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’
NB: If there’s a RV in brackets after a (paywalled) link, you might be able to read it via a Reader View extension to your browser, avoiding the paywall. If there is no RV, it will mean that the article is free to view or listen to. If there’s RV2, it means a second click on RV might let you see the article though the first RV click didn’t work.
Cosas de España
Property: Well, thanks to the defections of 2 of his several coalition partners, the PM didn’t get his 2 key (but hastily created) bills through parliament yesterday. So, confusion reigns in the rental market, leading to the inevitable withdrawal of properties from it around the country. Something of a mess. We await news reports and the (probably scathing) opinion of Mark Stücklin.
We might yet see early general elections, in which I’m not entitled to vote – despite paying a lot of tax in 26 years.
Lenox Napier says there’s nowhere like home here and writes on Spanish spelling mistakes here.
And Noémi tells us where to eat cheaply in Barcelona.
Portugal
- The popping of the Ronaldo bubble. (RV)
- The (ex?)star’s take on things.
The Middle East War
The latest update from Naked Capitalism. Narratives continue to differ..
The United States of Trump America
Trump . . . Contributing to his encyclopedia of lies, delusions and confessions . . .
- On the Democrats: They have a great line of bullshit. [As an expert on this, he’d know.]
- The guy in Michigan is a conman. [Ditto]
- I am the most physically fit president ever.
- Gas prices were higher under Biden.
- Gas prices will come down before the midterms.
- The prices of everything else are way down. [As if there’d not only been no inflation but in fact deflation]
Someone else’s take on that Time interview: It’s utterly worthless to read Trump’s answers. He doesn’t say anything concrete. He’s not clear or specific about anything. He interjects his rambling defensiveness on everything with random bits of self-aggrandizement. There is no sense of cause-and-effect, and everything he says and thinks and does is merely reactive. He has no plan he can articulate, and there are no goalposts he does not constantly move. History will not be kind to the American society that elected him twice.
In a normal world, would you take orders from a man who painted his face orange? Unless he was willing and capable of destroying you, of course. With the blessing of the Supreme Court of the land.
Relevant Books
- Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest
- 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.
Spanish
- A su debido tiempo: At the right time. All in good time.
- Eneldo: Dill
- Cobrar: Essentially ‘To receive payment’. So, can be used to mean to get a salary (intransitive) or to charge someone something, eg a bar or a bank.(transitive). At least here in Galicia, when you ask for a bar bill, you say (in the right tone) Me cobras. ‘Charge me’.
English
Like other languages, English contains many words which are compounds of others. But it struck me today we neither hear nor read these as such*. Take for example the verb to understand. Would you really understand this sentence.: ‘I stood under everything he said’? Just askin’
*I was actually pondering a Spanish compound word.
Did you know?
Possibly the definitive view on ADHD:-
You Have to Laugh
First sentence of a book review: This is a wonderful book to take to the beach, if what you’re intending to do at the beach is drown yourself.
Finally . . .
Gardening news: Pv city is built on and made of granite. And there’s a lot of it in my garden across the river in Poio de Arriba. This is the end of my back lawn, where you can see evidence of this. (I’ve no idea why the foto is so large, WordPress seems to have introduced an AI button and made it impossible for me to reduce it . . . )
When I came here 26 years ago, this was a jungle of weeds(malas hierbas)and brambles(silva). After clearing it, I built a granite terrace between the bottom of the slope and the hedge which forms the end of my garden. (See the fotos at the top of my posts). For this, I used stones from both my garden and the forest behind my house, But this has never been used and I’ve spent 26 years regularly killing the weeds that grew profusely on the slope and in between the terrace stones – though I did once remove some stones to make a vegetable patch to grow spring onions. Anyway, what you can see now on the slope are wild strawberries. Following successful planting of this fast-growing, ground-covering plant in borders elsewhere, I decided to eliminate the weed problem on the slope by planting a few surplus wild strawberry plants there. So far, so good. I hope to see it more covered before the winter temperatures suspend germination and growth. Meanwhile, I’m left wondering why it took me so long to do this. But pleased I’ve removed one boring task I’ll no longer have to do as I continue to age.
My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts.
The Usual Links
This – from veteran blogger Lenox Napier – is an excellent weekly newsletter (Business Over Tapas) on all matters Spanish. Indispensable for those who needs insights on how and why things happen here.
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.
