Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- How to know if your child is truly Spanish, from The Local. I would add: 29: They start using swear words that are totally unacceptable in even adults in other countries.
- And here's what you know if you're going to be riding an electric scooter along the Costa Brava, from The Olive Press.
- Our local press continues to sort of moan about the aggressive commercial activities of North Portugal, which are attracting Galician businesses and personnel. I'm a little surprised there aren't allegations of improper EU subventions but maybe this is because Galicia is being investigated by the EU Commission in respect of €21m of these.
- And here's a moan from me . . . Yesterday saw the first ever group of about 20 people with earphones following a chattering guide around Pontevedra's old quarter. But at least they were Spanish, not 85 year old Americans in Bermuda shorts and baseball caps, fresh off a cruise ship docked in Vigo harbour. Still it's all downhill now.
- Talking of Pontevedra streets . . . One of them is being 'remodelled', only a couple of years after a previous remodelling. Our anti-car mayor certainly seems to like to keep drivers guessing. Or at least those he can't persuade to stay out of the city.
- See the article below on the (old) British version of the siesta.
- Germany: Is Mummy really OK? . . . All of Germany is asking itself that question following Angela Merkel’s latest bout of tremors. Or so it says in this article, though a German friend refutes the claim.
- Twitter scares the hell out of most normal people; the slights and contempt, backbiting and vicious obscenities reflect a society that is leeching goodwill, good humour and good manners. From the article below.
- I guess it's no surprise that some Pharma companies are marketing products specifically for Hispanics, despite there being no genetic difference between them and other humans.
- Fart says he hardly knows Mr Epstein. Which is rather odd, as he wrote years go that he was a great guy who was fun to hang out with. Apparently in a get-together involving just the 2 of them and 28 'girls'. Perhaps a chess tournament.
- Word of the Day: Achuchar
- So, why do Finns suffer more than others from high blood pressure? Salted fish, apparently.
- There was a message in the Comments this morning re a magic 'spell caster'. Deleting it, I noticed it was to a blog of March 2016. Even odder was the fact that there were 2 similar messages there already, which I'd never deleted. Odder still, one of them was in German.
1. Siestas: the British way. July 1934 – The Guardian archive.
We never experience in this country sufficient lengths of hot weather for the siesta to become a permanent institution. The midday calm of an English village, for instance, in the middle of summer has not much to do with resting. It is really the time of change-over from morning to afternoon work and the all-important business of the midday meal. In some villages there is a custom for the women to sit outside their cottages in the shade before tidying up for the afternoon, and haymakers always snatch a quarter of an hour for a sleep at dinner-time.
There is little general abandonment of work at the hottest part of the day. In the big cities the park and open spaces fill up at the lunch hour, and some of the big new office blocks have their flat roofs laid out for the recreation of the staffs. In industrial towns commercial travellers on their rounds in small cars find hot weather trying, and it is a common sight in one street, where a huge mill offers shade, to find a line of cars with the drivers sleeping at the wheels. Sometimes an ice-cream barrow goes by and does a good trade.
In the old days of regular horse traffic a siesta in hot weather was almost a recognised part of the day’s programme. I remember as a child travelling with an old carrier on his rounds over parts of Dartmoor. The horse knew the bits of moor where he could stop at midday, and the two of us on the cart went to sleep under a tree. The horse was not loosed from the shafts, but I am sure he went to sleep on his feet. In a Lancashire street the other day I discovered a fruit hawker and his horse enjoying a siesta in much the same way. The man was lying on his elbow against a shady wall fast asleep, while the hind quarters of the horse and all the cart were in the hot sun.
School Children
The formal business of resting in hot weather is undertaken seriously in open-air schools in industrial towns. In one that I know the children rest on low camp beds in the garden under the trees for an hour, and in another hot weather rest was so essential to certain classes that parents were asked to indicate on a chart what time each child went to bed at night. The temptation is to stay out late, but the headmaster pointed out to parents that rest is as important as sun and air.
In countries where a midday siesta has become a national custom it extends in summer time to five or six in the evening. In Spain I noticed that my host’s method of keeping the house cool was to shut up all the windows with thick shutters and close all the doors. This kept the house cool all day, although the rooms were gloomy. For the siesta you could lie on a divan in the cloister of the courtyard, and every hour a little maid brought fresh iced water. But most of the household went thoroughly to bed and then stayed up most of the night. The streets of the town were completely deserted during the siesta, and the banks and public offices remained open during the evening. The loafers of the town lay in shady gutters, or sat forlornly at a pavement cafe. And although Spain keeps in many places to an antique water system whereby you employ a water-carrier, there away seems to be plenty of water. During siesta time a few bedraggled watermen shot water over the streets in a vain effort to keep them cool.
Tramps and walkers of all sorts have always been good supporters of the siesta in this country. But one thing has happened lately to the countryside which has ruined a good many favourite resting-places. The grass verge has disappeared or has been drastically reduced, and in most counties tarring goes on right up to the edge of the grass, and in some instances a few inches up the hedge. No one can enjoy a siesta with melting tar about. It is worse than dust.
2. During a witch hunt, the first casualty is common sense: Judith Woods, the Daily Telegraph
You know how racist people tend to say things like “I’m not racist, but...”, and how shadow cabinet members mumble “I’m not anti-Semitic, but...” before going on to make outrageous statements that suggest quite the opposite?
Well, I’m neither of those things. Nor am I transphobic. I do not care what consensual shenanigans people get up to in private, how they dress in public or where they worship.
Seriously, knock yourself out. As long as your rights aren’t impinging on mine, there’s no problem. And if I need to budge up my ancient rights a little to make space for your modern ones, I’ll do that, too. It’s the British way. Live and let live. Mustn’t grumble. Keep calm and carry on.
Except it’s increasingly difficult to carry on in our 21st-century Salem, where there’s a witch hunt in progress – and common sense is the casualty.
Take the case of the doctor who was sacked this week because he told his line manager that he would not address a (purely theoretical) “six-foot-tall bearded man” as “Madam” or “Mrs”.
Dr David Mackereth was barred from working as a disability benefits assessor because he believes gender is defined by biology. Apparently, this marked him out as transphobic. So help me. So help us all.
If said theoretical man then strode into the Ladies loo or swimming pool changing room claiming to identify as a woman, presumably we are expected to accept that as perfectly reasonable?
And what if his mate then came in and his mate’s mate? I might identify as a Marvel action superhero or Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but that doesn’t make it so.
I saw a man in the street not so long ago wearing a “Baby On Board” sign. Do you want to know my instinctive reaction? I thanked the Lord we weren’t on public transport.
If he’d asked for my seat, would it have been transphobic not to give it to him? Would anyone have stood up for me if I’d refused – or would I have been set upon?
I fear that our politically correct planet is losing nuance faster than rainforest. There is no longer any wiggle room; if you are not actively for something, you must be against it. And if you are against it then you will be made an example of.
It’s why Twitter scares the hell out of most normal people; the slights and contempt, backbiting and vicious obscenities reflect a society that is leeching goodwill, good humour and good manners.
I strongly suspect this militancy is behind the British Social Attitudes survey that has revealed our increasingly liberal attitudes to sex and relationships have stalled; acceptance levels for sex outside marriage and same-sex unions have dropped.
Does that make us prudes? Or have we become more judgmental because single issue identity politics is fracturing our sense of nation and undermining our honourable history of tolerance?
And while four out of five citizens had no prejudice against gender transition, it was worrying that fewer than 50 per cent felt prejudice against transgender people was “always wrong”.
Then again, what constitutes prejudice? There’s a term desperately in need of the aforementioned nuance; just because someone is offended does not mean an offence has taken place.
And just because an individual feels excluded does not make a situation or an institution prima facie discriminatory. That may be the case, but any conclusion must be reached by examination, discussion and in an even-handed spirit of enquiry.
Is it prejudice to insist that women and girls should accept biological men into their private spaces? Or is prejudice to refuse?
We now know that some of us could lose our jobs if we refuse to call six-foot men with beards “Madam”. Ought we to call everyone “Madam” just in case, so it’s more of an opt-out than an opt-in scenario? Will I be branded a terf (that is, a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, which is, for the avoidance of doubt, not a good thing) for even bringing any of this up?
Britain is changing – perhaps not fast enough for those who feel marginalised, but squaring up to fight all-comers is not the way to win hearts and minds.
I’m reminded of that hilarious kids’ comedy show Sorry I’ve Got No Head (shame on you, BBC, for not recommissioning it), which featured a series of fabulous sketches in which the Witchfinder General, in full 17th-century garb, is transplanted into the present day.
There he is, in the Post Office queuing up to apply for a passport. The jobsworth assistant tells him he needs to get new pictures taken without his Witchfinder’s hat and then join the back of the queue again.
He whinges a bit, tries to argue, and then triumphantly points at her and shouts “Witch! She’s a witch!” – whereupon and a gang of chanting peasants come running in to carry her off, presumably to be drowned or burned. It’s the perfect allegory for present day pettiness where pressure groups prefer to bully and intimidate than compromise.
Look no further than those angry parents who are back outside Parkfield School in Birmingham, demonstrating and shouting about how teaching an LGBT-inclusivity course is corrupting their children’s young minds and teaching them that it is OK to be gay.
The fact that it is OK to be gay and gay people’s rights are enshrined in equality legislation seems to have escaped them. They have decided that protesting and yelling and threatening takes precedence over the children too stressed to walk past them and too upset to focus on their education.
Such blatant homophobia is deeply disturbing, as is the fact their bigotry is going largely unchallenged. It appears that here in Britain, the authorities fear accusations of Islamophobia far more than charges of homophobia.
I have no idea why or how one phobia trumps another, but that’s for another day. It’s clear that intolerance begets intolerance. I’m not an intolerant person, but I do believe we need to stop tolerating the intolerable.
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