Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Note: One or two of the items below have been borrowed from Lenox Napier's Business Over Tapas of yesterday.
Spain
- I forgot to report yesterday on 3 things that happened during a train trip to Vigo on Wednesday. Coming in quick succession, they seemed to endorse my oft-stated view that, while the Spanish are wonderful people, on a day-to-day basis unless they know you - the 'personal factor' - you don't really exist and are not due any consideration:-
- I stood 15 minutes behind a couple who chatted to the ticket seller while a queue of at least 10 people formed behind them. Not once did they look over the shoulder to see what was happening as the departure time drew close. In contrast, my (other extreme) mother would have rather died than keep a complete strange waiting 30 seconds. There is a happy medium.
- As I was waiting a metre or so from the door to let passengers get off at Pontevedra, a young couple walked past me and stood in front of me. As if they thought it was my hobby to stand on railway platforms observing train doors. If they thought at all.
- On the train, a group of 4 oldish guys were standing in the aisle as we got on, making it impossible to pass. Worse, a fifth was sitting in my seat. Of course, they all apologised profusely - as is the way in Spain - and moved on to 5 unoccupied seats, having a complete disregard for whatever their original seat allocations had been. For the second time.
- Enough moaning. Some very good news. But it does rather contrast with other wild animal news - viz. that Spanish farmers here in the north are getting very fed up at the depredations of re-introduced bears and wolves. Not to mention the very-much-more-plentiful wild boars, which have now taken to 'invading' our cities.
- On that issue of the maltreatment of staff in the tourist industry: From La Cadena Ser: From a labour inspector: "I have never seen so much poltroonery". Abuses towards the workers, who do not take vacations and there are sectors where precariousness and exploitation are not the exception, but the rule: season after season.
- The Local thinks these are the 12 Spanish restaurants you need to eat at before you die. I guess it would he hard to do so after this event. Anyway, I haven't been to any of them and almost certainly won't before I pop my clogs.
- My elder daughter recently had her first child, down in Madrid, at the age of 42. She's far from alone in Spain these days.
- 'Old people on old machines' is said to be why Galicia has so many deaths caused by tractors toppling onto their owners. I suspect that another major factor is the undulating nature of our land.
- Uber lost more than 5bn dollars in the last quarter. Some people believe it'll never be profitable but meanwhile . . . The rideshare industry has just about destroyed the taxi business because it is able to dodge taxi regulations and burn huge amounts of money, while taxi companies have to stick to taxi regulations and make money or go out of business – because taxi-company investors are not willing to fund losses. Seems rather unfair, even if taxi fares were too high.
- Job interviews: These are rarely enjoyable, but the one I had the other day was more agonising than most. The main challenge was that my interviewer was the world’s first recruitment robot. Developed by a Swedish artificial intelligence company, in collaboration with Sweden’s biggest recruiter, it can nod, smile, wink, encourage candidates by conceding that some questions may be difficult and mutter “ah” and “hmm” occasionally, before it transcribes applicants’ answers and analyses them through “diversity and inclusion” software powered by “15 years of experience in unbiased recruitment”. Thank god, I'm retired.
- Says the author of the first article below: Pursuit of perfection is what makes us sad. We need to develop emotional intelligence and accept our flaws to survive in the modern world.
- Interesting to read that the Christian Science movement is moribund. I suspect it won't be missed. Unfortunately, though, the laws it inspired absolving crazy religious parents who kill their kids via neglect are still on the statute books in the USA. Strange country.
- Word of the Day:- Entenderas
- You may be asking . . . Poltroonery. Pusillanimity; Cowardice; Cravenness.
- Below are the 'best 30 jokes' from the Edinburgh Fringe comedy festival. I smiled at 3 and actually laughed at 2. The experience has done nothing to heighten my desire to attend the event.
Pursuit of perfection is what makes us sad: Jenni Russell. The Times
We need to develop emotional intelligence and accept our flaws to survive in the modern world
It’s high summer, and almost everyone I know well is a little jittery; anxious about our febrile, unpredictable politics, uneasy about their jobs or their elderly parents or their children’s exam results or the suddenly soaring costs of their holiday abroad, or disappointed by the stifling grey mugginess of this August at home. We’re searching for distraction — what, we ask hopefully, should we watch, read, visit? — and for ways to settle our agitated minds.
Unexpectedly, the best answer I’ve found turned up this week, and it’s not a box-set drama or a week in an Italian villa but a new book that dropped through my door. Alain de Botton’s The School of Life: An Emotional Education is here to remind us that life is made up of constant and inevitable dissatisfactions, that all humans are muddled, inconsistent, difficult to understand and intrinsically flawed, and that our contemporary belief that it’s possible to be enduringly happy is a destructive myth that’s driving us to collective rage.
De Botton points out that for thousands of years humans knew better. For the Buddhists life was a vale of suffering, the Greeks expected tragedy, Christianity believed we were divinely cursed. “All substantial endeavours — marriage, child-rearing, a career, politics — were understood to be sources of distinctive and elaborate misery.”
These gloomy framings have been largely superseded in western culture in the last 250 years by the spread of romanticism and individualism. We’re taught that we can find happiness and our true path as long as we listen to our inner voices, express ourselves and follow our emotions and instincts. But this apparently generous, optimistic view of our possibilities is a path to misery. It makes us feel like unique and lonely failures when happiness doesn’t result.
De Botton would like to liberate us from this false view of what’s possible by reintroducing us, merrily, to all the darkness and the limitations of every human soul. Our ignorance of our own natures is for most of us profound. When we act on intuition, whether choosing a spouse or abandoning a job, we are not following an unerring guide but responding to patterns set very early in our lives and that may be ruinously inappropriate; a preference for a distant, disapproving partner or an inability to accept criticism without being deeply wounded.
What we need instead and are rarely taught is emotional insight, into others and ourselves. Our society is skilled at training pilots, language teachers or actuaries. It can pass on, in a few hours, the accumulated knowledge acquired by rare geniuses over a lifetime. Emotional education is ignored. People learn maths, but not how to handle shame or rage, be kind, forgive. The consequence is we’re no wiser than the ancient Sumerians.
We pay a high price for our self-ignorance, as de Botton says, failing to understand why we may be irritable or sad, haughty when we long to be warm, or always late. “We destroy a relationship that might have been workable under a compulsion we cannot account for . . . Ambition that doesn’t know itself emerges as panic; envy transforms itself into bitterness. Much of what destroys our lives can be attributed to emotions that our conscious selves haven’t found a way to understand.”
The School of Life is a starting point for addressing this absence, and its steadfast recounting of our failings is, for any reader, a gleeful joy. It tells us that we are not alone with our crushing insecurities, peculiar sexual longings, fear of isolation. Our anxieties are not a weakness or an error and are unlikely to dissipate with success. They are a rational response to our living within the competitive, destructive, random workings of capitalism, and also “because we rely for our self-esteem and sense of comfort on the love of people we cannot control and whose needs and hopes will never align seamlessly with our own”.
De Botton’s philosophy is that we should know ourselves, as Socrates preached, and build intimacy with others by confessing our vulnerabilities, but he is delightfully acerbic about the inadvisability of ever surrendering to “being ourselves”. Much of what we truly want is best kept private; we all have fleeting desires to hurt or humiliate, we are all to some extent psychologically damaged and vain. We are profoundly difficult to live with and there are no perfect partners for us, though we cause such pain and break up so many families in the pursuit of that chimera. The only people we find truly admirable, he points out, are those we don’t yet know very well.
A contented existence alongside others depends not on abandonment of barriers but on restraint; a concern for how other people feel, and an understanding that however we look, everyone is walking around without a skin. Everyone fears being disliked or taken for granted, and “every piece of neglect, silence or slightly harsh word has the profound capacity to hurt”.
What de Botton hopes to free us from is the tyranny of expecting perfection, happiness or fairness to be our due, to accept that melancholy and disappointment are natural and inevitable, to take delight in lives that are good enough, with moments of joy. Culture, art and philosophy are essential consolations because they remind us of these truths. We should cultivate realism, humour, forgiveness and politeness as essential virtues.
We’re living in an age where we’ve never been more dependent on our personal qualities in the forging of our lives, as formal structures disappear; de Botton’s injunction to understand ourselves could not matter more.
2. The 30 funniest jokes and one-liners from the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe
My mate came second in a Winston Churchill lookalike competition. He was close, but no cigar.
If Natalie Portman appeared in a panto, that could be shortened to a Portmanteau.
The problem with the Spider-Man French adaptation is the character is called Peter Parkour, and they immediately guess he is Spider-Man.
If you are wondering how I got disabled, it’s because I didn’t forward that chain email to 10 of my closest friends when I was younger.
I'm addicted to smoking jackets – I'm on 20 a day – I've tried the patches but, if anything, they just make them more fashionable.
I suppose lesbian sex is a bit like cricket, in that it goes on forever and there’s a lot of men watching it at home, alone, on the internet.
I've got an Eton themed advent calendar, where all the doors are opened for me by my dad's contacts.
When people moan about our love of technology as incredible as phones, I wonder if they watched Harry Potter thinking, "I wish those kids would put their wands down and go play with a normal stick.
I’m taking my toddler to a lot of children’s shows. I want him to see how badly things can turn out if you pursue a career in the arts.
I turned 24 last week. Pythagoras was 22 when he worked out the lengths of a right angled triangle for the first time. I covered that in Year Six [age 11], so I’m doing pretty bloody well.
British people are like coconuts. Hard on the outside but sweet once you crack us. Also often found full of alcohol and holding an umbrella.
With enough revs and determination any restaurant is a drive-thru.
What do I want played at my funeral? Rugby.
A cowboy asked me if I could help him round up 18 cows. I said, "Yes, of course, that’s 20 cows."
I have an eating disorder where I can't eat fruit or vegetables, which in Scotland is very difficult to detect. It's a bit like having unrelated radiation sickness in Chernobyl.
A new eco-opera, Rainforest Ocean Blue, is a disaster. The tenor in particular is dreadful. An aria – The Sighs of Whales – is being destroyed every night…
Some people think being working class is a negative thing but I think there’s loads of benefits. I’ve claimed them all.
Nothing makes sense to me. We live in a world where we cut down trees to make birdhouses out of wood.
The best thing about being disabled is nobody ever wants you to babysit. In case you drop them. And recruit them.
If I were God I'd spend all my time appearing at Richard Dawkins. He'd never tell anyone but it would really piss him off.
I like to watch Love Your Garden when I have my tea and then True Crime before bed. I feel really confident being able to bury a body and know what to plant on top of it.
I'm an openly 30 man, and it's hard to come out as 30... my friends were supportive, my boyfriend was supportive but my mum actually tried to kick me out of the house.
Germans love to take things literally, just like kleptomaniacs.
Make picking up litter more fun by turning to a friend and saying, "Aha! A clue."
I'm not into street food. Putting the word "street" in front of something doesn't make it cooler. It just means they haven't bothered to provide a building.
True crime documentaries are the only place the entertainment industry will take a chance on an unknown female lead.
Sauvignon Blanc is French for "Text Your Ex”.
I’m from a competitive family. I remember as a kid my brother and I used to do that thing where you’d see who can hold their breath underwater for the longest… I really miss him.
You should try sexting. It's good fun and really gets rid of those PPI people.
My therapist told me, "When everything changes, change everything." So I changed therapists.
No, I didn't 't understand some either.
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