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

It’s been reported that 2 of the 3 adjacent nightclubs which fatally caught fire in Murcia didn’t have a licence and had been ordered to close some time ago. As I’ve said, a substantial proportion of Pv city’s places aren’t in compliance with the law. Not to mention the one – Otto’s Bar – which was busted last week for drug dealing.

The disgraced ex king has won his legal battle in London with his ex mistress. Click here for why.

Impressively, a Spanish company has become the first launcher in Europe of a re-usable rocket. But how Spanish to name it after a line of famous toros bravos. . .

British banks are now refusing to provide accounts for Brits around the world, not just EU residents. Click here for details and advice on what you can do about it.

What you didn’t know about Walt Disney, courtesy of Lenox Napier’s Spanish Shilling blog.

Pv city’s recalcitrant stallholders were at it again yesterday. They refused to use the stretch on a main road allocated to them but did block this with an empty stall at each end. Again screwing up the city’s traffic, ironically on a bypass option:-

Another quote from Cees Noteboom’s Roads to Santiago: [in the 1980s]The press and television keep up a steady stream of news about anything relating to the ‘Spanish family’, the countries the Spaniards ‘discovered’ and conquered long ago, and which still suffer the consequences of their colonial origins. Spaniards who ventured across the ocean were not known for their kindness of spirit. The conquistadors took with them the right of the strong, and the structured society they encountered when they arrived at their destination supplied them with that other essential ingredient: a people to oppress. Add to that a few other Spanish notions, like ‘patria chica‘, religious absolutism and greed, and you have the makings of a tragedy. ‘Patria chica’ is about the extreme loyalty to the native region at the expense of a sense of nationhood. It is thanks to this legacy that the map of Central and South America looks the way it does despite the efforts of Simón Bolivar. It is true that there are frontiers elsewhere in the world that seem equally absurd and surreal, but in this case it was also a linguistic area that was carved in two. That the Indians would have been better off being ‘discovered’ by ethical Puritans from the Protestant North is unlikely in light of the tribulations of the Sioux, the Hopi, the Navajo and the Apaches but, be that as it may, as a chemical wedding the encounter between the robber barons from Extremadura and the strictly regimented Inca societies was equally disastrous.

Sweden

The question is posed here: Are we allowed to talk about what’s happening there yet?

Quotes of the Day/The Way of the World/Social Media

These are taken from this article, by a famous (left wing) Irish comedian. If you read it, be prepared to be shocked by the final 2 paragraphs:

• Twitter was fast evolving from a platform that connected people into a colossal stage for intellectual self-stimulation. A whole generation of attention-seeing mediocrities swept onto it and got to work. Many of them started putting pronouns in their Twitter bios, which I was beginning to recognise as a cat-bell for idiots. 
• By now, the bogus language of American academia – its posturing and obfuscation, its fashionable ideological frameworks – had long been running wild on Twitter. But I was horrified to see the madness spreading far beyond those shores.
• I would soon see the full extent to which supposedly smart people can be bamboozled by the high priests and enforcers of online activism, and the ease with which the rest of the world falls into line with The American View of Things.
• The those people were going insane. They were full of fire and fury, and hated no one more than the heretics on their own side, for whom they reserved the worst punishments. 
• In this new political climate, words began to lose their meaning. 
• Unlike me, some quickly recognised the online Left’s lurch to authoritarianism.

English

To jackal: Modern rugby jargon for the act of stealing the ball from someone you’ve just tackled to the floor. Must be done in the proper sequence or you will give away a penalty. Seems to have gone from a word you never heard to one you hear at least 20 times in a match.

Spanish

I think I might have noted this before . . . The English word ‘relationship’ translates as relación in Spanish. But, whereas the English sense is very wide, the Spanish sense is narrow and connotes a physical element. Or un elemento amoroso, as the RAE puts it. So, una amistad is not una relación. Assuming I’ve got this right, one has to be careful about using relación, for example in Me gusta nuestra relación when you’r not sleeping with your friend. Who, if Spanish, might well be upset by your connotation. Of course, it’s not straightforward; I’m told you can say Tenemos una buena relación, without meaning that you have una relación física/sentimental but are just good friends. And there are relaciones internacionales, of course. In which the various countries are not screwing each other. In theory.

Finally . . .

Down in Pv city’s booze zone in the old quarter, there’s long been a closed-down bar called Van Gogh. Passing it yesterday, I saw it’s about to reopen as something apparently called Euphoria Inn. I thought it might be yet another health food shop but it turns out to be yet another tattoo parlour. Meeting, I guess, the demands of every woman under 50 who feels the need to decorate several parts of her body.

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.

For those thinking of moving to Spain:- This is an extremely comprehensive and accurate guide to the challenge, written by a Brit who lives in both the North and the South and who’s very involved in helping Camino walkers.