Blue Living

Blue Living is a monthly lifestyle magazine that the Caixa Geral de Depositos is kind enough to send me. Now I don't buy magazines as a rule - no time to read them. But this publication is so good that I would probably buy it.

Its articles on hotels and leisure activities are superb - the down-side comes with the twee photos of furnishings and accessories for the home. Not that I am against such articles, but where does one keep all that junk once the initial burst of enthusiasm has worn off?

In the June issue, the Editor, Luisa Jacobetty, complained about children's behaviour in a restaurant spoiling her evening, and was promptly crucified by her readers, either for being anti-children, or for not taking the matter up with the restaurant owner. For me her message was clear and balanced - maybe I missed some of the subtlety! Fortunately, some readers agreed with her, that the problem is fundamentally that of the parents and their attitudes.

This is a critical problem nowadays in Portugal, as it has been in other countries for many years. Parents are increasingly disinterested in giving a proper upbringing to their children, probably due to similar neglect by their parents. This, for me, is particularly visible among the rich, who are supposedly better educated. Their attitude, that money excuses bad behaviour, is seen everywhere nowadays, from restaurants to healthcare to driving habits. Parental disinterest is so common that in exclusive closed condominiums the main security problem is not intrusion by outsiders but damage caused by the owners' children. Unfortunately there is no obvious solution to this problem.

Anyway, I will keep on reading the magazine, in the hope of finding a restaurant or weekend destination where my children would fit in, or maybe even some "junk" that I like enough to have lying around the house.