Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Spain
- A worthy cause.
- A tragic Spanish tale that made the BBC news here.
- If you’ve tried and failed to buy property in Spain and lost money in the process, this news is for you.
- The manifesto of the right-wing Vox party makes it abundantly clear that these throwbacks not only want to stop the clock but to send it spinning backwards. They are pretty un-reconstructed Francoists, of course, and it’s sad that the other 2 right-of-centre parties have felt it necessary to save their electoral skins by associating with them. (As the Conservative party did with UKIP in the UK, to its current cost.) The result is that it’s hard to know where the Spanish right-wing is going and whether the newish Ciudadanos really has any raison d’etr̭e. It seems very unlikely that more Spaniards have right-wing views simply because both Vox and Ciudadanos exist. Essentially, the ‘broad church’ PP party has fractured and each of the 3 parties is now cannibalising one or both of the others. Which is why the minority PSOE party would stay in power if there were an election tomorrow, despite not being able to get its 2019 budget approved. So, it's not all bad news . . .
The UK and Brexit
- Brexit Britain, says this columnist, is not fit for purpose. Which seems about right.
- A propos . . . Richard North, possibly quoting Christopher Booker:- Whenever I hear the complaint that Britain is in a tragic state of decline, I have long replied that "there are still a great many good people in this country. The trouble is that none of them are running it".
- As for Mrs May and her robotic statements:-
The USA
- I will, despite everything, really miss Fart. The late-night satirical shows are a laugh-out-loud joy to watch. They make my evening.
- Meanwhile . . . . Words v Actions.
Finally . . .
- I’ve taken the unusual step of including below most of the Sunday column of someone I nearly always enjoy reading. I was going to mention the octopus story above but now don’t need to. To Galicians, the thought that they are food only for the rich would be hilarious. And to most Spaniards, I guess. Enjoy!
P. S. Does anyone else have problems with their Apple ID every time they try to access the Apple store??
THE ARTICLE
Making us eat lentil and fungus burgers won’t do a damn thing for global warming: Rod Liddle
Just 20 days into the new year and I’m already losing track of the stuff my conscience, or society, wants me to give up. Drink and cigs, obviously, but also a tendency to view the world through a privileged, heteronormative prism that can be exclusive to many groups of people, plus giggling at angry dwarfs.
And a new one — smiling at black people. An article in The Guardian last week made it clear this was no longer on. To quote: “Over-smiling allows us to mask an anti-blackness that is foundational to our very existence as white. A fleeting benevolence, of course, has no relation to how black people are actually undermined in white spaces. Black friends have often told me that they prefer open hostility to niceness.”
I’m not sure what over-smiling is — maybe staring at black folk with a fixed and manic rictus grin, which I can see might be unsettling. But in future perhaps I should follow the advice in the column and simply shout racial obscenities whenever I see a black friend. Or maybe just scowl at them and mutter unpleasantly. The writer of this ectopic bilge was, of course, a whitey.
And then there’s meat, this being Veganuary and so the entire country is chowing down on Gregg’s vegan sausage rolls made from compressed fungus and sinus fluid, or something.
I would have thought that having to inject yourself with vitamin B12, made from fermented bacteria, every couple of days so you don’t pass out in the street was the Lord Jesus Christ’s way of telling you that perhaps you’d taken a wrong turning in life, you vegans. And while vitamin B12 may alleviate the anaemia, it doesn’t stop the epic flatulence (or the smug self-righteousness). But there we are: 2019 will be the year of the virtue-signalling vegans, if they can stay awake long enough.
But now we also have The Lancet weighing in with its planetary health diet, instructing that we must all drastically cut down on red meat if we are to feed a projected world population of 10bn by 2050. And eat more nuts instead. Yay, bring on the honey-roasted peanuts.
The first response is to suggest, quietly, that it might be better if we tried to prevent the world’s population from rising to 10bn. But that vast growth in numbers will happen in the Third World, especially Africa — and so the issue is not addressed.
The next is that, so far as personal health is concerned, avoiding doctors is a more pressing concern than giving up steak and kidney pies. Medical mistakes account for more than 40,000 deaths in the UK every year — so put your own house in order first, Lancet.
But let’s get to the meat of the issue. If I give up eating free-range Welsh lamb, say, and replace that protein with nuts imported from South America and lentils flown in from Turkey, how is this helping the world, given our concerns about global warming? A report I read recently suggested you would have to abstain from meat for 10 years to match the emissions of a single transatlantic jet flight. Our topography is uniquely suited to pasture and grazing land: that’s how we feed ourselves. It is sustainable; it works. Or has The Lancet dismissed global warming and become a denier?
Further, in privileging white meat — chicken — over red meat, The Lancet tramples upon the very reason many people become vegetarian (as I have, from time to time, ineptly): animal welfare. No meat is more intensively produced, with more utter misery caused to the creature, than chicken. And yet The Lancet implies we should switch from red meat to white. It has no problem with chicken farming.
In other words, this hasty report hammers the fashionable, politically correct targets — the overprivileged meat-chomping West — and ignores completely all of the problems and animal welfare atrocities that would arise if we suddenly abided by its rules. Worse still, it ignores the more pressing concern of how we stop sub-Saharan Africa reproducing at its current rate, presumably because the report’s authors think we have no right to get involved.
So, that’s sorted then. I won’t be following The Lancet’s demand that I cut down on meat. Nor will I stop giggling at angry dwarfs, if I ever see any. I shall try just scowling at black folk, and white, and see how that goes.
Polpo friction
The president of an Oxford college has decided that octopus should no longer be allowed on the dining menus for students, because of the grotesque offence it might cause.
Baroness Royall, who runs Somerville College, made her decision after a first-year student felt deeply hurt and alienated having encountered octopus terrine at the freshers’ dinner, it being a dish she had never previously encountered, thus leaving her estranged from her college. Food henceforth must be less challenging, then.
A senior octopus told me yesterday: “Of course we support this fine initiative by Baroness Royall. “If students want to eat cephalopods, they should stick to squid, stupid beaky little bastards,” he added, waving a couple of tentacles in a dismissive manner, from under a rock.
Family is Google’s F-word. Search me
Google has at last been forced to stop using offensive language, beginning with that most vile of words, “family”. An employee demanded that the word should never be used in conjunction with children because “the use of ‘family’ as a synonym for ‘with children’ has a long-standing association with deeply homophobic organisations”. Further, it was “offensive, inappropriate and wrong”.
I don’t know what organisations the employee was referring to, otherwise I would have joined them all. But a vice-president of Google agreed and the word is now verboten unless used in conjunction with any and all groups of people either loosely or securely tied together, not necessarily with children, and may simply comprise, say, two transgendering werewolves who happen to communicate with one another via email.
Parsley the loin
Marie Claire is in trouble for having suggested readers start cramming lots of parsley up their lady gardens. According to the magazine: “Parsley can help to soften the cervix and level out hormonal imbalances that could be delaying your cycle.” Well, fair enough, so long as they don’t put it back in the fridge afterwards.
Gynaecologists, however, warned the practice could lead to illness or death. So a big thank-you to Dr Sheila Newman, from New Jersey, for my favourite quote of 2019 so far: “There are only a few things that should go in your vagina and vegetables generally aren’t one of them.” Still, if parsley’s out — what about sage and onion?
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