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/Galicia

There was a pre-boda gathering last evening on the terrace of one of my favourite watering holes. A pre-ceremony ‘reception’, I guess. All the women had, as we say, made an effort and some of the men clearly had done too. Others, though, were in shorts and T-shirt. A very Spanish mix of formal and informal, I thought. As at a tanatorio on the day after a death. But, if you can’t expect everyone to be formal at the latter, where can you?

Some Camino stats just published-

• For the first 5 months of the year, ‘Pilgrims’ on all the numerous Caminos to Santiago de Compostela numbered, 144,000 – 25, 000 up last year, or 21%. More than 60% of these came from overseas. Including The USA, 12,000; Germany 10,000: Portugal 8,600: and Italy 7,200.
• As for the Camino Portugués which passes through Pv city, some senior figure has forecast a total of 150,000 for the whole of last year. This compares with just 5,000 back in 2009.
• So, average daily pilgrims in the city: 14 for 2009, against 411 for 2024. But most of the latter won’t see much of our lovely old quarter, preferring to walk straight down one side of it – on Rúa Real – down to O Burgo bridge and across the river northwards. Only the wealthier ones can afford to splash out in restaurants every night.

A Pv city start . . .For the period January to end May, we had 12,500 visitors, almost double last year. Madrileños 2,600: Germans 400: French, Portuguese, Argentineans, North Americans and Italians, all c.300 each. Many of these will have been camino walkers, of course.

The UK

My prediction:- The turnout for next week’s general elections will be the lowest for some considerable time. No one likes the Conservatives and few trust the Labour Party, especially the 51% of the population who are real women. The Stay-at-Home party will be the winner, albeit never achieving power.

En passant . . . I didn’t know the SDP still existed so was surprised to hear its leader talking on a podcast. And very sensibly too. If I were in the UK, I might well throw away my vote on them. As there might be a reader interested in knowing more about the party and its manifesto, here and here are the links.

The EU

A (North) American chap here casts a critical – and amusing – eye over European politics, with an emphasis on current developments in France. A nice early paragraph: Europe is notoriously old, but Europe as a political entity is so young as to be still forming in some ways, and so Europeans aren’t used to caring about it. The pattern of voter care is reversed from the United States. People vote like they mean it in their own local contexts, but when it comes to the federal EU level, fewer people show up and they trash vote more. They vote as if it doesn’t matter, because many of them don’t think it does. As a result, voting at the EU level has attracted more political extremes at times than the more well-funded and attention grabbing local national elections do. Be warned that the author is rather vicious about ‘centrists’. And makes a throwaway comment about Spain and fascism.

Even if you only read his opening remarks, you’ll need to know that a turducken is a “culinary creation” consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed inside a deboned duck, which is then stuffed inside a deboned turkey

France

Just in case you didn’t read the article on Europe just cited, here’s a para on its president: Macron hasn’t been popular for years, and it often feels like that’s why he got into the game, so it’s not surprising that he’s acting like a angry, tired toddler. It is, however, inconvenient and disruptive to have one of the more powerful countries in Europe existing in a political temper tantrum. Europe is worried, the international community confused, and France itself is losing its shit. No one knows what will happen on Sunday. . . . Whatever the election results, France is in trouble. Whither go the fates of France and Germany, much of the EU will likely follow.

Germany

Couldn’t afford to bail France out even if it wanted to. Berlin has made clear that it will not let the European Central Bank print money to save its neighbour.

The USA

Counting down the days until Biden’s withdrawal, notwithstanding his defiance. What the hell is is a wife for, if not to save a man from humiliation?

Russia

The Times this morning had a headline reading: Killings, coups and chaos: inside Putin’s secret spy war on Europe. But clicking on it resulted in ‘This article has been removed’. I wondered by whom. But then it re-appeared and can be seen here. Maybe. Comments re Russian activities in Spain can be found towards the end.

Quotes of the Day

• To an even greater degree than the UK, France is an increasingly poor country that complacently assumes it is a rich one. The downside of having an ex-empire.
• The French electorate is clearly determined to keep on spending as wildly as it has done in the past

English

English is a Germanic, stress-based language, as opposed to syllable-based Romance languages such as Spanish, Italian and French. One advantage of the former is that they’re more flexible, as in this couplet from the lyrics of Procul Harem’s A whiter Shade of Pale:-

and although my eyes were open
they might have just as well’ve been closed.

As far as I know, Portuguese is the only Romance language that does things like this. So boa tarde becomes bo tar and leite crema becomes let crem. As if that language wasn’t difficult enough already. Aurally at least.

Spanish

Gota fria: Literally a ‘cold drop’. In English, a cold spell. Often something, as this last week down Southern Spain, which is considerably more than a mere ‘drop’. Severe cold during several days, possibly with hailstones. God is a bit of a cosmic joker. Whose pranks aren’t always funny . . .

Did You Know?

From 1995 to 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a bad-writing contest to mark “The most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.” The final year’s winner: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power – Judith Butler, “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” in the journal Diacritics.

The 2nd and 3rd placed offerings can be read here.

The contest’s only condition was that entries could not be ironic

Finally . . .

A famous song from the 1960s. As I crossed Waterloo Bridge many times during my years as a student in London, it elicits a a degree of nostalgia in me. P.S. If you wait for the next song, you should get the Beatles playing in the Cavern Club before they were famous outside Liverpool and Hamburg. If not, this should be it.

Finally, finally . . . Pseuds’ Corner

How do we get to know air?: “Aeropolos: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds” offers a speculative and interdisciplinary framework to reorient understandings of air and air pollution as matter “out there”. Drawing upon feminist technoscience and queer ecological frameworks, Aeropolis moves away from solutions toward a methodology of “designing-thinking-making” that redirects and connects our understandings of air – as designers, as citizens – with ongoing struggles for just futures. A book blurb.

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.
• 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. Finally, some advice on getting a mortgage.