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

Modelo 720 is the name of a Tax Office form and also the shorthand for an infamous law of 2012. This was supposed to be aimed at fraudulent Spaniards but, in practice, was used to collect how hanging fruit from foreign residents. After a 10-year EU court battle, its provisions were finally softened but it’s still something foreign residents need to know about, if they have assets outside Spain. Years ago, only around 4% of ‘targets’ were submitting Modelos 720, questioning its value on other grounds. This percentage might have increased since then, when at least one notary/asesor – used by a Dutch friend – advised him to ignore the law. As did my tax adviser back then. But I didn’t and made a submission, so that I could sleep at night when the penalties for failing to do so were (illegally, as it turned out) horrendous. Here’s a video about it.

I suspect there’s more behind this sacking of a clarinet placer that the allegation that he didn’t have a C2 qualification in Catalan. But, yes, strange things happened in Cataluña, Pais Vasco. Galicia and possibly even Valencia. But not Asturias, maybe.

Education: A reader writes: Lamentablemente, the Peter Principle has played a key role in Spain both in the public and private sector. Training is, like school education, rote. Also, while training companies are as common as Chinese bazaars, they all offer “titulos”. It is what people want, as it looks good on their CV. The problem! They teach you how to pass an exam. They don’t teach you the subject in question. These are two very different things. Over the years here, at management and director level, I have dealt with some really complex characters. With time I have discovered that it is the people lower down the hierarchical structure with the best answers and knowledge. The brain drain hasn’t helped. A quick study online, and you will find Spaniards in top roles in big corporations around the world*. It’s a shame these people felt they had to look abroad to make it to the top of their profession.

*The ward doctor in my daughter’s hospital is from Asturias. We had a nice chat. In Gallego. Honest . . .

Good to see that the best UHT milk is sold in my go-to supermarket.

The UK

Both my daughter and her husband are in hospital at the moment. To say that the latter has been buggered around by the NHS since he was sent to them by a private doctor as he was in need of an urgent operation on his heart would be an understatement. Eventually, he decided to have the operation privately, ro be performed by the same surgeon who’d do it at some indeterminate date in the future in the NHS. So, I was interested to read Richard North’s column on ‘the envy of the world’ this morning. And then this column by Janet Daley. She writes, inter alia, that she’s never known a time when there was such open discontent and such readiness to criticise the performance of what was once the most treasured fixture of British life. There is now a quite sophisticated recognition – perhaps due to the increase in foreign travel among people of all classes and levels of income – that the British healthcare system is quite unlike most other national arrangement: that its funding model and the service that it offers is not the only way to provide medical treatment that is fair and humane. But she stresses that, when you get it, treatment is excellent. Most often by non-British personnel, it seems to me. The challenge is getting it before you kick the bucket because of what ails you. Or even just old age.

I asked why Muslims were being allowed – virtually encouraged and state financed – to do what Christians have long been prevented from doing. On cue comes this article. Taster: There is a single truth about the schools system that we can no longer ignore: Michaela school, like many others, is dealing with an explosion of religious fervour. When is someone going to put a stop to this? Muslim pupils had been made by other Muslim pupils to wear the headscarf; they had been instructed not to sing in the school choir because it is “haram”. They were “bad Muslims” if they didn’t pray. Can you imagine if a Christian pupil did this? The Archbishop of Canterbury would provide a personal apology on television.

Germany

My Hamburg friend responded thus to the article I cited yesterday: The perverse thing is that the Germans are personally doing quite well, they live off the substance or state support, the tax revenues for 2024 will be the highest in the history of the republic! The average wealth of a German is over €300k. I guess it’d hardly be surprising if they were unhappy at seeing this reduce

Did you know? . . .

How Many Human Species Have Walked Earth? More Than You May* Think.

• * Should be ‘might’ of course; you’re not seeking permission . . . .

Finally . . .

I got this email from 2 different people this morning:- Hi Desiree, I am writing you because I am employing 2 new people in my system this week . . . I wonder how many Desirees it actually reached

The Usual Links . . .

You can get my posts by email as soon as they’re published. With the added bonus that they’ll contain the typos I’ll discover later. I believe there’s a box for this at the bottom of each post. I guess it’s logical that this doesn’t appear on the version given to 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.

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.