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

Here’s Lenox with another amusing look-back on Mojácar life in the wonderful 60s and 70s.

Not everyone here in Galicia is happy with the very successful Spanish film As Bestas(The Beasts). Here’s why. Odd that a Dutch couple have become French for the film.

More on recent developments at the Barça football club. As ever with the Corner, the Latinate (and machine?)English can be hard to follow. If you’re fluent in Spanish, the original will be easier.

Barça, much more than a club, a disaster

More tales of increasing bureaucratic delays here. A friend told me yesterday of being passed from pillar to post – and back – when trying renew her ID. And of being told it would be probably 12 months before she got back the money she’d been wrongly instructed to pay. Así son las cosas. Not enough young bureaucrats, it seems. Which is hard to believe. With almost every Spanish teenager wanting to become one-

Social Security offices in state of collapse: “I’ve been waiting four months for an appointment to retire”

Reader David has pointed out that expenditure on pointless roadworks might reflect a need to exhaust a budget, to ensure it isn’t reduced next year. This has reminded me of exactly that in every final quarter of the financial year back in the UK.

Germany

Facing recession after its economy contracted by more than expected at the end of last year. Official statistics show that GDP fell 0.4% in the last 3 months of 2022, compared with a year earlier. Twice the initial estimate of a 0.2%. Growth markedly lost momentum at the end of the year as high inflation forced cut backs on spending and led to a drop in business investment in the construction sector. So . . . nowt to do with Brexit. This is not schadenfreude. Honest. German shops are still full of tomatoes and red peppers, though the latter, says my old friend in Hamburg, cost almost twice as much as in Spain. Don’t know how they relate to the (deprived) UK.

The USA

After years of all but ignoring an epidemic of gender dysphoria, The [very liberal/progressive] New York Times will allow journalists to report it.

Russia

Russia will survive – it has managed to for centuries. Putin’s fate, however, is linked irrevocably to the outcome of the war in Ukraine. So, why did he start it? Was it meant to be another quickly successful pre-election initiative taken straight from the Putin playbook – Georgia, Chechnya, Crimea – of the last 20 years? Click here for one view of where he came from and where he might be going.

Social Media

One way to deal with a very modern internet-dating problem.

The Way of the World

A pro-Chinese influence-operation known as Spamouflage – active on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – is reported to have highjacked a British company’s AI technology to create a ‘deepfake’ news channel featuring a pair of computer-generated presenters. Wolf News’ videos feature a highly realistic pair of “news anchors”, Jason and Anna, who are computer generated. You can probably guess their slant.

A comment which seems to be regularly made these days . . A vexing question arises: “What’s to be done about it? One US example here.

Spanish

En tablas: A draw/tie. As in a football match. Or, sadly, a war.

Finally . .

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. And there’s the Thoughts from Galicia FB group.