Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable
Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’

Covid

Hmm. Did virus hunters cover up a lab leak? This wide-ranging international collaborative project vanished just when it was most needed. Interesting Comments.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Want to avoid looking like a tourist? Then read this. No. 11: Don’t walk around with a map in your hands

Sometimes you just have to admire crooks for their genius – and their chutzpah. A Belgian chap down in Valencia netted himself a massive €1m via an airport carpark swindle involving a warehouse near Alicante airport and a system of swapping number plates that I can’t pretend to get my head round. In brief: The fake plate switch meant airport plate recognition detectors only logged stays at 10-15 minutes, despite the cars remaining parked for months and even up to a year. But, clever as he is, he wasn’t smart enough to evade arrest.

Galicia is famous both for the beauty of its countryside and for the ugliness (feismo) of many of its buildings.(See here on this, for example). That said, the editor of El País claims that feismo is a feature of the entire nation.

Most Spanish flat blocks have bajos (shops and offices) at ground floor level. Given that many of these are vacant, I’ve thought for years that they could be converted into very-much-needed homes. It seems that the Galician Xunta has finally arrived at the same conclusion and is looking at changing the planning rules.

Talking of bajos, as more and more of these are boarded up in Pontevedra city, odd new places continue to open up in the centre. This is the latest – a T-shirt shop, which claims to be the/an official distributor for Camino T-shirts:-

Should do well in a year which will see 120,000 ‘pilgrims’ walk past it:-

France

AEP tells us below why he’s no fan of Emanuel Macron – Britain’s most implacable French foe since Bonaparte.

The Way of the World/Social Media

Social media is awash with people showing ever-more inventive ways to fold clothes and napkins. Thanks to viral videos on this, influencers are accruing millions of fans. And making a shedload of money, I guess.

Quote of the Day

The Manchester United squad has more dead wood than the Spanish Armada. 

Spanish 

The other day I used Menudo relevo! to mean What a relief! But reader paideleo kindly tells me this should have been Menudo alívio. In my defence I can only say I did check with Deepl and got erroneous confirmation of my guess.

Finally . . . 

To amuse . . .  The internet can be a force for good . . .

How to get your ears back to their previous position . . . .

-Manolo, have you taken my lipstick?

– After 2 years of covering it up, let me show off my mouth!

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

Why it is so hard to forgive Emmanuel Macron: The President comes out on top in debate with Le Pen but needs to hold out an olive branch to Boris Johnson: By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph

Britain will have to coexist for another 5 years with Emmanuel Macron, this island’s most implacable French foe since Bonaparte. So will the 57% of French voters who opted for “anti-system” parties in the first round of the election, roundly repudiating his brand of cocksure Europeanist globalism. The figure was 487% in 2017. France is less governable today than it was before Mr Macron took office.

The French fiscal profile has meanwhile degraded. The ratio of combined public and private debt has risen 50 percentage points to 3617% of GDP under his watch, compared to smaller rises to 2897% for the UK and 2057%for Germany (BIS data). The Mozart of finance has lulled foreign investors into funding an unsustainable debt bubble. The debt has mostly been acquired to finance consumption, allowing France to continue living beyond its means. Little has been used for investment that pays for itself. Fiscal slippage has flattered France’s economic performance. Dealing with the hangover will dominate Mr Macron’s second term. It is likely to combine with a broader European recession. 

The plausible alternatives to Mr Macron crumbled during the campaign, leaving only Marine Le Pen, still unable to expunge the stain of the old Front National despite her new image as Mutti of the nation – a nod to Angela Merkel’s winning formula. You cannot be taken seriously if you persist with idiotic positions, such as her vow to rip up wind turbines. Would Le Pen also rip the solar panels off the roof of my farm in the Perigord, in the middle of a global energy crisis? Whatever chance she had of closing the gap slipped away in the televised debate on Wednesday evening. She was not the right political animal to hold Mr Macron to account for serial errors, some due to the normal wear and tear of governing, others gratuitous and less forgivable.

When Oxford’s Sir John Bell says bad behaviour by politicians over the AstraZeneca vaccine “has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people”, we know who he means. Mr Macron called the vaccine “quasi-useless”, amplifying a false report by the Handelsblatt that the jab offered just 87% protection. This was AstraZeneca’s reward for producing at cost, offering an affordable workhorse vaccine for the developing world. As we now know, it is highly protective, slightly lower than mRNA vaccines on the antibody count, but probably better on long-term cell memory (harder to measure). The most comprehensive global study so far of Covid mortality – published by the US Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in The Lancet – shows that excess deaths in the UK up to January were 126.8 per 100,000, almost the same as France at 124.4, and Germany 120.5. The bad publicity for AstraZeneca had consequences in Africa and the global South, made worse by Russian and Chinese cyber disinformation. Some 2.6bn took the jab, the most widely-used by far. But many of the world’s poorest were induced to shun it, and died unvaccinated. It is hard to forgive Mr Macron for that.

Marine Le Pen could have made a clean break with Vladimir Putin’s Russia on Thursday night. She could have thrown her weight behind Ukraine, arguing that the mass slaughter of civilians changes everything. She could even have outflanked him by demanding that France gets off the fence and offers more than token support. Had she done so, she might have parried Mr Macron’s killer line on her bankers in Moscow. But the pro-Kremlin reflex runs too deep in her family and her party. The Russia policies of Macron and Le Pen are similar. Both want to draw Putin away from a Chinese alliance. Both want Russia in the European security system to counterbalance Beijing and Washington. Macron has had his own flirtations with the Russian dictator, inviting him on holiday without consulting EU allies. He scoffed at US and UK intelligence warnings about the military build-up last year, refusing to join efforts to beef up Ukraine’s defences as a deterrent. His posture – the core European posture – was one reason why Putin thought he could get away with an invasion. Macron’s chats even after the bombing of Kyiv tells us that his preference – like Le Pen’s preference – is a “Minsk 3” soft capitulation by Ukraine, followed by a “reset” and a return to business as usual.

The exchange on Europe was the most revealing moment. Macron unconsciously conflated the EU with the Franco-German couple as if the terms were interchangeable, and as if the rest of the EU-27 were decorative. But the Paris-Berlin axis has been dysfunctional for years. It is the EU’s most corrosive pathology. The reason Germany was able to impose austerity overkill on Club Med and commandeer EU bodies as debt collectors during the Great European Depression from 2010 to 2015 was because successive French governments went along meekly, knowing the policies were calamitous. They went along too as Berlin flouted the spirit and law of EU energy directives. They tolerated its deal with Gazprom, which gave German heavy industry a structural competitive advantage over EU rivals.

Mr Macron is so wedded to the legacy doctrine of Franco-German condominium that he will not now confront Berlin over weapons deliveries and a total energy embargo. The perennial irritant of the Franco-German axis – one fait accompli after another – is what slowly undermined support for the European project in Britain. Now state-to-state relations between Britain and France are at the lowest ebb since the Fashoda crisis in 1898. This diplomatic frost is Macron’s choice. He has chosen to be the enemy of Brexit Britain in a way that no other EU leader has, both for ideological reasons but also because the rosbifs are an exploitable foil for internal politics.

Macron seemed to think he could cherry-pick post-Brexit relations, expecting intimate defence ties to continue unchanged, even as he kicked Britain in the teeth on everything else.  He threatened to cut off our electricity interconnectors. He saw to it that the Chinese Communist Party secured better terms on financial services. But as he discovered with the AUKUS submarine deal, you cannot have “le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (cakeism).:  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph

Britain will have to coexist for another 5 years with Emmanuel Macron, this island’s most implacable French foe since Bonaparte. So will the 57% of French voters who opted for “anti-system” parties in the first round of the election, roundly repudiating his brand of cocksure Europeanist globalism. The figure was 487% in 2017. France is less governable today than it was before Mr Macron took office.

The French fiscal profile has meanwhile degraded. The ratio of combined public and private debt has risen 50 percentage points to 3617% of GDP under his watch, compared to smaller rises to 2897% for the UK and 2057%for Germany (BIS data). The Mozart of finance has lulled foreign investors into funding an unsustainable debt bubble. The debt has mostly been acquired to finance consumption, allowing France to continue living beyond its means. Little has been used for investment that pays for itself. Fiscal slippage has flattered France’s economic performance. Dealing with the hangover will dominate Mr Macron’s second term. It is likely to combine with a broader European recession. 

The plausible alternatives to Mr Macron crumbled during the campaign, leaving only Marine Le Pen, still unable to expunge the stain of the old Front National despite her new image as Mutti of the nation – a nod to Angela Merkel’s winning formula. You cannot be taken seriously if you persist with idiotic positions, such as her vow to rip up wind turbines. Would Le Pen also rip the solar panels off the roof of my farm in the Perigord, in the middle of a global energy crisis? Whatever chance she had of closing the gap slipped away in the televised debate on Wednesday evening. She was not the right political animal to hold Mr Macron to account for serial errors, some due to the normal wear and tear of governing, others gratuitous and less forgivable.

When Oxford’s Sir John Bell says bad behaviour by politicians over the AstraZeneca vaccine “has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people”, we know who he means. Mr Macron called the vaccine “quasi-useless”, amplifying a false report by the Handelsblatt that the jab offered just 87% protection. This was AstraZeneca’s reward for producing at cost, offering an affordable workhorse vaccine for the developing world. As we now know, it is highly protective, slightly lower than mRNA vaccines on the antibody count, but probably better on long-term cell memory (harder to measure). The most comprehensive global study so far of Covid mortality – published by the US Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in The Lancet – shows that excess deaths in the UK up to January were 126.8 per 100,000, almost the same as France at 124.4, and Germany 120.5. The bad publicity for AstraZeneca had consequences in Africa and the global South, made worse by Russian and Chinese cyber disinformation. Some 2.6bn took the jab, the most widely-used by far. But many of the world’s poorest were induced to shun it, and died unvaccinated. It is hard to forgive Mr Macron for that.

Marine Le Pen could have made a clean break with Vladimir Putin’s Russia on Thursday night. She could have thrown her weight behind Ukraine, arguing that the mass slaughter of civilians changes everything. She could even have outflanked him by demanding that France gets off the fence and offers more than token support. Had she done so, she might have parried Mr Macron’s killer line on her bankers in Moscow. But the pro-Kremlin reflex runs too deep in her family and her party. The Russia policies of Macron and Le Pen are similar. Both want to draw Putin away from a Chinese alliance. Both want Russia in the European security system to counterbalance Beijing and Washington. Macron has had his own flirtations with the Russian dictator, inviting him on holiday without consulting EU allies. He scoffed at US and UK intelligence warnings about the military build-up last year, refusing to join efforts to beef up Ukraine’s defences as a deterrent. His posture – the core European posture – was one reason why Putin thought he could get away with an invasion. Macron’s chats even after the bombing of Kyiv tells us that his preference – like Le Pen’s preference – is a “Minsk 3” soft capitulation by Ukraine, followed by a “reset” and a return to business as usual.

The exchange on Europe was the most revealing moment. Macron unconsciously conflated the EU with the Franco-German couple as if the terms were interchangeable, and as if the rest of the EU-27 were decorative. But the Paris-Berlin axis has been dysfunctional for years. It is the EU’s most corrosive pathology. The reason Germany was able to impose austerity overkill on Club Med and commandeer EU bodies as debt collectors during the Great European Depression from 2010 to 2015 was because successive French governments went along meekly, knowing the policies were calamitous. They went along too as Berlin flouted the spirit and law of EU energy directives. They tolerated its deal with Gazprom, which gave German heavy industry a structural competitive advantage over EU rivals.

Mr Macron is so wedded to the legacy doctrine of Franco-German condominium that he will not now confront Berlin over weapons deliveries and a total energy embargo. The perennial irritant of the Franco-German axis – one fait accompli after another – is what slowly undermined support for the European project in Britain. Now state-to-state relations between Britain and France are at the lowest ebb since the Fashoda crisis in 1898. This diplomatic frost is Macron’s choice. He has chosen to be the enemy of Brexit Britain in a way that no other EU leader has, both for ideological reasons but also because the rosbifs are an exploitable foil for internal politics.

Macron seemed to think he could cherry-pick post-Brexit relations, expecting intimate defence ties to continue unchanged, even as he kicked Britain in the teeth on everything else.  He threatened to cut off our electricity interconnectors. He saw to it that the Chinese Communist Party secured better terms on financial services. But as he discovered with the AUKUS submarine deal, you cannot have “le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (cakeism).