Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Politics- Says El País: Spain’s PM has a governing deal; now he needs to sell it to Congress: See here for more.
- Nasty developments down South. And news of a relevant book. Whose authors, surprisingly, are still with us.
- And here's news of a dying art, which reminded me of an exhibition of statuettes of these folk in the stunning parador of San/Santo Estebo/Estevo near Ourense, here in Galicia. Website here.
- Galicians - perhaps even more than Spaniards as a whole - are inured to delays in public projects and simply don't believe any forecast, let alone 'promise'. And who can blame then when the AVE high-speed train link is coming up for 30(sic) years late. I was reminded of this when noting this chart in a local paper yesterday:-
The USA
- Yet another chap whom we can assume Ffart 'hardly knew' has been convicted of obstruction of justice, hiding evidence and lying to the House Intelligence Committee while testifying under oath during an investigation into Russian hacking of Democratic email accounts. How many more of them are there, one wonders. And do any AlwaysTrumpers care?
- A nice bit from one of my favoured Sunday morning columnists - Rod Liddle of the Sunday Times: I was once sitting on a fairly crowded commuter train when a flea jumped out of my hair and started hopping about on the table, presumably searching for a more congenial host. “Ha, look at that little fella go!” I said, trying to cover my mortification. It was 5.30am, Salisbury to London. Everybody saw the flea. Nobody said anything. They just looked repulsed. Fair enough, I suppose. If I had had my wits about me, I would have reported them to the police for putting on a “bad face” and thus discomfiting me. See below for the rest of the article.
- Another of my favourite 'reactionaries' is Camilla Long, also of the Times. Liberal culture, she writes today, is one of the few popular cultures that hasn’t been shut down or bled to death, but has eaten everything that is good and noble around it. Its necrotising, halitotic dominance is now total — it is killing books, film, television and comedy and it is killing feminism dead. The full article is also below.
- Every year, it seems, there's a different form of nasty grass, weed or plant which takes over my garden. Helped this year by 7 weeks of incessant rain. (Of which only 7 days in October were free in Pontevedra, I understand). This year it's this stuff, taking over the earth between what passes for my lawn and the ivy hedges:-
Anyone know what it is? Not bloody Japanese knot-weed, I hope.
THE ARTICLES
1. As sure as eggs is eggs, our police help a nation of narcissists take offence: Rod Liddle
I was once sitting on a fairly crowded commuter train when a flea jumped out of my hair and started hopping about on the table, presumably searching for a more congenial host. “Ha, look at that little fella go!” I said, trying to cover my mortification. It was 5.30am, Salisbury to London. Everybody saw the flea. Nobody said anything. They just looked repulsed. Fair enough, I suppose. If I had had my wits about me, I would have reported them to the police for putting on a “bad face” and thus discomfiting me.
The flea wasn’t my fault. My then wife had taken in a vile cat, which was ridden with them. It later got flattened by a Mondeo on the A36. I thought this entirely just and held a small party, with wine and crisps.
I suppose it is antisocial to sit on a crowded train while ridden with fleas, but at least I didn’t do so knowingly. Far worse, I would argue, is the behaviour of Erika Stoter, who routinely eats boiled eggs on her 6am commuter train from Chelmsford to Liverpool Street in central London. A woman called Samantha Mead quite rightly told her that this was disgusting: foul for the people around her. Did Stoter look shamefaced? Not a bit of it. She reported Mead to the police for racially aggravated something.
There was not even the vaguest suggestion that Mead’s comments had been occasioned by Stoter’s race (she is apparently Brazilian). It was about her antisocial habit and, perhaps, her utter lack of regard for fellow travellers.
Stoter’s excuse was that her diet required her to eat boiled eggs at precisely that time. This is the point. Her fatuous diet took precedence over the sensibilities of all her fellow passengers: me first, you don’t matter.
If you are me, and slightly unhinged, you might argue that this is evidence of a dystopian, atomised and narcissistic society in which communal togetherness has been sacrificed for an indulgent and infantile “don’t judge me!” liberalism, to the detriment of us all. If indeed there is such a thing as society, to the modern mindset — rather than a random agglomeration of disconnected individuals, all of whom are determined to Do Their Thing, and sod everyone else. That is a very modish way to live your life, especially in cities with their transience and lack of communities.
Or you might just think Stoter is selfish. Whatever, Stoter also complained that Mead put on a “bad face” — which I think means she looked annoyed — and Mead was fined £750 and ordered to pay £750 to Stoter, which should keep her in boiled eggs for the next year or so. I think Mead should have been made an OBE, but that is not the gist of this piece and you may disagree.
Why in the name of Jesus H Christ was this allowed to come to court? You may be pro the eating of eggs on crowded trains — in which case, please don’t get on mine — but even so, we can agree on this, surely. Being moaned at by a grumpy woman (it was very early) may be unpleasant, but in what possible way is it worth the considerable expense of bringing the case to court?
And yet this is the thing with our police these days. They have somehow become convinced that the greatest threat to social cohesion is not burglaries, muggings or being stabbed in the throat on your way home from the pub, but an almost endless litany of stuff that is actually of no real consequence, engenders no real loss or injury, but merely causes momentary pique or is responsible for having “given offence” to people who have skin more easily violable than is the surface tension of water.
Perhaps the police find these imaginary crimes amenable because, unlike burglaries, they require very little in the way of investigation. As with those largely imaginary hate crimes online — it’s easy to find the perp from your desk in the local nick. No dusting for prints, no forensics.
But it is also the modern mindset of the Old Bill, which now believes that these political crimes (as they used to call them in the good old Soviet Union ) are vitally important, far more so than the loss of property, for example. We have “woke” police who no longer inhabit the real world, who cannot tell right from wrong. In this they have been aided and abetted by elected police commissioners who have politicised each force over which they preside — a truly awful innovation that we should do away with right now.
Increasingly, the real crimes go unsolved while the coppers scurry around protecting the sensibilities of narcissists. And just wait until there’s 20,000 more of them, avidly rooting out every imaginary offence.
2. In Hillary Clinton’s book the only good feminists are women like her, but slightly less successful: Camilla Long
If you spend too much time on social media, you will know that the world is divided into People Who Are Acceptable and People Who Are Not. People who are acceptable “burn with injustice” and gush over Greta and in spite of being celebrated as “outspoken” or “rebellious” and “controversial” in their professional lives, would rather die than challenge the current demonic orthodoxy for fear of not getting 2,000 retweets per “pithy” political observation.
It is a depressing world in which the television presenter Richard Osman can blindly receive 34,000 likes for ridiculously suggesting that the comedian Bob Mortimer should be made prime minister, while anyone who doesn’t immediately agree that Bob should be given the nuclear codes is in for a vituperative pile-on, tacitly presided over by “liberal” celebrities (I use the word loosely).
Liberal culture is one of the few popular cultures that hasn’t been shut down or bled to death, but it has eaten everything that is good and noble around it. Its necrotising, halitotic dominance is now total — it is killing books, film, television and comedy and it is killing feminism dead.
It is responsible, for example, for money-spinning tosh like Hillary Clinton’s gruntily titled new book, Gutsy Women — a list not of women who’ve actually achieved things but women who’ve achieved things in the “right” way. Scan its pages and you will see the stories of women who are dead or strategically less successful than Hillary is. She believes that the best way to be a feminist — sorry, a “hero” — is by “knocking down barriers for others”.
The worst way to be a feminist is being Margaret Thatcher, obviously. On a whistlestop publicity tour of London last week, Clinton said she hadn’t included our former prime minister on the grounds that Thatcher wasn’t “trying to make a positive difference” — although she could easily have said it was because she wasn’t Ellen DeGeneres or Ugly Betty’s America Ferrera or “organiser Ai-jen Poo” or a “deafblind young woman” or an actress in a wheelchair, or a Chinese gynaecologist you’ve never heard of, or a Japanese mountaineer her daughter and co-author Chelsea Clinton I guess found on Wikipedia. I don’t think Thatcher was perfect, but it’s a weird old world when the only true definition of being feminist is being mates with Hillary Clinton.
And it’s funny the way some feminists talk about other women, isn’t it? I’m not spiritually against Clinton’s idea that women should be nice to other women at work or help them in their jobs. But no one would dream of talking about ethnic minorities in this manner, would they? No one would repeatedly burden successful black people with the question: “And what have you done to help other black people?”
Yet it seems legitimate constantly to ask women this question, and to tear down any successful woman who hasn’t helped other women or done womanning the “right way”. Even at the peak of their success, women are required to cringe and cavil and do more and be better — to serve others — as if they should somehow pay penance for their good fortune.
As it happens I cannot see any way in which Ellen DeGeneres has broken down barriers or “made a positive difference” any more than Thatcher did. Chelsea says DeGeneres was “trailblazing” for coming out on live television but there is nothing more trailblazing than humiliating your entire cabinet or recovering from an IRA bombing.
DeGeneres can lead by example — but somehow Maggie can’t? Gutsy Women isn’t a book of feminist icons — it’s a list of people who think the same as Hillary. And what, pray, of her personal brand of feminism? To say it does not bear scrutiny is like saying Bill Clinton once slightly misplaced a cigar.
How can you be such an amazing feminist when you’ve married a man more successful than you are and let your own career take a back seat to his?
How can you say you’re an amazing feminist when you’ve colluded in the vilification of all the women he’s groped or shagged before tragically taking him back?
How is it feminist to use your husband’s name and contacts to launch a political career that will end in letting a weapons-grade misogynist into the White House — the pussy-grabber, of all people — before hauling your daughter around the TV shows in a shameless show of nepotism to flog a book on feminism? And she has the audacity to criticise Thatcher, who actually won not one national election, but three.
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