Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Spain- Galician depopulation and the opportunities arising therefrom. If you want to buy a village, that is.
- Reader Perry and I are chatting - in the Comments sections - about the O Burgo bridge pictured in yesterday's post. I don't think either of us is impressed by the modernisation plan discussed in detail in this video. See from about minute 16.30. Red lights??
- Incidentally, work on the bridge seems very slow. There was no one working on it Friday to Sunday and it was apparently closed even to pedestrians on those days. But people are using it this morning - I suspect unofficially, as all the fences at both ends are chained or wire-linked together. Except where someone had undone one of the latter.
- Coincidentally, my colleague on my recent Camino Invierno trek has sent me this laudatory tweet on Pontevedra. It's simply not true that there's no traffic in the city. You can drive around all the 'new' quarter and the old quarter can be driven in/through by people who live there and, during the mornings, by drivers of delivery vans/trucks. Not to mention by people on Segways and electric bloody scooters.
- Germany: Astonishingly . . . Germans are 9 times as likely as Britons to embrace homeopathy, with annual sales of about 55 million individual products. Unlike in Britain, where the NHS stopped funding homeopathy two years ago, German patients can also get the treatments paid for by their public health insurers, meaning that they are subsidised by other taxpayers. The result is a market worth about €780m a year. It is common for doctors to operate a sideline in para-medicine that is no more measurably effective than exorcism. My wife has been offered homeopathic pain relief for the impending birth of our second child as though it were gas and air. This is in part because Germany, for all its excellence in the chemical and medical sciences, is also the cradle of homeopathy. . . Periodically MPs try to block state funding for homeopathy, but the forces arrayed against them are well entrenched.
- The Netherlands: Problems with/er gypsies there. By coincidence, I heard on a podcast this morning that there's no connection between the words Roma and Romanian. The former comes from an Indian word for 'man' - rom.
- Those e-scooters . . . Are they a vital new part of modern, eco-friendly urban transport, or are they a risky and unnecessary fad, pushed by tech investors desperate to disrupt the status quo? And what can people in the UK, where the use of e-scooters remains illegal on both roads and pavements learn from the experience of other European cities? See the rest of this article for all the considerata.
- I have to confess I've been thinking of getting one of the things, so that I don't have to either drive or pedal up the steep hill to my house.
- In Spanish, the word for 'fed up' is harto. In Gallego, it's farto. So, we get:-
- Estou farto de Fart. Which surely has a better ring about it . . .
- One of the reasons why Fart could get a second term
- Word of the Day: Trasto
- I'll leave it to others to do justice to the truly astonishing cricket World Cup final between England and New Zealand yesterday. I'll confine myself to recording that the match came down to the very last ball of a play-off mechanism designed to deal with a tie, with both sides on the same score in runs. The odds against this were so high that one commentator actually said - in the middle of the match - that: "Our producer has a real sense of humour; he says that, if there's a tie, there'll be a Golden Over". No one, of course, believed this would happen, forcing each side to choose 2 batsmen to face just 6 balls. But it did. And NZ failed by only a thin whisker to beat England's score of 15. In fact, there was another (unbelievable) tie and the match was decided by a count-back of some sort. The rest, as they say, is history. National joy was unbounded.
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