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

Ceuta

Not a surprise to read that:-

• In parliament, the PM and he leader of PP opposition trade blame for turning the Ceuta issue into a chronic problem, and
• The Public Prosecutor has called for an investigation into the Government Delegate in the city regarding a possible failure to provide “prevention, assistance, or protection”.

Also not a surprise to read that the (desperate?) Galician government has announced that:-

• It’ll invest €200m in Galicia’s 3 inadequate international airports, and
• It’s acceded to Ryanair’s demand that it reduce – by 90% – a proposed increase in landing fees.

But I’m not at all confident that this means my family will soon be able to fly from the north of England into Galicia, rather than to Oporto in northern Portugal

On the roads, petrol/gas prices have pushed the inflation rate to its highest level in 3 years. Here in Pv city, they finally arrived at €2 a litre yesterday. Well, €1.999. This compares with a national average of €1.90.

Hmm. Owners of more than one property in Galicia now outnumber owners of just one property. And this is a relatively poor region. They can’t all be narcos. I guess one factor might be the reduction in family size, meaning fewer relatives to inherit.

Our autumn weather is forecast to be warmer and wetter than average. As I expect our winter will be as well.

The Middle East War

The latest update from Naked Capitalism.

The United States of Trump America

It’s not as if more evidence is needed of Trump’s dangerously insane thinking but here you go . . . The only guardrails that AI needs is a strong and high IQ president and the USA has that in spades. Concerns are being pushed by conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors and leakers.

And then there’s his reaction to a Supreme Court decision on postal ballots . . . Trump called it a “big loss for Republicans” and said it makes cheating on mail‑in ballots “much easier” for Democrats. He warned that the Court’s “inability and unwillingness to do the right thing” would “go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History”. The most striking element was his criticism of his 3 appointees, who all sided against him: He wrote: “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the Supreme Court. They are merely a shell of their original selves.” He accused the Court of being “bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left and are terrified of crazed and depraved Democrats into issuing “shockingly bad rulings” that “have set America back at least a hundred years, and are costing the US Trillions of Dollars”. Utterly beyond parody. Every accusation is a confession, as they say.

More serious are Trump’s deep, deep Russian roots and his links to Putin. (Scroll down).

In a standard response to these ProPublica revelations, Trump says he’s never heard of the sanctioned Russian oligarch who financed much of his son’s wedding. Relevant podcast: This Is Trump’s Most Jaw-Dropping Putin Scandal.

Relevant Books

• To be published in October. Can be pre-ordered now: Wtf America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy. On Amazon or here.
• The final pages of Kurt Andersen’s fascinating run through the USA’s history – Fantasyland: How America went haywire. A 500 year history.
• Profiles in Cowardice, by Jacob Weisberg. Cited in this podcast.

The Way of the World

It’s claimed that feeding cows on algae would reduce methane emissions by 80%. Worth a try. There’s a lot of it in the nearby ocean, I assume.

Spanish

• Táper: ‘A hermetically sealed container’. (From ‘Tupperware’)
• Tupper: Ditto.
• Integrante: Integrated. Constituent.
• Excedencia: Leave of absence. Sabbatical.

Did you know about?

The man who rode around the world on a penny-farthing bicycle

You Have to Laugh

The cautionary tale of young Rebecca.

Finally . . .

Being a tad tired of sparrows and greenfinches, I’ve been trying for quite a while to attract a robin into my garden, without success. But, yesterday, one landed on the outside ledge of my salón window, less than a metre away from me, apparently mesmerised by a large insect on the inside of the window. The robin, of course, not me. It eventually flew off and hasn’t been seen since. But the insect is still there, vainly trying to get through the glass. Time to get some more of the meal worms I used to supply the blackbirds with, before a magpie got to their chicks and they abandoned my garden.

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.