side to guarantee that Operation Grange was funded for another semester and that was because it was needed to show how the British government was distancing itself from that decision of the Portuguese justice system.

We also explained why, once that funding was given, the other side changed their objective in terms of having Operation Grange funded in the exact opposite direction.

Once winds from the hurricane that the Acórdão of the Portuguese Supreme Justice Court caused had settled and that the British government distanced itself from it by continuing funding Operation Grange, the quicker Operation Grange ends, the better for the other side.

This has to do, in our opinion, for the following 2 reasons:

The first reason is because Theresa May needs to have the British elite on her side to make, at least for the British public, Brexit a success. The British elite are, as our readers know, the ones who are responsible for the Maddie hoax, so determined they were and are in hiding from the public their sexual peccadilloes.

By having it archived in the middle of the Brexit storm, the case would be quickly forgotten and placed upon that curiosity shelf where popular cases like Jack the Ripper, JFK, Jimmy Hoffa and Ben Needham are.

The second reason is that the further in time one goes into the Brexit process the more the stranglehold the UK has over Portugal weakens.

The UK within the EU was a very important ally to Portugal. There, it was an important player and a very convenient ally against Germany and France.

The UK outside the EU, to put it bluntly, matters little to Portugal in terms of pursuing best its interests.

For example, the UK will no longer be able, if it ever did, to help Portugal reinforce its positions when EU quotas on various subjects will be discussed.

For Portugal the post-Brexit UK will be only one of many countries from where tourism originates. Just that, equal to many others.

If, for whatever reasons, such as an anticipated decrease of purchasing power of British consumers – something we think that even Brexiteers agree with as the result of difficulties which will arise during the transition period – there will be a decrease of British tourists, then the less and less important to Portugal the UK will be.

To sum up, the more time we’re into the Brexit process the less “reliable” the Portuguese will be about the Maddie case.

The longer it takes for the UK to archive the Maddie case, the greater there is of the risk of Portugal not being as submissive on this issue as it has been.

Aggravated by the fact that it has been humiliated by it for 10 years.

And being politically incorrect, Portugal being a small country in the EU’s schoolyard, taking an action that would embarrass the UK would significantly please the, shall we say, most popular ‘students’ of that same schoolyard.

If anyone doubts what we are saying, please watch what Pedro do Carmo says in Bilton’s documentary. He’s very clear: in his heart the case is solved.

One can almost sense by looking at his eyes that he’s eager to put an end to it and archiving it would not be it.


3. The handouts

We have also explained that the documentary was very carefully orchestrated and was introduced to the public with 2 pieces of marketing.

The first piece was Colin Sutton, reinforcing the fact that money given to Operation Grange was money wasted and saying that it was a biased investigation in favour of the McCanns from the outset.

As our readers know, we very much doubt the goodness of Sutton’s intentions as we will explain when the time comes when we deal with the very useful information that Jim Gamble had to tell us in the documentary, which we very much appreciated.

We continue to believe that Sutton’s mission was to give the public the false sense that the walls of protecting the McCanns were crumbling.

Just like before him, Hopkins and the Minor Celebrity League had done. Interesting how suddenly some people lost interest in the Maddie case, isn’t it?

The second piece was Bilton himself, coming out of a supposed closet as a naysayer against the McCanns.

Please note that in the documentary, it’s neither the McCanns or anyone from their legal team who attempt to entice him that it’s a “supporter” / “a friend somebody inside the McCann camp, not the family”

Let’s see what Bilton says at 29:09 in the documentary:

“Through their lawyers, the McCanns told us they were not party to any form of intimidation or targeting.

They also say they didn't know anything about a deal that was put to me by one of their supporters.

I was offered exclusive access to any new developments in the case, an inside track on any new breakthrough.

But there was a price.

I was expected to act as a spy within the press pack.

[Speaking to Robert Murat] I said to you before the interview that the thing that I was going to tell you that I hadn't told you before.

During that period, I was offered a deal by somebody inside the McCann camp, not the family.”

For a whistleblower, willing to ‘risk’ all by coming out against the McCanns, he’s very careful not to involve the couple, their family or their legal team, isn’t he?

The Portuguese have a saying “when the handout is too big, the poor man suspects it” (quando a esmola é grande, o pobre desconfia)

Bilton is really giving a big handout. Not only in the printed media on May 3 as he also makes certain he reminds us of that in the documentary.

By the way, if he really wanted to come out of that ‘closet’ then why not jump out of it before May 3rd? Surely the footage of the conversation between him and Murat happened before, didn’t it?

The answer to the above is simple: to create maximum effect when pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.

The premise when one started to watch the documentary was very clear: he, Bilton, is the good guy and they, the McCanns are the villains.

And who doesn’t believe a good guy especially when the villains are very much disliked, to be polite, by the entire society?

If one joins up the Bilton handout with Sutton’s, then it becomes enormous. Way too big. Way too grand. Too much glitter to be gold.



4. The points of decision

We also spoke of another thing that preceded the documentary but didn’t give it the appropriate importance and that was the fact it was a BBC production.

Yes, we said it was taxpayer’s money that was being wasted, or invested, in a hoax.

That we said.

What we didn’t highlight is the fact that a decision to produce it on public television, such is the BBC,  is completely different from a decision to produce it in a private media.

As we have said in another forum, more precisely on Facebook and then speaking about Sutton’s apparent good intentions, we are fascinated by the fact that how people knowing how politically sensitive the Maddie case is, believe that anything that is published in the MSM about the case is genuine and/or innocent.

We are certain that it is filtered, analysed and approved by the higher echelons in the corridors of power.

A story to see the light of day has to serve a purpose, accomplish an objective, that simple.

Anyone speaking against the McCanns in the official MSM should be immediately heard with the same suspicion as is anyone who speaks in their favour.

One thing is to want to speak, another completely different is to be heard. To be heard, officially, about Maddie one has to first pass a green light somewhere.

Should those who appear in the media speaking against the McCanns be ignored?

Of course not.

As said, they serve a purpose. Understanding what that purpose is, is to understand the game.

When one of these characters appear, we advise readers not to say they cannot see a reason why this person would have to say the things he’s saying but rather ask why such a person is saying what he’s saying when apparently there’s no reason for him to be saying them.

But what we want to highlight here is the fact Bilton’s documentary was produced by the BBC, the public television.

That means that somewhere before in time, there was a decision made there in the BBC, to go ahead and produce it.  And taking into account the sophistication of both script and the production itself, we would estimate that such a decision was not made a fortnight before.

A production of something of the greatest political sensitivity so we have to assume that it only got a green light from whomever holds, shall we say, influence over that public network.

We will let readers figure out for themselves who they think we are referring to.

That’s the first decision point we want to highlight.

The second one is something that happened before the documentary that we didn’t speak of in any previous posts: the calling of the snap election. Surprised everyone, didn’t it?

As it happened in the BBC with the documentary the same thing happened inside Theresa May’s head: at a certain point in time a decision was made.

And then announced.

We do not believe that Theresa May woke up one day and decided to call these snap-elections and immediately called the media to Nº10 and announced it.

One of 2 scenarios must have happened.

Either she did wake up one day and decided to call the election but then before announcing it she certainly sounded out the people around her about the possible benefits and consequences of such an action and only after that did she announce it publicly or she was influenced by someone over a period of time to call that snap-election and upon reflection decided to go ahead.

What is important to understand is that before she announced the snap-election, other people intervened and possibly influenced her decision.

Up to what degree, or if in any, is only up to Theresa May to know.

The interesting question to ask is if the decision to call the snap election came before or after the decision, by the BBC, to make Bilton’s documentary.

We would say it was before.

The decision to call the election preceded the decision to go ahead with the documentary. However, we are of the opinion that the ideas to generate both walked hand-in-hand during a certain period of time.

We would even go as far as speculating the following timeline: decision to continue funding Operation Grange, process of convincing whoever needed be convinced of snap-election (the documentary would be one of the many arguments put forward during the ‘negotiation’ period), decision of snap-election and decision of documentary.



5. Objectives of the documentary

About the content of the documentary, we have only explored the first 20 minutes in the 2 posts we have done about it.

But before we speak about what we have spoken about and about what we haven’t yet, let’s reveal first what we think were the main purposes of the programme.

Having Bilton establishing that all that would be seen as if from a point-of-view of someone antagonistic to the McCanns were, we think, the objectives to be achieved by the documentary:

#1 – To show how the Portuguese investigation had reason to suspect the McCanns but that on close analysis each one of them would not be valid or reliable. To show that there wasn’t any ‘real or palpable’ evidence against the couple, so although the Supreme Justice Court did say they weren’t proven innocent there was indeed ‘absolutely nothing’ to show they had any guilt (other than negligence, of course);

#2 – To show that Operation Grange was born anew and it only came about as the result of the government feeling pressured than because of having there being anything concrete to pursue. As there was no ‘real’ evidence (as Bilton had just ‘showed’), the Met were just a rudderless boat clueless of where to it’s heading.

#3 – Having shown that the Portuguese investigation really had no accusations and that Operation Grange was void, have people think the case was hopeless and best thing to do would be to archive it.


6. Nullifying the PJ investigation

To reach goal #1, making the PJ Operation null, is the reason why the documentary shows that the cadaver dog did signal cadaver odour but then discredits it by cherry-picking what the dog had signalled (and by showing those picked cherries confirming Mitchell’s words that the dog passed the cuddle cat twice without signalling it).

That’s why to the above the documentary adds:

- on one-hand the statement made by the main suspect that it was scientifically proven that the cadaver dogs were extremely unreliable without providing any sort of basis (nor any effort has been made by any reporter through time, from Sandra Felgueiras to Richard Bilton to research and confirm such a critical statement);

- on the other, have the police expert Jim Gamble (who dismissed Gerry’s possible guilt with a very professional “hmmm”) stating, very speciously (we will explain why ) that cadaver and blood dogs only provide an indication which much be corroborated with other evidence, otherwise these indications are useless.

That’s also why in the documentary Bilton discredits the blood by giving it more importance to it over the cadaver odour signalling, then by making the blood be all about DNA and then again by cherry-picking words out of John Lowe’s FSS shameful report, ‘proves’ that the DNA traces found in Maddie’s case prove nothing after all. One has just to read that report to see that it contradicts Bilton, and for Bilton to have highlighted the words he chose to highlight means that he read that report thoroughly.

And why Bilton discredits the signalling made by the dogs at the Scenic by subtly using DNA to justify it, intentionally disregarding that they don’t signal DNA but blood and cadaver odour.

And why Bilton discredits the use of the Renault Scenic to transport Maddie’s body by falsely claiming that PJ think that it was on the Huelva trip that the body was disposed of (where in the files is this stated?) and then saying it was impossible for that to have happened because the McCanns let a film crew in the car.

As if a more than proven collaborative media (which Bilton shows with this documentary to be clearly a part of) wouldn’t do that.

If the Huelva trip had that objective we don’t believe it to have had.

And, if the Huelva trip did indeed have that sordid objective then couldn’t that footage, filmed by those we now know to be allies, be used later as an alibi? Of course it could.

That’s why Bilton feels he has to ‘remind’ viewers that the McCanns were supposedly permanently followed by the media, making it impossible for them to participate in the disposal of the body – and we remind our readers that the McCanns were only “hounded” in Luz at the times they chose to be – even though the collaborative media that was present there never represented a minimal obstacle to anything pertaining the hoax.

That’s why Bilton discredits the Smith sighting by misplacing it by a significant distance from where it happened and by not being factual when saying dozens of people confirm Gerry was at Tapas at the time (when the files say exactly the opposite) and not being accurate, as far as we know, when saying the Smiths are now convinced they saw someone else.

Adding all of the above, Bilton’s viewers will conclude with him that there simply isn’t any ‘real or palpable’ evidence against the McCanns and all this said by a McCann whistle-blower.


7. Emptying Operation Grange

To reach goal #2, making Operation Grange void, is the reason why Bilton shows very clearly that supposedly Cameron on seeing The Sun’s May 12 2011 front page with the McCann letter asking for an "independent, transparent and comprehensive review of all information", the British PM, in less than 24 hours (on May 13 the media was already reporting his decision) decided to fold, certainly terrified of the consequences (which would be??) of a repetitive front-page in the following days, decided to launch an operation which would cost the British taxpayer millions of pounds.

Not even a 72 or even a 48 hour reflection period. The McCanns asked and the McCanns got it immediately. Wow, is the least it can be said.

And it’s also why Bilton ridicules the SY investigation. Not only we already knew it was ridiculous as he makes the point of making it even more so by showing that the Met considered the poor Mr Ribeiro as a possible suspect (these people have no scruples and have proven to use children to serve their purposes, but using Mr Ribeiro was a needless and disgusting injustice against the poor man done by Bilton).

The more pressured and ridiculous Bilton makes Operation Grange out to be, the more sense it makes for it to be closed.

And that’s why Bilton brings on the scene Mr Vitor Santos at the end of the documentary. If the reader did not understand why, let us explain why we think Bilton included him: to give the viewer the impression that he was the famous “key witness” who has been spoken about by the media and because of whom Operation Grange continued to be funded early this year. And Bilton made sure Mr Santos looked as unimportant to the case as in reality he is.

The bit of the documentary between Jim Gamble and Theresa May regarding his report is a totally different ball game which we will explain in a separate post.


9. Specious Gamble

Just to note why we have said Gamble was being specious when he says that cadaver and blood dogs only provide an indication which much be corroborated with other evidence, that is true but what he intentionally leaves out is in what way those indications are proof.

Dogs prove that the substances they are trained to detect are where they signal they are. With dogs there are false negatives (the substance being there and the dog not picking it up) but there are no false positives.

That means that blood and cadaver odour existed where the respective dogs signalled them to be.

What police then will do is if blood and cadaver odour are or not criminally relevant for the case and not whether the substances were there or not, they are. What may happen, and it didn’t in Maddie’s case, is if the substance signalled has a perfectly innocent reason for it to be where it was detected, then and only then will the dog’s signalling be deemed irrelevant to the investigation on hand.

Saying the way Gambles says it, one cannot say he’s lying, he’s just intentionally distorting the reality in order to minimise how damning the dogs are to the McCanns.

Hearing Gamble one gets the sense that the dogs prove nothing, which indeed is untrue. In this case the dogs proved there was blood and a cadaver odour in both the apartment and the Renault Scenic – as per documentary – and also cadaver odour in the closet, backyard, the toddler’s t-shirt, the key FOB and Kate’s trousers if one wishes to be truthful, which Bilton evidently doesn’t.

 About the reliability of the dogs, yesterday our reader Anne Guedes submitted a link to the article “Rigorous Training of Dogs Leads to High Accuracy in Human Scent Matching-To-Sample Performance” by Sophie Marchal, Olivier Bregeras, Didier Puaux, Rémi Gervais and Barbara Ferry, published February 10, 2016.

An interesting read indeed.



10. Textusa and the documentary

We have done one post on Sutton and 2 on the documentary itself.

What we would like to highlight is those 2 posts show the precision with which Bilton dealt with the information which he was supposed to show.

Everyone knows that there are 2 critical pieces of information that are critical against the McCanns: the blood and the cadaver odour.

In our two posts we covered in the first post the way Bilton did his best to discredit the cadaver odour.

And we finished that post by saying that he stated that the blood found in the apartment (omitting that blood was also found in the Scenic) was more damning to the McCanns than the cadaver odour and said we would explain why later.

So it would be logical for the post to follow the one about the cadaver odour to be one about the blood. Only it is not. Why?

Because it was not of our doing. We followed Bilton.

At that point of the documentary, Bilton instead of explaining why blood is more damning veers off to the Smith sighting.

Why? Because when he later returns to the blood – he doesn’t, he only mentions DNA from then on – the viewer has already been distracted and won’t remember anymore that blood was more damning than the odour but will remember that this same odour was already dismissed by Bilton as irrelevant earlier in the documentary.

Neat, isn’t it? If it wasn’t sick.

Also please note that we wouldn’t have reached the conclusions we have if the documentary had been produced by a network other than the BBC.



11. The ‘afterwards’ of the documentary

What happened afterwards, is that we had the results of the snap-election which displeased, to say the least, Theresa May.

And then that acute sense of displeasure on May’s part was significantly aggravated by the Grenfell fire and the 2 terrorist attacks that highlighted how stretched to the limit the police is in the UK from government cuts.

So July showed how really displeased May really was with the other side.

The May campaign of which Bilton’s documentary was the main feature, prepared things for archival.

If the results of the snap-election had been what May and her advisers (and we’re not speaking about those 2 people who resigned) anticipated, the country would be galvanised around a Tory led Brexit and the archival of Maddie would meet some moans and groans but would quickly pass as people had other much more important matters to be concerned with and engaged about.

Even with the electoral results that did happen, the Grenfell fire and the highlighting of how the British police is stretched to limit after governmental cuts, one can sense that people are tired of the case.

If things had gone according to plan, we would be here protesting the archival and our voices would be hardly heard.

The proof that things have gone sour and that Theresa May is not pleased with some people, is the news that SY are requesting more funds to continue Operation Grange after October.

Again, the same policy that applies to the official MSM applies to the Met: speak only about Maddie to serve a purpose.

We think that if SY requested more funds it was because they were told to request them much like they will do as told when the time comes to either charge whomever or archive the case.

Prolonging Operation Grange benefits only Theresa May, as we’ll explain later and certainly goes against the wanting of the other side if for nothing else, for what we have already mentioned in the post.

Now the reader can understand the ongoing war in the media about the continuing funding of Operation Grange

Anything that comes out in the press saying that Operation Grange should close, that too much money has already been spent on Maddie, that the parents are financially able to continue the search for Maddie (why haven’t people noticed that the depleting legal expenses are no longer mentioned), that some sort of documentary will be made under auspices of Netflix or dissing in any way Operation Grange are from the other side.

Anything saying that SY is requesting funds (now, what possible reason can the government give to refuse such a request after hearing compelling evidence and that there’s a key witness, who seems to continue to prove to be key otherwise SY wouldn’t have requested further funds) is from the government.


12. Ben Needham and Maddie

But what showed that Theresa May is really, really, really displeased with some people was the bringing up, out of nowhere, the update of Ben Needham’s case.

First of all, we would like to remind ours readers that in exactly 40 days it will be the first anniversary that it was officially announced that Ben had died in an accident near the farmhouse. We are still waiting to know any more details about the case.

A sandal with blood appeared out of nowhere. It was said it was found in 2012.

About this sandal, we would like to note that in 2012 the searches were only around the farmhouse. Where, at the time Ben was reported missing only present were grandfather, grandmother, uncle and property owner. As far as we know no one else was present. The other uncle had allegedly left to go buy fuel for the caravan’s generator.

If sandal found in 2012, then why have a replica of Ben’s sandals made in 2016? Were they expecting to find another pair?

And if they do have a sandal with blood and there’s blood on the toy car fascinatingly found in 2016 what does that add or subtract to the official version? Hasn’t SYP already concluded on Oct 18 2016 that Ben was dead? In what way does knowing one or both objects have his blood constitute news?

The determination of someone being dead only matters in cases in which the person in the centre of the investigation hasn’t been officially been determined dead. A case like Maddie McCann, for example.

It would only be news if blood was from another person. But then how would this fit with the OFFICIAL version that he died as the result of an accident? The person who accidentally killed him would have then to cut him or herself with such severity for his or her blood to have been in one or both of those objects! And on top of Ben’s blood as he would have certainly bled after he was the victim of alleged accident.

Ben Needham’s case seems to be taken out of an episode of Twilight Zone. Under this scenario it makes perfect sense. Ben was at that farmhouse with his family. He then wandered off and entered a portal to a parallel universe where at the same time, at that same farmhouse heavy machinery was working on site. As soon as Ben exited the portal he was accidentally run over.

So when family was searching for him, he was right there only in a different universe.

It is still to be explained how the sandal and toy car got back to this reality. Oh, and the missing shorts. Maybe shorts taken by a person of another reality in exchange for bringing the sandal and toy car to this one?

Are we being insensitive about the death of Ben Needham? No, the SYP is.

The whole July Needham media hype was to highlight the importance of blood and cadaver odour in criminal forensics. Know of any other similar case? We do, that of Maddie McCann.


13. The ‘missing’ boy of Luz and Maddie

The message using Ben Needham was getting out of hand so it was needed to be stopped. And so the ‘missing’ boy in Luz was invented.

Anyone who knows Luz minimally, knows that it would take the boy at least 300 hundred yards for the family to lose sight of him where they say it was they lost him.

Then he appears in front of the home of an elderly couple. They soothe him for half an hour instead of one of them running to the beach or anywhere in Luz to find a GNR officer so that the parents of the little boy could be quickly found.

That half an hour would justify the involvement of the Maritime Police, which has very little manning on the beaches compared to the number of GNR agents deployed to them in the summer.

As I wrote in a comment during our break, I happened to be in the Algarve at the time, far from Luz, and decided to go and find a GNR officer to ask him or her about their jurisdictions and functions

I found 4. Two on foot and the other two on bicycles. The four of them were talking with each other and were very helpful. And very surprised to know that a boy had apparently gone missing in Luz that day.

Note that in the ‘missing’ boy story, he never set foot on the beach or was near it when he allegedly disappeared.

So, there’s absolutely no reason for the Maritime Police to have been involved in this case which apparently lasted a little over half an hour. However, in the first reports it looked like it was the Maritime Police that was coordinating the operation to find him.

The couple, after having soothed him, again instead of doing what they should have done immediately like we said which was to look locally for agents of authority (by the way, at this point, the GNR was alerted and was knocking on doors – pity they missed this couple’s residence) they decide to drive all the way to Lagos to hand over the boy to the Lagos PSP.

The excuse they went to Lagos was because there’s no GNR facility in Luz does not stick.

All officers have radios on them and can quickly communicate with their higher echelon.

The boy went missing under the GNR’s jurisdiction so they would know how to handle such a critical situation and the boy would have been returned immediately to the family in Luz without having to take his father all the way to Lagos.

Are we saying a boy wasn’t driven into the PSP station in Lagos? Of course he was. As we also believe the GNR and the Maritime Police were warned of his alleged disappearance.

What we are saying is that in our opinion, this little boy was as just used. These people have no scruples to use children to perpetuate or defend the hoax.

This missing boy hoax just goes to show how not innocent is Praia da Luz. Some of their citizens are still willing to collaborate with the Maddie hoax.

What matters is that it stopped the Ben Needham stories in the media. Ben has gone again to be resurfaced when required.

  

14. The state of the game

The state of the game can be summed up in one name: Theresa May.

It has always been but now more than ever as we hoped to have shown.

The more the other side’s position is weakened the more its opposing side on this matter, the government, is strengthened. We even believe that with the passing of time the Maddie case gives her more and more leverage and letting the truth out will certainly not damage her reputation with the general public.

The Maely’s case, the little girl who disappeared in France and in which a man has been charged without a body having yet to be found, based on the fact that the child’s DNA being found after car having been washed – isn’t one immediately reminded of the cuddle cat? – does not play in favour of the McCanns.

So we think she will continue funding for another semester and if anything, what Sky News has said in the article published yesterday Sept 07, 2017 by Martin Brunt “Search for Madeleine McCann set to be extended as police ask for more funds”

It has the following as the sub-headline “Ministers are likely to approve more funding as long as they are satisfied there is a realistic chance of discovering her fate.”

If one remembers, last year they were shown there was compelling evidence and this year that there was a key-witness who would break the case.

Then the article ends with, as our reader Bampots also spotted, “Early ideas about sex predators, child traffickers and "a burglary gone wrong" were largely dismissed before both detective teams joined forces to focus on the latest theory.”

First it contradicts the half of Bilton’s documentary where he states quite clearly that SY was exclusively focused on the “burglary gone wrong”. Apparently it has “largely dismissed” even “both detective teams joined forces to focus on the latest theory”.

Then it states quite clearly that “latest theory” is NOT sex predators NOR child traffickers, what are we left with?

Join this dot with the July blood and cadaver odour one put out by the media in July about Ben Needham, and one cannot but feel optimistic.



15. Tapas Area

As said, I happened to go to the Algarve during the break and couldn’t obviously pass by the opportunity to see for myself the inside of the Tapas area.

Yes, it does clearly state on the reception glass pane door that it is only for guests (one has to wonder who in the heck uses a gym so nearby a reception).

It was a very interesting and very useful visit.

Silly, silly Ocean Club and that table of yours. So, so silly. But thank you for proving our point as we will show in a later post. If it’s any consolation, you made me smile there and then.

Feeling things personally makes a whole difference.

Everything is much tinier than expected. I tried my best to figure out where the crèche for the twins was. Was it in the white tent? One can only imagine the heat and not very practical trip to and from the kid’s area.

By the way, was the playhouses and other kid stuff and pool to be used by crèche as a priority? Just asking because I’m imagining being a parent of children with whom I wanted to share my holidays with (and not put them in a store, sorry, crèche) and see their space and pool being taken up by the children of parents who didn’t have the patience to put up with them.

Oh, and the kid’s pool… so tiny! Knee high water (as it should be) but had to stop myself from laughing out loud just thinking how some people really are making a fool of themselves in accepting (or should we say “accepting”?) that it would cause a vertical reflection on Gerry’s sunglasses.

We will now wait to see if Theresa May does indeed continue to fund Operation Grange before we publish again.

If she decides before next Friday, we warn our readers that there will be no post next week due to personal reasons.