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

Cataluña and its capital, Barcelona, are facing one of the worst droughts in recorded history. And it’s pitting farmers and locals against the region’s huge tourism industry.

Info here on working in Spain on a digital nomad visa.

I was interested – surprised even – to see in a article in a (surely) right-wing US journal that, in the recent Galician elections, the socialist PSOE party had been trounced by the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ BNG party. I guess one’s view depends on where one’s standing.

Germany

Not good news for Europe, from the FT: The German economy to keep shrinking, the Bundesbank warns. The central bank blames budget uncertainty, strikes and weak demand for a likely ‘technical recession’ in the first quarter.

The UK

I confess I had to read this twice to understand why a friend had sent it to me . . .

The USA

Does he still have the capacity to surprise? Trump compares himself to Navalny, as he says the latter’s death reminds him of ‘unfair courtroom decisions’

Russia

AEP sides here with those who think Russia is on – or at least heading towards – the economic rocks. Putin, he avers, is losing the economic war, and is not winning the military war fast enough to compensate.  . . He is wasting his armies, and two thirds of his tanks, on microscopic gains. . . . Russia is moving ineluctably towards economic exhaustion. It would be a monumental error for the West to lose its nerve now.

Quote of the Day

The Book of Proverbs says “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred therewith”. But a dinner with brilliant conversations surpasses herbs, ox, and love combined. The best pleasures of the feast proceed from the lips not to them.

The Way of the World

• Britain’s favourite department store (currently in financial difficulties, as it happens) leaps – desperately? – onto a bandwagon. But . . .Why on earth has it started flogging sex toys?, asks a DT columnist.
• Anyone for a moonymoon? The holiday buzzwords you’ll soon be sick of.

English

A Spanish friend, talking about the challenge of phrasal words, cited the difficulty he’d had with ‘pass out’ and ‘pass away’. This had come to light, he said, when, as a doctor, he’d intended to tell a woman that her husband was about to lose consciousness. Just before she fainted . . .

I saw the verb ‘to aroil’ but couldn’t find a definition. So, I concluded it was either a spelling mistake or a version of ‘to roil’: To cause something to move quickly in a twisting circular movement. Anyone?

Did you know? . . .

The most common vowel sound in English is the schwa sound, It is a reduced and neutral sound that occurs in many unstressed syllables, and it can be spelled with any vowel letter, such as ⟨a⟩ in “about” or ⟨e⟩ in “taken”.

This explains why my 5 year old grandson in Madrid wrote U tri in a bed, for ‘A tree in a bed’.

And everyone will have noticed the schwa in Horatio above . . .

Finally . .

The wit and wisdom of Samuel Johnson 4: In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

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.