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

Politics . . .

• Back in Jan 2021 the estimable Guy Hedgecoe wrote of the hyperbole and histrionics of Spanish political debate, which has made great progress in recent years in emptying language of its meaning.
• This week he’s written: What a dispiriting, unhappy thing this campaign has been. Devoid of vision or hope both sides, left and right, have turned it into a doped-up project fear.  . . As someone who is now technically Spanish I watch this election, with its almost unbelievable tribalism, with a worried eye. In his novels, McCarthy explored relentlessly the ambiguity of humanity – our ability to lurch from ordered civilisation to senseless barbarity, from clarity to confusion, wonder to horror. Spanish politics makes no such concessions, it is a world of frightening certainties. Who knows where they will lead us. More here.
• How Spain’s Left lost its heartlands and put the hard Right on the brink of power.
• In the Ft profile of the Vox leader I cited yesterday, someone says he sports ‘a regal’ beard. I’ve always seen him as ‘chin-jutting’. Legionnaire style. And then there’s this nice para about him: At university he studied sociology, railing against nationalism and its use of myths, the Basque strain included. He quoted philosopher Karl Popper in his dissertation, saying nationalism “flatters our tribal instincts, our passions and prejudices”. “Everything he criticises about Basque nationalism he has reproduced in Spanish nationalism,” says Miguel González, author of Vox Inc., a book about the party. “He’s either a cynic or he has the memory of a goldfish.”

The wonderful Canfranc station. Even better than when I saw it last October.

 Lenox Napier poses some good questions about water here.

One place down south you can go to cool down.

The pope is in Portugal for a few days from 1 August. If you’re planning to cross from Spain, be aware of traffic jams caused by police checks at the border. My neighbours say it was this, not a strike, that caused the cancellation of yesterday’s train from Vigo to Oporto.

I followed a car up my hill last evening. An old-ish Audi, it was belching black diesel fumes, making it impossible to believe it could pass the annual obligatory roadworthiness test, I wasn’t too surprised to see it turn into the permanent gypsy encampment and I confess to concluding that the driver probably didn’t have insurance or even a licence. Which the police are said to be able to easily determine. It’s a self-perpetuating circle, of course, but it’s sometimes easy to understand the general attitude towards gypsies here.

Quotes of The Day

• Quoted by Guy Hedgecoe: In the Spaniard’s heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance.” Cormac McCarthy, ‘All the Pretty Horses.’
• An old favourite of mine that reminded me of:- Every Spaniard’s ideal is to carry a statutory letter with a single provision, brief but imperious: “This Spaniard is entitled to do whatever he feels like doing”: Angel Ganivet

The Way of the World

Moralising firms have long made hay from right-on ‘values’. But there’s said to be a growing backlash against hypocritical corporate posturing/hogwashing/wokewashing. Not before time.

I wonder if this will causea reduction in those UK TV ads which only ever feature (sickeningly happy) mixed-race families?

Meanwhile, here’s a comment of the Farage affair that I fully endorse.

Finally . . .

An astonishing report of a flight by Ryanair. And an apposite question.

To amuse . . .

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.