Cosas de España/Galiza

Step forward the man from Galicia. Franco, Rajoy and now Feijóo? Our man is first in line to replace both the current leader of the PP party and the heir apparent, who’ve long been feuding between themselves and are now publicly slagging off each other. See these 2 articles and/or this one in the Guardian for details. My claim to fame –  I know the lady who taught Feijóo English in Vigo.

Outright War In The PP

People’s Party (PP) rift grows into all-out battle between Ayuso & Casado

A Californian’s idea of what Spain does better than the USA. Who am I, a Limey, to disagree?

Advice from Lenox (a sort of Limey) here on the perils of buying a rural property in Spain.

Talking abut public service announcements . . . Something odd happened to me yesterday.  In an FB group I’d joined – dedicated to folk planning a camino de Santiago this year – I’d offered a free tour of Pontevedra, referred to my free Guide to the city for pilgrims, and cited my two 2016 posts on the Camino Primitivo. I was then summarily banned, for breaching the group’s rule on ‘self-promotion’. Which is a strange way to treat my altruism. Since I’ve been doing caminos for more than 13 years, the group is of no value to me personally. So, if they re-instate me, I will immediately flounce out in high dudgeon.

BTW: Another recent discovery: If you join an FB group, other ‘members’ can send you a private message offering pornographic videos. Surely a better case for a ban than mine. By the group administrators, if not by Facebook/Meta itself. 

Listen up pilgrims and tourists! A shout-out for Bar Praza in Pontevedra city, where I go several times a week. Both the coffee and the service are great but the main reason for mentioning it is that they cook the fresh seafood you’ve just bought in the wonderful market below, at a very reasonable cost. Highly recommended. It’s just a few meters from the camino, as it gets close to O Burgo bridge. Above the market, of course.

A second shout-out – for this web page of the photographer wife of Adrian of Bar Praza.

The UK  

An updated nursery rhyme:-

The EU

That Putin table . . . Made in Italy or Spain?

Quote of the Day

Our age of incivility must end. Narcissistic radicals turn politics into a vacuum.

The Way of the World 

The liberal order is already dead, says the writer of this article

And Generation Z kids(‘Zoomers’) have made the world move faster, sacrificing substance along the way, says the writer of the article below.

Spanish

Un procurador: An animal unique to Spain? A ‘court processor/party agent’. A compulsory expense for you – in addition to your lawyer – if your claim is above €2k. Although your representative in court, you usually don’t get to meet your procurador. In 2016 the European investigated whether they raised ‘excessive and unjustified obstacles to the provision of justice’. However, in 2018, it approved the profession, in return for a change to the law on professional societies. The (regulated) cost of one now varies from €10 to €1500.

Finally . . . 

As a teenager attending a Catholic grammar school in Birkenhead, I used to walk from the nearby train station through the town’s large park – up Ashville Road. And I played cricket there against other local schools. Back then, I had no idea that the park had been designed by Joseph Paxton and that an American visiting a friend in 1848 had been so impressed and inspired by the park that he used it as the model for his winning design for New York’s Central Park. See Wiki here on the ‘first publicly funded civic park in the world’. And here on the industrious Paxton.

Talking about memories . . . Saturday always starts well. Two hours of Sounds of the Sixties on BBC Radio 2, accessible live or via the iPlayer, if you you’re not up at 6am UK time. Being a Boomer can be joyful.

For new reader(s): If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there.

THE ARTICLE  

Generation Z has made the world move faster – but they are sacrificing substance. With technological shortcuts putting everything on fast-forward, we’re missing out on actual pleasure in favour of ‘micro joys’: Hannah Betts, The Telegraph 

Research by the Policy Institute at King’s College London has found that 41% of Britons lament that the pace of life is too fast, compared with 30% in 1983. Ah, I remember it well. Boy George was scandalising boomers, and we all talked – a lot – about how it would soon be 1984. The first mobile cellular phone call was made, the internet officially began, and time as we knew it reached the beginning of its end.

I’m wary of those who argue that modern life has never been faster/more tech-dominated/worse, given that this has been the complaint attached to every new innovation, from papyrus to steam trains. But, truly, has modern life ever been faster/more tech-dominated/worse?

Uptime, a new “knowledge hack” app, allows readers (term used necessarily loosely) to condense 3,000 non-fiction books into five-minute PowerPoint-style presentations. One receives an overview, “three key insights” and a “take action” section before a final “wrap-up” on everything from Plato’s Republic to Ian Kerner’s She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman.

Schooled on Snapchat (where pictures disappear after three seconds), Instagram stories (15 seconds) and TikTok (where viewers complained of tedium when videos were expanded to allow three minutes), Generation Z fast-forward everything from podcasts to university lectures. Small wonder our undergraduates are hooked on “study drugs” such as Modafinil and Ritalin to sharpen their academic focus – £2 a pop, thus cheaper than a Starbucks flat white.

“Time-lapsing” has gone large on social media. Your iPhone will have endeavoured to force this upon you. A series of images of you and your beloved that would once have taken an age to look through is auto-compiled into a painfully naff, 15-second video of the sort that might be screened if one of you had died, the other lost all discernible taste.

StoryTerrace, a company that helps people pen their biographies, reports that a third of Brits are determined to have written their life stories by the age of 40. Still, this is positively long in the tooth compared with autobiographers Molly-Mae Hague (22), of Love Island fame, and footballer Marcus Rashford (24).

Meanwhile, we are told not to engage in time-consuming hobbies, or actual pleasure, but “micro-joys”, such as daily online puzzle Wordle, high-intensity workouts, three-minute meditations, and power naps.

True story of the week number one: a Zoomer informed me that he needed to pick up his Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder medicine, but hadn’t had the time. True story of the week number two: I texted my 49-year-old sister to talk about this subject and she replied: “Can’t talk now, I’ve had a heart attack [heart pulsing emoji]!” What a merry laugh we had over this week’s NHS revelation that feelings of weakness, light-headedness and general unease are something to look out for on the cardiac front.

Anyone not experiencing general unease? Then I will proceed.

When I consider the world that 12-year-old me occupied compared with the universe my 50-year-old self inhabits, I cannot help feeling that we speed freaks have sacrificed substance.

Back then, we had vast, macro stuff going down: economic upheaval, social unrest, nuclear threat, Aids, a prime minister on a clear mission, even if one didn’t agree with it. Today, we have a PM notorious not for policy but his hairstyle, and civilisation felled by a cough.

It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing… and played at 1.75x speed by a Gen Z GCSE student.