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

Says The (very sympathetic) Guardian here: Yolanda Díaz set up her Sumar coalition to fend off the far right in this month’s election, but polls show she has a staggering amount of work to do.

Wolves are caught in the crosshairs of the Spanish election battle. The Opposition party pledges to reverse the ban on hunting, reigniting the debate over conservation. Doubtless evidence of the influence of Vox. Details here.

The weather in Spain can be as unpredictable/surprising as elsewhere. Especially, it seems, up in the North East. After a storm of huge hailstones and then torrential rain, the city of Zaragoza has now been hit by floods.

I see that the bus companies are now operating the same luggage scam as the airlines. My sister’s ticket to Oporto airport on ALSA is €19 but her 10kilo bag costs €15 to go in the hold. Or 79% of the advertised ticket price. Plus €5 to change her seat allocation. So, total cost €39, not 19.

A snap of Pv city’s riff-raff, relaxing the day away, i.e. drinking and arguing – between San Francisco church and the main square.

As I’ve said, they’ve taken to sleeping again in the place they were banned from a couple of months ago. The police occasionally come – in 2 or 3 cars – and have a chat with them Possibly to politely ask them to swear less noisily.

Given the cash that’s floating – steaming? – out of my wallet, I do find it hard to believe that Spanish inflation is down to less than 2%, against more than 6% in Germany and 8% in the UK. Perhaps rents have stopped rising. And maybe house prices have fallen. Certainly, supermarkets and restaurants seem to be making up for income/profits lost to Covid.

As I’ve noted, reader Maria has a new blog on her life in a Galician village. She writes here on her transition from an American to an (almost) Galician but you might need to subscribe to see it.

Oh, yes. As with yesterday, NTR from Pamplona. Both runs were ‘clean’ and short, with minimal injuries. Disappointing . . .

UK

The Madness of the The British – by an amusing (and accurate) American columnist. A truly weird country at times.

Russia v Ukraine

A realistic assessment of Ukraine’s prospects from Richard North

Quote of The Day

The launch of Meta’s Threads proves yet again we are too much in awe of the internet.

The Way of the World

I don’t have any interest in Wimbledon and recognise only the most famous faces and names of yore. And I’m prepared to accept the assessment that the sport of tennis operates like a mixture between the worst of Hollywood and the worst of football. See below for more from the columnist who wrote that. Am I the only person in the world to whom this headline makes no sense at all? – Swiatek, Sabalenka and Rybakina: the new Big Three in tennis?

Spanish

HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for this article on medieval Spanish insults, including these:-

• Cagalindes (a coward),
• Verriondo (a phallocrat)
• Mangurrián (a bumpkin) and
• Casquivano (immature).

Did you know?

A useful tip for those looking for a discounted holiday – Check out where Russians used to go in droves. Elsewhere, the cost for Brits of a package holiday in sunny parts of Europe is up by 15-25% on last year. The flights to them, possibly even more. Crete might be ‘cheapest’.

Finally . . .

Saw this in the net . . . Next time you’re feeling down, remember that life is all about perspective. I have a friend who has enough time on his hands to exercise twice a day, reads 2 books a week, and is surrounded by people who want to have sex with him. Yet every day he complains about how much he hates.prison.

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 – updated a bit in early July 2023.

THE ARTICLE

Tennis is like Hollywood: it creates boy and girl heroes, then smashes them to pieces:Camilla Long. The Times

Roman generals had a slave to tell them: do not forget you are mortal. They would whisper it as their triumphant soldiers were paraded through the streets. Tennis stars, meanwhile, have a large, bloated German. Boris Becker, who is offering his views on Wimbledon on Instagram this year, is a warning to anyone who gets too big, too fast.

It’s remarkable to watch the footage of the now inexplicably albino, truffle-like former champion discussing Tsitsipas and Thiem, or conducting heart-breaking question and answer sessions about Wawrinka, “Nole”, and the “Damen”, instead of commentating on television.

Where is he doing this from? The film showed him in a sort of dim bunker, where sexy Fulham winebar music was playing. Was it a dive in Italy, where he says he now lives? Or in Germany, to which he was deported by private jet last year? Or perhaps he was in Miami, where he was once snapped massaging suncream into a girlfriend’s naked breasts? Or Mallorca, where he once hid horses in his bedroom to avoid debt collectors, because prize horses are taxed there? “You walk into the bedroom and there’s a horse,” said his ex-wife Lilly last week. “I’m sorry, that’s funny.

All the Lion of Leiman will say is that he will be offering “daily updates of the action in my living room” online. You can, of course, ask him any questions “around Wimbledon”. It’s crushing.

Normally Becker would be a highlight of the BBC coverage, poured into some giant white Ralph Lauren suit, like a gullible polar bear. But now he’s reduced to offering his views from a sofa, leering into the camera like Ray Winstone. How far he seems to have fallen: he has “nothing to show”, his own lawyer put it, “for the most glittering of sporting careers”.

It’s funny, because we imagine Becker’s story is unusual in the world of tennis. But it isn’t. The sport is filled with people who become successful really young, but can’t follow through on it. Martina Hingis; Gabriela Sabatini; even Bjorn Borg got burnt out. Wimbledon is less field of dreams, more graveyard of plastic Euro tears. The unhappiness of Emma Raducanu says it all: it hangs over this year’s tournament like a pall.

“Sometimes I think to myself, I wish I’d never won the US Open, I wish that didn’t happen,” Raducanu said a few weeks ago. I really felt for her: what a tragic thing to say. She went to Wimbledon last week, but only to post from the “iconic evian VIP suite” with the deputy editorial something from GQ and pose with the Vodafone symbol (another sponsor). She’s someone who doesn’t seem to know the point of any of it, even now. Look at her Instagram feed: it’s mostly listless promo.

It’s not unusual, of course, for young athletes to get sucked into the money side of it: but when you’re not being successful, the photoshoots, the empty advertorials, the bloodless Beyoncé-style blether about “iconic” or “timeless” jewels/hats/watches more usually seen on women four times her age must wear thin. How much time is she spending promoting herself, while not having anything to promote? She said she had no idea what was coming when she won the US Open at 18: “sharks” came for her; people saw her as a “piggy bank”. As with everything these days, a feeling of victimhood is never far away.

As for Becker, success also came far too quickly. At 17, says his former coach in a new documentary, he had barely lost his “baby speck” (puppy fat). He was thrown into a world where journalists would turn up with suitcases stuffed with money for exclusive interviews. One man in the show estimates he earned “€125 million” in winnings and sponsorship, now all gone. You watch it thinking: where are his parents? Who’s looking after them? Is there anyone in the world who can guide a teenager through sudden global fame? It’s not like being in a band: there’s only one of you.

Tennis infantilises. It takes young, hungry players and aims to preserve them in aspic at the moment their talent first becomes monetisable. It calls them “boy” and “girl”. It ferries them from tournament to tournament. It operates like a mixture between the worst of Hollywood and the worst of football.

Just look at the players on court: surrounded by bottles, towels, tissues, powders, emergency medical kits, flunkies running everywhere: it’s like an explosion in a Mayfair soft play. What must it do to your brain, thinking you can’t even put a plaster on? Being told, again and again, that “nothing is impossible”, you “must dream big”? Every player now is the same: a faintly Euro-flavoured 25-year-old, covered in headbands and sponsorship logos, with a slight resemblance to Roger Federer. Federer spends a lot of his time in Dubai: the face matches the place.

Meanwhile we still demand instant heroes. It says everything about the flawed, selfish impatience of our bored, shallow age that we need our top stars to appear fully formed and ready to satisfy us immediately. Look at Real Madrid, buying up the relatively untested Arda Guler at just 18. Just imagine the pressure. It’s the biggest club in the world, he’s being hired amid huge publicity as the “Turkish Messi”. At 18, even Lionel Messi wasn’t Messi yet.

Why do we rush to drain the most out of youngsters when they can’t always cope with it? Sometimes it’s worth waiting. Pleasure comes in different forms. You watch Becker drawling, bewildered, from his sofa and then you watch bouncy Stockport boy Liam Broady, 29, who’s never been inside the top 100, winning his match against the No 4 seed, and it’s just great.