It’s said to be a feature of Spanish society that there are many young people here working in jobs well below their level of education. One such is the waitress in my regular wifi café who is a philology graduate from Santiago university and who today brought me a couple of books on Galician rural society. So it’s to her I owe the fact I now know rather more about witches (meigas and bruxas) and spells than I did yesterday. I hadn’t been aware, for example, that you can identify the witches in a village by asking the priest to leave the missal open at the end of Mass on Palm Sunday. In which case the unfortunate sorceresses will be rooted to their pews, unable to leave the church until the book is closed. And, should I have any problems arising from a curse on my cattle, I can deal with these by putting a pair of male underpants on the horns of one of the beasts and encouraging it to run around the field. It promises to be an interesting few days reading.

Hitherto this week – and ahead of a meeting of the George Borrow Society in Salamanca next week – my preference has been for his book on Spanish gypsies, entitled Zincali. Old George was quite a linguist and included not only the gypsy language but also Spanish and Basque in his very extensive repertoire. I’ve commented before that, in his book "The Bible in Spain", he made it clear he didn’t much care for the Andalucians. So I can’t say I was very surprised to read this last night:- When we consider the character of the Andalusians in general, we shall find little to surprise us in their predilection for the Gitanos. They are an indolent frivolous people, fond of dancing and song, and sensual amusements. They live under the most glorious sun and benign heaven in Europe, and their country is by nature rich and fertile, yet in no province of Spain is there more beggary and misery; the greater part of the land being uncultivated, and producing nothing but thorns and brushwood, affording in itself a striking emblem of the moral state of its inhabitants. Of course, what GB wrote in 1840 is not true of Andalucia now. At least as regards the cultivation of the land. As for the Andalucians themselves, I really don’t know whether they’ve moved on or not. Perhaps not, if the unemployment statistics are to be believed. Which many claim they aren’t. And I fancy the industrious Catalans and Basques – and not a few Castilians – would admit to a similar view of Andalucians even now. Hence the demands that they keep more of the money they generate.

George, by the way, thought even less of the gypsies than of the Andalucians. A conclusion that really does seem to have been based on spending a great deal of time among them. I will be posting a web reference to the whole book soon, where you can check this out for yourself.

As I’ve said a few times, there’s a confused and confusing take on prostitution here in Spain. This appears to be a case in point. It would, I think, be interesting to see the charge sheet.

Finally . . . A Cade Footnote. Those of you who read the Comments will know there’s either a multiple-personality individual or group of folk who feel obliged to react provocatively to much of what I (and other readers) write. He/she/they come and go and the evidence for the existence of a group is that readership shoots up whenever there’s a contribution. I’ve long ceased to have any interest in what Cade writes and don’t in any way feel obliged to respond. Which, of course, is an irritant to him/her/them. So much so that today resort was had to what purports to be helpful medical advice. Which I find touching. Perhaps he, she or they is/are human after all. Or just truly desperate.