Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain*
Life in Spain in the Time of Something Like Cholera- This article has raised the question, for me at least: When is 12pm?? Noon? I guess it can't be called midday' in Spain, because it ain't. That's 2-3pm. Lunchtime.
- Another question raised: Can this really be accurate?
- María's Day 54 of the lockdown in her village.
- Galicians - especially the nationalist variety - are always telling me they're Celts, and so different from all other Spaniards. I reply that the Celts inhabited at least a third of Iberia, not just this NW bit. And then I insult them by saying their Celtic symbols and music are an 18th century invention of the Romantics. Anyway, here's a thread on this subject, which might interest some.
- That Casado/Married headline turns out to have been a spoof (bulo). So, thank god I didn't say it was taken from El País.
- Observations from a drive into town last night:-
o It was nice to be re-acquainted with the idiosycratic Spanish approach to driver signalling.
o The police barriers to the walks along the river Gándara have been removed but not those around the kids' playground in my street.
o There was a scruffy young chap on the camino road in Lérez who might have been an (illegal) 'pilgrim' but was more likely a 'street performer' en route to the gypsy drug-dealing spot near my house.
o More work has been done to the 'park' at the Lérez end of O Burgo bridge, but it's still not fully open to pedestrians:-
The UK
- An interesting post from a non-nationalist Scot.
- In the 2 'Third World' countries I've lived in, the commonplace view was that politicians were only ever in it to financially benefit themselves, their family and their tribe. The same view was expressed to me here in 1999, when I asked why the Ministress of Agriculture hadn't resigned when her relatives were caught having illicitly 'earned' more than €100m from fraudulent claims for subsidies in respect of (non-existent) flax(lino) production. (See here and here on this). If Fart is re-elected in November, will it show that the USA is, at bottom, no different? Has this already been demonstrated, in fact?
Finally . . .
- I'm now wondering if the black caps which sing in my garden aren't what are called black-capped chickadees in the USA. The one I saw this morning had more of a brown than black cap. Possibly a female then. Always less colourful than the strutting males. Perry? [Have now discovered there's a brown-capped chickadee]
- Which reminds me . . . Perry has provided in interesting trait of box hedges in the Comments to yesterday's post.
- A parting bit of philosophy for you, from here: Those who wish to grow old gracefully, to retain, or even make, some friends from a different era, have to learn that past memories may be added like seasoning to present-day cultural dishes – but they must never be allowed to be the 'plat du jour.' Perhaps the only way to announce your full and continuing membership of the human race, your total unsuitability for transfer to a care home, is to keep asserting, in spite of all the mental evidence to the contrary, that there really is no better time to be alive than the present.
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