As far as I can tell, these have been the flu injunctions to date. There may be more along later:-
1. Panic.
2. Stop Panicking
3. Don’t be complacent about the fact there’s no pandemic.
4. Consider re-panicking in August, when it might really arrive.
5. Failing this, also consider re-panicking in December when we find we have stock-piled the wrong flu vaccine

I do hope you are all coping and not dying like flies.

I might have said yesterday there’ll probably be no winter of discontent here in Spain later this year but, with the rubbish piling up on the streets of both Pontevedra and Vigo because of strikes in each city, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s arrived in spring.

I went to Vigo today for a lunch with several lovely ladies. I had planned to go by train but was surprised to find none on the Renfe timetable between 9.30 and 12. I mean, what is the point of a public rail system financed by taxation if it doesn’t run at commercially unprofitable times? Anyway, I got the bus and what a magnificent experience it was. I always enjoy driving on the motorway alongside the beautiful bay featured in Vernes' Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea but, higher up in a bus, it was an even greater pleasure. And I was interested to see that buses don’t appear to be subject to the same speed restrictions as cars on the bridge taking us into the outskirts of the city. Despite the radar camera on it.

Anyway, before I got to the lunch venue, I had to negotiate a large group of school kids coming towards me on a pavement narrowed by road-works. Being boisterous and lacking antennae, they were naturally unaware of my existence. And so seven or eight of them actually crashed into me, three of them on the run. But, as I’d stopped and braced my shoulder, this probably hurt them more than it did me. Especially the five year olds.

Finally . . . Here’s an interesting comment from a lover of Spain who’s returned to find it’s not quite what it was when he left as a young man some years ago:- “Spain has opened to the great immigration of our time. It is no longer the isolated peninsula whose modest economy and society kept the hordes at bay on its beaches. It is now a pluralistic society seemingly displeased with the fact that it has become so. There is no magic or singularity in it which, I realize now, was what distinguished it in the first place. It was so different from my American society. But now, with its new found European prosperity, its problems are similar: poverty, immigration, housing, finance, obesity, decline of education, and loss of traditional values.” More than a grain of truth in this I suspect.

Holiday Home

Looking for a place to rent in Galicia this summer? Click here for details of a lovely cottage in the hills outside Pontevedra.