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

Post election developments: Things could well depend on the single MP of a tiny party in the far-from-the-mainland Canary Islands, says The Times here. BTW: Do you know that the Canary islands get their name from dogs(Latin: canis). Not from birds.

2 blogs I follow:-

• Lenox Napier’s Spanish Shilling, and
• María’s Normal Times, here or here.

Sad reading for us lobophiles . . .

Here’s a paeon of praise to Galicia from a UK paper, kindly sent to me by a reader. The author actually seems to have been here, including to Pv city. But I don’t know what she means in saying you need authorisation to visit the Atlantic Islands; you just need to buy a ticket at a relevant booth in one of 3 places. And there’s some obligatory Celtic nonsense, of course.

Good luck if you want to fly to Galicia from anywhere in the UK other than the South East. Maybe things will change once demand ramps up but right now your best bet – if you want to avoid a change in Madrid or Barcelona – is to fly to Oporto and either take a bus or train from the airport or hire a car there. I have a friend arriving today who’s flight to Oporto left Liverpool at 06.05. This is 7.05 in Spain but he won’t get to Pv city until 14.30.

Talking of tourism here has reminded me . . . I see that you can now get a trip in a glass-bottomed boat from what was the 15^th century port in Pv city, silted up a long time ago. And you can now also risk some sort of scuba diving experience. See here or here. Not for me. (BTW2: A classic sentence translated without the help of a native speaker: At Diving Pontevedra we have more than a decade putting all our illusion to train in diving.)

The UK

That ‘blistering’ weather . . .

The UK & The EU

A fellow Brit here has sent me the article below on Brexit. It very much reflects my view.

The EU

In the wake of WW2, the EU was created to fight ‘dangerous’ nationalism(s). Well, that’s the conventional (‘liberal’) view but this article sheds some new light on its real origins. And claims that, paradoxically, it now displays a nationalism all of its own – ‘exposed’ by developments in Ukraine

The USA

August 3 isn’t – as I said it was – Columbus Day but the date does mark an important day in the history of the Americas. On that day, 531 years ago, Christopher Columbus set sail for a New World. Well, he didn’t really; he set out to reach the Spice Islands – The EAST Indies – by sailing the long way round, westwards. And he never gave up the belief that he’d reached them. A very clever mariner but quite mad. And a hopeless administrator, they say.

(A)GW/Energy/Net Zero

More on the (alleged) backlash here.

And a claim from one of the many ‘experts’ that we are ‘awash in pseudo-science’. Which is no great surprise. Especially to those of us who read Richard North’s blog.

The Way of the World

Ahead of an election next year, the UK Labour party has smelt the air and started to backtrack on gender issues – doubtless counting on the fact that a week is a long time in politics and that voters’ memories are shorter than those of a gnat. Especially in respect of one’s preferred side.

With exquisitely bad timing, The corporate world has been captured by trans ideology. Let’s see how quickly, they in turn, do a reverse ferret’.

Finally . . .

English as it ain’t spoke: The most important word in Mccarthy’s lexicon was perhaps the least conspicuous: ‘and’. That little conjunction paratactically strung together the atrocious and the mundane, the ultraviolet and the kind. A Guardian review.

To amuse . . . Lost on me . . .

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

Prof Anand Menon, responding to the question of how he sees the 1st half 2023 with respect to UK and EU.

“The year Brexit was betrayed. Or, for those of the opposite persuasion, “The year Brexit was definitively shown to have failed”. . . . As so often, the debate has been dominated by the extremes. And as so often, reality is somewhat different. It may transpire that 2023 was the year we learned – grudgingly – to live with Brexit.

For zealots on the Leave side, betrayal has come in several stages. The Windsor Framework left Northern Ireland marooned, subject to EU laws. Kemi Badenoch’s watered-down EU retained law bill promised the scrapping of only a fifth of the EU laws originally destined for Rishi Sunak’s shredder. By May, Nigel Farage himself was on our telly screens declaring that Brexit had ‘failed’.So, what does all this mean? In truth, not much. For all the noises off as Ministers compromised with reality – finding a modus vivendi with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol and avoiding the regulatory chaos that would have accompanied a wholescale scrapping of EU law – the Government was simply finding ways to, as the saying goes, ‘make Brexit work’. And the pushback was notable for its tameness. The days when the ERG tail could wag the Tory dog are, it seems, over.

All the while, Remainers have felt emboldened by a raft of economic data – on growth, on trade, and on investment – suggesting that Brexit has had a negative impact on the UK economy. They have become increasingly strident in their criticism of the decision to leave the EU (and increasingly prone to irrationally blame Brexit for everything that is going wrong).
And Remainers have been able to point to opinion polls showing a larger proportion than ever of the British public now believe that to have been the ‘wrong decision’.

However, prospects for a reconsideration of Brexit, seem remote at best. For one thing, there is simply no political appetite for it. Labour have ruled out rejoining the single market or customs union, proposing what amount to potentially helpful but largely cosmetic changes to current trading arrangements (though there is no guarantee the EU will be willing to grant these). As far as Keir Starmer is concerned, as long as the Liberal Democrats do not adopt a more aggressively anti-Brexit stance, there will be little political cost to this position.

As for the public, while increasing numbers of people feel Brexit has not been a success, we should be careful not to read too much into this.

Unhappiness with Brexit is not the same as a desire to re-litigate it. We have seen the issue drop steadily down the IPSOS issues tracker over time – last month only 9% of the public felt Brexit was the most important issue confronting the country. As my colleague Sophie Stowers has pointed out, when asked about re-opening the Brexit question, a large portion of the population (44%) consider the issue of EU membership to be settled. This could, as she says, ‘suggest that the popularity of ‘rejoin’ in a hypothetical referendum should not be interpreted as support for another vote’.

Furthermore, many of the Leavers who think the economic implications have been negative believe this is because politicians have implemented Brexit badly, not because it could not have been done well.

And finally, to perhaps the greatest unknown. What happens when the economy picks up? If, as seems to be the case, people are now blaming Brexit for economic outcomes that are clearly not the result of our leaving the EU, would an economic upturn lead to Brexit being credited for positive outcomes on which it has had equally little impact? How stable, in other words, is the current dissatisfaction?

The answer to this is we simply don’t know. But there is nothing inevitable about a steady rise in dissatisfaction with Brexit, let alone in political pressure for a change of course.

And so here we are. Grumpy, and generally quite dissatisfied with Brexit, but not really prepared to go over all that again. This might just be the new normal.