Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts
the stars to flight.
And, lo, the hunter of the east 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

Not many camino ‘pilgrims’ to be seen in the last few weeks. Maybe only 2 or 3 in the last week. But for those who did chance a winter walk, the weather here has been very kind to them. Cold at night but very sunny during the day. If you’re not going to have snow, this must be the next best thing:-

Talking about people . . . I don’t know about other parts of Spain but this is the pijo uniform in these parts – blue blazer, beige trousers and brown suede shoes. If only the last mentioned were blue . .

Something on the local language . . . Modern Galician contains numerous words of Germanic origin, primarily introduced by the Suebi and Visigoths during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Examples

1. Words related to daily life and nature:

• graba: ditch, trench
• íngreme, esgrevio: rough, steep
• maga: sardine’s guts
• gaspeto: nail
• gulapo: gulp
• brétema: fog, haze, mist, drizzle
• estinga: stingray
• espolarte: bottlenose dolphin, killer whale

2. Verbs and actions:

• deluvar: to peel, to rub
• bremar: to be anxious, to fret
• rispar: to snatch, to rub
• tripar, trispar: to tread, to stomp
• ganar: to win

3. Social and governance terms:

• barragán: young, strong man
• escançan: serf (cup bearer)
• gasaliana: companion, comrade
• saio: official
• tiufatus: commander

4. Other notable words:

• guerra: war
• rúa: street
• rico: rich
• espía: spy
• bandido: bandit

5. Suffixes: The Germanic suffix -ingaz is present in words like:

• reguengo: royal property
• avoengo: property of the lineage
• abadengo: monastical property
• mullerengo: effeminate
• andarengo: swift
• tourengo: heat, mating season of the cattle

I’ve no idea how many of these are still in common use. Even confirming they are in the RAG dictionary won’t tell me that. Paideleo? María?

Portugal

Many of those Germanic-origin words are shared with Portuguese, sometimes with minor spelling or phonetic differences.

Germany

Having read quite a lot about the Franks in the last week or two, I’ve formed the opinion that the ‘Germans’ – in one way or another – have had more influence on Western Europe society and culture than any other group. Most obviously, I guess, as regards languages – see here – but, in recent centuries, there’ve been many more influences in literature, architecture and music. I guess it’s arguable that Adolf Hitler – OK, Austrian German – had a considerable influence on European society.

On reflection, in view of the extent and enduring influence of the Romans – again, most obviously via Romance languages* – there’s certainly a case to be made for ‘Italians’ having had the greater influence on European developments. Though this would be more true for Southern Europe than for North or Western Europe. And the Romans haven’t contributed much to European society for quite some time now, while the Germans continue to do so.

*That said, Roman Latin is the only Italic language to survive. Cf. all the Teutonic/Germanic languages.

On a lighter note . . . In at least 2 Scandinavian countries, this sketch is shown every year during Xmas week. In Germany, it’s shown several times on New Year’s Eve. Every single year for decades now. I’m not sure it’ll have the same degree of appeal for folk further West, even if we are all basically Teutons.

The USA

Some excellent observations here – including that the only 2 constituencies which increased their support for Harris were white graduates and folk earning over $100,000 a year. Why Trump won the working class.

You Have to Laugh

See below for the wittiest insults and rudest put-downs ever

Finally . .

I’ve needed reading glasses since my late 40s. After discovering that the ‘cheap’ guy in the flea market was buying them for €3 in a Chino bazar and selling them for 5, I moved my business to the bazar in my barrio of Poio. And since I routinely break my glasses, I’m a regular customer there. Inscrutable though his gaze might be, I get the impression the owner views my frequent appearances with a degree of amusement. But I could be wrong; he might just be being friendly, in a Chinese fashion. Actually, there is one bazar in Pv city where the owner does greet me as a long-lost friend and chats to me in Spanish. In contrast, there’s one where I’ve never seen the owner smile at anyone except my elder daughter.

Witty Insults

Men and women

• Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men. Joseph Conrad
• Why did God create men? Because vibrators can’t mow the lawn. Madonna
• When women gossip, we get called bitchy, but when men do it’s called a podcast. Comedian Sikisa Bostwick-Barnes
• Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes. Jim Carey.
• Woman was God’s second mistake. Friedrich Nietzsche
• I wonder how girls manage to fall in love. It is easy to make them do it in books. But men are too ridiculous. George Eliot

Settling scores

• Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff. Clive James on Barbara Cartland
• I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy. Ava Gardner on Frank Sinatra’s marriage to Mia Farrow
• Miss Ferber, you look almost like a man. And so do you, Mr Coward. Novelist Edna Ferber (wearing a tweed suit) and Noël Coward at the Algonquin Hotel in New York
• I’ve polled 1,000 woman asking if they would sleep with Boris – 20% said ‘Never again’. Pollster Frank Luntz
• I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else. Eton master Martin Hammond on Boris Johnson, to Johnson’s father in 1982
• If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be surprised. Dorothy Parker
• The trouble with Ian is he gets off with women because he can’t get on with them. Novelist Rosamond Lehmann on Ian Fleming
• So boring you fell asleep halfway through her name. Alan Bennett on writer Arianna Stassinopoulos
• Hang on, I’ll just check my diary … Oh dear, I find I’m watching television that night. Peter Cook when asked by David Frost to attend a dinner party with Prince Andrew.
• His ears make him look like a taxi cab with both doors open. Howard Hughes on Clark Gable

Marriage

• Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow internet to see who they really are. Will Ferrell
• When a girl marries, she exchanges the attention of many men for the inattention of one. American journalist Helen Rowland
• The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change. Len Deighton
• There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it. George Bernard Shaw
• A man doesn’t know what happiness is until he marries. By then it’s too late. Frank Sinatra.
• I bequeath all my property to my wife on condition that she remarry immediately. Then there will be at least one man to regret my death. German poet Heinrich Heine
• Marriage is a long, dull meal with pudding as the first course. JB Priestley
• I married beneath me — all women do. Nancy Astor

Professionals

• The only difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too. Anton Chekhov
• A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep. WH Auden

Cricketers

• Would you like me to bowl you a piano and see if you can play that? Merv Hughes to Graham Gooch
• Shane Warne: I’ve been waiting two years for another chance to bowl at you. Daryll Cullinan: Looks like you spent it eating.

Actors

• She ran the gamut of human emotions all the way from A to B. Dorothy Parker on Katharine Hepburn
• Overweight, overbosomed, overpaid and under-talented, she set the acting profession back a decade. David Susskind on Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra
• Dear Ingrid – She speaks 5 languages and can’t act in any of the. John Gielgud on Ingrid Bergman.
• If you say, ‘Hiya, Clark, how are you?’ he’s stuck for an answer. Ava Gardner on Clark Gable
• You can count on Errol Flynn. He’ll always let you down. David Niven

Politicians

• The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: if Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity. Disraeli on Gladstone
• He’s so dumb he couldn’t tip shit out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. Lyndon Johnson on Gerald Ford
• A modest man with much to be modest about. Winston Churchill on Clement Attlee
• True terror is to wake up one morning and realise that your high school class is running the country. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut
• How can they tell? Dorothy Parker on being told that former US president Calvin Coolidge was dead
• Great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies. Boris Johnson on the London Assembly
• When I came to the Treasury, they predicted to me that I would become the most unpopular man in Britain. This was the only correct forecast the Treasury made in the several years I was chancellor. Norman Lamont

Liberals

• That dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat. George Orwell
• We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equal in every sense except that of being equal to us. American literary critic Lionel Trilling
• A liberal is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged. South African self-defence expert Hilton Hamann

Britain and abroad

• Life is never so bad that Germany is better. Jeremy Clarkson
• England is not a bad country — it’s just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. Margaret Drabble
• A soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with western Europe. John Updike
• Every country has its own mafia. Putin’s Russia is the first where the Mafia has its own country. Garry Kasparov
• There are two seasons in Scotland: June and winter. Billy Connolly
• The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it. Dylan Thomas on Wales
• A German wine label is one of the things life’s too short for. Kingsley Amis

America

• California is a place where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors. American journalist Walter Winchell
• Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went. John Updike
• The difference between yoghurt and Los Angeles is that yoghurt has a living culture. Pan
• Wherever there’s injustice, oppression and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening. PJ O’Rourke

Writers

• Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. TS Eliot
• He could not blow his nose without moralising about conditions in the handkerchief industry. Cyril Connolly on George Orwell
• Once again, words fail Norman Mailer. Gore Vidal after being punched by Mailer in a fit of rage
• My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness. DH Lawrence
• Every time I read pride and prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin bone. Mark Twain on Jane Austen
• An essentially private man who wanted his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognised. Tom Stoppard on James Joyce
• He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
• Does he really think big emotions come from big words? Hemingway on Faulkner
• A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘surefire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy. William Faulkner on Mark Twain

Art and music

• Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects, such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. Tom Stoppard
• Those who have never heard it for themselves may recreate it in the comfort and privacy of their own homes by setting fire to the tail of their pet cat. Craig Brown on Yoko Ono’s song, Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow)
• If a horse could sing in a monotone, the horse would sound like Carly Simon, only a horse wouldn’t rhyme ‘yacht’, ‘apricot’, and ‘gavotte’. American critic Robert Christgau
• Liam is the angriest man you’ll ever meet. Like a man with a fork in a world of soup. Noel Gallagher about his brother
• Mick Jagger has big lips. I saw him suck an egg out of a chicken. He can play a tuba from both ends. This man has got childbearing lips. Joan Rivers
• Wagner has beautiful moments, but awful quarters of an hour. Composer Gioachino Rossini
• She’s so pure Moses couldn’t part her knees. Joan Rivers on singer Marie Osmond

The way we live now

• Never trust people who smile constantly. They’re either selling something or not very bright. American writer Laurell Hamilton
• Anyone going slower than you is an idiot and anyone going faster than you is a maniac. Jerry Seinfeld on drivers
• Only two things are infinite – the universe and human stupidity And I’m not sure about the former. Albert Einstein
• Some ideas are so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them. George Orwell
• I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first. Peter Ustinov
• Wall Street indices predicted nine out of the last five recessions. Economist Paul Samuelson

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts, either after reading them 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.