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

According to the VdG, this is what it will cost you to heat a 90m2 house in a ‘cold part’ of Spain during the winter, in euros:-

• Heat pump: 455
• Pellets stove: 545
• Natural gas condensation boiler: 683
• Gasoil/Diesel boiler: 816
• Electric storage heaters: 1,046
• Electric radiators: 1,255

I imagine these numbers are debatable.

A Spanish chap has looked at language progression around the world over recent years. Are things similar in Spain to what they are in the Anglo world? It seems so: Rozado has repeated his analysis of word usage frequencies for Spain’s ‘newspaper of record’ El País and finds the same pattern as seen in the American media – with one or two differences. El País is pretty much Spain’s equivalent of the New York Times, the country’s most influential centre-left newspaper. Whereas America’s has been more focussed on race, Spain’s ‘Great Awokening’ has been more focussed on sex,

After paying outrageous prices to bring my daughter and grandson from Madrid recently, I was amused to read an article which focuses on the cheapness of train travel here.

A headline in today’s VdG: Galicia is more and more dog-friendly. I’m not surprised, given that there seem to be at least 10 times more of them than there were 20 years ago. In 2000, I had the only border collie in Pv city. Now, the place teems with them. Though they remain outnumbered by the ugly French bulldog.

The other thing that there’s an awful lot more of is speakers of English. These days I have to be rather more careful what I say in cafés and bars than I ever was. Worse. I can’t filter out the conversation in my native language at the next tables.

The UK

The Net Zero rip-off . . . Policies being introduced to discourage (or effectively prohibit) car use are bizarrely incoherent, and the money-making opportunities that they present are being so openly exploited that they insult public intelligence . . . The old political assumptions in which the Left sought to protect the poor and the Right promoted individual self-improvement have been abandoned in the face of a “climate emergency” that has reduced all the parties to consensual impotence. And in the confusion, the usual scoundrels have rushed in to fill the vacuum. More here‘

Who has the internet benefited most? . . . Scammers, it seems . . . Romance scams, text message tricks and pretending to be the taxman – they’ve tried it all to get your life savings off you. But now families are being warned to look out for a cynical new scam which could see their loved ones’ most valuable asset come under attack. Lawyers and industry experts say they’ve seen a worrying rise in cases of vulnerable homeowners being persuaded by scammers to take out equity release loans.

The USA

Republicans hoping to secure the party’s presidential nomination have courted the National Rifle Association, telling delegates to the annual conference of America’s biggest gun lobby that imposing restrictions on firearms would not curb mass shootings. To cheers, applause and chants of “USA”, Trump averred: I was proud to be the most pro-gun, pro-second amendment president you’ve ever had. With your support in 2024, I will be your loyal friend and fearless champion once again. It is a scandal and a tragedy that year after year Democrats continue to hold common-sense school safety measures hostage to their radical gun control agenda, which, in virtually all cases, would do nothing to prevent attacks by demented and disturbed individuals. As a pretty demented and disturbed person himself, he should know.

The Way of the World

• A university has ‘blocked’ academic from her own gender wars research because it’s ‘dangerous’ data
• An Edinburgh museum has hired a professional therapist to support staff and minority groups over fears that discussing “life in Britain” would be too traumatic for them. Presumably because it’s a project designed to explore “experiences of race, empire and migration” in museum collections.

If you’re looking for a counter-blast to the madness of the current zeitgeist in the West, here’s a good one for you.

English

Reverse ferret: This is a Private Eye term for, I think, what is usually called a ‘pivot’. As with the US beer company, Budweiser/Anheuser-Busch, after its daft (and costly) flirtation with a (possibly)trans ‘influencer’ who plays at being ‘a girl’. To the immense annoyance of many, especially real women

One of the big pluses of having English as your native language is that so many of the world’s experts learn it and discourse in it. While the lady interviewed in this podcast on the GDR certainly has a German accent, her English is native-speaker level. Very impressive.

Did you know?

According to my neighbour this morning, this week we’re having a period of hyperlucidity. But not only that . . . A hybrid solar eclipse will grace the skies this week

Finally . . .

At 7 this morning, in the Eastern sky, the sun and the moon were in celestial touching distance of each other. See the tiny white bit on the RHS of this foto, with the sun rising on the LHS:-

I originally took this for the lights of a plane coming from Vigo but it didn’t move, and blowing up the foto revealed this crescent moon:-

I can’t ever recall seeing the sun and moon so close. My seagoing neighbour says it’s a mirage but I wonder if it’s connected with the hybrid solar eclipse mentioned above.

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.