Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Can the PSOE prime minister avoid yet another general election in November? See here on this.
- Uber has arrived in Galicia. Or in La Coruña at least. We'll have to wait to see whether violent reaction from taxi drivers ensures it never arrives anywhere else in the region.
- It might be hard to believe but here in the provincial capital of Pontevedra we have no public transport link to Vigo airport. And, as far as I know, never have had. You can either go to Vigo by bus or train and get a bus from there or go by taxi. Perhaps one day by Uber as well.
- Talking of transport . . . . by a stroke of negligent genius, our AVE high-speed train link to Madrid is now forecast to come on stream just as RENFE is forced to reduce its prices because of competition from French, German and Italian operators. That said, I fear the latter will actually happen long before the former.
- The really good news . . . There's now a museum of Galician wines in the town of San Andrés, O Ribeiro. I'll be taking a look at it this week. Click the flag for the language options. If you like to do pointless things . . . .
- Boris Johnson: I've read a lot about him and am very aware of both his great strengths and great weaknesses - I've long said, by the way, that these always go together - and, though I have as little idea as anyone else of what will follow in the wake of his election, I'm convinced that both those who see him as a messiah and those who see him as merely an ambitious clown will be disappointed. Beyond that, I cannot say. Like many others, I have my fingers crossed for the UK.
- Reader María has provided an update on her experience in a Podemos FB group: That morning I made the comment, I was later forbidden from commenting for 24 hours. When my time was up, I made another comment, explaining what I thought, and decrying the censorship imposed on me. I was once again called all sorts of things, though a few agreed with me, and said that censorship was a no-no. The very last comment was probably from one of the admins, telling me that I could post my opinion on my own wall, not on their private page. Then, I discovered that I had been summarily blocked from the group, and could no longer see any posts or even find it on Facebook. Why am I reminded of Lenin and Trotsky?
- Instagram obsessed millennials ruined my summer holiday - don't let them spoil yours, too. See the first article below,
- See the nice article below on the woman who demanded legal redress because beauticians declined to shave her orchestra stalls. [I originally typed 'save her orchestra stalls'. Even more graphic.]
- Worth watching.
- A follow-up to my comment yesterday on Fart's point that England is not the UK. It's not the first time he's wandered onto this patch.
- Watch this to find out who Moscow Mitch is and what's he's about.
- Astonishing. Not really . . . . Fart lies about Mueller's testimony. . .
- The evangelical preacher-cum-crooked-End-Times profiteer, Jim Bakker, predicts there'll be mass murders of anyone to the left of Fart if he loses in 2020.
- Word of the Day: Marcha
- An eloquent farewell from reader María to a very popular Italian writer.
Instagram obsessed millennials ruined my summer holiday - don't let them spoil yours, too
Nicole Mowbray
Ah holidays… The joy of sun, sea and social media if my recent break is anything to go by. At the start of July, my husband and I travelled to Santorini for four days. Famed for its stunning sunsets, whitewashed clifftop villages and blue domed churches, we knew it wasn’t exactly an off-the-beaten-track destination. But it would be a relaxing one, we imagined, with good food and wine, and even better hotels – all our boxes ticked.
It’s a popular checklist. Last year, an estimated 2m visitors (not counting another 18,000 who come ashore daily from huge cruise liners) landed on the Greek island, which, at just 30 square miles, is home to 20,000 full-time residents.
Unfortunately for Santorini, however, it feels as if 1.5m of them are visiting purely to take faux-spontaneous photos of themselves. The statistics bear this out: the Greek islands are among the world’s top 10 destinations to post on Instagram – up there with Marrakech, Tulum in Mexico, Amsterdam, Positano and Bali.
And so, rather than unwinding - away from the pressures of modern life - we found ourselves trapped on an island full of Instagrammers, intent on spoiling all that is sacred about the summer holiday in the pursuit of social media ‘likes’.
Laying by our hotel pool was akin to being extras on a photoshoot. We were forced to watch – pictures obviously only being snapped in envy-inducing prime spots, such as the edge of a clifftop infinity pool - as women queued to get in front of the friend or partner they’d corralled into being their photographer.
Things took on a familiarity which was depressing as it was unintentionally hilarious: swimsuit legs were hoiked up, then pulled down and images checked to see which looked better. Photos were taken with hats on and off, staring out to sea in fake contemplation, gazing at the camera, pretending to find something (nothing) hilarious, looking over a shoulder, in the water, sitting on the edge of the water with a drink in hand - before changing one’s swimsuit, adding more make-up and starting again. Then it was time for the friend to repeat the same agonising process. It was all so contrived and self-conscious, not to mention an extraordinary amount of effort.
Forget beach bags, the Instagram crowd are taking full-on camera bags to the pool. Wannabe-influencers appear to travel with collapsible reflectors to create better lighting, tripods, pocket Osmo cameras used for creating high-quality video. Someone even had a laptop on her sunlounger to edit the photos there and then. One fellow guest was told not to swim behind an American woman having her 110th photo taken, as it “disrupted the light on the water”.
For the first day, I can’t deny, I was enthralled by people displaying their vanity so openly. In the days of film cameras (God, I sound ancient - I’m 40), it was potluck whether your pictures came out at all, let alone if you looked half decent. Even if you did manage to get one you loved, only a handful of people would ever see it.
Santorini wasn’t like this the last time I visited, 10 years ago. Of course, it was still heaving – tourists have flocked here for decades. And it would be churlish to suggest many weren’t taking multiple selfies on digital cameras in the Noughties, too. But they weren’t subjecting everyone around them to a relentless public quest for validation.
The problem is magnified in the iconic caldera-view villages of Oia and Imerovigli, where residents have erected signs asking people not to use drones and reminding them that “This is our home”. But with 5.5m Instagram posts tagged to the island, and counting, they have their work cut out. Others have reported seeing similar pleas elsewhere, with farmers in the lavender fields of Provence resorting to putting up banners reading “Please respect our work” to deter the selfie-tourists (it did not).
Then there are the Instagrammers who risk life and limb for likes - a recent example being the hoardes who have flocked to pose at a beautiful, turquoise lake in the Spanish coastal region of Carballo, only to later learn that it is actually a toxic dump; the azure waters the result of a Second World War-era tungsten mine. One Instagram influencer told Spanish news outlet Publico that she had suffered vomiting and a rash for two weeks after bathing in the “Galician Chernobyl” (pictured below).
Look, I use Instagram. My problem isn’t with the platform itself. It is the fact that - as Men’s Editor of Conde Nast Traveller, David Annand, puts it: “We’ve turned the camera around, focusing not out, but in. Photography no longer encourages seeing; it simply encourages projecting, turning the world’s great vistas into mere backdrops for the self.” And when so many people visit the same place to take a picture of the same church, the same cobbled street, the same infinity pool… are they really experiencing it?
To be honest, I wouldn’t care if it didn’t effect other people’s experiences. Witness the crowds blindly walking (some even jogging along a narrow clifftop hiking path with no barriers), holding their phones in front of their faces, angrily colliding with whoever dares to get in their way. Endure the supposedly romantic dinner, ruined by the couple on the table next door wrestling with a miniature tripod in order to film themselves eating their - by now stone cold - food. At a candlelit restaurant one night, my husband and I looked around the dozen tables hosting our fellow diners to find all but two occupied by couples with both their faces lit-up by their phones as they scrolled, mindlessly, looking at other people’s lives. So much for enjoying the moment.
A friend who lives in Florence described to me the boredom of watching an endless stream of people lining up to take photos sat on the wall of the Ponte Vecchio. “I frequently see people stopping others from taking pictures or asking people to move so they can get an image just so,” he says. “People have always taken pictures, but not hundreds spending 15 minutes in the one spot. It’s not about the view, it’s about them”.
Another pal tells me she and her mother spent a recent visit to the Majorelle Gardens in Marrakech dodging selfie sticks, camera tripod set-ups and people dressed in their YSL-inspired finery posing on raised flowerbeds. Many had brought changes of clothes; the loo was doubling as a makeshift changing room.
Beautiful places like these, and Santorini, are victims of their own success – something that hasn’t escaped the notice of mayor Nikos Zorzos who last year claimed to be concerned about the tourism on his island. While it is one of Greece’s few economic success stories, he told a broadsheet newspaper that he was concerned: “We have reached saturation point. The pressure is too much.”
It doesn’t seem to be a concern for those selling the dream - caldera-view rooms on the island can cost several thousand pounds per night. We saw acrylic Instagram plinths in hotel receptions asking guests to take pictures and upload them, using the hotel’s hashtag and offering a charging point should they - horror of horrors! - run out of battery. Our taxi driver told us Instagram was the best thing that had happened in decades. “The last time we got so much free publicity was the Amorgos earthquake of 1956, which made Santorini international news for a bad reason,” he said. “This is a way of us showing our beauty and redressing the balance.”
There is no doubt Instagram is a powerful marketing tool – according to travel company Topdeck, 18% of 18-30-year-olds book holidays directly based on posts. But how many would go back to somewhere they’ve already ‘grammed? And how many of us - having spent several days dodging narcissists taking photographs of themselves - would return?
My husband thinks he has the solution: “Next time darling,” he says, “we’ll just go to Hull in January”.
The Top 10 Instagrammable places to holiday
Travel account @earth has compiled a list of Instagram influencers’ favourite holiday destinations, which are sure to be flooding your feed this summer.
1. Tulum, Mexico
Take a selfie among the historic ruins. Like everyone else.
2. Amsterdam
The canals are helpfully framed with colourful townhouses for pretty snaps. Thanks Holland.
3. The Greek Islands
The obscenely blue waters are even more striking next to the white buildings: made for the Lark filter, right?
4. Mexico City
Two Insta posts for the price of one in a city with both Mayan temples and Spanish baroque cathedrals.
5. The Maldives
Even if you’ve never been there, you know exactly what those over-water villas look like by now.
6. The Algarve
If you angle the camera just right you can make it look like you’re the only people on that “hidden” Portuguese cove beach.
7. Marrakech
What could be more photogenic than the bowls of spices and sparkling slippers in a Moroccan souk?
8. Positano
This Italian town clinging to the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast is the perfect selfie background.
9. Cappadocia
A Turkish landscape of “fairy tower” rock formations - the most popular place in the world for hot air ballooning.
10. Bali
2. When a trans woman is refused a Brazilian wax, the issue isn’t human rights. It’s balls: Camilla Long, the Times
When I was at university, one of my tutors was trans. We knew she was trans because we’d heard she might appear in a skirt and/or earrings. Indeed, for my first tutorial she was wearing both. I remember thinking, “Oh look! Bloke with earrings!”, but then everything was so relaxed and normal. She didn’t make a fuss or draw any attention to it. When she later contemplated a full sex change, she told the tabloids: “It’s no big deal.”
No shrieking or posturing or demanding people accept “her#truth”. No thundering into the women’s changing rooms at the local swimming pool and shouting that this was the only place she’d get changed or she’d sue. No insisting people called her a “proud lesbian” or whatever label she’d dreamt up that morning. She was a trans woman, that was it. She just wanted to get on with her life teaching Aristophanes. End credits.
I was always struck by the calm and, indeed, womanly way in which she must have endured all the awful insults, the people openly criticising her figure, her looks, her inability to walk in high heels. It must have been a fitting initiation into the appalling business of being female, this constant close examination of everything she wore and everything she did, her mannerisms, her fashion decisions, the slightest of errors picked over and laughed at.
Why anyone would want to sign up to the painful pinching tyranny of female footwear or the sly horrors of “realistic” make-up is beyond me, but she did and now, two decades later, she is a brilliant professor at a major university.
I often think about her when I read about the cacophonous, illiberal outrages perpetrated by the provisional wing of the trans lobby — people such as the horrifying Canadian trans woman Jessica Yaniv, whose grim behaviour is a grotesque betrayal of her long-suffering sisters. Yaniv has most recently complained to the human rights tribunal in British Columbia because a series of female beauticians had refused to wax her testicles. You’d have thought her complaints, 16 in all, might have been immediately thrown out. No one has a right to walk into a beautician’s salon or, in some cases, her own home and say it’s the law that she touch their bollocks. But apparently Yaniv believes it is her human right to receive this service. It is her human right to be recognised as a woman. It is her right to receive Brazilians from the hands of poor, frightened immigrant women. If they refuse, they are transphobes. If they say no, they deserve to lose their livelihoods, as one beautician has done.
I’d like to say it puts us in the peculiar situation of arguing which is more of a human right: the right of a man-born woman to be recognised as a woman, or the right of a woman-born woman not to have to touch someone’s testicles. But I won’t, because it doesn’t. What it puts us in the position of is having to hold a serious discussion about waxing balls.
Really? How does this even get the air time? Why doesn’t someone just say, sorry, waxing bollocks is simply below our pay grade, off you run and stop harassing women? Stop pretending this is a serious grievance, stop screaming that you feel violated or degendered or whatever it is you don’t feel, because what you’re engaging in is the dismal grey slurp of bog-standard misogyny.
What you’re doing is trying to humiliate women for being women while requesting they satisfy your disgusting fantasies. Because this isn’t about gender or sexuality, it is about male aggression. It is almost as if these activists don’t think they’re making progress unless a woman has been publicly attacked or lost her job. No woman would storm into a salon and demand that someone give a certain type of wax. So why should people be allowed to claim they are women while behaving like men?
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