Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Politics- All as predicted in yesterday's elections. The dramatic difference was the huge surge in votes for far-right Vox, led by a gender-violence denier who wants to clamp down on immigration and makes repeated calls for 'patriotism'. In April, Vox gained 24 seats but this has now more than doubled to 52, making it the 3rd political force in the country.
- The big loser was the once-rising 'centrist' party, Ciudadanos, whose total fell from 57 in April to just 10, putting its future in jeopardy. The question is - Which party will its rump voters shift to? Probably, I guess, to several of the bigger boys, Left and Right.
- In a word . . . The result means that neither the left-wing bloc nor the right-wing bloc have enough seats to pass the threshold required for a majority. It means the PM will have to reach agreements with other parties to be invested on the first vote. Which he didn't succeed in doing the last time round and probably won't this time either. Meaning continued deadlock. Or. As the Times puts it this morning: Spain’s political system was left more fragmented and polarised after an election that was intended to return stability. And: The number of parties represented in parliament rose from 13 to 17.
- Here's the electoral map. Note the blue sector in the (conservative) NW
- And here's profile of the Vox leader. A taster: "If you look at polls, he's very popular amongst his voters but it's not his charisma that is driving voters," said Ignacio Jurado, a politics expert at Madrid's Carlos III University. "What has made the party successful is the crisis with Catalonia and the fact that the mainstream parties were unable to address it."
- A Spanish perspective: If governance was difficult before and leaders apparently lacked the ability of forming stable alliances, now the picture is even more complicated. In fact all the leaders except VOX and the separatists have failed, although no one admits it or takes responsibility. . . . The thesis of mediocre governments that describe democracies these days is perfectly fulfilled in the Spanish case. More here.
- Finally, here's The Local on the 'meteoric rise of Vox.
- I guess Spain may benefit from the decision - notwithstanding the damaging collapse of Thomas Cook - to enter the package holiday market.
- Talking of mediocre governments and oppositions . . . The December elections in the UK will almost certainly result in another hung parliament and continued uncertainty - a word which classifies for the term 'famous British understatement'.
- Talking of labels for Brits . . . British reserve is as much a part of the national stereotype as excessive tea drinking and complaining about the weather. Now research shows that it is accurate: more than half of us secretly admit to being a wallflower. But . . . The findings suggest that we should stop worrying about what other people think of us, as they are too busy worrying about themselves.
- Fewer than half of British students consistently support freedom of speech and 40% favour censorship and no-platforming of controversial speakers. A “culture of conformity” may also be having an effect on undergraduates, who are often too intimidated to espouse unpopular views on campus. The danger is that academic freedom is being significantly violated due, in particular, to forms of political discrimination.
- Dear Dog: Amazon plans for a future where Alexa is everywhere – and runs our lives. Alexa may already be capable of controlling more than 85,000 smart home products but in future, there'll be a far brainier Alexa - which will intuitively understand our needs and desires and become a proactive companion, prodding us into things we should or shouldn’t do rather serving us as a passive assistant. Time to bankrupt Amazon by mass avoidance/desertion??
- Back to British reserve . . . The growth of social media may be exacerbating shyness, particularly among the young, as they have fewer opportunities to hone interpersonal skills because they communicate more online.
- Why 'wallflower'? Wiki: This flower grows on old walls. The colloquial sense of "A woman who sits by the wall at parties, often for want of a partner" is first recorded 1820.
- Driving south yesterday I was musing, as you do, on Northern English accents and wondering how much they owe to Scandinavian influences of a thousand years ago. So, I was naturally interested in the article below.
- I do wonder if the Danish invaders/settlers all called each other 'Love', as virtually everyone in the North West - and other northern outposts - does.
- Heading south on the M6, I noted that, even on 'quiet' Sunday, there are inevitably long jams in both directions. Not helped by the many miles of roadworks engendered by the transformation of the M6 into a 'smart motorway'. Jams, like the poor, are always with us. At least for some years yet.
Our dialects are the last surviving bridges back into England’s past
One of the star exhibits at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is a small bottle of silvered glass, sealed with wax. Attached to it is a handwritten label recording that it was collected in 1915 from an old lady living in Hove, who remarked, “They do say there be a witch in it, and if you let him out there’ll be a peck of trouble.” The peck as a unit of volume became obsolete in 1826, but the term evidently lingered in metaphorical form almost a century later
Do old ladies in Hove still speak of “a peck of trouble”? Does the term “deediiy”, recorded as a “genuine Hampshire” by Mary Russell Mitford in Our Village, survive to this day? We are about to find out, for in 2021, researchers from the University of Leeds will embark on the largest survey of English dialect since the 1950s.
The original survey, conducted across 313 mostly rural sites, favoured “old men with good teeth” as the most likely repositories of dialect terms, and its field workers encountered vexing obstacles to their research: one reported having to wear old clothes to gain the trust of wary villagers.
The 21st-century dialect hunters will probably not find it necessary to outfit themselves in ancient cords held up with baler twine; nor will they confine their attention to greybeards with gleaming gnashers. Instead they will go in search of what the survey’s leader, Dr Fiona Douglas, called “language that allows you to bridge the gap of time”.
More of it may survive than we imagine. Such romantic chroniclers of rural life as John Stewart Collis, and more recently Robert Macfarlane, whose book, Landmarks, celebrates “the power of language to shape our sense of place”, tend towards the dying fall when recording the decline of regional vocabulary. “Language deficit leads to attention deficit”, Macfarlane warns.
Yet as Dr Douglas points out, people have been issuing some version of that dire prediction since the 18th century. Language has the quicksilver power to adapt to change, almost before we are aware of it; yet change is not necessarily loss. There is a faint whiff of taxidermy about the glossary of arcane place-words collected in Landmarks; but when the Leeds survey is complete, it will be intriguing to discover how much of local linguistic idiosyncrasy survives, in a realm now so intensely preoccupied with the assertion of its distinctive national identity.
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