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

The regularisation of undocumented immigrants . . .

• Nationally
• Cataluña

More on Asturias, flavour of the month.

A question I’ve been wanting the answer to . . . If I arrive in Portugal or Spain, can I join the (short) EU queue because I have a TIE as a resident in Spain. I’m assured that I can and will have no problems if I show my British passport with my TIE inside it. Anyone disagree?

Hmm. Here in Galicia, job growth in 2025 in the public sector was 5 times more than in the private sector.

The UK

Hard drugs, prostitution and Gaza: the Green agenda is nuts.

The USA

See my earlier post – The Delusional Bellicose President.

Russia

First class hypocrisy . . . Russia’s Foreign Ministry labelled the airstrikes on Iran a “deliberate, premeditated, and unprovoked act of armed aggression” against a sovereign UN member state, violating international law. Totally unlike the invasion of Ukraine, then.

China

Europe is bearing the full brunt of the “China Shock 2.0”, a massive and systemic dumping of Chinese excess capacity on the rest of the world. Rationale is this article on French economic problems. [BTW: Europe is also bearing the brunt of dollar flight as the US treasury injects liquidity via “stealth QE”].

Spanish

• Embriagarse: To get drunk/wasted/smashed/pissed/Brahms&List/tankered/plastered, etc., etc.
• Pócima mágica: Magical potion, witch’s brew.
• Tengo 30 palos(sticks) = Tengo 30 años: I am 30

Finally . . .

As Persia – now called Iran – is in the news . . . . And since it’s the start of the month . . .  Some readers, I hope, will know that the verse I cite at the top of my posts is the opening quatrain of Fitzgerald’s wonderful – but very ‘free’ – translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which you can read about here. Some verses are well known, of course, eg:-

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

My favourite:-

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
doctor and saint, and heard great argument
about it and about: but evermore
came out by the same door as in I went

Trump would do well, to take stock of the first quatrain . . . But he won’t, of course. Because he can’t.

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 there.

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