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

For years we’ve been promised the result of the DNA tests which will tell us which of the 3 candidates is Columbus’s real corpse. The latest promise is for the coming week. But, assuming you care,​ you might want to hold your breath​.

Lenox Napier writes here on the literary aspirations – and other activities – of the self-exiled ex king. Who is currently being feted by the yachting set in nearby Sanxenxo. He’s accompanied by one loving daughter, who – unlike her brother the current king – hasn’t forsworn her share of her father’s billions. Nice quote re the ex-king from from José Antonio Zarzalejos.

Spain is peppered with geological wonders, says this writer. Correctly.

In Galicia, the rise in rental costs since Covid has been at twice the rate of salary increased. Possibly true of many other places in Spain.

The UK

Some cynic has said that the ‘sweet spot’ of British politics is to hang paedophiles and throw more money at the National Health Service.

Germany

Clarkson on VW’s problems.

Russia

• From an article on a honey-trapped Irish politician: A Russia expert has said that using a politician to discreetly upset sentiments around Brexit and other political issues must have looked like a “fantastic opportunity” for the Russians. “Wherever there are social fracture lines, some smart, ruthless, imaginative and morally bankrupt Russian intelligence officer is working out how to widen it a little further. Politicians are classic targets for Russian services. They have access, they have careers where they work on committees, and they have large egos. Ego is one of the most reliable ways of recruiting people,” he added.
• Putin’s problems are building in Ukraine, but he’s finding help in Brussels: Ukraine sceptics are gaining influence in the EU parliament, as Russia fights to avoid a stalemate.

The Way of the World/Quotes of the Day

• “My students say they’re too anxious to learn. I daren’t question it”. At one university a third of undergraduates are absent and some are even scared to take the bus. As term starts. a [UK[ lecturer asks: “Is self-diagnosis the real crisis” .
• There is an acute political sickness I call progress mania. It is the belief that things — values, really — must keep hurtling forward. It is people thinking there must now be “no limits” on abortion. It is Ed Miliband still wildly pushing electric cars, even though no one’s buying them. It is throwing free laptops and iPads at primary school children, and then wondering why they are all broken by social media. It is the trans agenda writ very, very large. It is looking at assisted dying and thinking, well, why can’t we have that here, too? Aren’t people suffering? Aren’t we a sophisticated, forward-looking, politically alive nation? What could go wrong? Shouldn’t we have what we want? Isn’t it our human right to have exactly what we want, whenever we want it, like spoilt children? It is the fetid Obaman mantra: change, change, change. Me, me, me. It makes me uneasy.I used to think non-stop change was desirable — morally correct, even. But vast societal upheaval has made us more anxious, fearful, uncertain. A harsh duality has now replaced traditional conservative/liberal politics: there are those whose entire raison d’être is to continue hurtling forward at any cost, into more man-made medical horror, more movement of people, more stifling regulation, more incontinent financial mess, more family breakdown — moving, they think, away from pain but it’s actually towards it — and those who sense the horrific consequences of doing so but are shamed into silence.

English

• Back to the 2 A sounds, long and short. . . . I’m listening to a fascinating podcast on Eva Perón. As both historians are from the South of England (and educated at posh private schools), they each pronounce descamisados with one short A and one long A. Wrong, if they really want to reproduce Spanish. Your guess is as good as mine as to what they’d make of descAmisAdAs.
• Perry has kindly cited this video on the Great Vowel Shift in English. I’ve always understood that the introduction of the long A sound – non existent in British colonies – was an affectation of 18th century Londoners. Not adopted in the Midlands and the North. Except by snobs . . . 

Spanish

• Sacar rédito de: To profit from
• Juanca: The ex-king’s (pejorative?) nickname, hased on Juan. I wonder if it’s pronounced in the same was as guapa is in Galicia – viz. wuapa.
• Chasco: Disappointment, let-down, joke, turn-off

Finally . .

It’s nice to see a slow rise in subscribers but, from time to time, I do have to weed out those who never open the emails to read my posts. As I’ve said, there must be some benefit to their signing up but I don’t know what it is. Decent links??

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 Mombasa
• 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: 30 September 2024: The Sea and Me
• Episode 21: 1 October 2024: Fishy Tales
• Episode 22: 2 October 2024: Photos
• Episode 23: 3 October 2024: Photos Follow-up
• Episode 24: 4 October 2024: The Seychelles: History, Geography, Climate
• Episode 25: 5 October 2024: The Culture

Episode 26: The Seychellois People

[Warning: This was written after only a month there, back in 1969, when I was 18. Comments in square brackets have been added recently]

Fascinating variation in colour; some looking very European; even redheads; very large families: 50% or more are illegitimate (43.65% at the last count actually). Very indolent people. [Shades of Paddy Taylor!] Extremely jealous of the success of their fellows and, therefore, any new business is wrecked: the result is that the whole mercantile class is Chinese and Indian. [This much at least, was true]. Because of the presence of the Americans in the Satellite tracking station prices, are very high: higher than in the UK in fact.

The people are very dishonest in a petty sort of way: not much serious crime. Therefore the police, out of boredom, are ready to pounce on traffic offenders. The people seem a lot friendlier than those in Africa and just as jolly and colourful. [Oh, Boy!]. Very willing to smile and return greetings.

Not as many bugs as I had expected: Cockroaches are leviathans. Those here are twice the size of English ones. Lizards are everywhere: very pretty.

Roads are tortuous: very narrow and very steep: the taxi-drivers tend to use them as their private race track all the time, at great risk to the rest of the population.

Victoria is a strange mixture of wooden and concrete shops with seldom more than one floor: couple of ugly Victorian monuments. Gordon Square is minute; pedestrians are heedless of traffic – usually in various stages of inebriation.

Architecture is conspicuous by its absence. Even wealthy plantation owners have constructed mere boxes made of local stone, wood, corrugated iron and plasterboard.

The islands are too overcrowded with Americans. [Something must have upset me to make me jot that down but I can’t remember what].

Various reasons are suggested for their indolence. Some suggest the climate; some say the Seychellois believe that work is synonymous with being black and most of them, whatever the shade of their skin, wish to be thought of as white. This may have been so at one time but the present disposition was probably inherited from the early inhabitants and has no real basis in thought. Some say it’s due to a lack of contact with the rest of the world and to the dependency on the British government. The consequence is a lack of competition and the absence of any ideas of self-help.

The language here bears little resemblance to French although the Creoles understand it. The Seychellois accent is not very attractive and very difficult to imitate (I mention this fact in case any of my readers happen to be budgerigars or parrots).

The island seems to be overcrowded with policemen, who appear to be very inept and extremely bored. Bureaucracy seems to be the norm; I’m told [you may be able to guess by whom] that the Seychellois are quite willing to put four men on one man’s job and get a quarter of the wages for doing a quarter of the work.

The Governor (The Earl of Oxford and Asquith) and his wife are very nice [I’d just been to dinner at Government House] and have two delightful children here.

The weather at the moment (September) is very inconsistent and alternates between periods of very heavy rain and brilliant sunshine. I find the islands rather like a summery England at its best.

The Seychellois male of African descent is very well built with well developed shoulders and chest. This often looks funny on a man with thin legs. [Especially if he’s standing on his head and whistling Ave Maria].

Their sense of humour is weird and they will laugh at the most appalling tragedy; a production of William Tell at the College had to be withdrawn because the incessant laughter of the audience drowned the words. I’m told [same source] that demonstration is always necessary before these people will try anything new: no desire for self-help.

The English of the boys in Form One is, on the whole, atrocious. [But not quite as bad as the French of their French teacher, me]. Most of the boys of the College seem to be Chinese, Indian or white Seychellois. There are relatively few with pure negroid blood; this may be some indication of the great miscegenation that has taken place or it may simply show that even here the most menial tasks are still left to the negro who, therefore, cannot afford the school fees; education is neither compulsory nor free.

Promiscuity is not as overt as we were led to believe [Shame!] but there is little doubt it exists. The ratio of females to males is seven to one which more than partly accounts for the promiscuity.

There is no desire to inaugurate anything big in the islands; no desire for any industry or any co-ordinated fishing: Can one put this down simply to isolation and insulation?

Every shop in Victoria seems to be in need of drastic repair. Yet they seem to sell a great variety of things and not just bric-a-brac. Surprisingly, there is very little in the way of cheap goods from Japan. (33% surcharge). Most cheap goods come from Hong Kong and China.

Local craft is confined to meagre ornaments made out of tortoise shells; polished coco-de-mer shells are sold at a very exorbitant price.

There is no indigenous music and the singing of the people is surprisingly bad: the local dance music is played on electric guitars and is a cross between Scottish and Irish dance music and early English pop. The local dance [the séga] is done in a semi-crouch position and looks like an amateurish Paso Doble done at a gallop.

Most of the islanders seem to have a great propensity to stare at anyone – us in particular.

Bird life is astonishingly sparse [mainly because it was also astonishingly edible]. Very few birds are to be seen on Mahé.

Flora is also ridiculously unvaried: one finds very few flowers here and the main, but not quite the sole, vegetation is palm trees. To me, the whole island is very reminiscent of North Wales. [I might just add that everyone else considered this a positively lunatic conclusion. But then I was the only one who had ever been to North Wales]. There is no indigenous fauna except the flying fox – the name given to the fruit bat of the Seychelles. I’m told there are 2 kinds of snakes on the mountain tops but, apart from these and the usual cats, dogs and rats, there are no other animals on the main island.

The churches vary greatly: mostly disappointing inside. Interiors are apt to be rather bare, despite Gothic exteriors. Male worshippers are few in number.

Though, from the outside, the houses of most Seychellois look like wooden slums, their rural settling seems to offset this. Poverty is not striking in Victoria though it is undoubtedly there.

Although the climate is very equable, few crops are grown here, the most common excuse being that the ground is not flat enough. This may be true to some extent but there is very little attempt at terracing on the hill slopes. The most ridiculous thing is that rice, the staple diet, is not grown here but totally imported: potatoes are not grown at all.

The Seychellois seem to lack an identity; since the people consist of so many different races, it’s hard to see how they can all integrate. I hardly think that the majority of them think of themselves as British, which technically they are, or even French, which a lot of them claim to be. Of course [of course!] isolation creates a situation in which national identity is unnecessary. The term Seychellois – as a nationality – seems ridiculous considering the size of the islands and the population of 45,000.

I’m tempted to think that in 50 years, unless there is some large scale industry established or the much vaunted tourist industry is a success [which happened, of course], the population of the islands will have been drastically reduced by emigration on a much larger scale than exists now. Prospects for young people are practically nil, especially for the girls. Consequently, the islands suffer from the exodus of their intelligentsia. Neither are they anxious to return once they have qualified.

There seems little doubt that the people here do not want independence – with the exception of a small communist group. The British Government is anxious to bestow independence on the islands because of the excessive costs involved in balancing its budgets. As far as I can see [in my capacity as seer, of course], the granting of independence would be the quickest way of destroying any chance of survival here. The islanders are neither resourceful enough, clever enough, willing enough or experienced enough to govern their own country. Moreover, they are not prepared to rule themselves when they can get someone else to do it for them; the population is far too apathetic to hold any political ideas or cherish any hopes of a Seychellois free state. Independence would be synonymous with corruption, decay and collapse. [My thanks for the inspiration behind this passage must once again go to Paddy and his wife without whom this insight would have been lost to me].

Politics here are ludicrous; the two main parties spend their time making accusations at each other and claiming that the ideas of the other party were stolen from their own meagre manifesto: on the whole, politics are very childish. The Legislative Council was a farce in which the elected members asked set questions to which they got set answers from the government: debates are inaudible and not worth listening to anyway: the whole affair was treated much like a joke by the government members who obviously could not be forced into doing anything they didn’t want to by the elected members; the Governor is not very respected here and is thought to be a very ineffectual chap who would rather that these islands had 45,000 fewer people on them.

The people of the islands lack any culture whatsoever; they have undoubtedly lost the vitality of their African ancestors and have not inherited any European culture: they are neither spontaneous nor given to demonstrations in any way. They are, in fact, a very dull lot: a couple of centuries of enervating climate seem to have destroyed all desire to display their feelings in none but the most limited fashion; they have, however, inherited the culture of the house from the West and their homes are immaculately kept; they have also learnt that money is the primary object in life.

But this is not to say [Thank God!] that the people lack any good qualities; they are very friendly and very pleasant to talk to. They are a very clean people and they do their best to look tidy at all times; they dress well, especially on Sundays.

Nevertheless one can’t get away from the conclusion that for an island community, and a very small one at that, the lack of local customs and music is appalling.

Of course, a lot of people here would blame all this on the Catholic priests, who have to bear a lot of criticism for the faults of the islanders; just how far this is justified is hard to say. If one can believe all one hears [and I clearly made a damn good effort], the priests have done a lot to suppress any frenetic rejoicing but if this is true it can only show that the customs of the people were less than skin deep. The priests whom we’ve met do not seem very reactionary at all. In fact most of them have contributed a lot to the building of social centres in their parishes; one has to bear in mind that the priests came a long time after the natives and it would be extraordinary, therefore, if they have succeeded in destroying all the natural bents of the people. I can only conclude _ that these natural bents had been destroyed before the first slave inhabitants came here – this would seem to be a more likely explanation: several years in slavery would suppress anyone’s desire to celebrate and the present disposition of the islanders would seem to have been inherited.

The lack of incentive is undoubtedly a great contributory factor in Seychelles life; the isolation from the rest of the world means that there is very little spirit of competition here at all; the lack of any sort of poll tax amongst the poor [I’d just read some Russian history] means that they have no need to live at more than subsistence level. [Presupposing they had a choice, of course]. The fact that they have only to grow or catch as much as they require at that moment means that they will content themselves with very little; a big catch is not an incentive to do more fishing but an excuse for a holiday until the fish has all gone,

Arising from this attitude also is a lack of pride in their work: it is difficult for us [i.e. Paddy Taylor and me] to understand the lackadaisical attitude these people have towards the “fruits of their labour”. Everything is done in a half-hearted manner. They can make no immediate comparisons, so they accept shoddy work as the norm. The fear of being branded lazy by an industrious neighbour does not exist because there are no industrious neighbours. Hand in hand with this attitude to work goes the principle of ‘false economy’ which is rigidly adhered to here. If A is cheaper than B and they both serve the same purpose, or purport to, then A is unquestionably the better buy as far as they are concerned even if they have to buy two A’s for every B.

What music the people do favour is very slow and lugubrious; some say this yet another characteristic inherited from their days of slavery but the music of the West Indies wouldn’t seem to bear out this theory. Yet it is certainly true that the people here prefer to sound mournful rather than happy. The Christmas carol I service in the College was a very funereal affair at which not one joyful carol was sung. The current idol is Jim Reeves.

It seems ironic that these people, who have no culture to call their own and who are largely black in colour, should find the dancing of Africans amusing, to say the least.

Postscript

When I showed this to the visiting MP, Frank Judd, his response was “Hmm. Yes, well . . .”. Which was very possibly deserved. As I recall, my supervisor back as VSO on London also responded somewhat negatively to my insights. Ditto.

xxxxxxx

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.