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

As I feared . . . Easter processions are cancelled in southern Spain due to rainstorms. Sad. Even to an atheist.

Which reminds me . . . Every Easter, this foto and this video come up in one Spanish feed or another.

I confess to finding the event rather . . . gay. Though there’s nothing wrong with that, of course. I’m just giving you my truth.

HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for this item. ‘How to know if a home is being sold at a fair price in Spain. To know how much a house is worth, you need to take into account its characteristics and the market situation’. A guide from Idealista here.

Barely a year after Spain passed its ‘trans equality’ law, gender self-identification is wreaking havoc across the country. To almost no one’s surprise, the law that makes it significantly easier for anyone to legally change their gender has turned out to be a predator’s charter. . . . The new law has taken a shredder to women’s rights. As anyone could have predicted, single-sex spaces have been all but abolished. And many other legal protections that women once fought for have disappeared overnight. More here.

Vogue includes Galicia in The Best Places to Visit in Spain.

The USA

The Islamist threat.

Social Media

The smartphone mental health epidemic . . . Only God may have the answer, says this (Catholic) columnist .I do hope not. And that his claim is too pessimistic.

The Way of the World

Down in Australia . . . A women’s football competition has been won by a team featuring 5 transgender players, amid accusations one had broken an opponent’s leg in 2 places. The team won every match, including a 10-0 victory in which one of their trans players scored a double hat-trick*. It has emerged that the organisers earlier warned rival teams that forfeiting games against the team would result in disciplinary action and could even be viewed as “an act of discrimination”.

* 2 x 3

BTW . . . The winning team is ‘a lesbian team’. Meaning that the transwomen in it – who might well be male-endowed – fancy women. Leading one to wonder if their advances on lesbian colleagues would be well received. YCMIU. There’ll probably be a movie made about it quite soon.

English

Of the inane marketing sort . . . The £22 Happy Tummy Loaf is made from 2-day soaked wholegrain chia teff and contains 16 specifically chosen ingredients. What a great – if expensive – advance. All bread previously made throughout human history must have included any ingredients which happened to be around and, so, selected themselves.

Did you know? . . .

The JFK announcement was: “Please check your hand luggage for firearms before you go through security.” No greater culture shock than a country where, instead of risking an overlarge bottle of shampoo or water bottle being confiscated, people might absent-mindedly leave guns in their handbags.

Finally . . .

A nice observation . . .

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. And this is something on the so-called Beckham Rule, which is beneficial – tax-wise – for folk who want to work here.