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Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Thoughts from Galicia, Spain: 15.8.18

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
  • According to The Times: The Spanish government has struck a deal to share migrants saved from the Mediterranean with five other European countries, ending a stand-off over the fate of a rescue vessel. The arrangement includes 141 migrants on board the Aquarius, a vessel used by the charities SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières for rescue operations, along with an unspecified number of other migrants pulled from the sea and taken to Luxembourg yesterday, a source said. Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, had faced stern criticism after appearing to harden his stance on the question this week when a government spokeswoman suggested that Spanish ports would be closed to the ship.
  • My thanks to reader María for this amusing example of attitudes towards irritating guiris (tourists).
Life in Spain
  • As a great admirer of Spain's night trains, I enjoyed the article below. Though I suspect the writer was travelling first class, which I've only done once, when there was nothing else available. Don't recall a shower, though.
  • Driving on Spain's roads is not as hazardous as it was when I first arrived in 2000. But I'm glad I wasn't on the road at the same time as this guy . . .
The EU
  • Still on holiday. Nothing is happening.
The UK
  • As everyone knows, there's an obesity epidemic in the UK. A (silly season?) Guardian article rejects the standard explanation for massive changes since the mid 70s and concludes: The light begins to dawn when you look at the nutrition figures in more detail. Yes, we ate more in 1976, but differently. Today, we buy half as much fresh milk per person, but five times more yoghurt, three times more ice cream and – wait for it – 39 times as many dairy desserts. We buy half as many eggs as in 1976, but a third more breakfast cereals and twice the cereal snacks; half the total potatoes, but three times the crisps. While our direct purchases of sugar have sharply declined, the sugar we consume in drinks and confectionery is likely to have rocketed (there are purchase numbers only from 1992, at which point they were rising rapidly. Perhaps, as we consumed just 9kcal a day in the form of drinksin 1976, no one thought the numbers were worth collecting.) In other words, the opportunities to load our food with sugar have boomed. As some experts have long proposed, this seems to be the issue. The Devi's grain, as I call it.
The USA
  • Americans have strange ideas about socialism, most of them equating it with communism. I was reminded of this when reading yesterday that: Roughly two thirds of Democrats say they would not vote for a socialist. I guess the percentage for Republicans would be around 100. The writer went on to say that: Things might be changing in that, just a few years ago, the label 'socialist' here was at best an eccentricity and, more commonly, a slur. Now, it is central to a potentially viable constituency of activists and voters that can no longer be ignored. I guess November will bring some evidence of whether that's true or not.
  • President Fart is, of course, not a socialist but an out-and-out right wing populist. Steven Pinker talks of him and others of his ilk in this interview (in English) with El País.
  • The writer of this post – I'm guessing a Republican – believes that Fart has an ace up his sleeve which would bring about an immediate end to Mueller's 'witch hunt'. I've seen contrary opinions but I guess we'll know relatively soon.
Galicia and Pontevedra
  • Yesterday morning I drove back from Santiago on the N550, as usual paying the closest possible attention to the ever-changing speed signs. Just after Caldas de Reis, I noticed these 80 and 50 signs, a mere 20m (at most) apart.

  • As of now, there's no radar machine just after the latter. But I don't rule out its future installation. Some readers will recall that I was once caught in such a trap when driving along the Spanish bank of the river Miño. And booked by a friendly cop who told me it was a shame I didn't live locally as then I'd have known about it.
Finally . . .
  • Using irony in written communications – and in blog posts – is fraught with risk. I knew there were several alternative punctuation marks indicating irony, when placed at the end of a sentence. But yesterday I learnt of ingenious backwards-slanting italic fonts, like this one:-
Good morning, readers.

Well, it would have been a good example, if Blogger had reproduced the original text. So, now I just have to learn how to ensure that . . .

© David Colin Davies, Pontevedra: 15.8.18

THE ARTICLE

The trains in Spain are filled with water: Matthew Parris,  The Times

Accounts of continental European travel strain after capital letters. The Glories of Venice, Magic of Paris, Treasures of St Petersburg, etc. I’d love to write like that but struggle to see like that. I’m too interested in the plumbing. Tram technology fascinates me. What’s the reasoning behind the weird way you peel off right to turn left off a Spanish trunk road? And how much water does the sleeper train from the French border to Lisbon need to carry to provide private showers in each compartment?

This last question teased me during the magnificent 12-hour overnight journey by Spanish Trenhotel from Hendaye in France to the Portuguese capital. Spain’s rather retro 20th-century Talgo trains will surely not be in service for too much longer, but ours was full. Showering in your own cubicle tinted in shades of salmony-pink that put one in mind of a hit-and-miss try at flesh colour for an NHS prosthetic limb, you have to wonder how many thousands of gallons of water were being hauled with us through the hot Spanish night. A serious train crash would create a micro-tropical-cloudburst.

Unbeaten tracks

You really have to visit the tram museum in Lisbon. Nobody else does, but it’s fascinating to see the evolution from the wooden horse-drawn carts on rails to today’s efficient but rather characterless electric cars. One is conveyed on a legacy tram from one part of the museum to another, observing examples of antique ticketing systems and portraits of luminaries of Portuguese public transport along the way. Doubtless Lisbon boasts art galleries and architectural glories that I missed, but I will always remember the raffia seatwork of the early 20th-century city tramcars.

I don’t, incidentally, think there are any actual Portuguese people in Lisbon in August at all. Just tourists. It is very thoughtful of the natives to absent themselves while we eat their sardines and look around.

It’s not socket science

The landscape between Lisbon and Faro is featureless but I spent three happy hours totally absorbed in converting the only electrical socket in our carriage into something capable of taking a British plug and adaptor. Poor Julian (my partner) was unable to read either of his books as both were employed as wedges.

Continental socketry is a triumph of theory over practice. With beautifully Cartesian simplicity, two calibres of two-pin plugs co-exist in wary partnership. The thin-pin plugs can mate with the fat-pin sockets, but the fat-pin plugs can’t penetrate the thin-pin sockets. The theory seems to be that you can plug a light-power appliance into any socket, but cannot plug a heavy-power appliance into a light-power socket. Clever. Too clever.

Whether a pin is thick or thin is not readily discernible, resulting in much futile pushing. And thin pins give too loose a connection in thick-pin sockets, so that (especially with a British adaptor) the whole thing droops and the connection flickers. Hence Julian’s book wedges. I didn’t need to charge my laptop, but it was fun beating the system.

Spray treatment

Seville has a splendid new tram system, designed with great sensitivity towards the streetscapes of this amazing city. In the historic centre are none of those ghastly tangles of poles and wires that now disfigure Manchester: Seville trams are battery-operated, so pause at charge-points at stops and termini to recharge.

Admiring of the creativity and intelligence of the city’s planners and engineers, I’m developing for Seville a pavement air-conditioning system for this intensely hot town. Street cafés there cool you (slightly) with puffs of very fine overhead spray, but this wastes water and the spray blows away.

My new unit will encircle drinking/dining areas within a movable curtain of delicate chains. These will hang like flyscreening from a ring of curtain-railing above, each anchored down into a corresponding ring of (portable) gutter.

Water will be dripped down the screen, collecting below for recirculation. You’ll be surrounded by a wet, see-through curtain of stainless steel chain.

Worth a prototype?

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