Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

One of the letters awaiting my return from the camino was a leaflet from El Trafico giving me complete details of the harsh new penalties for sundry motoring offences. It provoked the thought that it’s a few months now since I’ve received a letter claiming that – notwithstanding my determination to stay within all the limits - I’d committed yet another speeding offence. Perhaps they’ve been waiting until the fines were doubled before contacting me. Whether or not that’s so, there’s now even more validity to my claim that the only way to avoid fines in Spain is to drive everywhere at somewhere between 30 and 50kph.

Talking of the camino adventure . . . Once I’m clear of the tasks that have built up in my absence, I’ll be writing it up in some form or other. For now, I just want to say that one of the (well-documented) joys of doing the walk is meeting, re-meeting and greeting several people along the way. So that by the time you reach Santiago, you almost regard them as old friends, even if you’ve only exchanged a couple of words. Indeed, if you bump into them in the city, you feel strangely compelled to take their photo. So it was with “the Asian woman”, “the man with the GPS” and “the German guy”, who quite possibly wasn’t German at all. But special mention must be made of the lovely ladies, Jill and Janine, who’d made their way, one way and another, from Lisbon and with whom we shared several chats, drinks and even a tapas feast in Caldas de Reis. It would have been great to spend time with them in Santiago but they’d arrived a day earlier than us and left for Lisbon before we got there. Another time, perhaps. Meanwhile, it’s good to know they found Pontevedra a charming place. Even though I wasn’t in it at the time. Or possibly because.

Talking of Pontevedra . . . I’ve mentioned that one of my near-neighbours is the judge Luciano Varela, described in this article as the nemesis of his campaigning colleague Báltasar Garzón. The writer says that Varela’s “enmity toward Garzón is no secret” but I’m struggling to find the reasons behind it. One local friend insists that Varela is and always has been an outspoken communist. If so, it might contain the seeds of an explanation. People of the far left tend to hate people of the near left even more than those of the far right. Whatever the truth, the antipathy seems to run deep as Varela’s latest decision is “widely seen as a deliberate move to humiliate Garzón”. With fellow-travellers like that . . .

Finally, here’s an interesting article on President Zapatero’s current predicament. It reminded me of a recent article in the Spanish press (El Mundo?) in which a psychiatrist suggested the besieged Sr. Z is now suffering from the mental state attributed to the captain of the eponymous ship in the film “The Caine Mutiny”. Which might explain a few things. But doesn’t bode well.

No comments: