One of the aspects of life in Spain about which I’m ambivalent is the scruffy men and women who collect money for guiding you into parking spaces that are, in all senses, free. These are apparently called gorrillas, from their habit of wearing a cap, or gorra. Part of me resents paying and part of me thinks that, if this really helps to prevent drug addicts from stealing my radio, then the council is being admirably pragmatic and sensible. But there’s a straw in the wind from Sevilla, where the town hall has counselled drivers against giving money to these unofficial parking attendants. Further, it says it’s going to start fining them 120 euros for importuning drivers. Even if they can’t pay. Along, I guess, with drivers who can pay for parking where they thought it was legal to do so. And indeed was until this week.

Talking of money – I see the British supermarket, Tesco, has today announced record profits of 3 billion pounds for 2008. My guess is they had to work pretty hard for this. Unlike, say, the two promoters of a new airport down in Ciudad Real who made the very similar sum of 3 billion euros when the rural land they’d previously bought was re-classified as industrial and sold to the local authority. What lucky chaps. And what unlucky taxpayers.

Using a golf buggy – or boggie – at my local course for the first time today, I was surprised to see all the instructions were in English only, even though they stressed an understanding was essential for safe use of the vehicle. Worse, the bit warning about risk of serious injury or death was half plastered over with a sticker giving the buggy’s number. Now, one can take this as a good example of the relaxed Spanish attitude to risk but what it really is is evidence of the fact it’s hard to successfully sue someone for negligence in the Spanish courts. If and when things change, I guess we can expect some tightening up. Meanwhile, I noticed that foreigners (extranjeros) have to pay a green fee 10% higher than the locals. The word ‘insurance’ was written in brackets after the fee but I, for one, am dubious. Anyway, next time I will strenuously deny I am foreign. Insured or not.

Finally, I was approached today by a Chinese publisher of on-line bibles, on the basis that they’d “noticed that you are the Biggest Bible Publisher and Christian product sales channel in your country, and we would like to know if there is a possibility for us to introduce our product to your market.” Damn. My cover’s blown. I hope they didn’t copy it to the Hacienda.

God be with you.

Reportedly, 43% of Spanish kids between 6 and 11 have a mobile phone. Presumably the standard teenage argument of "But I'm the only person in my class without one" starts younger here.

Reverting back again to the issue of pronunciation of foreign names, I had hoped by now to be able to tell you how the name of the President of the EU bank is said here. But I've not heard it this week. So, can anyone help out - Is it tree-shé, tree-ché or trich-ette? My money's on the last one.

The Life and Insane Times of Modern Britain: Number 37.
Earlier this week Victoria Clarke was fined £350, plus a similar amount in costs, for putting her rubbish out on the wrong day.

At the side of the road down to town from my house, they're constructing a new children's playground. This will match an existing one on the other side of the road. On reading about these plans a few weeks ago, my first thought was the risk of kids running from one side of the road to the other. And my visiting sister had the same initial reaction when she saw the work going on this week. So, are we being oversensitive? Is the Spanish attitude to risk more pragmatic ? Sensible even? My sister said she assumed there'd be a footbridge across the road but I rather doubt this will happen. At least not until one, two or even three children have been hit by cars. By the way, the work is being part-financed by the EU. Try as I might, I can't see how it's a good use of the money of taxpayers in other countries to build something for the kids of rich folk who live in what's widely regarded as the snobbiest part of Pontevedra. But, then, I'm biased. And I have just read this about a self-regarding waste of time and public money.

Galicia

Talking of children, here's a shop in town that's one of the many offshoots of the immensely successful Zara [Inditex] group. Which is Galicia-based, of course. Sadly, it seems to be beyond the resources of even a very profitable Spanish company to employ the services of a native English speaker when it comes to brainstorming names for their new shops. Though there's an even more depressing possibility - they did. But perhaps I'm being too pedantic.


Walking through town this morning, I noticed another shop with a strange name - Purificación García. It's one of Pontevedra's numerous women's clothes boutiques and it finally dawned on me it was simply the forename and the surname of the owner. Of a chain, it seems. Here in Spain, Garcia is so common it's considered the equivalent of Smith in the UK. So it's nice, I guess, to have Purification as a first name to spice it up a bit.

A nice quote about the camino to Santiago . . . The main reason, I suppose, why some people dislike Lourdes is that they suspect it of commerce, miracle-mongering and idolatry. It is strange that such strictures seem not to apply to the pilgrim destination of Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of the doubtful remains of an Apostle. Perhaps the likeness of the Spanish journey to a sporting challenge makes it seem wholesome.

Talking of wholesome challenges, if you're lucky enough to be in Galicia this weekend and you're anywhere near my home barrio of Poio, you could do worse than attend tomorrow's Tripe Festival. This is the second year of the event and the mayor has promised twice as many free portions as last year. What more do you need?

If you're unlucky enough not to be in or near Poio but fortunate enough to be in New York, then you might like to pop along to the Hispanic Society, where they're showing photos taken in Galicia in the 1920s by Ruth Matilda Anderson.

Finally. . . I noticed this morning that this blog has a Follower. I'm not sure what this means - compared with, say, Google's Reader facility - but I've now added a Follower link on the right - just in case anyone else feels they'd like to go public.

Auto de Fe: I got a bit ahead of myself yesterday in implying the St Juan celebrations would be last night, 21st June. They’ll actually be on Monday, 23rd. I suspect my subconscious felt events starting close to midnight and going on into the small hours would be moved to the nearest Saturday, so as to avoid people losing a lot of sleep before a working day. You’d think, after 8 years here, I’d know better. I also got my Johns and James’s mixed up; Santiago is the latter, of course. And, while I’m apologising, I should say my French partner insists they never use the expression chacun à son goût . If true, this seems very thoughtless and perverse of them. No wonder hardly anyone wants to learn their poverty-stricken language these days. For what it’s worth, I’m told that what the French actually say is chacun ses goûts or à chacun ses goûts or even à chacun son goût . You’d think that, as they have three options, one of them would be right.

Years ago, I used to record the percentages of drivers wearing safety belts as I walked into town of a morning. This would be an even more boring exercise now as my impression is almost everyone obeys the law and puts them on. Or at least in the front seats. In the back, things are somewhat different. Take the case I saw yesterday of a young couple in a large car containing them, their chica and a baby. The former were in the front – belted up - and the latter were in the back – unprotected. Worse, the baby was on the chica’s lap and being held forward between the front seats. Perfect positioning for being torpedoed through the windscreen. So, were the parents really convinced about the risky/safety argument? Or merely afraid of being fined? If the latter, do they really not know that the law applies to back seats as well as front ones? And that it specifically obliges them to strap a baby into a special seat? My market research of a single Spanish friend last night concluded that back-seat-belting-up had not yet forced itself into Spanish consciousness in any way at all. Hence the dissonance.

El Pais yesterday carried an article eulogising British humour. Its overview was that “English humour - with its quality, it sadism, its acrobatic capacity to triumph in any place – has not aged”. No, I don’t know that this means either but the paper singled out Little Britain and The Office for praise. Such a shame, then, that they illustrated the article with a still from the American version of the latter. Coincidentally, I read in today’s British papers that, if you’re really desperate, you can take a tour of Britain’s Comedy Towns. Apparently some non-Brits already do. Strange folk, foreigners.

And finally, still on the humour theme – The residents of the nearby coastal pueblo of Raxó – or some of them anyway – are demanding that their bendy road be called something other than Rabo do Porco. Or Pigtail Street. Must have all had a sense of humour by-pass. In contrast, I’ve never heard of any complaints from the residents of the nearby villages of Pozo Negro [Cesspit], Picaraña [Spiderbite], Parderubias [Couple-of-blondes], Esclavitude, [Slavery] and, my favourite, Gatomorto [Deadcat].

And a humour PS which I can’t resist – If you click here and scroll to picture no. 5, you’ll see that the last remaining political relic from the Franco era – the 85-year-old Manuel Fraga – is still in control of all his faculties. Mas o menos. As is La Espe.

The Spanish press gives impressive coverage of UK events. To say the least, this is not exactly reciprocated in Britain. Today’s item on Spain in the UK papers is pretty representative of the situation - a report that Brits stand to have their houses, at best, confiscated or, at worst, destroyed even if they were legally built 30 years ago. In other words, long before the 1988 Law of the Coast and the current government’s efforts to clean up after the rampant corruption and despoliation of the last 10 to 15 years. This won’t, of course, do much for a construction industry now screaming for bankruptcy-avoiding tax breaks for the buyers who are now refusing to open their wallets. Funny but I don’t recall hearing this during the ‘fat cow’ years.

I regularly comment on the different attitude towards risk in Spain. And I’ve confessed to ambivalence about this, sometimes viewing Spanish pragmatism as more sane than the UK’s obsession with [unachievable] total safety. A nice example of the latter is today’s recommendation from Britain’s doctors that pregnant women should avoid alcohol totally. This, it seems, is far more stringent than their recommendation of only a couple of months ago and was justified by the relevant government minister on the grounds that they were really interested in absolute safety. Which, she logically said, could only be achieved by taking no alcohol at all. I guess she’ll be advising next that we stop eating, so as to ensure we don’t go down [and out] with botulism.

Another example of this madness today was the warning that kids under 2 should not be given cough medicines as:- 1. They are not as effective as a blast of steam up the nostrils, and 2. There have been 4 deaths in 50 years which might just have had something to do with the ingestion of a syrup. So, to be absolutely sure your child does not become an esoteric statistic, just keep taking the steam. And putting vinegar and brown paper on cuts in case you get an allergy from the plaster. Is this really the stamp of government to come? If it is, roll on another war to distract us from trivia. Brought to us by people whose expenses alone vastly exceed the salaries of most of the population. The trivia, I mean. Not the war.

In my hugely popular book How to Slim Easily and Cheaply, there’s only one chapter. In fact, there’s only one page. OK, there’s only one line. And it’s shorter than the title - Eat less. Exercise more. The validity of this advice has been proven yet again over the last 10 days, when I've walked little, eaten more than usual and gained 2 kilos. Or 4.4 pounds. Which will, of course, take a lot more than 10 days to shift. And I have another 10 days of excess before I can even start on this. Oh for a bit of Delhi belly.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way – The latest negative comments on Spain’s economy have come from the UN. Specifically, it criticises housing policy - highlighting the revenue link between local councils and real estate developments. With now the highest number of empty properties in Europe, the country – it says – now faces a slowdown that will be greater than elsewhere. However, some praise is given for the [belated] efforts to promote the rental market.

To be more positive – The Central Bank here says it’s acted sagely over the last six months or so and that, as a result, Spain’s banks are not as exposed to the consequences of the USA sub-prime debacle as those elsewhere. However, the opposition PP party takes the view there are things under the carpet which we’ll only get to hear about after the March elections. So, not long to wait.

Meanwhile, over in the UK and thanks, of course, to the country’s egregious tabloid media, Britons now appear to live in a greater state of fear than at any time in our history. Times are relatively peaceful, infant mortality is negligible, most people have too much to eat, yet people all over the country seem to wake up every day to a heightened sense of dread. My question is - If it only cost a few thousand pounds to assassinate Mrs Bhutto, wouldn’t it take only a couple of hundred to get rid of Rupert Murdoch? Any takers? There’s a big discount for the whole bloody family.

Before I walk into Pontevedra every morning, I park my car in a side street on my side of the bridge. Since this is on a slope, I put the car in the right gear, apply the hand brake and turn the wheels so as to ensure, if all else fails, it can only run into the kerb. It struck me yesterday that, although this only takes a second or two, it would probably strike most Spaniards as preposterously anally retentive. So I checked on all the cars parked on inclines on my way into and out of town. Of 137, only 5 had their wheels askew. Since one of these was the wrong way, let’s say 4 out of 137, or 3%. I’ve no idea whether Spaniards are taught to turn their wheels but, if so, this seems to be conclusive evidence they comprehensively ignore the advice. Possibly because of a pragmatic view that where there’s only a small percentage risk, life is too short to bother with even a few seconds of preventative effort. All of these would add up to a serious inroad into fun time. Of course, I could always try to argue that the nature of the consequence [destruction of your car, death of a pedestrian, etc.] is as important as the percentages but I imagine I’d get very short shrift on this. Hence the leaning lampposts near my house.

The other survey I’ve been working on is that of legal/illegal parking. But I think I’ll give this up as there seems to be nowhere in Pontevedra where parking is not practised – white lines on the road, yellow lines on the road and/or kerb, chevrons, hospital urgency bays, bus stops, zebra crossings. You name it, it’s a parking space. I guess the attitude was summed up by a friend who told me on Friday evening she’d been lucky enough to find a space right in front of the town hall. “But” I said “there are yellow chevrons there and there’s no sign saying the restriction is limited to working hours.” “It’s implicit.” she replied. She should know; she’s a lawyer.

I’ve often said Spanish women bear themselves far more proudly than their British counterparts. Indeed, I’ve encouraged both my daughters to emulate them in this respect. So I was interested in this article by a woman [with a Spanish name] who explains why – despite equally pernicious media pressures – 70% of females here are happy with their bodies, against a mere 2% in the UK. But, as I don’t know whether she’s right or wrong, I will have to do some research on your behalf. I’m not convinced the women of Pontevedra eschew skinniness as much as the article suggests. But perhaps the city is an exception to the general rule.

Global warming: Confused? How could you not be? - “Satellite data confirm the northern hemisphere (except for western Europe) has been enduring its coldest winter for decades, with snow cover at its greatest extent since 1966. January's global temperatures were lower than their entire 20th-century average. Antarctic summer ice was at its highest January level ever recorded, 30 per cent above normal. Amid the continuing absence of sunspot activity, many thoughtful climate scientists now believe the Earth may be entering a period of marked cooling, similar to that which in the 1970s prompted fears of a ‘new ice age’. The "warmists" are already trying to explain that this recent drop in global temperatures is only "masking the underlying warming trend".

Galicia Facts

In a shipyard I can see from my window [well, almost], the largest sailboat in the world is about to be constructed. The Factoría Naval de Marín has started building the Hussar, which will have a length of 136m and cost €65 million. I hope to be able to watch its progress. And even post a few photos.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of pix of lampposts within 100 metres of my house. Personally, I regard them as dangerous but I suspect I have a different perspective on risk from my more laid-back neighbours. So it will be interesting to see how long it is before anything is done about them. Or before they fall down.

And here are photos of large granite rocks which were disgorged in the forest this week. Across the track and side-track, in fact. As I reported this to a couple of passing Guardia Civil officers yesterday, I should add that - in the event I suddenly disappear - the names of the truck companies are on my mobile phone. On the other hand, it might be significant the policemen didn’t take my name and address. Or even my identity number . . . So, it’s good I met a dog-walking neighbour when taking these snaps just now and we have agreed to make a formal joint denuncia at the police station tomorrow. Now, if both of us disappear . . .

The number of deaths in the Spanish workplace fell by 11% in 2007, the largest reduction in ten years. This is said to be due to an increase in safety inspections. Not before time, obviously.

Another interesting piece of recent news is that rural tourism in Spain has increased by 93% over the past five years. This will be welcome to those Brits who’ve bought properties in the hills of Galicia with the intention of setting up a B&B/casa rural. Which, as far as I can tell, is just about all of them.

Several Pakistanis have been arrested in Barcelona, in connection with a planned terrorist atrocity there. Spain is said to be at the top of al-Qa'eda’s hit list and one wonders why. Is it the Andalus factor? Or do they just think the police are less efficient here? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.

I read last night that Another knock-on effect of the fall in the construction sector is the loss of jobs among electricians and plumbers across the country. I wonder if this means the one I’ve been waiting three months for will now turn up. Or whether he’s still too busy working on the numerous sites I can see from my windows. Where’s the bloody slowdown when you need it?

Election Special

The PP party says every child in Spain will be bilingual within 10 years if they get in. Or trilingual in the case of those who have Gallego, Basque or Catalan as well as Spanish and English.

The PSOE Socialist party says it will raise pensions wholesale.

And the Galician Nationalist Party says we’ll have the AVE high-speed connection with Madrid within a week of it being put in power.

I only made one of these up.

Galicia Facts

Although the region’s depopulation is taking place primarily in the rural hinterland, there’s one spot on the coast where things are pretty bad. Here, only 25% of the population has work. Appropriately, it’s called the Costa del Muerte, or the Coast of Death. Or Costa do Morte, if you prefer Gallego. It’s a Celtic tradition to have one of these.

The Pontevedra town council has an approach to urban development which is probably best described as a mix of modernist and traditionalist. What this means is that they sometimes get it very right and sometimes very wrong. An example of the former is the way they’re landscaping the area around a new archaeological site they’re keeping open to view down by the river. Examples of the latter include the monstrous new museum in sheet granite and glass and the repulsive street furniture made of what I think is galvanised zinc. To be added to these must be the world’s largest and ugliest zebra crossing. This is massively wide and rises six inches above the road on either side of it. As if this weren’t enough, it’s flanked by eight metal poles about three feet [90cm] in height, the tops of which flash red and green in sync with the traffic lights. Of course, our council is a coalition of socialists and nationalists so it’s possible the split personality of urban development is down to this. Though I can only guess which is modernist and which traditionalist. The nationalist-controlled town of Allariz possibly provides a clue. Anyway, if and when my digital camera recovers from Sudden Death Syndrome, I will post a picture or two of at least the zebra crossing that thinks it’s a Christmas decoration.

Yesterday’s Travel section in El País had a very sympathetic piece on Liverpool, the EU Capital of Culture, of course. Or one of them. A lovely chap called José Luis de Juan wrote of Liverpudlians that “They are so open and amusing, they don’t seem to be British”. For fun-loving Spaniards, this short sentence contains both the greatest compliment and the biggest insult one could possibly make about other people. He goes on to add that “The city’s elegance doesn’t obscure the working class character of the city and its hard-working and un-starchy people, who know how to enjoy themselves better than anyone else this side of the Channel”. Who am I to argue? Even if he does get his Scouse and Scousers mixed up.

I regularly say the attitude to risk in Spain marks it off from at least the UK, and possibly several other societies as well. This is not to say I endorse the British situation; I believe sanity lies somewhere unattainable in the middle. There’s been another story in the UK media this week about the excesses of the Health and Safety Executive [HSE] in respect of plastic swords in an amateur stage production. This has led one columnist to make this easy-to- agree-with comment - We hold the HSE in such low regard that we presume this story is probably true. The agency is a laughing stock, albeit a rather sinister one with despotic powers. And they only have themselves to blame. Through their bossiness - and their determination to justify their salaries to the taxpayer - they have created a climate of paranoia and excessive caution, one that has left people fretting about risks previous generations deemed acceptable. I suspect we’re at least a decade off this here in Spain. Possibly even two. Thank God.

Mr Brown has been at it again in the UK, acting as the president he isn’t. This time in respect of MPs’ salaries. As someone has written of these fine people - They should possibly be paid less but the subject has got nothing remotely to do with him. That this argument will sound rather old-fashioned to many Britons is more proof that in the New Labour years we have lost any collective understanding of constitutional propriety. It is simple: Parliament is sovereign. Its affairs are none of the Prime Minister's business. His presumptions about human behaviour are essentially statist. We know this, so we should be very wary when he blurs the line between himself, his Government, and Parliament's business. The Commons should not be the creature of Gordon Brown or David Cameron: it is ours. Too late to do much about this, I’m afraid. Especially as national parliaments in the EU have less and less relevance. Urinating against the wind is an image which springs to mind.

Quotes of the Week

In England we never mean entirely what we say. Do I mean that? Not entirely.
Alan Bennett.

Politics – show business for ugly people.
Unknown

Galicia Facts

The excellent news of the weekend is that the Xunta is going to ensure we have a real commuter train service along the coast, between La Coruña and Vigo. This comes on top of the welcome assurance that the AVE high-speed train connection with Madrid really will be operating by 2012 and not, as some sceptics insist, by 2014 at the very earliest. But, hang on. Don’t we have an election coming up . . . . ?

In the UK, the best place for learning the Galician language seems to be Bangor University. For one thing, they have a Centre for Galician Studies in Wales and journal dedicated to ‘contemporary Galician studies’. This is called Galicia 21 and its first issue will appear in August this year. I fancy this is a little later than originally planned but no matter. The Contemporary Galician Studies course probably includes a module on something like Learning to Live with Delays and Waiting. Meanwhile, if you’ve been interested in this paragraph so far, here’s something really relevant - A escritora e investigadora María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar inaugurará entre o 23 de febreiro e o 22 de marzo unha iniciativa que procura a promoción da cultura e a lingua galegas no Reino Unido. Helena Miguélez, profesora galega na Universidade de Bangor, indicou que a María do Cebreiro lle van facilitar contactos coa cultura galesa, e actividades que supoñan visibilidade para a cultura galega naquel país.

Finally, lots of numbers . . .

Pontevedra may be the cheapest provincial capital in Spain when it comes to buying a flat but prices rose more, they say, in our province than in any other in Galicia last year. For the record:-
Pontevedra – 8%
La Coruña – 6%
Lugo - 5%
Ourense – 3%
These compare with a Galicia average of 7% and a national average of only 5%. All those Brits buying up in the hills don’t seem to be making much of an impact in Lugo and Ourense provinces, unless prices would have fallen without them. Which I guess is possible.

When it comes to euros per square metre for a new flat, here’s how the Galician cities rank:-
Vigo – 2241
Santiago – 2095
La Coruña – 2095
Pontevedra – 1951
Ourense – 1459
Lugo – 1383
Ferrol - 1119

And to complete this data-fest, here’s how the population figures were for the cities at the end of the year, in thousands of heads:-
Vigo – 295
La Coruña – 244
Ourense – 107 [Down]
Lugo – 95
Santiago – 94
Pontevedra – 80
Ferrol – 76 [Down by 2%]

So, for low prices and reducing demand on public services, Ferrol is your destination. Ignoring all other considerations. Which may or may not be wise. Lord Henry might like to comment . . .

El Mundo yesterday angrily headlined the fact that school history textbooks were being ‘manipulated’ in those parts of Spain where you’d expect this to happen. By coincidence a Scottish columnist today congratulates the government in Edinburgh on its decision to include Scottish History in the national curriculum. This, he hopes, will mean an end to the propagation of what he calls the ‘Braveheart bilge’ that currently passes for history in Scotland. In a comment that would apply just as much to Spain as it does to Scotland, he adds that it’s entirely typical of the fraught nature of the nationality issue in Scotland in recent decades that something as seemingly normal as teaching schoolchildren their country's history has been caught up in politics.

Taking a wider perspective on nationalism . . . When I first moved to Spain in 2000 – doubtless influenced by an aversion to IRA and ETA terror tactics – I was instinctively opposed to the secession of any of its current regions. Seven years on, I’ve grown in my conviction that, provided the process is democratic, there’s a lot to be said for allowing the regions that see themselves as nations to go their own way. Early in November, El Pais carried a long and persuasive article that put the case for Spain being realistic and wise enough to accept that the only feasible choices now open to it are either a symmetrical federal state [USA? Germany?] or ‘national’ self-determination that would see Cataluña, the Basque Country and possibly even Galicia breaking away. You can read the original here and Google will give you an immediate – if rather rough and ready – translation. However, it would be nice if one of my totally bilingual readers could give us an accurate English version for something as important as this.

Meanwhile, back in the here and now of today’s Spain, parlous economic news continues to rain down on us. After the recent massive hike in the inflation rate comes a threat from the farmers that meat prices will rise at least 10% in January. As this is the month when everybody – especially the government and its monopolies - raises prices and since it follows a December in which much will have been spent on presents and five family feasts in little more than a week, my guess is it wouldn’t be very wise to open any sort of shop in early 2008.

For local governments, the really bad news, of course, is just how much their income will fall now that the Golden Goose of highly-taxed property deals has stopped laying. The big question is whether spending will fall in line with the sort of reductions - 4.9 billion euros in 2009 according to Standard & Poors - that are being forecast. Personally, I’d be quite happy to see an end to the public works which have made Pontevedra one large roadworks site for the last seven years. But I fear politicians may well be reluctant to curtail expenditure that has its benefits.

A touching scene on the streets of Pontevedra yesterday – a stone mason gently trying to take a bit of granite out of his colleague’s eye. But, as they’d both been chipping away at the façade of Citibank without wearing protective goggles, my sympathy was rather short-lived. There is too much of this [macho?] refusal to take sensible safety measures in Spain. Which might well account for her poor record on work-related accidents.

Finally – Another 14 people have been arrested in the great Madrid town hall bribes-for-business-licences case. And it’s reported that the brains behind this is a guy whose line of work is selling business premises. What genius! Via others, you manipulate and control the market for the very things you’re selling. Rather like Charles Saatchi with the works of modern artists. Only not quite as legal and admirable. Or at least admired. Saatchi’s huge profits, that is. Not the so-called works of art.

A big welcome to September – when the sun can still be high but our tourist numbers are definitely low. This, of course, is because most of them are Spanish. And it’s simply not done here to take holidays outside late July and August. Even, I suspect, if you don’t have kids who have to go back to school in early September. So, our old quarter will be an absolute delight. As would the beaches, if I had any interest in lying on one.

Our last big fiesta of the year – the Medieval Fair – kicked off last night, with various events down in said old quarter. The one that fascinated me most was a peripatetic group of pipers, drummers, belly dancers, stilted giants and huge dragons. I was particularly taken, as was everyone else, by the beast which had a sort of Bunsen burner coming out of its snout and which belched long flames every couple of minutes. Though I bet I was the only person there wondering just how long it would be before a section of the milling crowd went up in smoke.

Nice-but-noisy Tony next door was drilling his wall until 10.30 last night. But this was OK as, by my rule of thumb, this is equivalent to 8.30 in other cultures. Less acceptable was the fact he took up the task again this morning at 9.30, equivalent to 7.30. On a bloody Saturday. Hence his nickname.

Works by the British artist Damian Hirst normally sell for hundreds of thousand of pounds, even if actually done by his 4 year old. But something he auctioned anonymously last week fetched a mere 300 euros. Which tells you everything you need to know about the art world.

Finally, this report comes from a site called Typically Spanish. But I certainly hope it isn’t . . . A 30 year old man from Salamanca chopped off his own penis and threw it down the toilet because he ‘did not want to sin anymore’.

I talked recently about attitudes to risk, saying they're different here in Spain. One reader effectively accused me of racism but no matter because the thin end of the ‘ealthnsafety wedge has just made its appearance in one of the final events of our August fiesta extravaganza. The Devil who chases kids round the old quarter of the city used to chuck little firecrackers at them. As of this year it’s flour. But we all know this can get in your eyes so within 10 years I imagine it will just be harsh words. And then a nasty grimace.

As I expected, Galician friends last night confirmed that the author of yesterday’s quoted article wants more education in Gallego so that the masses can learn to speak the codified form which is currently the preserve of only the ‘cultivated’ few. For me, the most interesting thing about the ensuing discussion was the resentment felt by all of them at attempts to foist on them an ‘artificial’ language different from the one they all spoke at home as kids. And still do whenever the want or need to. One of them even felt strict logic demanded that codification included a return to Portuguese spelling, as in Espanha. Not that he was advocating this reintegrista approach. Whenever I report this sort of thing, I get angry letters from Galician nationalists/Nationalists whom I take to be relatively young and idealist. My response is that I’m only recording what I hear. They’re all free to post alternative views, without needing to question my parenthood.

Anyway, I guess the writer of the article would agree with the VP of the Galician government, the Xunta, who’s said he wants the community’s ‘national’ anthem to be taught to children in our kindergartens. Sadly for him, he appears to be getting no support from his socialist coalition partner in the position of Minister of Education. Needless to say, when the President of the right-of-centre party criticised the proposal, he got the stock divisive accusation of being a pawn of Madrid.

Spain’s central bank says that, like Ireland, Spain has lost competitiveness over the last decade. It attributes this to high inflation and the weakening of the dollar. I suppose it’s possible to argue this wouldn’t have happened if the EU bank rate hadn’t been so ridiculously low for the Spanish economy, producing not only this result but also massive structural distortions such as the exploding property market. Which is now more explosive than exploding. Or is it vice versa? Or even implosive?

Pontevedra Book Club Recommendation: I’ve just finished a delightful book, Casa Nostra, by an Englishwoman – Caroline Seller Manzo – who married into an eccentric Sicilian family [are there any others?] and took on the challenge of converting part of the villa-cum-castle which her husband and his idiosyncratic siblings each owned some of. It’s beautifully written and full of anecdotes that will resonate with anyone living in Spain. Even Galicia, even though this is not normally regarded as having a terribly Mediterranean culture. Here’s a reference. One interesting comment is that, despite being close to Italy’s largest fishing port, the Manzo family could not avail itself of cheap or even high quality seafood and shellfish, as this all went off to the rich cities in northern Italy. I suspect this is true for us as well, despite the proximity of Vigo.

I occasionally allude to the possibility the issue of safety/risk is viewed differently here in Spain than elsewhere. I mention this again merely because last night I had to swerve to avoid the oncoming car of a neighbour with a 4 year old child on his lap. You might think this would horrify his wife but I guess not. For she was sitting next to him with a baby on her lap. But things are always relative; I never see here 6 or 7 on a motorbike, a pretty common sight when I lived in Jakarta.

The starting salary for a UK state sector teacher is around 19,000 pounds, or 28,000 euros. This compares with an average UK salary of around 23,000 pounds, or 34,000 euros. So 83%. Here in Spain, I’m told the starting salary for a teacher is 27,000 euros, compared with an average of 23,000 euros. So 117%. Given that teachers here have a relatively easy life, guaranteed employment as a civil servant, private medical insurance, very long holidays and an excellent pension, it’s pretty easy to understand why it’s a popular profession. On the downside, though, I’m assured there’s not much growth in your salary over your career. In contrast, UK teachers’ salaries can [will?] rise 47%, to 28,000 pounds a year, or 42,000 euros. Or 122% of the average. These are all gross, annual salaries, of course. One of the things that makes comparisons difficult is that here everyone talks about their individual net, monthly salary. I wait to be corrected on all this.

Reflecting demographic trends, there’s now a large surplus of university places in Spain – 292,000 courses for only 200,000 students. Inevitably, grade requirements have fallen. For some places, an application form bearing just your name and address is said to be enough. Hard to see this situation improving Spain’s problem of unemployed/underpaid graduates.

A UK poll has found that “The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim”. Well, there’s a surprise. Perhaps we can expect all those ‘green’ politicians to jump off this particular bandwagon now. Especially as, so far this summer, warming of any type is conspicuous by its absence here in Galicia.

Another non-surprise – The EU is about to impose a massive fine on Spain’s Telefonica for abuse of its dominant position in the broadband market. This will, of course, be met by the shareholders, a major one of which is the Spanish government. Or the taxpayers, as they’re sometimes called.

We’ve had two more local examples recently of what’s called kamikaze driving here – people speeding the wrong way down an autopista. Does this happen elsewhere, I’m forced to wonder.

Finally, here’s another example of the British art of understatement - It has emerged that five of the seven [terrorist] suspects held by the police are young Middle Eastern doctors employed at British hospitals. This is a development that will raise questions over the vetting procedures for medics from abroad.

Spain has been celebrating 30 yeas of democracy this week, not to mention a couple of decades of impressive economic growth. Here are a few then-and-now comparisons from a table in one of the national papers:-
Foreigners: 0.2m – 4.2m
Minimum monthly salary: 79 euros – 571 euros
Houses built: 406,000 – 612,000 [2004]
Phones: 9.5m – 59.7m
Life expectancy: 73 years – 81 years. The highest in Europe, I believe.

Some months ago, I joked about the likelihood of there being a Cornish nationalist movement. Inevitably, we now have the Cornish National Liberation Army, which insists Cornwall is not English and threatens to firebomb the houses and cars of the ‘invaders’. I also jokingly asked where the Leonese and Asturian nationalist movements where. And now we have them. Maybe I should give up on the humour. Or at least the sarcasm.

And perhaps it’s time to stress too my link on this page to the piece on the Kingdom of Danelaw takes you to a spoof. And not to a serious proposal that I be enthroned as monarch of the restored nation.

Returning to sanity . . . Different countries take different attitudes towards risk and safety. And, while I may sometimes express concern at things I see around me here, on balance I’m happy Spain is much less of a nanny state than the UK. In the latter, hardly a day passes without news of another lunatic step from the Health & Safety zealots in the direction of eliminating all possible risks from British society. The end result, of course, will be that all babies will have to be aborted, on the grounds that life always brings with it a risk of death.

I‘ve been known to make the occasional swipe at Telefonica. But yesterday I was impressed to receive a call – albeit from a machine – asking me to indicate whether I’d been satisfied with their response to my complaint about a breakdown. Well, I say ‘impressed’ but, as I’d not had a breakdown nor made a complaint, I’m not sure this is exactly the right word. Certainly not for the customer who should have got the call. After all, you’d think getting your number right would be one thing you could rely on your phone company for.

A gentleman called Joe Gallo has kindly referred me to a site which sets out the coats-of-arms of the various Gallo clans around the world. These all feature the bird in question. But these are always described as either as a ‘rooster’ or a ‘cockerel’. So, plenty of pollos but, as yet, no polla.

Up in north Galicia on Monday, the traffic police stopped a quadriplegic man in a motorised wheelchair after he’d taken a wrong turn and gone 10km down the autovia in the opposite direction from the brothel he was looking for. “I was just going for a shag” he told the Voz de Galicia, “but I don’t want people to think I’m a randy bastard. I went there three years ago but couldn’t get the chair up the steps. I was hoping they’d had a ramp fitted by now. The police over-reacted and made too much of it. I prefer dark girls with Indian features and intend to try again when I feel like it”.

This will presumably be when he’s had a sat-nav fitted to his chair. Which, by the way, he steers with his mouth. Meanwhile, though, he’s returned to the simpler pleasure of painting pictures of the countryside with his mouth. . . Am I alone in thinking this could only happen in Spain?

Most of the time I’m impressed and happy that Spain is not cursed with the twin evils of an excess of Health & Safety inspectors and a surfeit of lawyers. But there are occasions when I suspect things could be a little different. These might include, for example, if one of my legs were to go through rotten boards on the walkway from my house to the communal gardens and I were left dangling 4 metres above solid concrete. Or if, 2 weeks later, the promise of immediate repair had not been fulfilled. If this really were to happen, I guess the boards would look like this. . .

Eating out is such a compulsive feature of Spanish culture I’ve even heard people who struggle to get to the end of each month justify it with the claim it’s cheaper than eating in. So I wasn’t too surprised to read yesterday that the Spanish head the European table for spend on food and drink. The stay-at-home Brits manage only 9% on internal and external consumption of food and drink, compared with 11 in Germany, 14 in France and 15 in Italy. Here, though, it’s a whopping 20%.

A book called “The Return of the Idiot” has been published in Spanish. It was reviewed in El Mundo last Sunday in an article headed “El Colectivo de Idiotas sin Fronteras”, which needs no translation. The six cretins featured here were:- Juan Perón, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Ignacio Ramonet and the Anglos, Noam Chomsky and Harold Pinter. I just mention this here to upset my old left-wing friends and to pose the question whether a Collective of Idiots is worse than a Confederacy of Dunces. Meanwhile, the book is called “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot” in English.

The Spanish press has naturally given extensive coverage to the events in Northern Ireland and it was nice to see El Pais giving credit to John Major for initiating the peace process. It reported his comment that he hadn’t attended the photo-shoot in Belfast because Mr Blair hadn’t invited him. Anyway, the best thing about these developments is we may never again see the name of Teddy Kennedy in the British press. A man who supported collections for IRA terrorists in the USA on the grounds they were ‘freedom fighters’. I once asked him whether he’d see Mexicans setting off bombs in California in the same light but answer came there none.

The latest Miss Spain was crowned this week. She has, of course, a lovely face and a perfect body. But, in her first post-victory interview, she confirmed she’d have plastic surgery ‘if it was necessary’. No one here could be surprised at this answer. But why on earth was the question asked in the first place? Was the program perhaps sponsored by the clinic notorious for ads that leave nothing to the imagination?

My car had its annual service yesterday, ahead of it first roadworthiness test. I was astonished to be told it would fail this because the rear tyres were of different makes. Not different types nor different specifications but different brands. When I queried this, I was told it was because the tyres had different patterns and, thus, created a risk when braking. In response to my sceptical expression, the mechanic had the decency to say this would only be in extreme circumstances. None of my Spanish friends were aware of this regulation and – in a country where safety is simply not the god it is elsewhere – one is again left wondering what could possibly lie behind this pioneering development.

Scotland is the new Catalunia. Ahead of the May elections for the devolved parliament, the independence-minded Scottish Nationalist Party is wooing the UK’s third party [the Liberals] in order to ensure a ruling coalition. The Liberals are against independence but in favour of increased delegation of powers from London to Edinburgh, including the freedom to raise and keep all taxes. Since this would mean the cessation of subsidies from England and a sizeable increase in Scottish income tax, it will be interesting to see how the allegedly mean Scots respond to the various claims and counter-claims they’ll be hit with over the next month or so. Right now, the SNP is on a roll because of anti Labour and Conservative sentiment. But will this last once the impact of an SNP victory on Scottish wallets becomes clear? Interesting times. Both for Brits and Spaniards.

Here’s my latest 3-year compilation. Shorter but catchier than any of the previous. On the subject of SEX . . .

2003-4

I give a conversation class to a small group of teachers of English. One topic I tried last week was the critical attitude struck by many in the UK towards Mrs Beckham for her failure to keep her husband in harness. Rather to my surprise, no one seemed much interested in arguing the toss one way or the other. It was later explained to me that no one in Spain is surprised at Mr Beckham’s reported activities, since this is how men were. Nor at suggestions that Mrs Beckham was stupid for giving him the opportunity to play around, as this was self evident. What really surprised people here was that a woman would want to tell the world about sleeping with a man and get a million Euros for doing so. How quaint this all seems by British ‘standards’.


Of a morning I walk my dog, Ryan, through the forest behind my house, taking a small track off the main one. In the past three days this has been blocked – at 11 in the morning - by a car occupied [I believe] by a young couple. Since – for obvious reasons - I don’t look at them, I can’t say whether it is the same occupants every day. But I’m beginning to suspect that it is the same enterprising young woman each time. We are used to the forest being used, at least at night, by lovers desperate to find alternatives to their family flats but this matutinal activity is a new development. And not entirely welcome. Perhaps those small ads at the back of the local news papers will now add ‘Forest visits’ to the list of acceptable venues. I must check.


The magazine section of El Mundo today is largely devoted to an extensive survey of sex in Spain. Perhaps the most astonishing finding is that young Spanish woman clearly don’t get much payback on their significant investment in making themselves perhaps the sexiest females on the planet. What on earth does this tell us about Spanish society? And is it time for me to flesh out my youthful dreams of a one-man company called Hyr-A-Syr? No, they can’t be that desperate, can they? Plus they smoke.


The second survey I read today was the perennial favourite about Spanish sexual habits, particularly the frequency of activity and the number of orgasms achieved by participants. As ever, I will refrain from giving numbers but merely comment, once again, that an awful lot of women seem to be dissatisfied in this macho country. Another business opportunity?


As I have a counter on this blog page, I can check the number of hits I get each day and also, to some extent, their provenance. Sadly, I do. One of the more fascinating aspects [honest!] is the information about how people have arrived at my blog by using a search engine. So, in the last few days, I have been ‘hit’ by people looking for information on ‘superwomans details’, the ‘casita de Elena in Vigo’ and ‘roadside brothels’. Regular readers will know that the Casita de Elena is [according to its ads] Vigo’s premier brothel. Is it the same person in each case, I ask myself.


Today I came across an internet company called Websidestory Research Co. Brought a smile to my face at least. Which reminds me … While I’m delighted to be able to report that the daily hits to my blog continue to rise, I’m a little chastened by the fact that 3 or 4 a week arise from someone in Spain putting ‘casita de elena vigo’ into their search engine. As this is a brothel, God only knows what they make of the fact that this brings up my blog as the no. I item.


It’s getting worse. At least 4 of the 25 hits to my blog today have been searches for information on the The Little House of Elena in Vigo. Mind you, this does leave 21 which weren’t.


In post-Franco, more-liberal-than-thou Spain, sex is pretty much everywhere. Especially on the TV or in any space on the outskirts of town which can take a car. And Spanish women, of course, do little to downplay their sexual characteristics. So, in this environment of abandon, it is all the more surprising to find that one of the public TV channels hosts possibly the most sensible sex-education programmes in the history of the cathode tube. Being very popular, its thirty-second welcome is naturally followed by 15 minutes of [appropriate] advertising but, once it gets going, the programme is a model of how to approach quite delicate issues such as…. well, you know. That said, I have some difficulty believing that all the calls to the young female presenter are entirely genuine. Like the one from a waiter who said he reacted unusually to the electricity from the fridge he had to keep walking past, for example. The programme is naturally a talking point and, as a result of this, I get the impression that some of the information re women comes as rather a shock to the Madonna-or-whore generation of Spanish men. They do like to keep things compartmentalised.


As you know, it takes Google about 0.18 of a second to come up with several zillion citations for anything you type in the box. So it’s all the more incredible that, as someone in Holland discovered today, if you search for “Spanish sexual habits”, the one and only reference you will get is my blog of October 22. Fame at last.


In the small hours of this morning, my blog received its 1000th hit. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I’d been hoping that this honour would go to yet another frustrated Spaniard searching for more details of the C de E in Vigo. Alas, no. It was someone who’d entered ‘things to do in Galicia’ into Google. The really gratifying thing about this is that it brought up both my blog and my web page.


2005

I read today, to my surprise, that the age at which one can marry in Spain is 14. This was in the account of a Supreme Court acquittal of a 30 year-old teacher of having illegal sex with a 14 year-old pupil, on the grounds that she’d been a willing partner.


Yet another survey on national sex attitudes. 73% of Spanish men and 71% of Spanish women profess to being happy with their sex lives, though in each case a slightly higher percentage thinks their partner gets more out of it than them. Not sure what, if anything, we can read into this. Except that the women are more accurate about their partners. Possibly even their husbands.


Thank God for another of those sex surveys the Spanish love so much! The major finding of this one is that a staggering 96% of Spanish males believe it’s ‘important’ or ‘essential’ to give pleasure to one’s partner. The researchers have coined the term hombre vitasexual for such paragons. The odd thing is that every other survey I’ve seen reports a significant percentage of Spanish women have never had an orgasm. Three possible explanations for this dichotomy are:- 1. Los hombres vitasexuales are not getting round to everyone, 2. They have a different definition of ‘giving pleasure’ than the women, or 3. The greatest skill developed by hombre vitasexual is giving the right answer to questions about his sexual performance.


Britain and Spain are converging in at least one way. More and more university graduates in the UK are having to live at home after completing their studies. Which naturally brings their active sex life to a sudden halt. So, as in Spain, there’s a need for discreet places where they can be nice to each other. This has apparently led to nocturnal competition for Wendy houses in neighbourhood gardens. Where there’s a will ……


Regular readers will know I often cite the results of surveys of sex in Spain, plus others such as one on the use mobile phones. It struck me yesterday that the survey I’d really like to see would answer the question How often do either one or both Spanish partners use a mobile phone when making love?


Only in Spain?: The town hall in Palma, Mallorca has issued a sex guide for teenagers. One section addresses the problems of young men who are worried about the size of their manhoods [menhood?]. They are advised, firstly, to “Do what porn stars do and shave off your pubic hair as this makes your member look bigger” and, secondly, to “Avoid gaining weight as your penis doesn’t follow suit and so looks proportionately smaller’. This is the sort of thing I could have done with 30 years ago!


2006

We had another of those reviews of Spanish sex life in our papers today. A staggering 68% of women say they are unhappy with things, especially [I suppose] the 36% who never experience an orgasm. These are preumably in relationships with the 27% of men who admit they normally ejaculate after a minute or so. As for the men, a mere 20% say they’re unhappy with their sex life. But then, quite apart from inequality in the home, and unlike their wives, they’re able to avail themselves of a vast take-in service industry aimed directly at them and to which their partners seem to turn a blind eye. Not to mention the Catholic Church.


I give a conversational class to five teachers of English on a Monday evening. They are all very fluent and the session is always fun but we exceeded ourselves today when discussing changing attitudes in Spain towards sex before and during marriage. The high spot came when one of the group told us of being propositioned by a married man while she was attending a hen party for one of her friends. He, it turned out, was at a similar function for one of his friends. Or a ‘cock party’ as she quite logically called it.


Quote of the week: Civil partnerships are intended for homosexuals but, of course, the tax authorities can’t insist the partners actually have sex. This means anyone can form a civil partnership with any unmarried person of the same sex, so long as he/she is not a close blood relation. So the smart thing to do if, for example, you are a widow and know you are dying, is to have a civil partnership with the woman who is engaged to marry your so and leave her everything tax-free.
An article on the workings of the UK inheritance tax


The Spanish government last year reformed matrimonial law so as to make it much easier and quicker to get a divorce. In the second half of 2005, these rose by around 80% compared with the previous year. My guess is the majority of these were initiated by women. Possibly the same ones who complain of an unsatisfactory sex life in the surveys we’re regularly treated to.


To lighten our hearts, there was another of those surveys about the sex life of the Spanish. This one reported that 81% of them plan their sexual activity, with 61% even setting aside a particular day of the week. I regard this as being more inaccurate than any of the previous surveys; I’ve never met a Spaniard who even knew how to spell ‘plan’, never mind do it. And all this sexual pre-thinking hardly fits well with the Spanish view of themselves as the world’s most spontaneous people. Obviously rubbish.


Yet another of thos sex surveys, this time about the performance of Spanish men. Apparently they rank highly in terms of average time per session. At 22.5 minutes, they come second only to Mexicans, who manage 23. To no one's great surprise, they also rank [I almost wrote 'score'] highly as regards infidelity, defined as 'one night'. And they also do well when it comes to trying new postures. But they're only 15th for number of times per week [3] and are way down the list at giving their partner an orgasm every time. Only 37% achieve this, against 62% with Italians and 58% with Hungarians. One wonders, then, what Spanish men are doing for twenty two and a half minutes.


I’ve regularly said how much more sane Spain is than the ‘more progressive’ Anglo-Saxon cultures. To make the point, I leave you with this report from a UK newspaper:- A five-year-old American schoolboy who pinched the bottom of a female classmate has been disciplined for sexual harassment. The boy's father said he was unable to explain to his son why he was in trouble. "He knows nothing about sex". A spokesman for Washington County public schools, said : "It's important to understand a child may not realise what he or she is doing may be sexual harassment but, if it fits under the definition, then it is. Any time a student touches another student inappropriately, it could be sexual harassment," she said. The case comes weeks after a four-year-old in Texas who hugged a teaching assistant was suspended for "inappropriately touching" her.

The Spanish president, Mr Zapatero, appeared in parliament yesterday to defend his policy of talking to ETA terrorists. Ignoring opposition demands that he apologise for his mistakes and return to a bipartisan hard line, he did at least say he was sorry for being optimistic on the day before ETA exploded its bomb at Madrid airport, killing two Ecuadorians. If he expected magnanimity for this rare act of political chest-beating, he’ll have been sorely disappointed. The opposition’s line continues to be that Zapatero is a naïve idiot who has put the future of Spain at grave risk. Not to mention his own political career.

Tomorrow is the 300th anniversary of the Union of the English and Scottish nations. In keeping with British tradition, celebrations will be – to say the least - low key. Ahead of the day, there’ve been several polls on the current attitude of the English and Scottish populaces. These suggest growing support in both countries for Scottish independence and so the May elections for the Scottish parliament will surely be pored over meticulously. From a Spanish perspective – unless you live in the Basque Country, Catalunia or even Galicia – the break up of the British union would be an alarming precedent.

Generally speaking, I’m an admirer of the Spanish refusal to create temples to the great god of Safety but I do occasionally wonder whether there shouldn’t be a bit of a move in that direction. Today I watched as a couple of men and a crane levered massive blocks of granite onto the top of a wall already 6 metres [18 feet] high. Not only were neither of the men wearing anything as sissy as a hard hat but the work was taking place directly above cars and pedestrians passing below. So I wasn’t too surprised to see a chunk of granite fall down into the road. I guess it’s easy to understand why the Spanish death-at-work rate is one of the highest in Europe. A macho thing?

A couple in Italy has been arrested for killing their next door neighbours because of excessive noise. If this were to catch on in Spain, the population would be decimated within a decade. At least, around here it would.