Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain*
The C Word- What lies behind Spain's failure to get on top of things.
- The lessons to be learnt? Or is this premature?
- Err . . . The graph might just be improving/getting less worrying in Italy, Spain and the UK. Though not yet in the USA - despite the 'fabulous performance' of Trump and his government. The virus there is as nasty as reporters, columnists and state governors.
- María's Chronicle Day 17.
- Below, as the 1st article, A postcard from down South, where the screw is now very tight indeed.
- Who'd have thought it? The adoption of dogs is on the up and up. Have they not been told that A dog is not only for a pandemic?
- Well, what did you expect from the bullfighting community?
- Here's one way to alleviate boredom.
- And here's another - riskier - way.
- Well, I did get a plumber to come yesterday, to investigate the 3 water leaks I've been having. The first had stopped, so that wasn't relevant. The second - under my bath - had a simple explanation unconnected with a leaking pipe. I'll leave the details as it'd embarrass me to reveal them. How we laughed. And the 3rd didn't have any explanation other than too much water around the kitchen taps and poor sealant around the sink. Strangely, the visit ended with me getting a quote for significant expenditure on an improved shower in my bathroom.
- The gypsy beggar has now come to my gate 4 days running and seems to do this with total impunity. One wonders why.
- The 2nd article below begins with: The coronavirus pandemic has ripped away the EU’s mask of unity and now poses an existential threat to the European Project, and ends with: Brussels prides itself on using any crisis to push forward the cause of greater European integration. So far, the EU has only succeeded in exacerbating its divisions. See the meat in this sandwich below.
Spanish
- Words of the day:-
- To Spurt (out): Salir a chorros; Borrobotar: Chorrear
- To Splurt (out): Soltar [Maybe]
- An old (Scouse) friend has given me this rhyming slang explanation of gruns: Solomon Grundies; Undies. Just one of the many words Perry cited in the Comments for yesterday.
- By pure coincidence, another northern dialect word cropped up yesterday - Nesh. The internet gives these meanings: 1. (Especially of a person) Weak and delicate; feeble. 2. An English dialect word meaning 'unusually susceptible to cold weather'. The word is said to come from Old English 'hnesce' meaning feeble, weak, or infirm and to be cognate with the 16th century Dutch word nesch typically meaning damp or foolish. The internet claims there no synonyms for nest, which must offer Perry a huge challenge for this morning.
- A neighbour has taken to exercising by going into the woods for a long walk as soon as it gets dark, talking a bagful of rubbish to the contender en route. He's told me this morning that that last night, as he was nearing the brighter spot of the entrance to the granite carvers' school, a very large but misshapen dog walked across the path about 10metres in front of him. He thought it was another neighbour's mastiff but then recalled this had died a couple of years ago. Then he saw the tusks and realised it was a large male wild boar. I understand he's thinking of changing his routine but I've assured him that a net search suggests there's very little risk of an unthreatened/ unprovoked boar attacking him. Neither of us had ever heard of a boar this close to human habitation here, so wonder what it portends.
1. A postcard from Spain, where the Marines have arrived to enforce our draconian lockdown: Alexander Fiske-Harrison, the Telegraph.
Those who questioned my last postcard from Andalusia, where I spoke of “martial law in all but name”, should be under no illusion about the Spanish style of lockdown
The Marines rolled into town on Friday to ‘support’ the police and the Guardia Civil. Admittedly they arrived in olive green pick-up trucks, not Humvees or 4-tonners, and were only kitted out with 9mm pistols strapped to their thighs, not full assault rifles, but those who questioned my last postcard from Andalusia, where I spoke of “martial law in all but name”, should be under no illusion about the Spanish style of lockdown.
As I predicted, last week the government extended our fortnight of house-arrest to a full month, and this week they instituted even harsher measures, putting the economy into “hibernation” in the government’s terrifying phrasing.
The Spanish press have given a running commentary on the various ineptitudes of the government, Spain’s first coalition since the Civil War. After a second indecisive election in 2019 – the fourth in as many years – the social democrats and the far-left populists managed to scrape together a narrow majority. Their weakness, in so many senses of the word, only adds to the growing feeling of unrest – not just fear but also anger – one senses across the media, both social and traditional.
As for the measures they have taken, they are egalitarian in the worst sense of the word: too light in Madrid, Catalonia, the Basque Country and the two Castiles, but counter-productively heavy-handed in Andalusia, which has one third the number of confirmed infections per capita, and less than a fifth the number of deaths per capita, compared to the country at large. Perhaps the warm weather, which has been pretty constant down here since early February, will save us all in the end.
On the local level, people circumnavigate the aisles of the supermarket like Pac-Man in the old arcade game, trying to collect their food but going into reverse at the sight of another person. Supplies hold up, but with a unit of armed military outside the door who would dare buy more than their fair share?
We will survive, what will the world be like afterwards? Not only did all the clients of my fiancée Klarina’s horse business cancel, but half my own annual income, earned as a tour guide at the annual bull-running feria in Pamplona, has evaporated. A million drunken tourists rubbing shoulders under a July sun was just not going to be feasible, although my employers may move their 2020 operation to the much smaller taurine feria in the nearby town of Tafalla a month after.
Either way, I’ve decided it is time to get back into shape, despite legal restrictions. I managed to create a clear circuit around our two-bedroom apartment and have worked my way up from 5km last Tuesday to 12.5km today. That works out at around 500 laps. Klarina and her dog Kela began by staring at me as I passed in bewilderment, followed by boredom, and finally outright annoyance.
Some challenge the view both here and at home – usually reflecting their own politically leftward leanings – that neither economics nor liberty should enter into our considerations at this time. However, the death toll from poverty, both personal and national, is measurable. And poverty kills the old just as disproportionally, and probably more numerously, than this often mild illness. Extended periods without social proximity and exercise will kill as well.
Which is not to say this writer does not take the virus seriously. I study the papers, both scientific and journalistic, closely, drawing on my own university studies of microbiology and statistics.
On a less cerebral plane, I worry for my elderly parents and friends. A particular couple, who are very dear to me, not only live in a Covid-19 hotspot, but one of them is a senior doctor heading a key department in the hospital there. Her fear is not for herself at work, but that when she then returns home from her shift at what they call “The Corona Palace”, she sits down to dinner with a husband whose age and medical history puts him at tangibly higher risk.
Their courage and goodness are awe-inspiring, and have made Klarina and I think about what we can do to help in our own little way.
One of the lesser-known consequences of the 2008 economic crisis in Spain was that people could no longer afford to feed and care for their animals. Thousands of fit young horses, donkeys and mules were sent to slaughter, the lorries queuing at the abattoir door.
With our own dearth of clients for our breeding herd of 12 horses, we had already begun to search for pasture to turn them out on, and now realise we could look after a greater number of animals if we rent a larger space – four times as many in fact.
So we have set up a Just Giving page with a view to founding a temporary charity, Equine Orphans of Coronavirus in Andalusia, EOCA, to look after them until the weather and the economy turn a corner. All contributions will go exclusively on those animals and their care, and once the climate has improved, they will be rehomed or the animals and any residual funds given to another, more established and permanent charity, all of which are currently close to capacity.
In a part of Spain where, when the summer comes, the earth scorches and the rivers run dry, it is at least something to look forward to with a sense of hope. There is precious little of this now. As I write this I am watching my neighbour, usually a bartender, walk across the desolate town square. However, today this is not his day job: he is also the undertaker and we have just had our first fatality from the disease. The afternoon sun seems somehow threatening on the barren paving stones.
2. Will the coronavirus crisis tear the European Union apart? James Crisp, the Telegraph
EU leaders have warned that failure to agree a unified response to the pandemic could destroy the European Project:
The coronavirus pandemic has ripped away the EU’s mask of unity and now poses an existential threat to the European Project.
Faced with the crisis, the EU’s member states have turned on each other and reopened the crudely sutured wounds of the financial crisis.
Then, as now, northern eurozone countries are being asked to bail out poorer, southern countries, who bridle against the north’s lectures on financial housekeeping.
The infighting was brutal enough to convince Jacques Delors, the former European Commission president and architect of the euro, to intervene.
The 94-year-old made a rare public warning that the lack of solidarity in the face of the virus posed a “mortal danger” to the EU.
The EU’s initial reaction to the crisis, which has proved more divisive than Brexit, was poor.
Italy used the EU’s civil protection mechanism to put out an urgent call for face masks. No EU country volunteered to help before China stepped in with aid.
Germany banned the export of medical equipment, even to fellow EU countries. Border controls were reintroduced in the bloc’s passport-free Schengen Zone.
But it is the issue of “coronabonds” that has laid bare the mutual distrust between EU countries.
Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, urged his fellow EU leaders to create the mutualised debt instrument. It would be guaranteed by all member states, to help the economy recover.
Germany and the Netherlands have no desire to underwrite debt to fund spending in other countries. Berlin’s critics point out that debt mutualisation is the logical consequence of EU monetary union and the single currency.
Berlin, the EU’s largest economy and biggest beneficiary of the euro, resisted common eurozone debt issuance at the height of the 2008 crisis that almost spelled the end of the single currency.
Italy, the EU country worst hit by the virus, was supported by eight other member states, including France and Spain, during a teleconference summit of EU leaders last week.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said the “survival of the European Project” was at stake.
Angela Merkel and Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, were unmoved. “I cannot foresee any circumstance under which we will change our position,” Mr Rutte said.
The five hour “e-Summit” ended with the issue being kicked back to EU finance ministers, who must now try and find a compromise next Tuesday.
Tempers were frayed. Wopke Hoekstra, the Dutch finance minister, had demanded an investigation into why some countries had not saved up enough money to weather the crisis.
"That statement is repugnant in the framework of the European Union,” Antonio Costa, the prime minister of Portugal, said. “No one has any more time to hear Dutch finance ministers as we heard in 2008, 2009, 2010 and so forth.”
Jereoen Dijsselbloem, a former Dutch finance minister and ex head of the Eurogroup, faced calls to resign in 2017 after telling a German newspaper that financial crisis-striken southern countries had wasted their money on “drinks and women”.
“Either the EU does what it needs to be done or it will end,” the centre-left Mr Costa added.
Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s socialist leader, warned that Brussels must react faster than it did in bailing out Spanish banks or risk losing support in his ardently pro-EU country.
Hostilities have not ceased, with Italian politicians taking out a full page ad in an influential German newspaper, urging the country to “not be like the Netherlands”. Enrico Letta, a former Italian prime minister, warned that the EU was in "mortal danger" and predicted attitudes in Berlin and the Hague would change as the coffins piled up.
Amid the tumult, the authoritarian Viktor Orban secured sweeping new powers to rule by decree to combat the virus, leading to accusations that the EU had a first dictatorship among its member states.
With health policy largely a national responsibility, the European Commission has a coordination and facilitation role which EU diplomats describe as “not to get in the way” of the member states.
The executive has relaxed its tight fiscal rules for national budget and state aid laws to give governments more flexibility in the fight against the economic impact of the outbreak.
But the commission has also made things worse in its struggle to appear more relevant.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission and a former minister in Angela Merkel’s government, appeared to dismiss coronabonds as a “slogan” in a German interview just two days after the failed summit.
Faced with Italian fury, the commission spin machine insisted that nothing was taken off the table.
Mrs von der Leyen dispatched Paolo Gentiloni, the former Italian prime minister and EU commissioner for the economy, to Italy. His intervention, which will do little to allay suspicions that Mrs von der Leyen is not a true European leader but a puppet of the member states, told the real story.
Mr Gentiloni said that mutualised debt would never be agreed. Calling for consensus, he said that compromise with Germany was vital or “the European project is in danger of dying out".
The Dutch and the Germans will try to steer the compromise towards existing debt instruments created after the financial crisis, which come with strict rules and conditions.
Mrs von der Leyen’s big idea is to use the coronavirus crisis to reinvigorate stalled intergovernmental negotiations over the next EU Budget.
She argues that certain governments, including Germany and the Netherlands, should drop their resistance to being asked to pay more to Brussels to help the economy recover from the pandemic.
It is a particularly uninspiring cause to rally behind at a time when more than 10,000 EU citizens have died from the virus in Italy.
Brussels prides itself on using any crisis to push forward the cause of greater European integration.
So far, the EU has only succeeded in exacerbating its divisions.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.
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