Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- The Local's essential guide to Easter in Spain. If the various strikes don't prevent you from travelling, that is.
- More - from Político - on the issue of the emptying/desertification of Spain and why it's electorally important.
- The Spanish PP government appears to have used a leading journalist as well as the police to undermine the Podemos party. As I've said, shades of Franco. Did they really think they could get away with it? I guess so.
- I'm organising a camino in Galicia for next month. Getting decent accommodation - other than in pilgrims' albergues - is always a challenge, not made any easier by the Galician custom of having the same name for many, many villages. Which is confusing not only for me but also for sites such as booking and tripadvisor. You even get villages of the same name only a few kilometres from each other. I put it down to the poverty of peasant imagination.
- Maybe 20 years ago, I claimed we were living in The Age of the Bureaucrat. And of uninspiring 'managerial' politicians. Since then, things have only got worse. At least in the UK. But at least that crowd can be sacked, every few years. Which is rather less true of the technocrats who run the burgeoning federal EU superstate. Everyone knows that the main (sole?) object of bureaucrats is to entrench their own positions and, if possible, to do this by expanding their own little empires. All of which is always dressed up as public service. Over in Brussels, of course, this empire-building is on 2 levels. Firstly, the (phenomenally well-remunerated) technocrats and MEPs are bent on keeping/enlarging their own empires. Secondly, they have the EU empire (the 'Project') to secure and expand - taking powers from national governments in the process. And aren't they doing a grand job? Or, to put it another way, no wonder people just about everywhere are fed up with their politicians and are breaking traditional moulds. Apart from Marcon, who's hell-bent on re-creating Napoleon, it seems.
- A propos . . . Here's a Richard North comment this morning: Who will rebuild the wreckage of our political system is not easy to fathom. In a parliament inhabited by intellectual pygmies, there is no obvious leader waiting in the wings, ready to take over responsibility.
- Do we really need a war to re-order priorities and to encourage some real talent to rise to the top? Where not only cream floats, it's said.
- Near term, the EU faces a big election mess: Brexit is just a small part of the EU’s chaotic and unpredictable election year. The Juncker Commission doesn't end until Halloween, but the scary season for Europe's political elite is already underway. Polls suggest May's European Parliament election will deliver chaotic results, including unprecedented gains for far-right and populist parties that will force the major pro-EU groups to reach wider than ever to form a majority coalition.
Brexit/Priorities
The World
- Talking of politics, here's a book which might interest some, from both the Right and the Left.
- Word of the Day: Listillo.
- Words you need to know to understand the election stuff that's filling the newspaper right now, says The Local.
- Odd Old Word: Chincough: 'A violent dry cough, affecting children even to a danger of suffocation. From the Dutch kitchen, to pant/cough. Or maybe the Dutch kind (child) and kuch(cough).'
- I recently moaned about having to dodge lazy/thoughtless youngsters on electric scooters in the centre of Madrid. So, thank-you, Uber.
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