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

Madrid to Brussels: “Thanks for cash gift but we just can’t spend it all sensibly, so are sending some of it back”. One wonders why. Increased property construction would seem to be a worthwhile cause and an obvious superordinate priority. Some explanations here.

A propos . . . Property expert Mark Stücklin writes here that: Cataluña has approved a new law regulating seasonal and room rentals, presented as a bold response to the housing crisis. In reality, it looks like another symbolic intervention that will shrink supply, distort incentives, and end up benefiting precisely the wrong people. . . . Ironically, one of the main beneficiaries of this reform is likely to be well-off foreign tenant. Shouting into the political void, S stresses that: Cataluña’s housing crisis is driven by a chronic shortage of homes in high-demand areas. Regulating seasonal and room rentals does nothing to address that shortage. It simply reallocates limited supply towards safer, wealthier tenants and away from those the policy claims to protect. If the objective is genuinely more affordable housing, the focus should be on increasing supply, not on tightening the screws on an already shrinking rental market.

Is it just me or are we seeing more and more headlines like this one: Dimite el jefe de Redes de Vox tras ser denunciado por acoso sexual. Does this reflect a (belated) consequence of the Me-Too movement?

Practical advice on identifying pickpockets.

The UK

A bit of clickbait stuff I clicked on . . . We Brits have a way with words, and sometimes we deliver insults so subtly that they can sound like compliments, especially to Americans unfamiliar with the nuance. We’re probably not really trying to offend but, even if we were, our inherent passive-aggressiveness prevents us from being overtly rude. That’s okay, though — we still get the message across and make a little dig, just in a more subtle way. Here are some classic British jabs that might leave Americans saying “thank you” without realising they’ve been roasted.

The USA

A decent podcast on both Trump’s ‘deranged’ speech of Tuesday night – ‘Certified madness’ – and the doozy of Suzie Wiles’ interview in Vogue.

It ain’t no Golden Age, says the WSJ here.

Here’s one answer to the question we’re all asking ourselves . . . . What will happen if the Right wins absolutely? Which is why Vance is even more of a threat to US democracy than Trump. A development which some would lay at the door of ‘progressive’ liberals in the Democratic party. Those who massively lost touch with their voter base. Rather like Labour in the UK.

Quote of the Day

If Donald Trump is to be properly derailed in the coming year, the Democrats are going to have to broaden their appeal and that means addressing issues that are uncomfortable for the party. The fate of young white men is one of them.

The Way of the World

How to stay sane in a maddening world of excessive information.

Spanish

• Punto y final: The end. Full stop.
• Pucherazo: Vote rigging, ballot box stuffing, electoral fraud.
• Esdrújula: Proparoxytone – A word with the stress on the antepenultimate syllable, eg “cinema” and “operational”.

A Spanish lesson . . .

• Q. Why is the subjunctive used in this sentence? “Ella rompe su silencio 5 meses después de que una cámara la captase abrazada al CEO y la imagen se hiciese viral.”
• A. The subjunctive is used because “después de que” is a temporal conjunction that triggers it when referring to an event prior to the main clause action.

So, in this case, nowt to do with being ‘hypothetical or non-witnessed’. Just ‘prior’.

Mood	Example	Context
Indicative	después de que la captó	Factual, witnessed event ​
Subjunctive	después de que la captase	Prior or hypothetical prior event ​

Clear??

Did you know?

Green rooms in theatres were green because this colour was most restful on the actors’ eyes after an evening spent gazing into the limelight.

You Have to Laugh

Finally . . .

My umbrella wouldn’t close last night. So, before entering a tapas bar for dinner, I hid it behind a large rubbish container nearby, intending to pick it up later. Someone stole it. So, I hope that, like me, they couldn’t close it and chucked it away somewhere else. For the process to repeat itself before I eventually come across it

Finally . . . Finally . . .

A Majorcan tourist brochure of several decades ago, on some local caves . . They are hollowed out in the see coast at the municipal terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, wich prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called ‘The Spider’ There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their eulogy about, included Nort-American geoglogues.

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 . . .

I can also be read on Facebook and on X.

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.