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

Well, if you’ve read my earlier post of today, you could well have realised that there’s no edit function in the WordPress phone app. Hence ‘sue’ instead’ of ‘use’. So, be prepared for daily typos that my brain has missed.

Cosas de España/Galiza

I saw a headline about a massive fraud perpetrated by the owners of a vineyard somewhere in the world and I instinctively thought – I bet that’s in ‘low ethics’ Spain. And guess what . . .

A reason to visit Lugo, here in Galicia . . . The best preserved Roman walls in the world are there. But this article is about the walls of Ávila . . .

There’s a nice video here of a dog swimming with a dolphin in the harbour of somewhere along our coast.

For lovers of beer . . .

Finally . . .

In a 1949 essay on Xmas, George Orwell noted:-

– How enormous is the literature on eating and drinking, especially the latter . . . But, offhand, I can’t recall a single poem in praise of water, i.e. water regarded as a drink.

– No one has written memorable prose in praise of vitamins, or the dangers of an excess of proteins, or the importance of masticating everything 32 times.

Talking of writing . . .My bits about Persia have come from a re-reading of Tom Holland’s marvellous tome In The Shadow of The Sword. As it says on the back of it: Holland traces the process by which the world  of the first millenium came to be dominated by one god, 3 religions and an innumerable succession of emperors. Not only that; Holland also tells us about Manichean and Zaroastrian precursors of these 3 great ‘desert religions’.