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

According to this site, Islamic fundamentalism (Islamism?) is a growing reality in Spain.

Madrid: I was struck, though not surprised, at the number of young women smoking outside the bars and cafés of Malasaña on Friday and Saturday nights. And the piles of cigarette butts there on Sunday morning were also to be expected.

Piles . . . butts. Seems somehow appropriate that they appear in the same sentence.

Complaints Section

• Renfe yet again . . .Two long-suffering friends who’ve been in Spain as long as me have confirmed that they don’t wrestle with the web page but go to the station to reserve seats. One of them has advised me of a new wrinkle . . . If you do this, you get better seats and ones which are closer to the buffet car. Certainly true of trip back to Galicia today. At least as regards the latter. Don’t really know if the seats were superior to any other. Still no plugs for charging my laptop
• Need I say that we were late getting into Pv city station. One of the troublesome ‘Ourense factors’ is that the bogies have to be changed as you enter and leave the city’s environs. This will be the case until the high-speed track around the city is finally completed. This change can only be done one train at a time and one coming the other way to us had experienced a ‘technical problem‘ during this process, meaning that we couldn’t start on ours. We were detained several minutes in the sticks before moving on and, so, arrived late in both Ourense and Pv city. In the latter case by 15 minutes. About par for the course, in my experience of waiting there.

Travel advice: If you’re going to leave from Chamartín station, give yourself another 10 minutes on top of than your usual cushion. The station is being massively ‘reformed’ and both access from the metro and boarding take longer than ever.

It was bright and sunny in Madrid but the rain started as we came down from the top of the mountain range that forms the border with Castilla y León and entered Galicia. Also at least half-expected.

The UK

Those darned elusive Englishmen (and women) . . . One part of the English personality is to be disputatious, mocking and contrarian. [I disagree with the idiot who said that. Who also said:] Other facets of the national character are: a love of small pleasures, emotional repression, argumentativeness – with a helping of smugness or self-loathing on the side. 

The EU/Austria

So, the land of the birthplace of Adolf Hitler is to have far-right government. A testament to how far modern administrations have failed their voters in the last decade.

The USA

Well, the orange clown – very hard as this is to believe – has sunk to a new low. “Kamala is mentally impaired, he said to baying supporters, adding: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way”. His hard core voters will love it but ‘top Republicans’ – desperate to get him to address key issues – disavowed these attacks on Harris. As well they might.

And to think, he might still win, such is the craziness of the US presidential election process.

By the way . . . I wonder if ad hominem is gender neutral. If not, does one exist in Latin.

Spanish

• Latinos in both South and (particularly, I imagine) in North America are increasingly using Latinx in place of Latino and Latina. I might well be wrong but don’t see this making headway here in the mother country. Latinx is certainly recognised by my (American) spellcheck. But not by the RAE. What, I wonder, is the plural of Latinx. Latinxes?
• It seems that Latine is an emerging alternative. But this isn’t even recognised by my spellcheck, yet.
• On the train today, I wondered why stations were referred to as comparadas. To what, I thought? But the announcement in English gave me the answer . . . It was con paradas, not what I’d heard.

Did you know?

At the time of the French Revolution – 1789 – the French king – Louis XVI – would not have been able to understand the great majority of his subjects. For they spoke the languages/dialects of the country’s several regions. French was eventually forced on all of them by later rulers

Finally . . .

On the short 7 minute walk to my car from the station this afternoon, I was passed by 43 ‘pilgrims’ entering Pv city. This is more than 7 times we saw in an entire week when I and my friends did our first Camino in 2009.

Finally, Finally . .

MY YEAR IN THE SEYCHELLES

• Episode 1: 12 September 2024: Why VSO?
• Episode 2: 13 September 2024: The Leaving of Liverpool
• Episode 3: 14 September 2024: An interlude: The Seychelles back then
• Episode 4: 14 September 2024: Departure, Nairobi and Arrival
• Episode 5: 15 September 2024: Arriving in MombasE
• Episode 6: 16 September 2024: The YCWA in Mombasa
• Episode 7: 17 September 2024: The flight to Mahé
• Episode 8: 18 September 2024: Our Arrival
• Episode 9: 19 September 2024: Early Days
• Episode 10: 20 September 2024: My Colleagues and Some Early Adventures
• Episode 11: 21 September 2024: Mr Warren and Me
• Episode 12: 22 September 2024: Chris Green
• Episode 13: 23 September 2024 The Hotel des Seychelles
• Episode 14: 24 September 2024: A Night to Remember
• Episode 15: 25 September 2024: Visitors
• Episode 16: 26 September 2024: Dr McGregor and Me
• Episode 17: 27 September 2024: Dr McGregor and Me 2
• Episode 18: 28 September 2024: Teaching Duties
• Episode 19: 29 September 2024: The Watch

Episode 20: The Sea and Me

Even by the age of 18, I’d never been at home in the water. And, shamefully perhaps, I’d never learned to swim by the time I arrived in the Seychelles.

I have a vague record of my father taking me to the local swimming baths in Wallasey just the once and trying to teach me to swim, before giving it up as a bad job. Quite possibly because he was ashamed of my obvious fear of water. For he was a a better swimmer than he was a father.

I certainly do recall a teacher at my primary school – a Mr Slevin – responding to my question on how I was doing on the outings to the pool telling me that I was nesh. This word isn’t in my spellcheck and wouldn’t, I suspect, have been recognised by my southern colleagues in King’s College Laws faculty. Or by my US friends. It’s a northern word which doesn’t appear in the OED. But an on-line dictionary gives the following synonyms: soft, tender, delicate, weak, poor-spirited, susceptible to cold weather, harsh conditions, etc. You get the picture.

This fear was only deepened after I’d been pushed into the deep end of the Guinea Gap pool by some teenage psychopath a year or two later. I can, even now, see myself terrified of dying and struggling to keep my head above water and to reach the bar at the side of the pool. of course.

I don’t think I ever went into a pool after that. Certainly not after my bike had been stolen from outside a pool in a rough-ish part of Birkenhead, one of England’s poorest boroughs. True, I used to go with friends to the Derby pool that used to lie long the sea-front, just below the Wallasey golf links. But only to lie on the balcony to try to get a tan.

And I think I went once to the much larger New Brighton pool – also long gone – but I suspect this might be a false memory, born of the fact that it appears in an Ealing Studios film shot in Wallasey and called The Magnet.

You will appreciate by now that, while my pre-departure research into the Seychelles had delighted and excited me, I’d placed no value at all on living right in the middle of the Indian Ocean. If you’d have told me then that I’d one day spend 2-3 hours a day under water, I’d have laughed you off the planet.

As I’ve said, things changed for me the day some American Peace Corps workers finally persuaded me to don a pair of flippers and a face-mask and snorkel so I could float on the surface and propel myself along it. It was, without doubt, a Eureka moment. As they’d assured me, the scene that met my eyes totally astonished me. It’s impossible to do justice to it in words. Just imagine everything you’ve ever seen in an aquarium – well, almost everything – swimming right below you. A massive kaleidoscope of shapes and colours. Unsurprisingly, I resolved to overcome my fear of water and to learn to swim.

This I did very gradually, going into the Beau Vallon waters every afternoon and attempting to swim a bit more each day. Of course, I did eventually overcome my fear and I can still recall the elation with which I wrote home to my parents telling them I’m swum from one side of the bay to the other. My mother wrote back to congratulate me but my father didn’t. But, then, we never exchanged letters even once during his entire lifetime. He was of Irish stock, quite possibly from the 19th century . . .

Beau Vallon Bay waters were crystal clear and it was was protected by a partial reef, so there was little, if any, fear of sharks or barracudas. A list of creatures I saw – and chased – there would be very long indeed. It included every imaginable type of fish, crayfish, turtles, eels, sting-rays, and dangerous lion fish. Even giant manta rays, which I swam among the one time they appeared in front of the hotel.

I used to hunt the crayfish with a spear-gun, detecting their lairs below rocks via their feelers. For a while, I used to take those I’d caught to the kitchen of the hotel and get the cook to boil them for me. As I recall, the biggest I caught had a tail which weighed in at 6 pounds, or 2.7 kilos. Or maybe that was someone’s educated guess. But this had to stop after Jerry Legrand got wind of it.

Recently reading accounts of Indian sailors using monsoon winds to move to and from East Asia more than a thousand years ago reminded me that the Seychelles had 2 monsoon winds, each of which blew for 6 months a year – the North West and the South East monsoons. As we lived on the northern side of the islands, the latter brought us seas as placid as a mirror. The former, though, delivered turbulent waters. Sometimes very turbulent indeed..

This would be during the winter months and I recall spending Christmas Day 1965 doing what what we might well have called waterboarding . . . This involved a short, thin piece of wood with which one walked out into the sea before diving though an incoming wave and surfing back to the shore on the on the crest of the next one, if you could catch it. Albeit lying down on the flimsy board, rather than standing on it. When the waves were very high, failure to get your timing right would cause you to be caught up in a vortex, somersaulting towards the beach. Which was thrilling but not at all productive. When the waves were at their highest, we didn’t indulge in this sport.

I didn’t confine my swimming and spear-fishing to Beau Vallon Bay. But only 3 expeditions stand out in my memory, one far less amusing than the other 2.

Swimming near rocks in a bay along from Beau Vallon’s, I got caught up in a strong down-current and tossed against one of the rocks. Struggling for air, I had another near-death experience, which seemed to last a lot longer than it probably did. I refrained from writing home about my achievement in staying alive.

The second outing was in a little boat with Phil Hunt on Good Friday, 1966. We motored along the north coast to Anse La Mouche – Fly Bay, where we dropped anchor and set about spear fishing for a few hours. Disappointingly, the prominent fish in the bay was the rather boring parrot fish but there was compensation for a while in chasing an octopus that changed its colour several times as it fled, successfully, away from me.

Having low levels of melatonin, I don’t tan easily but, by now I’d been in the islands for close to 6 months and was brown enough to be safe from burning, even if I swam only in my trunks.

However, an hour or so into the afternoon, my trunks split and I decided to take them off and swim naked. After all, no one lived in Anse La Mouche, so there was no one to offend. I’d forgotten, of course, that my backside wasn’t tanned, as I’d never sunbathed in the buff. Some way into our return home, I realised that my buttock cheeks were hurting quite a lot. I didn’t sit down for the rest of the journey, nor for the entire weekend. I know that Phil – very unsympathetically – made several appropriate jokes but can’t recall any of them. Though I can imagine some.

On Monday in the College staff room, there was chat about what folk had done over the 3 day holiday. “You’ll never guess’ said one of my colleagues. “My wife and I went to Anse La Mouche, where we saw some idiot with a totally white arse swimming and diving naked”. Thankfully, it seemed I’d been too far out to sea to be recognised. Or so I thought at the time. Anyway, I kept schtum and concurred on the foolishness of risking that under a tropical sun. I assumed they hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t sat down during the break in lessons.

The third outing – for both Martin and me – was on a small yacht belonging to the Governor. Its purpose was to collect shells, on the southern side of the island. Where I did actually see a barracuda. My abiding memory is of finding a large shell and proudly showing it to the Governor’s daughter. Whereupon she said “Oh, that’s lovely” and promptly put it into the bag hanging from her waist. I was dumbfounded. And speechless. But I sidled over to complain to Martin and we agreed she was a presumptive bitch with whom we’d have nothing more to do.

As if we plebs were ever going to be given the chance. It was her loss, of course. Except in the seashell department.

*******

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts, either after reading on line or in my FB group Thoughts from Galicia.

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. If you do this but don’t read the posts, I will delete your subscription. So perhaps don’t bother if you have other reasons for subscribing . . .
• 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. And this article ‘debunks claims re wealth and residency taxes’. Probably only relevant if you’re a HNWI. In which case, you’ll surely know what that stands for.