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’

Covid

An inhuman experiment that should never be repeated?

Maybe this is relevant . . .

Cosas de España

Here’s the VdG on that tough History exam of the first morning of the current Selectividad exams: There’s controversy over a confusing question: The problem arose from mixing 2 topics in one statement, and presenting 3 documents to contextualize in the wrong chronological order, confusing many students, who changed the question and found themselves without enough time to finish the topic of the Second Republic. Poor kids.

As for cheating . . .Yesterday in Santiago there was another expulsion for copying. But this time it was a traditional ‘chop'[chuleta]. And, in Vigo, a student who wore an activity bracelet was allowed to continue with his exam, although it will be recorded on his file. I’ve no idea why.

I read that the ‘fast fashion’ phenomenon was at an end, with companies such as Asos, In The Style, Boohoo, Missguided and ‘the Chinese monster’ Shein all recording falling sales and profits. Tell that to Inditex, the Galicia-based parent of Zara et al. Where sales and profits continue to boom.

My rule-of-thumb is to deduct 2 hours from Spanish time-points to arrive at the equivalents in North European countries – for meals, theatre/cinema performances, shop openings and closings, and even ‘midday’. But the bike path near my daughter’s flat in Madrid is being torn up and the JCB pneumatic hammers start up at 8am. This surely couldn’t happen at 6 elsewhere. And they knock off at 5 – not 7 or even 8. So, the rule clearly doesn’t apply in this case. I wonder why not.

Here in Madrid, the cost of renting is said to have risen by 62% in the last 10 years, against only 3% for the average salary. How much can we blame Airbnb for this, I wonder.

Ecologically-sound windfarms aren’t good for everyone, it seems.

A Galician friend who’s something of a nationalist has sent me an amusing list of the 9 things Galicians love to hate, appended below. I’ve tarted up the bits that Google’s machine struggled with and hope it now makes complete sense. At least as a translation, if not as a point of view . . . I say the document is amusing but I gave a copy to my daughter’s neighbours last night and should find out today whether they find all of it funny.

The Way of the World/Quote of The Day

Today’s parental dilemma . . . We’re mad to give our children smartphones: by barring under-16s from social media can we break this toxic cycle of anxiety, addiction and mental ill-health.

English

What a wonderfully flexible language . . .

• An upfrontsy: A one-off payment which makes your monthly phone payments lower. Possibly coined in an Indian call-centre.
• To unlive your self: To commit suicide. Gets round bans on ‘suicide’ and ‘kill’ on social media.

Finally . . .

Tom Sharpe was the author of some of the funniest books I’ve ever read. You can see them cited in this article on the man and his odd life.

Actually, I’ve just finished a more recent amusing book – The Restraint of Beasts – by a chap called Magnus Mills, described as occupying ‘a slot between Albert Camus and Enid Blyton’. I’m now moving on to The Maintenance of Headway – about ‘the weird world of a bus driver’.

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.

THE 9 THINGS GALICIANS LOVE TO HATE

1. The bugfuckers
This is the name chosen to designate the tourists who are normally from Madrid who fill the beaches of SanJenJo* and PanJón* in summer, which makes it quite clear that they’re not exactly loved around here. Yes, their contribution to the Galician tourist industry is very important, but do they really always have to complain about how cold the water is, about the mists in August (it starts in the evening, you should know that after so many years!), and point out how cheap everything is while tucking into shellfish? Not to mention the great moments they have when they talk to us…

*Sanxenxo and Panxón

2. The people who call us galleguiños [‘Little Galicians’].
Why?? Why can’t we spend a few days in another part of the Peninsula without finding ourselves at some point interacting with someone who, when they know where we come from, tells us “Oh, un galleguiño!” with a condescending tone and smile? If that person knew everything we are thinking about them at that moment, their smile would disappear. We Galicians have one of the most direct and brutal arsenals of insults in the world, so you are lucky that most of the time we use them in silence.

3. The rain.
What does the phrase “It’s complicated” as regards Facebook relationships mean? Basically, it¡s what we Galicians have with the rain. We hate it when it shows up for more than two days in a row, we miss it when it’s gone for more than a week (because what if it doesn’t come back??). We celebrate its arrival after a dry spell but immediately remember that we hate it and return to complaining about the weather – saying that this is the worst winter/summer in memory, and dreaming of those days that we think we remember when we could leave the house without an umbrella.

4. To people who eat little.
How come you can’t deal with ribs of the second course if for the first course you only have a few tapas of empanada, seafood, and Padrón peppers? What about a couple of ribs, without even touching the criollos? We have no confidence in you, we cannot avoid it. We may not hate you, but we have no confidence in you. Not to mention vegetarians – why don’t you eat pork shoulder with turnip tops [lacón con grelos] seeing as it’s vegetable? We prepare it especially for you after knowing your diet! Nor teetotalers – have a shot of herbal liqueur after eating. It isn’t drinking, it’s a digestive aid!.

5. Galicians with a Madrid accent.
There are few things worse than Galicians who go to work in the capital of the Kingdom and return speaking in compound tenses***and with the characteristic intonation of those who believe they don’t have an accent. Not to mention those who undergo this transformation after spending just one weekend partying in Madrid…
*** Galllego speakers prefer the simple past.

6. Delicate people.
The Basques get the fame, but we Galicians don’t mess around either. Tanned by the sea and the countryside, we are intimidated by few things, as demonstrated a few months ago by the viral photo of Mrs. Ribeira cleaning the windows of her house while she was standing on the windowsill. The people who do everything carefully, those who get scared when they encounter a bug or look disgusted at barnacles or a plate of octopus will be the focus of all our retranca [the Galician sarcasm-based sense of humour].

7. The ‘Galician’ of our politicians.
Feijóo’s “crisis”[?] and other pearls they give us every time they get behind a microphone and try not to show that it’s the only time of day they speak Galician.

8. Portuguese drivers.
The terror of driving through Vigo is only surpassed by the one we suffer when we cross the border to the south. Now that the license plates no longer tell us where in Spain each car is from and we can’t say that “it had to be from A Coruña” (in Vigo) or “it had to be from Pontevedra” (in A Coruña), we are left with only the pleasure of discovering the P on that vehicle that has just done what has come to be called a portuguesada. “Portuguese, of course”, we say, full of Galician pride. The road and the beach are the contexts in which we forget that when we cross the Miño we tell all the Portuguese that we Galicians are like their brothers (when they, as much as it hurts us, tend to see us as just more Spaniards).

[Footnote: Galicians are fined €300 down in Portugal for taking roundabouts per the modelo español – i .e. dangerously. Always in the outer lane, no matter what exit they’re taking.]

9. Changing our place names into Spanish
Apart from SanJenJo and PanJón mentioned above, there are other place names in which the “translation” is much more bloody. Carballino, Viana del Bollo, Ginzo de Limia, Niño de la Guía, Desván de los Monjes. . . No comment.