Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.

And, lo, has caught the sultan’s turret In a noose of light!

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

 Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’

Cosas de España/Galicia

The Spanish retail trade is really suffering, it says here. An unprecedented wave of closures, together with a fall in productivity make for a bleak outlook:-

215 shops close every day in Spain

In contrast, January numbers for those passing through Pv city suggest another bumper year for camino ‘pilgrims”. So, even more than 120, 000 this year?

In his excellent Business Over Tapas, Lenox Napier comments thus on something I’ve touched on in the past: It’s interesting how the Spanish translate foreign names into Castellano, whereas the English tend to use the foreign name. So . . Primera visita de los príncipes Guillermo y Catalina a Cornualles tras asumir el ducado’. Lenox is happy that this can’t be done to his names, as in my case. Unlike that of a friend called Graham, which is rendered as Gré-kham by everyone Spanish. A tad ironic as he’s fluent in both Castellano and Gallego . . .

HT to Lenox for this waring today: Have you received an email supposedly from Correos in which they demand €4.80 for “customs fees”? Be careful. Don’provide any information because it is a case of phishing, a practice that seeks to get hold of your personal data and your money.

I confess to be being both horrified and amused by this headline in the VdG: There are to be more roundabouts on the PO-308, the Xunta’s solution to its high accident rate.

A wreck is being investigated in Ferrol’s harbour. Rather ironically, this is said to have numbered among Spain’s 1588 ‘Invincible Armada’.

Well, reader David tells me it really is Olgueira for sale, not a bit of Ortigueira. Up near the border with Asturias. But Google Maps is as unaware of it today, as it was yesterday when I checked before I cited the article Must be very, very small.

The UK

So, Nicola Sturgeon has done a Jacinda and jumped before she was pushed. There are acres of newsprint on her career in the British media today, all of whom seem to agree that, impressive politician that she was, she was ultimately a failure as Scotland’s First Minister. This is a representative paragraph: Sturgeon fell short of the only achievement that mattered to her, achieving Scottish independence. This left her with no where to go except fringe issues such as men becoming women, which would have baffled her own parents let alone Robert the Bruce. This was Sturgeon’s great flaw. She had the anger and passion to lead Scotland to independence, but she did not have the arguments and in the end did not have the intellect. End result – Independence has gone as a practical possibility for the foreseeable future. Which won’t go down well in much of Cataluña.

Pies are an unsung element of something which many around the world think doesn’t exist – British cuisine. Here’s something on one which surely, as we say, takes the biscuit. Or should that be ‘the bisque’? An uncontrived pun. Honest.

France

One wonders where this country would be without an EU designed in its favour. Witness.

Turkey

Will it ever be allowed into the EU? Looks increasingly unlikely . . .

Turkey: a study in impotence

English.

 A skeuomorph: The little phone symbol on your phone app is one of these. So is the save icon in the shape of a floppy disk, along with the Instagram icon. They are all images of objects that have been replaced by the object you’re using.

Gallego

I see English is making inroads even into this language: As detectives de historia traballaron pola arqueoloxía desde os seus inicios.

Finally . . .

Lenox again . . . It’s one thing to pixelate the face of a child who appears in a news story, or perhaps a villain, or a policeman, or even a passer-by to some news-scene, but what is this? They’ve pixelated here the face of a Rottweiler that attacked a child. So we can’t recognise it?

For new readers:-

1. 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.

2. Should you want to, the easiest way to to get my post routinely is to sign up for email subscription. As opposed to using a Bookmark or entering the URL in your browser.