Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- More news on the Spanish/Galician victims of the Nazis.
- Is no government better than an unstable government? No, say the Galicians, as central budgets are frozen and Madrid is not sending the funds needed for pensions and social security payments.
- Talking of funds . . This is the tale of some that did flow, albeit to the wrong place. The Pujols, it seems, were even more crooked than previously thought.
- This morning Pontevedra's flea market had to compete for space with several honey stalls. Clearly, a lot of traders had decided not to bother, meaning that today saw the highest ever percentage of the market being taken up by the unlicensed gypsies. But I still couldn't find any of the things nicked from my car or my house a while ago.
- Which reminds me . . . Two 'young men from O Vao' - i. e. gypsies - were arrested last week. One was taken in despite the attempts of fellow gypsies on the settlement to prevent the Guardia Civil nabbing him. But the other was arrested in rather strange circumstances, way out of town on the A6 south. After robbing a petrol station, he'd sped off on his motor bike and then run out of petrol. When a passing police patrol pulled up, he asked for their help to get to France. But since they had his details, they opted to take him in. Not the brightest knife in the drawer.
- Returning to the theme of lack of consideration for others . . . As I rode my bike this morning on a dedicated bike path, I saw a woman walking towards me on it, pushing a child's buggy while talking on the phone. Although she'd seen me, she didn't move to the pedestrian path, forcing me to swerve past her. But, needless to say, when I looked at the buggy and asked if it was a bike, she apologised profusely. As I've said many times, Spaniards are brilliant at this, thanks to all the practice they get. Ironically, sometimes quite unnecessarily . . .
- Far more positively . . . One of the great things about the Spanish is that they're pragmatic, un-petty and, usually not so commercial as to charge you for everything little thing. This week I asked a bike shop to repair one of my tyres but, when I went to pick it up, the guy told me there was actually no puncture. I offered to pay him for his time but he declined payment. Not at all the first time this sort of thing has happened to me. Little things mean a lot.
- It's funny but I see many examples of parents plus one or more teenage daughters walking past my table - most often only one, in fact - but it's just struck me that I rarely see male teenagers with their parents. Wonder why.
- Rural crime is rocketing there. Not only are the crooks now stealing entire sheep herds, they're also taking the border collies, worth more than €5,000 each. Not as pets, I'm guessing.
- Can you believe? . . . YouTube has paid a neo-Nazi thousands of pounds and taken a cut of the money in a new revenue-generating scheme, it can be revealed. Mark Collett, a former British National Party official who has praised Adolf Hitler, called refugees “cockroaches” and been arrested for inciting racial hatred, is one of several far-right internet figures to profit from a service called Super Chat. According to the Google-owned website, Super Chat lets fans pay for their comments to appear prominently in the “live chat” next to popular bloggers’ videos. Most of the money goes to the blogger, but YouTube takes an estimated 30%.
- This is his swastika-bedecked gf, by the way. A less than charming lady who might not be a true natural beauty:-
- I've often thought during several decades that the West needs another world war to re-order perspective and priorities. Without ever really wanting one, of course. Below are similar thoughts from a Sunday Times columnist.
- Well, it's certainly not suspicious that Jeffrey Einstein was left alone to hang himself, is it? After all, it was a couple of weeks since his last attempt, so who could have expected it? To the relief of many, there goes the trial! But hopefully not the investigations.
- Word of the Day:- Chiringuito
- Not a great day on my bike, as it happens. Fell off it as I dismounted to check something when setting off, because I didn't appreciate I was on a down-slope, meaning the leg I was getting off on - if you see what I mean - was too short. But no bones broken. And no witnesses to my cursing. Not that this would have been remotely out-of-the-ordinary in Spain.
- Then, after buying some new reading glasses at the flea market, I realised I'd left my backpack with my Mac and Kindle in it in the car - on the route used by the gypsies to walk into town. In mild panic, I peddled back as fast as I could and was relieved to see it was still there.
THE ARTICLE
A peaceful, easy life hasn’t made us happy. Perhaps it’s time to give war a chance: Rod Liddle, times
I was wondering, idly, recently if maybe it was time for us to have another war with someone. I didn’t really care who, although I would prefer it if it were a war we might win, which removes only four or five countries out of the 197. Not a hi-tech war against impecunious Arabs, such as the Iraq war: an involving war, which impinges on us all.
The obvious candidate for an act of unprovoked aggression on our part is France — but it might be over too quickly for the beneficial side effects to take root. So China, maybe, using its bullying of Hong Kong as a pretext. My suspicion is that China’s military competence is gravely overstated.
If we had a war with the Chinese, we’d find out if I’m right, I suppose. If the only animated thing left in the country after hostilities is strontium-90, then I will have been proved errant and you can point this out in the letters page of whichever newspaper they have in the afterlife (almost certainly the bloody Guardian).
War increases social cohesion and integration (unless it’s a civil war, obvs) and the population becomes less deranged and self-indulgent. Madness diminishes and people are less inclined to top themselves. It also reduces personal dissatisfaction.
We now live in a country where everyone is dissatisfied, which has little social cohesion, where integration is a dirty word and a significant minority wishes to dismantle everything that has given us a comparatively comfortable existence. There seems to be a millennialist yearning for catastrophe. The best way to assuage that yearning is to give them one.
The Extinction Rebellion crowd recently demanded that London Fashion Week be scrapped and that instead we should convene “a people’s assembly of industry professionals and designers as a platform to declare a climate and ecological emergency”. That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Will this people’s assembly have to wear outré stuff while they’re debating our imminent demise? I’d like to see David Attenborough in an orange Perspex thong, or maybe channelling heroin chic.
To tell you the truth, I don’t have much time for the fashion business, but it generates more than £32bn a year for the UK, a vital contribution in a country that doesn’t make enough stuff any more. For the Extinction Rebellion crowd, this doesn’t matter. They have become monomaniacal — all that counts is this kind of biblical Armageddon, this annihilation, which is just around the corner. They cleave to this catastrophe more as an article of blind faith than a careful consideration of the science.
They are not alone. A growing number of greenish economists think we should reduce our GDP: they yearn for “degrowth”, as The Times reported on Friday. They wish us, then, to be poorer, in the mistaken belief that the world will benefit from our Lenten abstinence from industry. Much as New Zealand’s uniquely irritating and exponentially woke prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has asserted, they also believe that capitalism has conspicuously failed, forgetting the billions of people it has lifted out of poverty.
This self-abnegation is there, too, in the dim 12-watt-bulb sanctimony of our big box office royal couple. It is Harry and Meghan’s stated intention to have only two children because of over-population. And yet our birth rate is falling. (By contrast, it is rising in the poorest parts of the globe, where people have more pressing concerns than pretending, unconvincingly, that they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.)
In the social ranks below those two increasingly risible individuals, there is also a madness. More working days lost to stress, depression and fatigue than ever before. More money than ever spent on mental health, and still it is nowhere near enough. Where does this misery come from? Why is it only manifested now?
My argument is not that climate change is imaginary or that capitalism is perfect or that we should invade China. But one of the earliest social studies, published by Emile Durkheim in 1897, noted the beneficial social effects of war, and it still holds a few uncomfortable truths today. We have become softened and prone to be frit at everything, perpetually discombobulated in our pacific affluence and our ease, to the extent that we would throw it all away.
Summertime, then. And the living is, perhaps, too easy.
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