Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Life
- In contrast to that of Galicia, Spain's population grew last year, by 303, 228. It's now more than 47m, against, as I recall, c. 40m before the boom years of the 2000s and massive immigration from South America.
- Every foreign resident in Spain and every travel writer for almost 300 years has experienced - and often written about - Spanish 'localism'. Fascinatingly, the province of León has decided it has 'nothing to do with' the province of Castilla and so wishes to depart from the region of Castilla y León. In furtherance of a new region which will include the provinces of Zamora and Salamanca. I wonder what the chances are of this coming to pass.
- Reader María has advised of a future book that I look forward to reading, set during the Civil War. I'm reminded of this harrowing Almodovar documentary an old UK friend recently told me about and which I was able to get on BBC catchup.
- A week or so ago, I chose to differ with a British woman in Andalucia about what she saw as the very superior Spanish public health service compared with the UK's. I thought of this again when reading that all UK hospitals had, in December, failed to achieve the maximum of 4 hours waiting in Emergencies. A friend here has recently had to take her mother to Urxencias 3 times, each time waiting between 5 and 12 hours - in keeping with my own experience with my ex and my daughters over the years.
Galician Life
- Oh, dear. Pontevedra made the news again, but for all the wrong reasons. Hang on . . . The 'Pontevedra' mentioned is said to be a 'North Sea port'. But we're on the Atlantic . . .
- The tolls on our north-south autopista - the AP9 - are now so high it now costs a lot less to do the journey by train. And it also costs you more than the petrol alone, never mind the other expenses of running a car. So, it's no surprise the traffic on the highway is light.
- I see the cycle has begun once again down at Pontevedra's Sunday flea market. The unlicensed gypsies are back in force. And I doubt it's just for Xmas. I imagine it'll be 12-24 months before the police oust them yet again.
The USA
- More from the trenches of Ffart's 'war on reality'.
The Way of the World/Social Media
- Smartphones, social media and self-service, coupled with the erosion of civic spaces, have left us more isolated than ever. The 2010s has been the decade of increasing disconnection; a time when we have grown farther apart from each other, from nature, from shared experiences. A time when convenience, technology and austerity have conspired to inch us away from some of the most satisfying parts of being human. If we were packing a time capsule to capture the Great Disconnection it would contain only one item: a smartphone. If anyone were to visit us from previous eras, they would assume these ubiquitous rectangles were portals to our gods. The trouble is that we are creatures made for face-to-face contact, not screen-to-screen contact. Our brains are primed to socialise with our own small tribe, not thousands of strangers on Twitter. When interacting the old-fashioned way we get hits of oxytocin, dopamine and the natural opiate beta-endorphins. The returns from online interaction don’t compare.
Nutters and Shysters Corner
- You just have to laugh at the travails of US incels.
Spanish
- Words of the Day: Trono: Throne. Trona: Child's highchair
Finally
- Here's an end-of-the-decade quiz for you. A decade in which, alleges the author, social media fuelled division, gender fluidity turned into a torrent and freedom of speech took a battering. At least in the UK:-
Rod Liddle’s politically incorrect Quiz of the Decade
Were you paying attention over the past 10 years?
OK, boomers — wassup? I’ll tell you wassup. This was the decade you got left behind. You may have been out and about, but only in a semiconscious state. You were emphatically not woke. In the past 10 years there has been a cultural upheaval and you were not part of it. I bet you don’t even know what “cis” means, and even if you do, I bet you never use it to refer to people. As in, for example: “Darling, would you like to hear this joke I heard from the cis man in the butcher’s?” I mean, if you really werea woke edgelord you wouldn’t be in a butcher’s either, unless it was to howl abuse at the staff and customers and maybe liberate a side of beef and give it a proper secular burial.
And you wouldn’t be telling jokes because, according to Marcuse, a sense of humour is the last refuge of the bourgeois. And the “darling” you refer to wouldn’t be your boringly straight wife. It would be a transgendered parrot or something.
Anyway, cis is short for cisgender and refers to someone whose current gender is the same as the one they were “assigned” at birth. Yes, I know — scientifically that means everyone. It’s all there in the chromosomes. It is an indisputable fact. But don’t come the essentialist with me, boomer. For the generations that have followed you — the millennialists and now the zoomers — science and fact are an irrelevance.
They can be anything they want to be, utterly unconstrained from the suffocating straitjacket of, er, reality. White people can be black, or Chinese, or Tamil. People born male can be female or something in between. Today you can identify as anything you like and nobody will gainsay you. Or some old tossers might, but they are bigots and should be paid no mind.
And today there is a hierarchy about what you can be. It used to be all about equality, which seemed a reasonable goal to attain. Not any more. In these woke times, if you are gay, it is better than being straight. If you are transgendered, it is better than being “cis”. If you are black, it is better than being white. If you are a vegan, it is better than being a carnivore.
Gender and sexuality has changed, if not in reality, then in what passes for sentience among the younger generation. There are now an infinite number of ways in which you can express your desire, and furthermore claim, when people like me raise an eyebrow, that you were biologically hardwired to behave that way, despite the total lack of evidence for such a claim.
The number of very young children transitioning at the Tavistock Centre increases exponentially each year. We may soon see an end to women’s sport, as more and more athletic and sporting titles are held by ladies who aren’t really ladies at all. Lesbians fear that girls who might have become lesbians will be shepherded into transitioning while young and that the species will therefore soon become extinct, and we will need a special reintroduction programme, like we’ve done with beavers in the West Country and Kent.
Meanwhile, almost everything is racist and almost everything is the consequence of cultural appropriation. And among the young, mysterious new tribes emerge seemingly each week.
You may find all this extremely liberating. Or you may, like me, find it the natural consequence of an incalculably narcissistic, deluded and perpetually indulged culture and that the concomitant rise in mental health issues is really no coincidence. Whatever, here’s a quiz to see how alert you’ve been these past 10 years. And I oop? No kidding.
TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE
1. In 2016, the National Union of Students voted to remove special representation from which of the following groups, saying they were not oppressed and often misogynistic?
A Lunatics
B Students
C Gay men
D Women
2. Which of the following did the idiotic Huffington Post worry might be racist in 2018?
A Air
B Water
C Bees
D Milk
3. Demisexual is a term referring to people who have sexual relations only when...
A They have all their clothes on
B They have known their partner for a long time
C They are watching the film Ghost
D They are only partly conscious
4. Which of the following Harry Potter characters did the author JK Rowling, somewhat retrospectively, decide was actually black?
A Hermione Granger
B Hagrid
C Harry Potter
D Those swooping bat things — dementors or something
5. In 2018, the black vlogger and commentator Candace Owens was hounded out of a restaurant in the US by white liberal Antifa activists because, they argued, she was...
A Not using her cutlery appropriately
B Not choosing from the “meat free” options
C A white supremacist
D Not in the right part of the restaurant for black people
6. What subset of teenagers are known for carrying Hydro Flasks and saying, somewhat mystifyingly, “And I oop” and “Sksksksksksk”?
A Roadmen
B VSCO girls
C E-girls
D Mad lads
7. The Israeli Eurovision winner Netta Barzilai and US singer Katy Perry were both condemned for the cultural appropriation of which form of dress?
A Palestinian national costume
B Geisha
C Sombrero
D Burqa
8. The ultra-woke US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez considered which of the following vegetables to be responsible for colonialist oppression?
A Turnip
B Okra
C Cauliflower
D Mangetout
9. In 2013, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard caused a #MeToo outrage in his party when it was revealed that he had asked a female colleague if she would like a...
A Cup of coffee
B Threesome with that Swinson lass
C Tickets to the annual Lib Dem conference
D Box of Milk Tray
10. A painting by the 17th-century Flemish artist Frans Snyders was removed this year from Hughes Hall, Cambridge University, because it might cause offence to which group of people?
A Walloons
B Druids
C Women
D Vegans
11. In 2015, the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow posed proudly with which object as part of a terribly right-on campaign?
A Labour Party membership card
B Golliwog
C Tampon
D Male contraceptive device
12. The US professor Rochelle Gutierrez announced that which of the following was responsible for underpinning white supremacy in society?
A Books
B Trees
C Cheese
D Mathematics
13. In 2019, the University and College Union in Britain decided it was OK for white folks to identify as black, so long as they...
A Were attending a job interview
B Blacked up properly
C Were dancing
D Felt like it
14. Adidas produced a training shoe to celebrate Black History Month, but quickly withdrew the product because it...
A Was entirely white
B Had a design that looked a bit like a swastika
C Contained cotton and was therefore racist
D Fell apart at the seams after a short jog
15. The term pansexual defines people who have sex...
A In the kitchen
B With goats
C With everything
D While dressed as daemons
16. Furries are a subset of the population who...
A Enjoy sex while dressed as animals
B Have copious bodily hair
C Skin cats for fun
D Take “comfort animals” on public transport
17. At what age was the youngest child referred to the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Centre in London for potentially invasive transitioning surgery?
A 3
B 6
C 9
D 12
18. The cricketer Maxine Blythin recently improved her batting average from a meagre 15 to a remarkable 124. How, chiefly, was this success achieved?
A Long hours of training and practice
B She hired Sir Geoffrey Boycott to coach her
C She bought a new bat
D She transitioned from being a man and now competes against women
19. What is a Terf?
A Small patch of grass
B Totally excellent radical feminist
C Trans-exclusionary radical feminist
D Small furry figure, like a gonk
20. The students’ union at Lincoln University banned the college’s Conservative Society because it had...
A Held a Third Reich fancy-dress party
B Burnt £10 notes in front of poor people
C Invited Jacob Rees-Mogg to speak on campus
D Objected to limitations on freedom of speech at the university
ANSWERS
1 C Gay “cis” men are frequently riven with prejudice against other groups with “protected characteristics”, the NUS decided.
2 D Milk “has long been used as a symbol for and tool of white supremacy”, Huff Post reported, and also noted that “people of colour are more likely to report symptoms of lactose intolerance”.
3 B Demisexual is one of a thousand new descriptions for sexual orientation and, frankly, the only one that is remotely decent.
4 A Which is odd, as Rowling was there at the casting for Hermione. She also later decided that Professor Dumbledore was gay.
5 C Owens is a Conservative. As she eloquently put it: “Liberals believe that they own blacks — still. They believe there’s something proprietary about being black in this country, and if you deviate from the way they want you to think, in the way they want you to act, they grow violent.”
6 B Somewhat derisive appellation for a largely middle-class set of girls, taken from the online photography app they supposedly use, VSCO.
7 B Well, it could have been any. “My culture is not your fancy-dress costume — #appropriation.”
8 C She was talking about allotments. Far better to plant yucca instead, the madwoman insisted.
9 A After years of investigation, Rennard was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, despite the obviously loathsome and outrageous nature of his invitation.
10 D Entitled The Fowl Market, the painting contained depictions of dead birds and animals. A number of snowflakes melted on the spot.
11 C It was an attempt to “break the taboo” surrounding menstruation. Snow held the tampon by the little string on its end, as if it were a dead mouse.
12 D “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness,” Gutierrez added. Ban it! Bet she got awful grades.
13 D The ridiculous far-left union prides itself on always recognising the right of people to identify as anything they want, even when they’re palpably not — including, one supposes, identifying as academics.
14 A “Hmm. Now, what colour should we make our shoes for Black History Month?” Lots of objections.
15 C The “fill your boots” preference. Very different from another new subset, the dacryphiliacs, who become sexually aroused from hearing people crying. Including their parents, I imagine.
16 A Please do not confuse these people with plushophiles, who find sexual satisfactions with teddy bears.
17 A In fact, in 2018 the clinic treated 10 children aged between three and four years and another 80 between four and seven years. All easily old enough to make their minds up, I’m sure. Numbers have increased fourfold in the past three years.
18 D Asked how she viewed herself, the six-footer said: “A woman, simple as. I always have felt that way, I’ve always wanted to articulate it as such.”
19 C People such as Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill. Viewed with detestation by the somewhat vocal trans activists.
20 D According to a Spiked online survey, Lincoln is one of Britain’s worst universities for freedom of speech — along with Oxford and Edinburgh. Buckingham is best.
Were you paying attention over the past 10 years?
OK, boomers — wassup? I’ll tell you wassup. This was the decade you got left behind. You may have been out and about, but only in a semiconscious state. You were emphatically not woke. In the past 10 years there has been a cultural upheaval and you were not part of it. I bet you don’t even know what “cis” means, and even if you do, I bet you never use it to refer to people. As in, for example: “Darling, would you like to hear this joke I heard from the cis man in the butcher’s?” I mean, if you really werea woke edgelord you wouldn’t be in a butcher’s either, unless it was to howl abuse at the staff and customers and maybe liberate a side of beef and give it a proper secular burial.
And you wouldn’t be telling jokes because, according to Marcuse, a sense of humour is the last refuge of the bourgeois. And the “darling” you refer to wouldn’t be your boringly straight wife. It would be a transgendered parrot or something.
Anyway, cis is short for cisgender and refers to someone whose current gender is the same as the one they were “assigned” at birth. Yes, I know — scientifically that means everyone. It’s all there in the chromosomes. It is an indisputable fact. But don’t come the essentialist with me, boomer. For the generations that have followed you — the millennialists and now the zoomers — science and fact are an irrelevance.
They can be anything they want to be, utterly unconstrained from the suffocating straitjacket of, er, reality. White people can be black, or Chinese, or Tamil. People born male can be female or something in between. Today you can identify as anything you like and nobody will gainsay you. Or some old tossers might, but they are bigots and should be paid no mind.
And today there is a hierarchy about what you can be. It used to be all about equality, which seemed a reasonable goal to attain. Not any more. In these woke times, if you are gay, it is better than being straight. If you are transgendered, it is better than being “cis”. If you are black, it is better than being white. If you are a vegan, it is better than being a carnivore.
Gender and sexuality has changed, if not in reality, then in what passes for sentience among the younger generation. There are now an infinite number of ways in which you can express your desire, and furthermore claim, when people like me raise an eyebrow, that you were biologically hardwired to behave that way, despite the total lack of evidence for such a claim.
The number of very young children transitioning at the Tavistock Centre increases exponentially each year. We may soon see an end to women’s sport, as more and more athletic and sporting titles are held by ladies who aren’t really ladies at all. Lesbians fear that girls who might have become lesbians will be shepherded into transitioning while young and that the species will therefore soon become extinct, and we will need a special reintroduction programme, like we’ve done with beavers in the West Country and Kent.
Meanwhile, almost everything is racist and almost everything is the consequence of cultural appropriation. And among the young, mysterious new tribes emerge seemingly each week.
You may find all this extremely liberating. Or you may, like me, find it the natural consequence of an incalculably narcissistic, deluded and perpetually indulged culture and that the concomitant rise in mental health issues is really no coincidence. Whatever, here’s a quiz to see how alert you’ve been these past 10 years. And I oop? No kidding.
TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE
1. In 2016, the National Union of Students voted to remove special representation from which of the following groups, saying they were not oppressed and often misogynistic?
A Lunatics
B Students
C Gay men
D Women
2. Which of the following did the idiotic Huffington Post worry might be racist in 2018?
A Air
B Water
C Bees
D Milk
3. Demisexual is a term referring to people who have sexual relations only when...
A They have all their clothes on
B They have known their partner for a long time
C They are watching the film Ghost
D They are only partly conscious
4. Which of the following Harry Potter characters did the author JK Rowling, somewhat retrospectively, decide was actually black?
A Hermione Granger
B Hagrid
C Harry Potter
D Those swooping bat things — dementors or something
5. In 2018, the black vlogger and commentator Candace Owens was hounded out of a restaurant in the US by white liberal Antifa activists because, they argued, she was...
A Not using her cutlery appropriately
B Not choosing from the “meat free” options
C A white supremacist
D Not in the right part of the restaurant for black people
6. What subset of teenagers are known for carrying Hydro Flasks and saying, somewhat mystifyingly, “And I oop” and “Sksksksksksk”?
A Roadmen
B VSCO girls
C E-girls
D Mad lads
7. The Israeli Eurovision winner Netta Barzilai and US singer Katy Perry were both condemned for the cultural appropriation of which form of dress?
A Palestinian national costume
B Geisha
C Sombrero
D Burqa
8. The ultra-woke US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez considered which of the following vegetables to be responsible for colonialist oppression?
A Turnip
B Okra
C Cauliflower
D Mangetout
9. In 2013, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard caused a #MeToo outrage in his party when it was revealed that he had asked a female colleague if she would like a...
A Cup of coffee
B Threesome with that Swinson lass
C Tickets to the annual Lib Dem conference
D Box of Milk Tray
10. A painting by the 17th-century Flemish artist Frans Snyders was removed this year from Hughes Hall, Cambridge University, because it might cause offence to which group of people?
A Walloons
B Druids
C Women
D Vegans
11. In 2015, the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow posed proudly with which object as part of a terribly right-on campaign?
A Labour Party membership card
B Golliwog
C Tampon
D Male contraceptive device
12. The US professor Rochelle Gutierrez announced that which of the following was responsible for underpinning white supremacy in society?
A Books
B Trees
C Cheese
D Mathematics
13. In 2019, the University and College Union in Britain decided it was OK for white folks to identify as black, so long as they...
A Were attending a job interview
B Blacked up properly
C Were dancing
D Felt like it
14. Adidas produced a training shoe to celebrate Black History Month, but quickly withdrew the product because it...
A Was entirely white
B Had a design that looked a bit like a swastika
C Contained cotton and was therefore racist
D Fell apart at the seams after a short jog
15. The term pansexual defines people who have sex...
A In the kitchen
B With goats
C With everything
D While dressed as daemons
16. Furries are a subset of the population who...
A Enjoy sex while dressed as animals
B Have copious bodily hair
C Skin cats for fun
D Take “comfort animals” on public transport
17. At what age was the youngest child referred to the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Centre in London for potentially invasive transitioning surgery?
A 3
B 6
C 9
D 12
18. The cricketer Maxine Blythin recently improved her batting average from a meagre 15 to a remarkable 124. How, chiefly, was this success achieved?
A Long hours of training and practice
B She hired Sir Geoffrey Boycott to coach her
C She bought a new bat
D She transitioned from being a man and now competes against women
19. What is a Terf?
A Small patch of grass
B Totally excellent radical feminist
C Trans-exclusionary radical feminist
D Small furry figure, like a gonk
20. The students’ union at Lincoln University banned the college’s Conservative Society because it had...
A Held a Third Reich fancy-dress party
B Burnt £10 notes in front of poor people
C Invited Jacob Rees-Mogg to speak on campus
D Objected to limitations on freedom of speech at the university
ANSWERS
1 C Gay “cis” men are frequently riven with prejudice against other groups with “protected characteristics”, the NUS decided.
2 D Milk “has long been used as a symbol for and tool of white supremacy”, Huff Post reported, and also noted that “people of colour are more likely to report symptoms of lactose intolerance”.
3 B Demisexual is one of a thousand new descriptions for sexual orientation and, frankly, the only one that is remotely decent.
4 A Which is odd, as Rowling was there at the casting for Hermione. She also later decided that Professor Dumbledore was gay.
5 C Owens is a Conservative. As she eloquently put it: “Liberals believe that they own blacks — still. They believe there’s something proprietary about being black in this country, and if you deviate from the way they want you to think, in the way they want you to act, they grow violent.”
6 B Somewhat derisive appellation for a largely middle-class set of girls, taken from the online photography app they supposedly use, VSCO.
7 B Well, it could have been any. “My culture is not your fancy-dress costume — #appropriation.”
8 C She was talking about allotments. Far better to plant yucca instead, the madwoman insisted.
9 A After years of investigation, Rennard was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, despite the obviously loathsome and outrageous nature of his invitation.
10 D Entitled The Fowl Market, the painting contained depictions of dead birds and animals. A number of snowflakes melted on the spot.
11 C It was an attempt to “break the taboo” surrounding menstruation. Snow held the tampon by the little string on its end, as if it were a dead mouse.
12 D “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness,” Gutierrez added. Ban it! Bet she got awful grades.
13 D The ridiculous far-left union prides itself on always recognising the right of people to identify as anything they want, even when they’re palpably not — including, one supposes, identifying as academics.
14 A “Hmm. Now, what colour should we make our shoes for Black History Month?” Lots of objections.
15 C The “fill your boots” preference. Very different from another new subset, the dacryphiliacs, who become sexually aroused from hearing people crying. Including their parents, I imagine.
16 A Please do not confuse these people with plushophiles, who find sexual satisfactions with teddy bears.
17 A In fact, in 2018 the clinic treated 10 children aged between three and four years and another 80 between four and seven years. All easily old enough to make their minds up, I’m sure. Numbers have increased fourfold in the past three years.
18 D Asked how she viewed herself, the six-footer said: “A woman, simple as. I always have felt that way, I’ve always wanted to articulate it as such.”
19 C People such as Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill. Viewed with detestation by the somewhat vocal trans activists.
20 D According to a Spiked online survey, Lincoln is one of Britain’s worst universities for freedom of speech — along with Oxford and Edinburgh. Buckingham is best.
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