It’s a feature of Spanish life that you get flyers on your windscreen if you park your car in town. More impressively, it’s another feature of Spanish society that the streets are not full of discarded flyers and other bits of paper. I believe this is because of the highly efficient daily street-cleaning schemes operated by most town councils.

Talking of parking . . . I have a new theory as to why there are never any places on the streets of Pontevedra. And a possible answer to my question of last week as to how on earth anyone finds a spot to park in near their house. This is that they don’t actually look for one. Rather, they head for the underground car-park which every block of flats has but, if they happen to see a space on the street, they opportunistically seize it. This, at least, is a logical explanation of why there are neither free spaces nor evidence of people driving round becoming increasingly distracted. But I’ve no idea whether it’s true or not.

And still on this theme . . . Another day, another square, another zebra crossing, another another inconsiderately parked car and another blocked bus . . .


In this case, the car driver didn’t appear when the bus-driver leant on his horn. Nor when the angry car drivers in the 100 metre tailback did the same. But this may have been because the offender had left his hazard lights on. So, technically his car wasn’t there. The bus eventually manoeuvred backwards and forwards until it get past the obstruction, with the driver – as usual – showing no sign of frustration or anger. My suspicion is that, given how many times a day this must happen to him, he knows any Anglo-type response would be life-shortening.

I listened this morning to a BBC podcast on the implications for societies – such as the UK’s – which are more unequal than others. An interesting finding was that, in the very equal Scandinavian societies, more than 60% of the people say they trust others. Down at the bottom of the table – at a mere 19% - was Portugal. Spain obviously comes somewhere in between but I wonder where. It is a pretty equal society but . . .

Talking of BBC podcasts . . . I heard one last week about the G8 conference, in which the reporter naturally spoke of Mr Berlusconi’s recent travails. Appropriately enough, his name was David Willey.

Finally . . . Another example of the Spanish antennae-manners dichotomy I regularly refer to. I picked up a leaflet on our imminent Jazz/Blues festival from a pile at the entrance to my midday bar. Having sat down, I put it with my other things on the bar and was surprised – well, not really – when the woman next to me picked it up. Suddenly realising that it might be mine, she asked me if it was. When I said yes but not to worry as there were many more, she went bright red, apologised profusely and refused to take it. As I say, I’m so used to this pattern now that I never get annoyed at the invasion of my space. Though coming back from the toilets and finding that someone has taken the newspaper on which I’ve left a glass of wine, a pen and a notepad can still irritate.

Postscript for reader Cade:
Keep sending you Bilious Thoughts from Leicester and I will keep deleting them. But, should you discard your abusive tone and write politely, I will be happy to leave them alone, however critical of me they are. Up to you.

I have a Spanish friend who's had two English boyfriends and who, as a lawyer, has worked a good deal with British house buyers. As a result, she's pretty cross-cultural and, indeed, her Spanish friends are wont to call her La Britanica. Especially when she advises them their preconceptions are wrong. But I had to tell her on Sunday that she has as much chance of being truly British as I have of being truly Spanish. This was after she’d told me that another Brit’s accent was “worse than yours.” Nobody British, I told her, would ever say something as blunt as that but would opt for an alternative such as “not as good as yours”. If this is the hypocrisy that we Brits are regularly accused of, then I have to say I prefer it!.

And speaking of Spanishness . . . I was wrong last week to say that Tony had gone back to sea – the result of a mistake on my wall chart. Yes, I do track his movements. Anyway, he turned up at my gate this afternoon, asking for a favour. As the woman (“chica”) who looks after the kids is on holiday, the younger boy, Pablo, couldn’t be taken every day to the grandparents’ house so he could practice the piano. So, as I had a piano, they were wondering if he could use it. Well, I tried a few shafts of British humour designed to demonstrate I wasn’t totally enchanted with the thought of Pablo doing this every day for two months but, as these clearly went right over Tony’s head, I had little choice but to agree. And so they came at 5. And left at 5.05. Happily, a couple of scales with one hand seems to be young Pablo’s limit right now. And the other bit of good news is that Tony flies to Singapore tonight, to pick up his oil tanker. As it were. One door closes and another opens.

Pontevedra City now has a new tourist organisation and this is its HQ.


They say it will be functioning by September – when all the tourists have gone – but, as little is going on right now and nothing at all will happen in August, I find this a little hard to believe.

The rest of the city is equally ready for the summer tourist season, which began a couple of weeks ago. Here are a few fotos of the mess in front of the town hall and on the Alameda, where our Peregrina Fiesta events will take place in a couple of weeks. I will let you know how things go.




Which reminds me – I’ve now had a full look at the program for July and August and found that far more than two events had taken place before it hit the streets. But does anyone care? Or, as most of our tourists are Spanish, is it just assumed they’ll be unaffected by the lack of information and the mess in the streets? And only too happy to return for a second bite at the mouldy cherry.

To be more positive . . . We had a lovely exhibition of Galician musical instruments in the main square this week. I found the harps particularly attractive but this might just have been because the woman manning the stall was stunning. Frankly, I think she soon saw through my questions about design, wood used, strings material, etc. Or she would have done if I’d had the courage to ask them.

English Showers: The Sky woman went straight to the point this morning. “The showers will be heavy, slow-moving and thunderous. But also the least of our problems. Two to four inches of rain will fall on many places today.” What fun.

Finally, if you have any understanding of the Blair-Brown feud that has disfigured British politics over the last 12 years, this video of yesterday’s proceedings in the House of Commons may bring as many tears to your eyes as it did to mine. Enjoy.

Over in the UK, they’ve just initiated a project called One & Other, under the aegis of the sculptor Antony Gormley. The idea is that, for a hundred days, members of the public will stand for an hour and do whatever they like on top of a large empty block of stone in one of the corners of Trafalgar Square in London. Different people will have different takes on this creative endeavour but I prefer to see it as artistry that was previously known as a plinth . . . Those interested can read more here, once they’ve recovered from a pun which mocks the age-old advice that “A pun should be a feather with which to tickle the intellect. Not a pistol let off at the ear.”

Well, the Spanish government has finally announced – a year late – a new model for financing the regions. Or “Autonomous Communities”. As befits a government mouthpiece, El Pais has little to say about it. But its opposite number for the PP Party, El Mundo, tears into it today - as a development that does nothing for national solidarity but a lot for the retention of support for the government in Cataluña and Andalucia. It will be a while before we know the devil in the detail but it does seem, that while everyone will end up with more money (query: from where?), the richer regions will do better than the poorer ones. One specific novelty is that Cataluña will be keeping all its tax revenue and paying nothing to the central coffers. Which looks like a perfect prelude to independence. No wonder they’re dancing in the street up there, albeit at the lugubrious pace of their sleep-inducing national dance, the Sardana.

Meanwhile, prospects for the Spanish economy continue to look poor and a Europe-wide survey tells us that - at 70% - Spain has the highest proportion of citizens who think the response of their government to the financial crisis has been inadequate. This is a good ten percentage points above the next nation and is consistent with last week’s report that most Spaniards think the President is making things up as he goes along. Which may actually amount to flattery.

The Galician Xunta has announced it will be relaxing the law preventing rural properties being re-classified as urbano and, thus, edificable. I’m a little confused by this as I’d rather got the impression the law was not proving much of a barrier to building developments. But maybe this is more true of other parts of Spain. Apart from, say, Gondomar near the border with Portugal. Where a major corruption case is proceeding through the courts.

Finally . . . The Sky weather girl told us this morning that the UK would be having ‘hefty` showers today. Getting rather carried away by her own eloquence, she later amended this to ‘hefty, possibly thunderous.’ Lucky Brits.

One sometimes reads that one profession or other has the highest suicide rate in the country/world. Usually it’s dentists but what I can’t understand is why it isn’t weather forecasters on British TV. I mean, what can it be like, every single day of the year, having to tell at least half the population that rain is going to fall on them today? Incidentally, one of the main challenges for these people is to think up new ways to describe the arrival of the UK’s daily dose of showers. Having heard it this week on two different channels, the in-vogue expression of the moment seems to be “Showers will be bubbling up during the morning”. I guess it makes them more exotic. Like witches.

Readers with long memories may recall I once corrected the menu of a place along the coast here which, among other oddities, was offering “Mussels to the seaman’s blouse”. For Mejillones a la marinera. I was there again yesterday to find that, while most of the menu was now OK, they’d added the dish of “Gallega teat of fumbling with grelos”. This is simply Galician cheese – which comes in the shape of a breast – with turnip tops. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out where the fumbling element comes from. Perhaps some professional translator could help.

Talking of restaurants . . . I was in one on Sunday night where the two highly efficient waitresses spoke excellent English – still a rarity around here. They turned out to be Polish, leaving me wondering why foreign labour is needed when local employment rates are so high. Apart, perhaps, for a requirement to speak good English, my friends tell me that few young people here are prepared to give up their summers to hard work when they can live comfortably off their parents, doing (and paying) nothing. Which is understandable, I guess.

Here in Pontevedra, the guide for our July-August events finally emerged on Saturday. Needless to say, two of them had already taken place. So one wonders how well patronised these were.

I mentioned recently that I drive slowly down the road to the bridge into town as I have to pass two kids’ playgrounds frequented by youngsters from the nearby gypsy encampments. As if this wasn’t worrying enough, I also have to contend with five-year-olds racing their bikes down the middle of the road as they head home. Typical contrary gypsies. Why can’t they terrorise the pedestrians by using the pavements, like everybody else? [Note for American readers: Pavement is sidewalk in British English, not the road surface.]

Finally . . . In Pontevedra’s Vegetables Square – which actually has a (meat-serving) vegetarian restaurant in it – we used to have an “Indian” restaurant. Though it wasn’t very good, it did at least it had a soupcon of international flavour about it. But it didn’t last long and was converted last year into a Kebab house. This apparently found it hard competing with the other five Kebab houses that had sprung up almost overnight and now it’s become a tapas bar. Which is just what the city needed – another place offering exactly the same menu as the other 543 options in the old quarter. But I guess it’s profitable. So what do I know?

As I was leaving my regular bar at midday today, I got a call on my mobile. So I stopped to take it and instinctively moved to the left, to avoid blocking the doorway. As I did so, the sad realisation struck me that I am a pathetic victim of my own base culture and have no real hope of fully integrating into this society.

I was interested to read in a British magazine this week that “Conceptual art has collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity”. But I wasn’t too impressed to see that, according to the writer, a great example of what’s coming next is extra large photos of crushed butterflies. Which is a lot less stupid, it would seem.

I guess everyone by now has seen an example of the trousers (worn by the young of both sexes) that have the crutch at the knee, with baggy legs above and skin-tight legs below. Well, today I saw these taken to the logical extreme. The crutch at the ankles. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of witnessing these, it might take a feat of imagination to come up with a good mental picture.

Talking of fashion . . . El País today carried an article in which it was claimed that our friend Cristiano Ronaldo - because of the cultivation of his body and his penchant for tight clothes, chains and depilation - is a leading exponent of macarra chic. The word macarra was new to me and has, according to the writer, connotations of vulgarity, violence and hostility. My dictionary has lout; thug; vulgar, and flashy. So, a chav I guess. Which word, interestingly enough, may well have Romany links to chaval, the Spanish for boy or lad.

More seriously, El País yesterday carried the results of a survey of socio-political attitudes. I was amused to read that more than 60% of Spaniards think that both the President and the Leader of the Opposition make it up on the hoof. Or shoot from the hip. Or whatever other translation you prefer for improvisar sobre la marcha. Not that it calls for much thought to label your opponent a bare-faced liar.

Finally, I don’t say often enough that Spain is a great country which, if approached in the right way, can be rejuvenating. I certainly feel a lot younger than I would in the UK. But, in truth, I can’t hold a candle to the two queens of Spanish daytime TV. For, looking at their pictures in the press over the weekend, I realised they’re both now at least twenty years younger than when I came to live here almost nine years ago. Truly impressive.

Well, it was another bad day for the bull-runners in Pamplona this morning. Especially for the poor chap who was gored at least twice before he was dragged away under the boards by his feet. I wonder if the authorities will use their previous logic to say that, as no one was killed, things are safer than they were two days ago. Incidentally, one of the pre-run pictures was of a medic donning surgical gloves but I couldn’t help wondering how aseptic these would be after she was later seen scrambling over a fence to get to one of the injured.

It’s said that the French have a poor view of the Spanish. But, then, don’t they have a poor view of everyone? Anyway, I was reminded of this by a report on the France 24 TV channel that the Girona-Barcelona leg of the Tour de France was taking place in the south of Spain. Which displays a certain disregard for the facts, I feel.

My recent sorties into matters historical have thrown up contrasting profiles of Sir Francis Drake, here and here. The first is generally favourable and, for example, explains that he only embarked on his career of piracy after a spot of Spanish treachery. Of course. The second is less of a hagiography but, then, it is written by a foreigner.

For anyone whose appetite for knowledge of Brits in Galicia has been whetted by all this, here’s information on 6th century settlements in North West Spain.

Back to modern times . . . For those who are as confused as I am, here’s an Economist report on Spanish banks. There’s also an interesting article in the Business Section of today’s El País which concentrates on the regionally-organised and politically-managed savings banks.

Today’s El País also has a nice article on corruption in Spain over the last decade. Which is a nice link into the news that Tony Blair has lost the support of President Sarkozy for the future position of EU President, once the Irish have been drummed into line on the Lisbon Treaty. As a result, he’s no longer the favourite for this sinecure. This is now Felipe Gonzales – described as “Spain's charismatic socialist former prime minister, whose government collapsed in a sleaze scandal in 1996”. So, perfect for the job.

Finally . . . You may not have heard that 75,000 people filled Real Madrid’s stadium last week just to see Cristiano Ronaldo walk on the grass, smile and wave his hands. And another 5,000 were locked out. If you told me the suckers had paid for this privilege, I’d have to admit I’d believe you. And, sticking my neck out, I’d bet Ronaldo’s career in Spain won’t be successful. Like Figo before him, he’ll soon be spending as much time horizontal as vertical.

As expected, the Pamplona authorities have said that the death of a young man yesterday will make no difference to their bull-running event. Using an excellent example of what I’ve long called the true-but-irrelevant school of logic, they’ve stressed that “If no one ran, there’d be no deaths”. This insouciant sentence alone would be worth millions to a negligence lawyer in the Anglo-Saxon world. And, in a reasoned editorial today, even El Mundo has pointed out it might be time to take some sensible measures, such as reducing the excessive number of what I called the other day “heroic idiots”.

But back to the detail – Before the start of each run, an arms-linked group of eight or nine policemen prevent the crowd from getting close to the pen the cows and bulls run from when the rocket goes up. I guess this is to allow the beasts to get up a good head of steam before they hit the throng. But, when the camera pans from the gates to the crowd, the cops are nowhere to be seen - either in the lane or on the other side of the fence. So, are they lifted out by helicopter? And do they have a more balanced view of the concept of safety than any of the other participants? Not to mention the organisers.

Ever the optimists, the Spanish government has said that the recession will end here in the first half of next year. Meanwhile, though, Spain’s is the only large economy for which the IMF’s forecasts this time round are even worse than the last lot for 2009 and 2010.

My historical search for info on Drake and Pontevedra threw up this Parador page. It’s a nice intro to the city. And an excellent example of the sort of English you get when you eschew using a native speaker and blow the budget on a relative or friend.

It was a bit of a Wild Life day for me today. First there was a dead rat on my front lawn this morning. Then there was a large green lizard and a two-metre snake on the forest track this afternoon. And now, this evening, I’ve just surprised a large mouse or small rat outside my back door. The lizard was chased off by my dog, Ryan. Which probably saved its life, as I suspect the snake was just about to wrap its dislocateable jaws around it.

Finally . . . A word of advice . . . Unless you love crowds, 6pm of a Saturday is not a good time to go shopping in a supermarket in Spain. At least not when several of the conurbation’s shops are closed because it’s the feast day of the patron saint of a part of it that used to be a separate village.