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

Well, at least this (Moroccan) writer believes the Moroccan government was, to say the least, complicit in the invasion of Ceuta. And that – apart from geopolitical considerations – this reflects a different attitude towards risking deaths between Christian and Muslim religious traditions.

BTW, the total of gate-crashers has now risen from 45-50,000 to more than 73,000 – very close to the population of Ceuta. (And Pv city, as it happens).

The temperature of the sea along our coast is notoriously low but recently it’s been 23+ degrees, 4 more than last year and even more than 10 years ago. I guess it won’t be long before we see some unusual examples of marine life – as the UK has done with octopuses. And also even lower quantities of the shellfish so important to our local economy than has been the case this year. Humans might like warmer water but they don’t.

Something else that has markedly reduced over the years – parking spaces in the centre of Pv city. This is an article from today’s DdeP on this.

Last night, my peace on a bar terrace was disturbed by rehearsals for a show due to start at 10.30, the usual time for such things in Spain. The sounds took me back to muezzin calls from mosques in Iran and Indonesia and I wondered if if they were Arabic songs. Or, given the castanets, Flamenco. But it turned out they were from a Galician female group, singing – I guess – traditional folk songs.

Talking of music not to my taste . . . This is the ‘Afrofunk’ group performing tomorrow night on the opening of our annual Jazz and Blues festival – which has become far more jazz than blues-oriented over the years. I won’t be attending, and not just because it starts and ends so late.

The United States of Trump America

Quotes

Trump:[After the administration said new information from the Department of the Interior had indicated the damage “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor.”] I disagree 100% on the Reflecting Pool. To me it was a pure case of VANDALISM. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!

Other:

• Michael Wolff: Trump can’t not be Trump. Why his Desperate Ploy to Be Serious Is a Sham
• Kurt Andersen: Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham—that a conspiracy consisting of “the press, the talk-show experts, the campaign strategists, the political parties, even the candidates themselves—has rigged the game,” as Louis Menand put it in The New Yorker. “Everyone knows that what you see in politics is fake or confected.” Yet that article in the summer of 2015 did not even mention Trump, who was still an impossible joke candidate.

If the whole thing is an insincere charade, rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his earnest competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid, excitingly authentic in the age of fake. Who but a preternaturally honest man would say in his announcement speech that Mexican immigrants are “rapists”? Or, as he said a few months later, that Muslims should be prohibited from entering the United States? A ban on Muslims is “very important and probably not politically correct, but I don’t care.” Fuck the dog whistles, you fucking pussies.

Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—The most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: his actual thuggish, un-PC sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.

And when Trump does do his obligatory bits of patently faked niceness, they get a pass, because the rest of the time he’s implying that most public niceness is fake.

If he were just a truth-telling wise guy, however, he wouldn’t now [2017] be president. Trump’s genius was to exploit the extreme skepticism about politics—too much equivocating, democracy’s a charade—but also pander to Americans’ extreme magical thinking about national greatness. “I play to people’s fantasies,” his ghostwriter, on Trump’s behalf, warned Americans 30 [40] years ago in The Art of the Deal. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

The Way of the World

• Football finally found its moral compass to stop a money-grabbing gargoyle. Infantino’s attempt to sell off the ‘family silver’ has united 143 nations in disgust and shown those in charge can act for good of the game.
• Gianni Infantino is clinging to power as efforts to oust him mount. Support is flooding away from the FIFA president, who is likely to be asked to resign at emergency meeting and is scrambling to establish a base of backers.

The inescapable conclusion from this imbroglio is that – if football had been under the control of the USA – the superordinate importance of money there would have allowed this corrupt deal to fly. So, thank god it wasn’t. And hopefully it never will be. We have been warned.

Spanish

• Recetario: Recipe/cook book. Prescription pad
• La llave del triunfo: The key to success.
• Marquesina: Awning, canopy

Did you know?

Says El País here, there are 5 types of holiday foto you shouldn’t take and post . . .

You Have to Laugh

‘Sparkling Wit’: Age doesn’t diminish the extreme disappointment of having ice cream fall from a cone.

Finally . . .

Queen Elizabeth I of (Tudor) England was known as The Virgin Queen and was famous for wearing a red wig on top of a bald pate. So, neither heir nor hair. (Both of which would be a pronunciation challenge for Spaniards. And, probably, English kids,)

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 there.

If you´re thinking of moving to Spain, this link should be useful to you. And this, on the annual costs of owning property here.