bail-out

A week and a half ago, a good friend bailed out on me. We were meant to take a trip together, to get away for the weekend, to fly to a land neither of us knew, but my friend got out of the bargain at the last moment. I can't blame him, and I feel more for him than I commiserate with myself because he didn't do it maliciously. He didn't even do it voluntarily. Here's what happened.

On Sunday nearly two weeks ago, my friend was on his way to the railway station, hot in pursuit of important business. He was crossing town on a swift clip and would have made the train he was shooting for, had it not been for the season. It was winter and the sidewalks were icy. In sight of the station already and slowing down, my friend slipped on the approach and fell. He got up no problem and it didn't hurt to bad, but when he tried to take a step he nearly collapsed again. Fire burned madly in his ankle.

On Monday he sent me a text, saying he was in the university medical center, with a triple fracture in his foot, unable to walk, immobilized for weeks. He wouldn't be flying to Lisbon to visit collaborators, a long-planned two-week stay whose academic seriousness I was supposed to break during the weekend that was just around the corner.

I decided to go without him even though I couldn't find a replacement sidekick on such short notice. Then the first storm of the season struck London, and Gatwick, the most fragile airport in Europe, shut down for three days because of the cold and the snow, two features of winter that come, with depressing regularity, as a complete shock to everyone in the transportation business here and cause chaos all over England. My flight was canceled.

The same snow and freezing temperatures that had thrown my plans in disarray made me change my flights to dates precisely one week later, and change the hotel reservation, never mind the charges. I could have asked the airline for a refund and canceled the hotel, but I was sick of the cold and greedy for warmth and tossed common sense aside.

I also felt it my duty to help out Portugal in a tough situation. Taxpayers in the European Union, I among them, had to bail out the Greek half a year ago and the Irish last month. The specters of financial ruin haven't been silenced in the south and the northwest of Europe, but they have been muted. But like a hydra that grows new heads whenever you chop off existing ones, the possibility of financial catastrophe is now growing in the southwest. Portugal is going down, it says all over the news.

The near-bankruptcy of Greece was explained with general laziness, with three-month vacations on sunny islands and retirement at 52, with a royal lifestyle inexplicably based on exporting a few barrels of olive oil and assorted produce. Ireland was going to the dogs, they said, because the twin brothers of credit inflation and house price explosion had driven the entire country to spend many times the amount they could ever recover by selling whiskey, stout and butter. Portugal's problems, in contrast, haven't found simple populist explanations yet.

If any hypotheses about what's wrong with Portugal have been put forth, I haven't seen them. But I don't need them either, to be honest, because the solution will always be the same: Bring money into the country until the sinking galleon of public finances has been stabilized and put on course to prosperity again. During this long weekend in Lisbon, I will do my share by eating out and drinking, seeing monuments and castles, and sleeping like a king. It certainly beats seeing my taxes increased to contain the contagion and fend off doom, yet again.