Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Can there be any better country than Spain in the world to be a baby? You're adored, fussed over by everyone, called 'beautiful' when you're ugly, and completely socialised by the age of 3 months because you accompany your parents to every event they attend, no matter how late it finishes. And best of all, no one ever tells you to consider the interests of adults, whether they be your family or strangers in a restaurant.
- I can't pretend to fully understand what's going on in Spanish politics at the moment - beyond realising we don't have a government and budget monies are not being spent in the regions - but here's something that might interest those who want an idea of what's happening.
- Neither do I understand what's going on in Cataluña. So here's an article on this, for those who might want to have some idea.
- Talking of that nation/country/region . . . Here's another negative report on the capital city.
- But now a very positive report, to the truth of which I can testify, having arrived here when the annual death toll on the roads was pretty horrendous. Just before the police turned from white to black. And started earning commissions on fines . . .
- And talking of history . . . What did the Romans ever do for Spain?
- The first article below is about today's 'snowflake' protesters, by a middle-aged woman who used to be a real termigant of the Left . ..
- The 2nd article is about a company set up on the basis of a friendly, sensible and economical idea but which then collided with capitalism and grew into a highly profitable monster, which communities around the world are waking up to and wondering how to control. You can probably guess its name.
- The founder of Pennsylvania - William Penn - insisted that 'Five things are requisite to a good Officer of State: Ability; Clean Hands; Dispatch; Patience; and Impartiality.' I wonder what score he'd give Ffart. Nil out of 5? Or maybe 1, depending on his definition of 'Dispatch'. Webster suggests that 'To dispatch' can mean: 'To dispose of something, such as a task, rapidly or efficiently'. I guess we could give Ffart half a mark for 'rapidly'.
- P. S. I've just discovered that Penn goes on to define all these terms, at some length. Tune in tomorrow for 'dispatch'.
- Another buffoon from a different universe who insists Ffart never lies.
- Word of the Day: Guasap. Guess.
- I will, of course, mourn the passing of another wonderful Galician summer but at least there'll be relief from the 2 bloody accordianists who alternate in making my life a misery for 10-15 minutes every day. And whom I have to pay to get to piss off from near my table.
1. Protesting just isn’t what it used to be in this vapid snowflake age. What happened to the days when activism involved some actual courage and tenacity. Julie Burchill.
Observing the thoughtlessness with which the word ‘coup’ was reduced to a hashtag this week, I had an epiphany about why I dislike those shrill young people we hard-hearted types like to call snowflakes and who like to call themselves Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). It’s not because I find them Left-wing, as many Snowflake-baiters do - but because I find them not Left-wing enough. They are bleeding heart solipsists whose hearts bleed only for themselves.
That the lily-livered SJWs of Twitter dare to apply ‘coup’ to being outfoxed by someone who pulled the rug out from under their two left feet made me see red - and indeed remember the time I used to be Red. I may be a church-going Hove-dwelling sexagenarian Telegraph columnist now, but in my youth I was forever carrying placards which generally read ‘Down With This Sort Of Thing’.
I’d march for dolphins being slaughtered by the Japanese and foxes being bothered by the burghers of Berkshire, but anti-fascist demos were my favourite by far; facing down the National Front on the mean streets of Lewisham, crushed between a Rastafarian and a posh old man who waved his walking stick and shouted “Jew-baiters! Damn Jew-baiters!” I was having the time of my teenage life.
Yes, we sometimes verged on the self-righteous and the Socialist Workers Party were always lurking on the sidelines like perves by a playground, trying to making puffin-killing connected in some way to the situation in so-called Palestine. But I don’t think we were anything like as pathetic as the ‘Antifas’ of today, mainly because we were all about the cause, not the coverage.
Because we existed before social media, we couldn’t mistake Tweeting about the sexism of the term ‘guy’, or sharing pictures of the Amazon fires on Instagram for activism. When we found ourselves on the wrong end of a police horse we took a few dodgy pills and got on with it rather than portraying ourselves as online martyrs.
When one looks at the history of modern protest, there’s real courage, tenacity and dignity involved, especially in the United States of America; students getting shot by the National Guard on campuses for protesting against a war, one-legged priests on long marches for racial equality - even the lazy hippies showed some guts and stuck flowers down the barrels of police guns. Compare this to the big incontinent babies squawking for attention with their blue hair and pierced-navel gazing - look at me, mom, aren’t I naughty?
This solipsism leads to a worse state of affairs than mere exhibitionism; it leads to cases of cultural callousness wherein Western feminists will wear hijab in solidarity with Muslim women - visibly purring with self-satisfaction - when the bravest of Muslim women are harangued for daring to remove them.
It’s far more ego-boosting to declare yourself non-binary than protest about the vile treatment meted out to gay people in the Islamic world; SJWs have no concern about oppression in other countries, preferring to keep the spotlight on themselves and their own pet peeves. They take this attitude into the classroom with them, where the words which African-American author James Baldwin wrenched from the depths of his pain have to be neutered lest they be triggered; a professor at the New School in New York was recently investigated for using the n-word in one of her classes when reading out the Go Tell It on the Mountain author’s prose.
Would, say, the International Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, with their matter-of-fact willingness to fight and die for democracy, recognise the SJWs? I think not. But they’d see an echo of themselves in the youngsters who went off to join the Kurdish army to fight ISIS, for the sake of a faraway country of which they knew nothing, while their coddled contemporaries on the conventional Left stayed safely at home whining about pronouns.
2. Airbnb is a monster that must be tamed: Libby Purves
The offer of an airbed and breakfast has grown into a $31bn beast that threatens to damage local communities
It was born 11 years ago in a San Francisco loft and grew to be worth $31 billion. Its soft tentacles cover the world, invigorating or choking. It isn’t the showiest of digital revolutions but a stealthily significant one, challenging the most intimate domestic sphere. Now, from Edinburgh to Oahu and Boston to Bath, communities are waking up and wondering how to control it. It is Airbnb.
An old idea was turbocharged by the IT age, when in 2007 young Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed help with their rent, put an airbed in the living room and offered bed and breakfast. We’ve all done it, usually without charging. But another friend, Nathan Blecharczyk, was a tech wizard. Fancying “a few bucks” extra, they set up a website linking spare-room owners with business or holiday travellers who couldn’t find a hotel or needed something cheaper. They branded and professionalised the idea of being a stranger’s guest: the sharing economy was born.
Fed by bright venture capitalists Airbnb went global. Within three years more than a million nights were booked, rocketing to ten million a year later. Now it has offices in 11 world cities and plans more.
Airbnb is basically a harmless, friendly, sensible and economical idea, and savvy business because when it comes to sleeping, people are wary of relating to total strangers — foreign ones at that — but comfortable dealing with a company and a safe payment system. The website still sells itself on basic internationalist mateyness: François of Paris who met a Finnish interior decorator, Silvia and Mateo of London who enjoy guests who “often bring gifts from their country . . . sometimes they invite us to their home town”. It is fashionably “woke” about nondiscrimination and a person’s gender being whatever they identify as. But when a sweet little idea collides with a capitalist economy things tend to harden.
Despite the company’s considerable commission, hosting is a good earner. The second “b” for breakfast soon eroded as people realised they didn’t have to be there or feed anyone, but could use lets to pay for their holiday, with the first £1,000 a year tax free because UK law rightly encourages lodgers. Now a vast number of Airbnb properties are “entire house/cottage/apartment” rather than a room with a family. It becomes a self-catering let without paying a hotel’s business rate (unless you exceed 140 nights a year and get found out). Crucially it is free from the stringent fire, electrical and safety regulations laid on real hotels and B&Bs.
Next, entrepreneurs realised that it needn’t be your home at all, just a buy-to-let without the hassle of tenancy agreements. Some “hosts” are actually companies listing multiple properties, raising concern about the hollowing-out of desirable neighbourhoods. From Barcelona to Bath, concern rises about profit-seekers distorting the local housing market, dumping long-term tenants and disrupting the lives of those who stay.
In Bath last week councillors complained of their powerlessness against it. From across the world, alongside friendly, happy tales you hear neighbours appalled at suddenly living next to a “party house” where instead of the tolerable racket of occasional festivities perpetrated by familiar neighbours whose names they know, there are months of nonstop loud music, screaming rows, double parking, drug and barbecue smoke. Often small apartments are let to large groups, though Airbnb officially bans it. Some examples are preposterous and rare: one US let advertised as “The Love Shack” seemed to be housing porn shoots.
Others are just intensely annoying. One long-term bedsit tenant found that his absentee landlord had cavalierly put the rest of the house on Airbnb, listing personal property like the tenant’s washer-dryer and fridge as “amenities”. He was unwillingly sharing facilities with a series of messy strangers who let his cat escape and used his towels.
A parliamentary committee discussed Airbnb last year; the formal hospitality industry obviously hates it, since in London, Brighton and Bristol it has already swallowed over a quarter of the market in rooms. But there are wider reasons. Gordon Marsden, the chairman, observed: “There is an image that this is a lot of happy, jolly people with a spare room trying to make some pin money . . . That’s true, but it’s also true that there seem to be systematic attempts to do block booking on blocks of flats.” Some are tall blocks. The risks are obvious.
Slowly authorities wake up and try to tame the beast. The mayor of Honolulu signed a bill to limit even rentals where the owner lives on site. From San Francisco to Edinburgh research shows that a local increase in Airbnb raises the neighbourhood’s rents and house prices. New York has put limits on it, while Japan, Singapore and parts of Spain restrict or ban it. In Greater London you may only do 90 nights without planning permission. Even 90 nights can wreck a neighbour’s peace.
As the committee said, the UK government is slow to take it seriously. Politicians love to boast about Britain’s vibrant attractions, but maybe also it reflects the sentimental unease of an owner-occupier nation, reluctant to tell an Englishman what he can do with his castle. Apart from price inflation and nuisance there is something unhealthy in the idea that, just because a pleasant little scheme grew monstrously profitable, we accept that transients are more valuable than rooted residents. It’s not how to build communities.
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