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/Galiza

Polling suggests that, were a general election to be held today, we’d have a new government, comprising a coalition of the centre-right PP party and the far-right Vox party. This would partly reflect (ignorant) young voters favouring the last-mentioned.

Sitting in a taxi blocked by a car dropping off passengers at a junction, I wondered out loud why the driver hadn’t gone 2 metres to a vacant spot at the side of the road we were joining. ‘That’s the Spanish for you’, said the taxi driver. ‘They don’t care about others’. I neglected to ask whether he himself was Spanish. And whether, if so, he included or excluded himself from this trait.

These are sheep in front of the cathedral of Mondoñedo in north eastern Galicia, on the occasion of the annual re-creation of a custom going back to 1156, when the sheep are brought down from the mountains and paraded through the town to pastures new.

It’s called transhumancia. Which has nowt to do with transhumanism, for which see below.

For me, Mondoñedo is more interesting for being close to Bretoña, the site of a 6th century settlement of monks from Britain. But whether this was Bretagne or Grand Bretagne, no one seems to know. But, if it were the former, we can assume they were descendants of monks and Britons who migrated to Brittany in the 5th century, transplanting Celtic Christian traditions and language. And who were fleeing pagan Anglo-Saxons, of course.

This evening I briefly watched the cutting down of eucalyptus trees on this nearby hillside.

The sound of a large saw was immediately followed by the toppling of an individual tree, sometimes two, and then a short period of silence while the fallen tree was moved aside. I was left wondering how many of them would be left on the crest of the hills and how different this vista would look by the end of the week.

Relatedly . . . The Xunta of Galicia has recently extended to 2030 the ban on new plantations of eucalyptus trees, known to some as Tasmanian oaks. But this term should really apply only to the 3 hardwood eucalyptus species native to Tasmania:

MAGAWorld

Obama’s sadly accurate joke/prediction from 2011.

I guess we must be grateful that Trump’s regime can’t be accused of this . . . The economic history of the Third Reich is inseparable from the history of the regime’s expropriation of the Jews, a vast campaign of plunder with few parallels in modern history. In Trump’s case, it’s all US taxpayers who are being exploited in his financial interest.

Spanish

• Trueque: Barter, exchange, swap.
• Trapicheo: Skulduggery, fiddle. [I have the impression it’s also used for small-scale drug peddling]

English

Transhumanism: A philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available new and future technologies that can greatly enhance longevity, cognition, and well-being. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies.

Did you know?

• Bolshevik: (One of a) majority.
• Menshevik: (One of a) minority

You Have to Laugh

Finally . . .

I’ve mentioned that some folk had put a lot of effort into a spoof report (un bulo) that the FIFA had moved World Cup matches from the USA to Canada and Mexico. This might be the same video or a new one.

Finally, Finally . . .

Reorganising files and fotos on my latest laptop today, I came across a message from a reader back in 2006, saying how much she’d laughed at something I’d written about my dog, Ryan. In the hope that others will, here’s Part 1 of 3. . .

ME AND RYAN: PART 1

Ryan is my dog – a border collie. We live together, as it were, in Galicia in Spain. I moved here after separating from my wife last October and Ryan joined me in December.

I’ve recently read that it’s easy to take a dog out of the UK but difficult to bring one back in. I go along with the second of these views but demur on the first. I thought it would be easy to get Ryan to Spain, essentially because the advice of the British Consul in Vigo was that Spain – recognising that the UK was rabies free – made no particular demands. But this was to overlook the capacity of bureaucrats anywhere to make things difficult in Area B where their jobs have been endangered by relaxation of rules in Area A. In the UK the Pet Passports Scheme introduced to replace the 6 months quarantine requirement has been a godsend in this regard for civil servants in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAFF).

When I left the UK, I put Ryan in the capable hands of my brother and expected to see him in a matter of days. Ryan, of course, not my brother. But the first problem we ran into was confusion on the part of all concerned as to what the export requirements now were. Then we ran up against stipulations dictated in the UK that were far more onerous than those demanded by the Spanish authorities. Then we had the distraction of a detour aimed at avoiding these problems by sending Ryan to Portugal and driving him across the (totally unmanned) border with Spain. But in the end we gave up and simply went along with the significant effort and cost involved in going through the paper chase required by the MAFF before it will allow a perfectly healthy dog to leave a country with no rabies in order to enter a country where it does exist. This, of course, involved injections, health checks and the production, signing, countersigning and stamping of a number of official documents. All of the latter were placed in a large envelope for the attention of the Spanish authorities at the airport of Santiago de Compostela. Suffice to say that when the employee of Iberia handed Ryan over to me at 1.30 in the morning, he commented only that he was ‘a bit fat’ and gave me the said envelope, completely unopened and unchecked. Ryan could have been a rabid wolf for all his apparent concern.

Anyway, back to Ryan. Being a border collie, he is naturally intelligent as far as dogs go. There’s a tendency to exaggerate this but he’s probably even intelligent as far as border collies go. Certainly, he has always been very ‘biddable’ and extremely obedient. But in the last month or two, he appears to have developed an attitude problem and this is beginning to get to me.

The first signs of this was evidence that he had been sleeping on the furniture at night. Over the years, I have once or twice suspected him of this but he has always been smart enough to get off the settee or whatever as soon as he heard anyone descending the stairs. He would then try to disguise his malfeasance by doing a long stretch, as if to say ‘These floors are pretty uncomfortable, you know.’ I was pretty sure that he was getting up to his old tricks here but couldn’t catch him, except at stretching. And then one morning I did find him getting down from the settee and played hell with him. My surprise that he had allowed himself to be caught in flagrente delicto turned to astonishment a few days later, when I came down to find him curled up in one of the armchairs. Worse, he made not the slightest attempt to move and lay staring at me with the canine equivalence of dumb insolence on his face. This time I was beside myself and he was severely reprimanded. As far as I am aware, he has not been back on the furniture since but his campaign has clearly moved onto another battleground.

In order to get rid of some, at least, of the significant extra weight gained after his castration a few years ago, I take Ryan out twice a day and give him the pleasure of chasing a ball up a long and pretty steep hillside. And he obviously really does enjoy it, as he always has. In fact, his pleasure is so great that he makes it quite clear that he resents turning round at the top of the hill and coming back home. Initially, he expressed his feelings by being a tad desultory in retrieving the ball on the return journey. But a few weeks ago he started to develop what can only be called a ‘routine’, designed to show his dissatisfaction and, if possible, to get me to retrace my steps and give him some more throws. Essentially, he makes only a pretence of retrieving the ball, dropping it when my back is turned and then coming up behind me without it. When I angrily tell him to go and get the ball, he does so but at a snail’s pace. He then walks around it a few times before condescending to pick it up and bring it to me. He then repeats the process for as many times as I care to throw the ball. When he first started doing this, we would be a hundred yards away from the house but the distance has gradually increased so that now he starts the nonsense about four hundred yards from home, making the last leg very slow and irritating.

As I say, this has started to get to me and I have begun to theorise about what is really going on here. It seems to me very relevant that this is the first time Ryan and I have been the only two males together. Previously, he has lived as part of a large-ish human family. In addition, after a few years as the sole canine, he was compelled to fit in with one or two other dogs, involving a loss of status from being top dog to being just one of the pack. I now suspect that he is both taking revenge on me for this and, at the same time, seeking to achieve Alpha Male status in the very small pack we now comprise. He now has an opportunity not given to him before and he means to seize it to achieve domination over me. To him, I am just a flock of sheep. Or perhaps a single, ageing ram.

Most pertinently, I think his border collie brain realises that – having been born 7 human years ago this month – he is now 49, against my 54. He is keenly aware that, this time next year, he will be 56 and I will be only 55. Age will no longer be on his side and things can only then get more difficult for him. So it’s now or never.

This battle could run and run. It’s the ultimate test of intelligence for me; have I got what it takes to outwit a border collie in his prime? I fear not.

POSTSCRIPT

Immediately after finishing this, I took Ryan for his afternoon exercise session. Since it was raining, I decided to follow my usual bad-weather practice of staying near the house and throwing the ball in the large car park of the nearby School for Granite Carvers. This is on a steep slope and provides plenty of scope for making Ryan run uphill, while I more or less stand still, under an umbrella. We have done this many times before, during this very wet winter.

Ryan was as excited as ever to be going out and ran energetically for the first two or three throws of the ball. Then he simply stood and watched it as it reached the extent of its trajectory and ran back down the hill towards me. After this had happened three times, I remonstrated with him, whereupon he simply turned and walked slowly away towards the house, flagrantly ignoring my orders to come back. This is unprecedented.

Things have gone on to a higher plane. The wheel had been cranked. He has opened another chapter in his campaign designed to wear me down.

My suspicion is that he has read what I wrote about him earlier and is furious that I realise what his game is. Now it’s to the death!

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

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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.

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