Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Politics- This is possibly an accurate statement on Spain's current trajectory: The country is now falling into old patterns of behaviour, stretching back over a thousand years, of being in conflict with itself. See the full - pessimistic? - article below.
- What next for the [recently vacated] Valley of the Fallen?
- As we wait for an answer to that, some say that, while Franco might have gone, Francoism hasn't. And, in the form of Vox, is on the way back.
- Meanwhile some (marginally) good news - assuming you ignore the margin of error and accept the accuracy of Spanish statistics which, as usual, are taken to 2 decimal points. To give specious accuracy?
- Another big question - Is Spain ever going to change its ridiculous horario? See here and here on this.
- Perhaps it's not great surprise that the UK is 28th in the table of developed countries providing childcare but it's strange to see Spain well below other EU countries, at no. 14. BTW . . . The USA doesn't figure because there's no nation-wide provision of childcare in that non-communist/ socialist country. American exceptionalism at work:-
2 Norway
3 Iceland
4 Estonia
5 Portugal
6 Germany
6 Denmark
8 Slovenia
9 Luxembourg
10 France
11 Austria
12 Finland
13 Belgium
14 Spain
15 Netherlands
16 Lithuania
Hungary
Latvia
19 Italy
20 Bulgaria
Romania
22 Croatia
23 Poland
24 Czech Republic
25 Malta
26 Slovakia
27 Ireland
28 United Kingdom
29 Cyprus
30 Greece
31 Switzerland
Note: The United States is the only OECD country without nationwide, statutory, paid maternity leave, paternity leave or parental leave. Some states offer paid parental leave insurance programmes to eligible workers (Donovan 2018).
Galician Life
- To my immense surprise, the latest forecast/promise for the AVE high-speed train won't be met. It's not going to arrive in 2020. But will, of course, be in place in 2021. As I keep stressing, the original promise was for 1993. Sic.
- An interesting fact about travelling on the London tube - The shortest trip is a 250m leg between Covent Garden and Leicester Square. An average of at least 862 people did this year, at a cost to them of more than £100,000. Mostly tourists?
- Fromage Bleu! Cheeses from Britain and America have overtaken French rivals at an international cheese competition, drawing scorn from a French newspaper that damned the humiliating defeat as “sacrilege”.
- Ffart has described Democrats as sick and deranged, and Republicans who've criticised him as human scum. More accusations that are confessions.
- So . . . 99% of White Evangelicals oppose impeaching Trump. What impressive solidarity and religiosity. Couldn't they ask Jesus? That said, I'm sure they have, and got the answer they wanted. That's the trouble with God, always eager to please.
- A pleasure to come . . . An official who exposed secret efforts within the White House to undermine the president has promised that a book will reveal the truth about Trump, in his “own words”. “Too many people have confused loyalty to a man with loyalty to the country,” the official writes. “The truth about the president must be spoken, not after Americans have stood in the voting booth to consider whether to give him another term.”
- I bought some shoes last week and was told they'd be delivered on the 30th. Shortly thereafter, I received an emailed receipt and 2 delivery notes confirming this. Then, yesterday, I was told they were arriving that morning. I advised I'd be out at the cited time and was told the deliverer had been advised. So it was a bit of a surprise to find them on the doorstep when we got home. Ignoring the fact this wasn't authorised, this surely amounted to excessive communication? Especially as the saga is continuing with the now obligatory How Did We Do? emails from both the shoe company and the courier company.
- Incidentally, why the 2 adjectives in this (misleading) response from the shoe company? - We’ve received your diversion request and we’ll pass it on to your friendly local courier. Perhaps they should start charging for emails, by the word.
- This is an essay from a blog I enjoy. Older readers will relate to it, I'm sure. While shaking their heads.
Exhuming Franco threatens to reopen Spain’s old hatreds: Jason Webster
In recent years I used to take visitors to the mausoleum of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as part of a tour of the country’s civil war sites. It’s an impressive structure: a basilica carved out of a mountain, capped with a cross 150m tall. But it was always a depressing experience: damp patches stained the granite walls, the vast, bunker-like hall dimly lit and almost empty save for a handful of nuns, an occasional diehard fan, and bored-looking guards on the door. Re-emerging into the light afterwards, the reaction was one of bewilderment: how could this place be still standing in a modern democracy? Could one imagine anything similar today in Germany or Italy?
Yesterday, Spain finally began to deal with perhaps the biggest single reminder of its bloody and brutal 20th-century history. The acting socialist government of Pedro Sánchez, in full campaigning mode ahead of yet another general election, carried out its promise to remove Franco’s remains from The Valley of the Fallen complex. Yet it would be a mistake to view this as a simple matter of right and wrong. Spain is caught in a perpetual struggle against itself in which the past is always weaponised, a live and volatile substance used to attack political opponents. And by digging up Franco, more ammunition has been added to the general mix.
Predictably the far-right party Vox, whose support is growing, was quick to take advantage of Franco’s exhumation, which it said was part of a plan to bring down King Felipe. Meanwhile, the government applauded itself over the move, a useful adjunct to its PR drive to convince the world that Spain is a “consolidated democracy” despite widespread condemnation of the sentences handed down to Catalan separatists.
Spain is in a particularly vulnerable position today. When Franco died in 1975, democracy was rapidly established thanks to an overwhelming desire in the country to leave the dictatorship behind. The collective spirit of the Transición, however, has long since passed, and the country is now falling into old patterns of behaviour, stretching back over a thousand years, of being in conflict with itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current Catalan crisis, which is becoming increasingly dangerous by the day. Every century in Spanish history there has been at least one civil war. Can the 21st century buck the trend? And by exhuming its former fascist ruler, it might not be burying the past for good but instead, awakening a sleeping dragon in those mountains.
Jason Webster is author of Violencia: A New History of Spain — Past, Present and the Future of the West
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