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 Spain/Galiza

Starting on a a grim note . . . Under the Law of Democratic Memory, a search is going on for the bodies of those slaughtered during the Civil War. Many have been found and identified but it’s reported there are still 13,000 corpses to be exhumed. Neither the right-of-centre PP nor the far right Vox party supports this endeavour and would halt it if returned to power.

Talking about the Civil War, María comment that one reason Spain’s young folk are turning to Vox is that their grandparents choose not to tell them how life really was under a fascist government.

Turning to another search – Eva Longoria’s for Spain . . . I could say quite a lot about her – food orientated – episode on Galicia but will restrain myself. My Galician friends would want me to report that no one stopped her translating rubia gallega as ‘Galician blonde’, when it really means ‘Galician red’, the colour of a local breed of large cows. I appreciated her admission that – like me – she didn’t go for percebes (goose barnacles) – but she then went on to enjoy them dipped in a sauce so tremendous it surely disguised the fact that – just boiled – they taste – to me at least – like rubber dipped in sea water. Overall, she did a lot of praising of the stuff prepared for her by local cooks and chefs – as if she was ever going to dismiss them as vomit-worthy. As in Episode 1, Eva – in a number of outfits – was the star, with Galicia playing only a supporting role, and that rather superficially. But, from minute 23.30 she’s in Pv city, en route to the restaurant – actually across the river in Poio – of celebrity chef, Pepe Solla. The brief street scene shows my favourite restaurant, Dukela, on the right. It’s a Moroccan place and the guy sitting alone is at the table I occupy every Sunday.

Oh yes, furanchos aren’t ‘secret’, or even hard to find. There are at least 6 guides to them on the web.

But there were some nice shots. Especially of Eva.

Talking of Pv city, some additional things we have more of than in 2000:-

• Gyms
• Cross fit places
• Squash courts
• Padel courts
• Shops selling South America food specialities.
• Halal food shops

And another odd shop name – Coosy. God knows why it’s called that. Or the language it’s in.

ALICE IN MAGAWORLD

The Attorney General Pam Bondi gives a Senate committee performance characterised by statements that are ‘brazen, shameless’, and verifiably false’. And by a failure to answer all the critical questions posed, thus ‘making a mockery of the institution’. But she did deny that Trump wrote the infamous birthday card to Epstein. Not a huge surprise, of course. To Trump, she’s worth every cent she’s being paid to defend him and to prosecute anyone who has irritated him. Which is a large and growing list. One wonders how she sleeps as night, though I guess it helps to be a psychopath. Perhaps, when she was a Democrat, Mephistopheles had a word with her about lifetime riches in return for her eternal soul.. .

How true . . .

Quotes of the Day

• Every day Trump says something that would rank at the very top of the list of the most ridiculous things an American president has ever said.
• Trump is actually the most stupid member of his crime gang.

Spanish

• Regato: Pool
• Siderurgia: Iron and steel industry. (From the Greek for ‘steel’ and ‘work’, apparently)
• Atisbar: To glimpse, discern, peek

Galician

• Rubio/a: Red, not blonde, as in Spanish. A redhead.
• Louro/a or Loiro/a: A person with yellow or golden hair

Did you know?

Adolf Hitler liked to concrete over grassy areas. In particular the vast Königsplatz, which was paved over with 24,000 square feet of granite slabs.

And as for Hitler’s favourite firm of architects . . . Their designs were far from original: their civic architecture drew on Classical models in other countries, and the idea of remodelling cities along geometrical lines, with broad boulevards and great public buildings, was hardly new either; Speer’s plans for Berlin bore a striking resemblance to the centre of the US Federal capital in Washington, D.C., with its wide central mall surrounded by large colonnaded neo-Classical structures, all in gleaming white stone. What distinguished Nazi civic architecture and city planning was the maniacal gigantism of its scale. Everything might not be very different from civic structures elsewhere, but it certainly was going to be vastly bigger than anything the world had so far seen OK, but did they ever go so far as to plaster an entire room with gold or design a vast ballroom fit for an emperor?

Finally . . . You Have to Laugh/Wonder

Last Friday evening, I gave a guided tour of Pv city’s old quarter to a group of (North) American Caminoer women, for which I was treated to dinner. On Saturday morning, I helped one of them to find places selling the tea-bags she wanted. So, I was a tad taken back on Monday to see that – on her FB page – she’d accused me (wrongly) of having brought 2 friends to eat at the group’s expense. Not content with that, she characterised me – ‘despite being British’- as an ill-mannered freeloader, dressed in clothes that needed washing. So, she clearly hadn’t taken a shine to me. Perhaps I hadn’t paid her enough attention. Anyway, I wasn’t surprised to read yesterday that she’d fallen out with the group and had made her own way to SdC. What did surprise me was to see today that she has 3,000 friends on FB. I’ve long wondered about folk who achieve/boast such numbers. Is there, perhaps, a Law of Inverse Friendship, meaning the more you have on social media, the fewer you have in real life. Or IRL, as the kids say in that phoney world.

I asked an AI engine about this and got: While not specifically called a “Law of Inverse Friendship,” social science shows that the more friends one has on social media, the fewer true, close friendships one can realistically maintain. This reflects cognitive limits and the friendship paradox, supporting the idea of such an inverse relationship.

For the record, I have 185 friends on FB and none on other platforms. And possibly half of these I don’t know IRL. Moreover, I ‘follow’ very, very few of those whom I do know, preferring to concentrate on friends I’m otherwise in regular contact with. Not all of whom read my blog. The bastards!

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts.

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 . . .

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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.

If you´re thinking of moving to Spain, this link should be useful to you.