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/Galiza

Spain, it seems, doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to paying fines imposed on it by foreign courts. Case in point.

Talking of fines . . . One of €92,000 has been imposed on a Spanish chap who was head of the IT operation in Banco Sabadells’ UK subsidiary, TSB. As he’s back in Spain, I can’t help wondering if he’ll ever pay it.

There’s a list here of all the places in Spain that someone will pay you to move to. Worth a look, if you’re young. And adaptable.

A headline yesterday: Arrested in Turkey, Europe’s heroin king and the head of drug running in the Rías Baixas. He was behind the biggest shipments to Europe and turned Pontevedra into a drug warehouse for Spain and Portugal. He had, of course, been bribing Turkish authorities for years. More here.

And today comes more details of the large cocaine lab in the middle of a forest in the hills outside Pv city, close to where I used to have a little house:-

Talking of headlines . . . It’s reported that: A survey shows that nearly half of Spaniards approve of polyamory. The article then claimed that: 47% of Spaniards agree that a person ‘can have 2 or more affective sexual relationships at the same time’. I confess to finding this very hard to believe, unless everyone they asked was 18. So I wasn’t too surprised to see the final comment that: Only 0.5% said they are actually in a polyamorous relationship with 3 or more people involved.

I’ve been trying to get a director’s chair recovered for at least 6 months. Yesterday – on my 3rd trip to the shop – I found the challenge triply frustrating/irritating: 1. Despite knowing how the mayor has made the urban road system a one-way maze, I still went wrong, twice: 2. They had no idea where the chair was; 3. The guy in charge answered my query in rapid Gallego for at least 30 seconds, and when I asked him to repeat it in Spanish, he did so in even faster Castrapo. Also hard to follow. But I did catch that they had a big job on and that I should come back in 15 days. I doubt I’ll bother. Less stressful to just buy another chair.

Despite the fact we’ve had a lot of sun in the last 3 months, it seems we were the only bit of Spain to get any much-needed rain. . .

Today, though, it’s miserably wet and the midday temperature has plummeted from last week’s 26 to just 13. That’s the problem of being in the hands of the Atlantic. Having switched off the central heating 2 weeks ago, this morning I had to resort to an open fire. Life can be hell.

Last week, ‘vandals’ knocked over just one of these mayoral info cubes. Last night, the wind savaged 7 of them:-

The UK

Reality meets the Net Zero fantasy: The (subsidised) uptake of ground/air source heat pump and biomass boilers has been ‘embarrassingly’ low, with more of them installed in holiday homes in Cornwall than in the city of Birmingham. A “taxpayer handout to those who don’t need it”. More here.

I wrote that before reading this article entitled: Heat pumps epitomise the economic folly of net zero. It starts with a sentence which seems pretty accurate to me but I could be wrong, of course: Amid the cacophony of claims about Net Zero, there is little concrete analysis of its wider impact in macroeconomic terms. And it ends with an echo of my ‘headline’: The 2050 target is on a collision course with reality.

Ukraine

The area mined by the Russians is said to be larger than that of the entire UK.

Quote of The Day

Caitlin Moran, expressing my view of many years: You can’t fuck up singing like Dylan. Just chuck any old noises in there — skronk and wheeze as much as you like – and everyone will be like, “Yeah — that sure sounds like Bob. You’ve nailed it, dude.”

Spanish

Extranjero: Stranger/Foreigner. Or, in Galicia at least, anyone from outside the region . . .

Finally . . .

What Man has done to the wolf – The world’s smallest – and ugliest? – dog:-

For new readers:– 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.