Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse:A Pilgrim in Spain.
If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here. Garish but informative.
Spain
- Spain's abdicated king might well have been even more corrupt than we ever knew. According to a British newspaper: The former king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, used his alleged lover Princess Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein to buy multiple overseas properties due to her tax residence in Monaco, according to claims made by the German aristocrat in a leaked audio recording. In a 2015 conversation with a former Spanish police officer in London, Princess Corinna alleged that the king’s lawyers put her name on overseas properties without her permission, complaining that she was being drawn into “money laundering”. The 53-year-old princess, who obtained her title from her second marriage, also claimed that Juan Carlos I held bank accounts in Switzerland in the name of his cousin, Álvaro Orleans de Borbón. I wonder how much these allegations will feature in the local media, which is said to have known all about this sort of thing for a long time. Here's one El País article in which the princess doesn't deny the validity of the recording.
- At least some PP politicians can't grasp that judicial systems in other countries aren't exactly the same as that of Spain. Following this decision of the German court, they've demanded that Germany be punished for being nasty to Spain. Some have gone so far as to say that Spain should respond to 'insults' by quitting the Schengen free-movement area.
- I said years ago that the Guardia Civil should equip me with a head camera so that I could pass on fotos of the many drivers I clocked using mobile phones. I'm reminded of this by news that the penalties for this are to be increased. Because it's now the biggest cause of fatal accidents.
- But, to put this in perspective, more young people die of suicide in Spain than in traffic accidents. And, while huge sums of time and money are spent on reducing the latter, rather less is spent on eliminating the former. However, maybe things are changing.
Europe/The UK/Brexit
- Astonishingly . . . According to YouGov, 13% of Brits still think the government is handling Brexit well. I guess there's always someone to take a contrary view, possibly just for the sake of it.
The USA
- Donald Trump must be the best exponent ever of the validity of the maxim: Better to keep your mouth shut and he thought a fool than to open it and prove it. Witness the bizarre press conference yesterday, when he tried to row back on some of his outrageous statements and then repeated others. You only have to ponder how he'd react if another world leader did the same to him in the USA.
- It has to be admitted, though, that some of the things he says are, indeed, correct. And remain correct even if he later disowns them.
- That press conference:-
- The Times: 'often surreal'.
- The Telegraph: 'extraordinary' and 'incredible'
- The BBC refrained from providing adjectives.
- Politico: Headlined an article: Trump blows up Theresa May’s party in his honor. And, referring back to the prior Nato meeting said: As a summit he threw into chaos wrapped up Thursday, President Donald Trump cheekily declared himself a “very stable genius.” European leaders beg to differ: The president’s wild shifts in tone left many NATO allies concluding no hidden strategy lies behind his unpredictability. More here. As I say, imagine Trump's reaction to any of these leaders doing the same on his patch.
Galicia/Pontevedra
- As feared, the Minister of Development has hinted that there might be delays in implementing the AVE high-speed train plans of the last PP government.
- The first 6 months of this year have seen at least 1,128 dogs abandoned in Galicia. These were perhaps the lucky ones. Many greyhounds (galgos) are hanged from trees at the end of their short hunting career.
- A year or so ago, a visiting male friend of my younger daughter spoke of a sex shop in the city. I said there wasn't one. He insisted we'd passed it several times when walking into town. He was right, of course, and the reason for my missing it was perhaps that its windows were full of not-very-sexy objeces, most of which seemed to be part of the 50 Shades of Grey franchise. But, walking past it last night, I noticed it'd changed its shop-window strategy. Hard not to, really . . .
Finally . . .
The World Cup:-
- Outplayed in the first half by England, it was 5ft 5in(165cm) Modric - his passing, his harrying, his unwillingness to yield -- which dragged Croatia to victory. More testament – as if Messi weren't enough – to the fact that you don't need to be huge to be a football(soccer) superstar.
- Twenty reasons to be glad that England lost: Giles Coren, The Times
1. Had we made the final, it would have been via a miserably inglorious route that would have taken the shine off it. On the way to the semis, we beat four inferior nations — all of them either tiny or very poor or both — and lost to the reserve team of the only half-decent country (also small) that we played. To have beaten yet another very small and poor nation to get to a World Cup final would frankly have looked like bullying. Croatia, on the other hand, have beaten Argentina, England and the host nation. That’s how you win World Cups.
2. It was better to go out fighting in a close match against a small country with no football league to speak of, than to beat them and go into a final against an actual footballing nation in front of the eyes of the whole world, and lose 10-0.
3. We were all able to get home after the match, driving through nice empty streets. Whereas if we had won, the streets would have been full of cheering drunken arseholes jumping on cars and we’d have been stuck in traffic till midnight. (I genuinely worried all through the game about getting my kids home from the party we were at in Dalston, and a little piece of me genuinely celebrated the Mandzukic goal because I knew we’d be able to get back okay).
4. Winning is vulgar and teaches us nothing. Losing builds character.
5. It’s in Russia, so it is all fixed anyway. Like Argentina ’78, Russia 2018 will be looked back on as a farce and whoever wins it, it won’t really count.
6. Kylian Mbappé is the player of the tournament, a teenager with pace, skill and intelligence and it will be good to cheer him on in the final in earnest, taking unalloyed pleasure in his genius.
7. Kyle Walker will probably get a Pizza Hut advert.
8. Nice girls on Twitter will stop going on about how the only thing this World Cup needs now is for darling little Raheem Stirling to score a goal.
9. There’s no pressure to go out and watch the final on Sunday on a big screen with a load of boozed-up morons throwing beer in the air. Now you can watch it as television is meant to be watched: at home, alone.
10. My dear friend David Baddiel will not now move to the top of the Sunday Times Rich List on the back of his Three Lions royalties.
11. Had we made the final, the BBC was planning to fly the surviving members of the 1966 team out there for it. They are mostly around 80 now and I’m sure a couple of them would have died from all the excitement, which would have been awful.
12. If France lose to Croatia it will be doubly humiliating for them. Being beaten by England would have been bad, sure, but there would have been some honour for the Frogs in defeat at the hands of a heavily-funded, big-hitting rival with massive international support and a glorious history. But to lose to a weeny nation of nobodies will mean nothing short of national disgrace. Huzzah!
13. I didn’t like where Gareth was taking the whole thing, talking in overtly political terms about the problems Britain is having and how his team was helping to heal the wounds. If England had won, I am pretty sure he would have mounted some sort of soppy Lib Dem putsch and we’d have ended up living under a mealy-mouthed, centre-left dictatorship with compulsory waistcoat wearing and inflatable unicorns for all.
14. It’s put a stop to all this nonsense about the glory of teamwork and how planning, collective spirit and hard work is more important than experience and individual flair. That was a terrible neo-Stalinist message to be putting out. It’s no surprise all the Corbynite snowflake whingers were so behind this England team, for it represented the total eradication of self-expression on which their dream of a socialist future depends.
15. It’s only 21 days till the English football season starts again. We need a break from the mania. And we need it to start now. Not next week. Now!
16. If England had got any farther in a week when BBC salary revelations restarted the gender pay-gap dispute, the spotlight would have fallen on players’ incomes and how the likes of Trippier and Rashford and Kane are paid considerably more than Winifred Robinson and Martha Kearney. Which is of course an absolute outrage.
17. We can finally stop the dreary, misinformed conversation about the “diversity” of this oh-so-special England team and how it is a better representation of the country at large than it has ever been in the past. As if the teams I cheered for in my youth were some ghastly collection of pasty-faced Nazis. In fact, England’s last World Cup semi-final in 1990 featured two black players out of 11 — Des Walker and Paul Parker — which was and is a very fair representation of the black-white ratio at home. And in most of the matches John Barnes started as well, making the team over-representative even then. So for a load of weepy white middle-aged media tarts to sit at home tweeting about how five or six black players in the side sends some beautiful message of diversity is frankly vomitous. It’s what everyone said about the French World Cup-winning team in 1998 and the country has been more or less in flames ever since.
18. I put £50 on Croatia at 33-1 before the tournament started (thanks to a fellow dad at the school gates to whom I said, “what’s a good long shot for the World Cup?”) so I stand to win £1,650 if we, I mean, they, pull off a miracle against France tomorrow.
19. Summer is for cricket, not football. The Test series against India starts in a couple of weeks. That’s proper sport, that is.
20. Look at how the memory of 1966 crippled our football team for half a century. Are you really telling me you wanted that to happen AGAIN?
2. It was better to go out fighting in a close match against a small country with no football league to speak of, than to beat them and go into a final against an actual footballing nation in front of the eyes of the whole world, and lose 10-0.
3. We were all able to get home after the match, driving through nice empty streets. Whereas if we had won, the streets would have been full of cheering drunken arseholes jumping on cars and we’d have been stuck in traffic till midnight. (I genuinely worried all through the game about getting my kids home from the party we were at in Dalston, and a little piece of me genuinely celebrated the Mandzukic goal because I knew we’d be able to get back okay).
4. Winning is vulgar and teaches us nothing. Losing builds character.
5. It’s in Russia, so it is all fixed anyway. Like Argentina ’78, Russia 2018 will be looked back on as a farce and whoever wins it, it won’t really count.
6. Kylian Mbappé is the player of the tournament, a teenager with pace, skill and intelligence and it will be good to cheer him on in the final in earnest, taking unalloyed pleasure in his genius.
7. Kyle Walker will probably get a Pizza Hut advert.
8. Nice girls on Twitter will stop going on about how the only thing this World Cup needs now is for darling little Raheem Stirling to score a goal.
9. There’s no pressure to go out and watch the final on Sunday on a big screen with a load of boozed-up morons throwing beer in the air. Now you can watch it as television is meant to be watched: at home, alone.
10. My dear friend David Baddiel will not now move to the top of the Sunday Times Rich List on the back of his Three Lions royalties.
11. Had we made the final, the BBC was planning to fly the surviving members of the 1966 team out there for it. They are mostly around 80 now and I’m sure a couple of them would have died from all the excitement, which would have been awful.
12. If France lose to Croatia it will be doubly humiliating for them. Being beaten by England would have been bad, sure, but there would have been some honour for the Frogs in defeat at the hands of a heavily-funded, big-hitting rival with massive international support and a glorious history. But to lose to a weeny nation of nobodies will mean nothing short of national disgrace. Huzzah!
13. I didn’t like where Gareth was taking the whole thing, talking in overtly political terms about the problems Britain is having and how his team was helping to heal the wounds. If England had won, I am pretty sure he would have mounted some sort of soppy Lib Dem putsch and we’d have ended up living under a mealy-mouthed, centre-left dictatorship with compulsory waistcoat wearing and inflatable unicorns for all.
14. It’s put a stop to all this nonsense about the glory of teamwork and how planning, collective spirit and hard work is more important than experience and individual flair. That was a terrible neo-Stalinist message to be putting out. It’s no surprise all the Corbynite snowflake whingers were so behind this England team, for it represented the total eradication of self-expression on which their dream of a socialist future depends.
15. It’s only 21 days till the English football season starts again. We need a break from the mania. And we need it to start now. Not next week. Now!
16. If England had got any farther in a week when BBC salary revelations restarted the gender pay-gap dispute, the spotlight would have fallen on players’ incomes and how the likes of Trippier and Rashford and Kane are paid considerably more than Winifred Robinson and Martha Kearney. Which is of course an absolute outrage.
17. We can finally stop the dreary, misinformed conversation about the “diversity” of this oh-so-special England team and how it is a better representation of the country at large than it has ever been in the past. As if the teams I cheered for in my youth were some ghastly collection of pasty-faced Nazis. In fact, England’s last World Cup semi-final in 1990 featured two black players out of 11 — Des Walker and Paul Parker — which was and is a very fair representation of the black-white ratio at home. And in most of the matches John Barnes started as well, making the team over-representative even then. So for a load of weepy white middle-aged media tarts to sit at home tweeting about how five or six black players in the side sends some beautiful message of diversity is frankly vomitous. It’s what everyone said about the French World Cup-winning team in 1998 and the country has been more or less in flames ever since.
18. I put £50 on Croatia at 33-1 before the tournament started (thanks to a fellow dad at the school gates to whom I said, “what’s a good long shot for the World Cup?”) so I stand to win £1,650 if we, I mean, they, pull off a miracle against France tomorrow.
19. Summer is for cricket, not football. The Test series against India starts in a couple of weeks. That’s proper sport, that is.
20. Look at how the memory of 1966 crippled our football team for half a century. Are you really telling me you wanted that to happen AGAIN?
© David Colin Davies, Pontevedra: 15.7.18
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