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

Mark Stücklin gives us a trio of articles on the property market:

• Dutch buyers are leaping up the charts.
• AI is coming to the sector.
• Most properties in Spain are energy inefficient, with implications for future costs.

A supreme Court decision upsets the electoral apple cart.

There were a couple of comments on my paragraph on the oposición exams, These prompted me to ask if everyone employed by a municipality – say a street cleaner – needed to take some form of exam. The (logical) answer was: No. It’s important to distinguish working for the public sector from being a career civil servant (funcionario de carrera). Details at the end of this post.

The EU

A ‘shocking’ poll reveals that 70% of citizens of the EU have a negative view of it.

The United States of Trump America

Trump America politics . . . In his speech at the Republican midterm convention, RFK Jr. – a man who once demanded a senior position in a Democrat administration – said that he’d discovered all this about Donald Trump during a chat 3 hours after the Butler shooting:-

• Trump is a self‑effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues in molecular detail.
• He shows a near reckless courage to challenge vested interests and official orthodoxies.
• He cares deeply about transparency in government, and believed in protecting free speech more than anything, and also the entire United States Constitution.

Kennedy claimed to have realised that everything he’d heard about Trump and everything he’d believed about him from the mainstream media was a lie. He credited Trump with having ended 9 wars, restoring competency to the US government, restoring public faith, and restoring America’s leadership across the globe. Finally, Kennedy averred that Trump had kept every single promise he’d made to him, without exception.

Clearly, Kennedy’s got what it takes to be a worthwhile successor to Trump. Failing that, he could surely get a job as a ventriloquist dummy for Trump.

Relevant Books

• To be published in October. Can be pre-ordered now: Wtf America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy.
• The final pages of Kurt Andersen’s fascinating run through the USA’s history – Fantasyland: How America went haywire. A 500 year history.

Spanish

• Lingote: Ingot
• Cebollino: Chives, scallions
• Comer de gorra: To scrounge a meal

You Have to Laugh

The irony here is that someone did publish a sexed-up version of Pride and Prejudice.

Finally . . .

What is better/worse than a single bagpipe player advancing on you? Possibly a butcher’s dozen (13) heading towards you at full blast . . .

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 X at Thoughts from Galicia. And on Substack here. I no longer post on Facebook.

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.

Civil service employees

The main types of people employed by a municipality

• Funcionario de carrera: Normally must pass an oposición or concurso-oposición. This is the permanent civil-service status. Spanish law requires public recruitment to respect equality, merit, ability and publicity.
• Funcionario interino: Can be appointed temporarily—for example, to cover a vacancy, replace an absent employee or meet a temporary need. They may not have passed the full examination for a permanent post.
• Personal laboral: An employee with an employment contract rather than civil-servant status. Town halls commonly use this category for manual and operational jobs such as street cleaning, gardening, maintenance, refuse collection and similar work.
• Temporary labour employee: May be recruited for a fixed-term need, campaign or replacement, often through a bolsa de empleo or a local selection procedure rather than a full oposición.
• Employee of a publicly owned company or contractor: Street cleaning may be carried out by a municipal company or a private company contracted by the council. In that case the worker is not a civil servant at all.