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

Be warned: Gmail advised me that this link looks unusual and that I should ensure I could trust it before opening it. It’s from BBC News – a report on someone who must rank as a more-than- ordinarily-unpopular thief.

A HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for these 2 items:-

• From Noticias de Trabajo here: The Spanish Tax office – La Hacienda – can fine home-owners many thousands of euros if they sell their homes at a price lower than market-value. The fine can be up to €100,000. Even jail time depending on the difference in price.
• A useful guide to buying a property in Spain comes from Digital Journal.

The UK

More on the bandwaggon-jumping – lost-its-way? – department store I mentioned yesterday. Some good questions and observations therein.

Russia

The historian Ian Kershaw suggested that Hitler was in a position to translate his politics into reality not because he was giving direct orders but because the German bureaucracy and the SS apparatus were willingly working towards him. One wonders if recent death deaths in Siberia and the UK reflect the same phenomenon.

Quote of the Day

Almost every single attempt to make an assembly of citizens that bypasses the normal constitutional modes of governance has been a disaster. Moreover, the people for whom it was most disastrous were often those most prominent in promoting the idiotic idea in the first place. The (headless) M Robespierere, for example.

The Way of the World

A question I’ve long thought had been answered in the affirmative – Are men and women really wired differently? But . . . Can men blame the way their brains were wired by evolution? We know men and women on average behave differently and there is only one thing that could be making them behave differently: their brains. So, of course, if we look at their brains, they will be different. But is that difference forged by the rigours of a caveman’s life on the savannahs of Africa? Or by the mollycoddling of a mother and then a wife?

Here’s a 2nd – amusing – article on this theme.

English

Some eminent German linguists claim that English reigns supreme as regards the number of words for being drunk. There are at least 546 of them, they say. Wellied, spannered, mortalled and rat-arsed, for example. One wonders why this is. . . Anyway, it’s claimed that these fine linguists missed number 547 . . . bell-ended. The rationale for which I can just about understand. If you behave like un carallo.

Finally . . .

One of those headlines . . . A ‘mumfluencer’ who posted parenting advice on YouTube admits torturing her children.

The wit of Samuel Johnson 4: Example is always more efficacious than precept.

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.