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'
Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here.
Covid
The UK: Now on the optimism upswing again . . . The UK reported no new coronavirus deaths yesterday for the first time since the pandemic began, raising hope that the remaining restrictions in England may still be lifted this month. En passant, I read last night that the typical daily death toll from cancer in the UK is 450. Thanks to the neglect of patients over the last 15 months, this has now surely risen.
Peru: After a review, it's more than doubled its death toll, meaning it now has the worst Covid-related death rate per capita in the world.
Gibraltar: Reported to have vaccinated 100% of its population. Would this have happened if it'd been part of Spain? Just askin'. As no doubt its inhabitants are.
Cosas de España/Galiza
Internal politics: An article here on the complicated and complicating issue of pardons (full or partial) for Catalan politicians involved in the illegal referendum of a few years ago.
External politics: The price of being an ex-colonial nation . . . Spain has refused to take part in a US-led military exercise in Africa from fear that it would legitimise Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara. A Lot of interest in a lot of sand.
As it says at the top of every post, Spain is compellingly loveable. But this doesn't mean there's a total absence of things which grate. As every long-time reader will know, the continued prevalence of smoking is one of these for me. I've said more than once how saddened I am by the sight of groups of young women all smoking - a scene which plays out more than ever now that Covid regulations oblige them to stand apart from terrace tables. Yesterday, 4 things sort of jumped out at me on this theme:-
1. A report on an organisation called AECC posting members outside Pontevedra's colleges to try to persuade pupils not to smoke.
2. Another report that the average age at which Spanish kids take up the habit is 14
3. A finding that 90% of smokers do it in front of minors (including mothers pushing prams and the like), and
4. These signs on the windows of houses between the bars in the city's main tapas street, imploring folk exiled from the tables not to smoke and drop butts in front of the properties:-
It's one of the complaints I have against smokers - or some of them, at least - that they’re inconsiderate of others. Maybe the not-serious theory I postulated when I was a young man - that nicotine affects certain parts of the brain - is not so daft after all. Do they also throw, say, the wrapping paper from an ice lolly on the ground? Or just their butts. Or 'fag-ends' as we Brits say, to the amusement of our US cousins.
Enough said. Rant over.
To be positive . . . The computer bit I need arrived yesterday. As it came from Amazon UK, I was rather expecting it to be sent to the Post Office so I'd have to go there to pay post-Brexit charges and taxes on it. But it was delivered by the courier. Even better news, after initially failing to solve the problem, it then began to work and allow me to connect my laptop to both my printer and the all-important back-up hard disk.
Having recently read Giles Trmelett's book on the International Brigades, I felt more than normally saddened by news of the death of the last surviving member of these, aged 101. Him, not me.
The UK
Best news of the year so far . . . Salad Cream is coming back to Britain as part of Kraft Heinz's plans to invest £140m in its Wigan factory.
The EU
Here's a warning for those Brits who haven't - like many of their compatriots - been living below the wire and have dutifully gained official residence: Britons face a one-month deadline to retain their rights in 4 EU countries. France, Malta, Luxembourg and Latvia.
For those Brits who have been living below the wire here in Spain - lots and lots of them - they might get lucky, in that the government might well continue to turn a blind eye to their (non-taxed) existence. Bit of a risk, though, for those - many - who haven't fled back to Blighty or sought to regularise their situation. And pay taxes. Time will tell.
Finally . . .
I couldn't find a document I wrote in 2001 and decided to use a voice-to-text app to reproduce it, rather than re-type it. It's debatable whether this saved me time and effort. Anyway. . . Some of the more amusing errors:-
Lump: Lamb
Urine: Your Rhine
Vomit: My meat
Must be my (faint) Scouse accent . . .
"Best news of the year so far . . . Salad Cream is coming back to Britain as part of Kraft Heinz's plans to invest £140m in its Wigan factory."
ReplyDeleteDear God, I never thought i'd see 'Wigan' and 'salad cream' in the same sentence. A dreadful concoction of water, canola oils and sugar ("3% egg yolks" they boast too!), it's best seen where it belongs - in toilet-sized little sachets adding a little colour to Wetherspoons tables as their bovine clientele cram calories into overstretched Primark tee shirts...
But are they Heinz?
ReplyDeleteNo vinegar?
'There's no accounting for taste'
Scouse? Must be the app. When I first met you, I thought you had a clear accent, with hints of Dublin (which must be the Scouse part, but uncloudy). But then, there are voice apps (and telephone computers) that would only recognize words if they are enunciated exactly like in the dictionary, which is exactly the way in which nobody speaks.
ReplyDelete1. Liverpool is even more of an Irish city than Boston.
ReplyDelete2. The best explanation of the v nasal Scouse accent is this . . . The Irish accent 'hardens' as it moves northwards from the south coast, until it's delivered via v a closed mouth by Dubliners. The Scouse accent is this Dublin accent delivered via the nose . .
3. The Liverpool accent is v different from the Manc accent less than 30 miles away
4. If I spoke as I did as a kid, you would not understand me .
5. I havee been accused of being American, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Inter alia.
6. Only other Scousers guess correctly and it's my party trick to then say 'But you are Liverpudlian too, even tho you have lost the accent'. Which astonishes them. I believe this has something to do with musicality. Other Scousers are the only ones to 'intuit' this, which is why I have had 100% success with my party trick.
I'm glad your amazon delivery arrived safely. I had a parcel containing cycling bike parts from the UK stuck in DHL's Santiago's office for over a week. I was asked to pay over €215 IVA, duties and some bizarre fee for them to test the quality of the products. I guess the German and EU certification was not enough... This a week after a box of my own staff was turn away by SEUR for some 'third party' reasons after it was ready in Ourense. "Spain doesn’t deliver individual to individual (customers who have used third party shippers to send their parcels)... Whatever that means.... Fortunately, there was no charge there and the box made its way back to source, a friend's storage in London. I sure hope people back in the UK (who voted yes to leaving the EU) will feel the Brexit Karma slap in their face one day.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things one learns when living in the UK long enough is that this is a society divided into castes (the word class does not even closely manage to convey the full awfulness of the reality). John Le Carre referred to the curious phenomenom of tracing one's social origin through one's accent as being "branded on the tongue". You might think this happens in other countries as well. Needless to say, on the continent there are class divisions in accordance with education or wealth, and people often speak differently according to their level of education or the region they hail from. The only country in Europe that comes anywhere near to british norms is probably France - although I am not sure that is actually true. But nothing, nothing - in the western world - really compares to Britain's (I should say England's ) revolting class system. If one grew up in a household speaking non RP English......you will never really be able to overcome that, and you will remain branded for the rest of your life. It is possible to atenuate or water down one's accent but traces will always remain audible to other Britons. And trying to get rid of it completely quite simply equates to class bretayal. Try explaining to a Dutch person, or to a German or to a Slovak or to a Spaniard - not familiar with life in the UK- the concept of being branded on the tongue - they would not understand what you are talking about.....The best way to evade all that is, of course, to live abroad where you can pretend to be whatever you want unemcumbered by the rules and strictures of life in Britain. Which is why so many Britons love living in the US or Australia, and once there never come back. Apologies for the rant - I am not expecting anyone to read this anyway.
ReplyDeleteThis is a 2013 Guardian article on the subject, starting with a well-known comment from G B Shaw.
ReplyDeleteI'm well aware of the British class system and recall finding it very noticeable each time I returned from working outside the UK.
But I will say 2 things:-
1. It's not, as you suggest, impossible to lose a strong local accent. I did it without consciously trying to do so, possibly because I left the UK for a year aged 18 and came back to go to London university.
2. There were no regional accents on the BBC when I was young but there are now a lot of them. And on other media outlets. They are not the bar they once were.
But it does remain true that there's a tendency to look down on those who retain a strong regional accent, particularly if it's a northern one. That said, there are differences. Hardly anyone likes the Birmingham accent and nearly everyone loves the Geordie (North East) accent. And assumptions about the speaker are made on the basis of these accents.
As with those with a strong Scouse accent, people such as Brummies with a strong regional accent who want to 'get on' will try (and usually succeed) to move to something akin to BBC/Oxford English, but will almost never lose their short vowel sounds. So that both I and my daughters still say, laff not larf, for example. While their Londoner mother still says the latter, despite having lived many years in the North.
Incidentally, I've heard it said this doesn't happen in the USA. Against that, I'm not at all sure that a strong Southern drawl will help you gain acceptance and career advancement in the North.
Though an Irish accent might be useful in Boston. María?
@Unknown.
ReplyDeleteYes, I don't know how I escaped what occurred with a previous package, when I paid about 25% of the value of some books.
I looked at the packaging to see if it had come (in a small envelope) from the EU not the UK but this had a return label for Amazon Spain in Madrid, Which was odd as SEUR tracking had told me a few days ago that hit had 'cleared Customs', suggesting it did come from the UK and implying some duty/clearing costs. Perhaps it was re.packaged when it got to Spain.
I wondered if I'd escaped costs and duties because it was only worth 10 quid but I really don't know.
I wonder if your odd Ourense experience reflects 'teething problems', not whatever should be/will be the norm, But who knows? Like you, I have no idea what the '3rd party shipper' comment means. Perhaps the company used in the UK doesn't have a forwarding agent or the like in Spain. But if it was sent by the Post Office, this shouldn't happen, as they- like Amazon - use SEUR in my experience.
The missing Guardian article . . .
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/social-class-denied-and-despised
The british elite/upper class/establishment (whatever) definitely has staying power. How do you otherwise explain they are still around while old european elites are essentially not? Basically, in Britain if you are maths genious and get excellent results in your A levels nothing will stop you from getting into Oxbridge and pursue a brilliant career in academia or whatever you wish. And this, no matter where you came from or what accent you speak/spoke with. The system works well enough (and much better than in most countries). The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a the black son of Asian inmigrants, but otherwise ticks all the right boxes (Winchester, Oxbridge,...). Priti Patel doesn't, and she keeps getting mocked for her accent. Nevertheless, the elite in this country has always known how to keep the door open for the gifted and the resourceful.....and perhaps this explains why it has survived for so long (50% of the land in the hands of just 1%). Their continental counterparts, perhaps, were just simply too stupid to realise that change was needed and ended up losing everything, including their heads. Regardless of the above, I see no real change. The accents in the BBC and the adoption of Estuarian by aristos is just window dressing, a form of cosmetic mutation. It falls squarely into the pattern of changing a few things so that at the end nothing really changes much.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I won't bother you more......haven't you noticed how you studiedly rationalize your change of accent? You remember the time frame, you explain why it happened, you are starkly aware of it .......ever heard a Spaniard analyzing that sort of thing? Do people in other Western countries do that sort of thing? Of course not. As I said, they wouldn't know what you are talking about. Even if it is true that regional accents do mongrelize when their owner moves to another part of the country....and some accents are cruelly mocked....like andalucian or galician in other parts of Spain....but the context is an entirely different one. In this as in some other things Britain is unique.
ReplyDeleteI didn't 'rationalise' it, in my view.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think about it at the time. I explained that it happened subconsciously but don't deny there will have been an element of (subconscious) move towards the standard speech of most of my peers, albeit retaining Northern vowel sounds. Though not the Liverpool vowel sounds of my mother - buke for book and luke for look, for example.
But I don't reject your point that this doesn't happen in Spain. No idea. Though I wonder if southern politicians would retain strong (and, therefore, incomprehensible) Andaluz if they moved to a government position in Madrid
Given that there are literally hundreds of local accents England alone, it doesn't surprise me that people move away from them towards the RP they hear in the media. Though now less than they used to.
I'm not convinced as much as you are that this is essentially a class thing, as opposed to a 'personal betterment' thing. People don't do it to quit their original class - in my class lower middle class - but to increase their chances of a better job and more income. Because RP is seen as superior to a local dialect accent. I imagine that here in Spain a C y L accent - especially that of Valladolid - Is seen as superior to Andaluz. But I might be wrong. Certainly the Galician accent - which is to a Castilian accent what 'musical' Welsh is to the English - comes in for it's share of mockery.
I will ask my German friend in Hamburg what happens there. We've talked before about the many dialects of German in the country. I don't know if some of them are mocked but I suspect so.
. . . it's share . .
ReplyDeleteI do not agree with you at all. Not one bit. There are standard accents in other countries. I know Germany very well. It is nothing like Britain. The standard accents in Europe are all regional accents, in a way. In Germany it would be Hannoverian. Hochdeutsch is a merger of northern speech and southern writing. Nothing to do with class. In France it is the Loire Valley accent that is regarded as standard, possibly because the court resided in the area in late medieval times (although today everybody tries to speak with a Parisian accent). In Spain it would be Burgos/Valladolid. In Italy, Tuscany. The reasons for this are mainly historical, quasi serependitious. The RP accent in Britain is bound not to a region, or a geographical area but to class. If someoen attends a posh private expensive independent school in Derby or Northumberland, you and your peers will speak RP (modernised version) while the people in the village nearby will speak with the accent of their village. Class not the region determines what accent you speak with.
ReplyDeleteHi, Colin. Accents are fascinating, really. They show much of how and where a person grew up, their income level, and, sometimes, their education. As to an Irish accent in Boston, it's looked upon as loveable, but not really Bostonian. A Boston Irish speaks without R's. His is the very Boston way of speaking, even though he shares it with other ethnicities. The important thing there is not so much to sound Irish, but something similar to Ocho Apellidos Vascos. Where are your ancestors from and when did they emigrate? Are all four grandparents of Irish descent?
ReplyDeleteIn Spain, an Andalucian accent is considered low class. A Galician accent is considered a bumpkin's speech; uneducated and unsophisticated. These considerations tend to reflect history and prejudices created by it.
I don't disagree with your main comment about the British class system. Everyone knows about it. And its presence always hit me again when I returned from living outside the UK. Some folk out it down to the ability of the British aristocracy to survive both the revolutionary turmoil of the late 18th century and 1848.
ReplyDeleteMaybe if Prussia had survived . . .