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/Galiza

Politics: So, we are, indeed, to have a general election next month, with the PM clearly thinking this is likely to be the best chance he and his left-of-centre PSOE party will have of retaining power. He’s clearly hoping that the electorate will turn against right-wing parties because of their rejection of the decrees/bills aimed at alleviating the property crisis and extending the rights of tenants.

Ceuta: The National Police have ended their operation named El Trampolín, having moved 1,100 migrants off a beach. Around 600 of these are reported to have voluntarily returned to Morocco, after refusing to be identified.

It sometimes seems that, in a Spanish bar or café, everyone talks as if they don’t care a jot that everyone else there is privy to their thoughts. And even to the details of their private life. Or would be if they, too weren’t talking loudly at the same time. Quite a contrast with, say, nearby Portugal. And possibly with many other countries/cultures as well. Certainly with the other 5 I’ve lived in.

Do Spaniards, I wonder, have a preternatural fear of being stabbed in the back? I ask this because it seems to me that everyone who has the option of crossing behind me or right in front of me chooses the latter. It’s the one thing I’ve never got used to. Of course, I haven’t noticed the folk who didn’t do this. If there ever have been any.

I’ve been known to say that the Spanish excel at apologising. I was reminded of this by this table of ways to do it in Spanish:-

We had a power cut in my barrio during the dead hours of this afternoon, lasting over an hour. Maybe because everyone was post-prandially watching the news about next month’s general election. It can’t have been the lack of solar energy, as we’re having glorious sunshine here in Galicia while it rains in most of the rest of Spain. And an un-Octoberish temperature of 28. But I guess we’ll never know why. Nor why blackouts – it seems to me – are more frequent these days than they were 25 years ago. Very annoying, I’m sure, if you’re a digital nomad deprived of wifi in you computer.

One of the oddest things I’ve seen in Pv city’s Sunday morning flea market – an ancient (agricultural?) weighing machine.

Will it ever be sold?

The Middle East War

The latest update from Naked Capitalism. Belligerent Saudis.

The United States of Trump America

(US) Americans have had one thing on the rest of the world for the last 10 years – they’ve known with certainty who the cleverest and the dumbest individuals in their country are. In fact, miraculously in a population of almost 350m, he’s a toofer . . .

As if we needed it, Trump has confirmed his stupidity with the comments he’d made about the very high dose of aspirin that he takes, against his doctor’s recommendations. Hopefully, it’s killing him.

True to form, Trump has accused a lone woman protesting his Washington beautification projects of being a paid provocateur, offering no evidence as he shared photos of her with his millions of online followers. The death threats will surely follow.

Australians can have a way with words. At the end of this post, there’s a few pungent ones addressed to the US president.

This is Beni Rae Harmony, a 24-year-old reporter from Real America’s Voice, who’s just been hired as a ‘spokesperson and Assistant Press Secretary’ in the White House Communications group:-

The blocked-out word begins with F and ends with K. Seems eminently qualified. Will anyone be surprised if she turns blonde quite soon? And gets some extensions.

Query: In any other democracy are the sums of money spent on influencing voters anywhere near – pro rata – what is incurred on this in the USA? Perplexity’s answer: No. In virtually every other advanced democracy, the sums spent to influence elections and policy are far below US levels, even after adjusting for population or economic size.

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. This is not simply a book about Trump. He is the vessel, not the disease – the product of a system decades in the making, fueled by powerful interests, weakened democratic institutions, and a media ecosystem that too often chose access and complicity over accountability. The book confronts the defining questions of our time: How did we get here? Why did so many institutions fail when they were needed most? And what must we do now to defend democracy before it is too late?
• 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

• Cerda: Sow. Bristle, horsehair.
• Ensanchar: Widen, extend, enlarge, expand, stretch,
• Mancuerna: Dumbbell. Cufflink.

English

Burlap: (US). UK: Hessian. Sackcloth.

Did you know?

How Queen Victoria’s haemophilia gene changed history

Finally . . .

I had the experience this weekend of a Pv city lady I’d just met saying that she knew of me and then asking me to confirm I was a writer. Which was nice, if confusing. In 26 years of writing – daily – about the city, this has only happened once before, about 15 years ago. It’s always struck me as odd that no one employed by the city council has never written to comment on a post or to take issue with something ‘negative’ I’ve written. Not that this would have pleased me, of course. Perhaps I should say that Pv city is regarded by many inhabitants as the gossip capital of Spain. A ‘village’ of, now, 85,000 souls.

An Ozzie writes to Trump

Mate.

You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.

You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re just too poor to make bail.

Your life expectancy is going backwards. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker’s stock to your mates.

Your minimum wage hasn’t moved in 15 years. You’ve got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn’t attack you.

And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban in Afghanistan thanked you very much for losing again.

And you’re calling Greenland poorly run?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.

“NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.” When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn’t even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.

And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.

So, maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run is your fucking mouth.

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.