Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain

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'*    

Covid

So, what percentages of the population are prepared to have the vaccine? Well, these were reported last week, as of October, with August numbers in brackets-

UK 79%% (85%)

Germany 67% (69%)

Italy 65% 67%)

Spain 64% (72%)

USA 64% (67%)    

France 54% (59%)

Surprisingly, all the numbers have reduced over 2 months.

This is an interesting app in the risk of there being one person in groups of varying size around the world. It doesn't, though, indicate the consequence of that person giving you the plague. As we (think we) know, that depends on age, health and your personal precautions.    

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Bureaucracy 1: It seems that, despite, thousands of denuncias for violations of the Covid restrictions, few of the resulting fines have been collected. Because no one knew who was responsible for this, as between the various administrations - municipal, provincial and regional (the Xunta). But now - according to the Voz de Galicia  -  A Solomonic solution has been reached: the Xunta will takes charge of fines relating to the violation of quarantines or isolations, while the rest must be pursued by municipal councils. Presumably for 'minor' things like not wearing a mask or not distancing, as opposed to breaking the curfew.  My guess is this means nothing will be done re the vagabonds in Pontevedra's main square, who appear to have immunity to at least the law, if not the virus.

Bureaucracy 2: In my diary for late 2000. I wrote of difficulties of dealing with Spain's energy companies, who insisted I go through numerous (time and energy wasting) hoops before they'd deign to take my money and refrain from cutting off supply to my new home. Here's a rather more recent example.

And here's María's Riding the Wave - Days 15&16  

The Way of the World

A Guardian headline: Silent victims: The hidden Romanian women exploited in the UK sex trade. Sex traffickers can make profits of over £1m a year per brothel – and Covid lockdowns have only made it easier for them to operate. Maybe today's woke generation should be rather more concerned with this than with some other things they rant about.

Spanish

1. I'm grateful to an (anonymous) reader for this phrase: Quien te ha visto y quien te ve. ‘If only they could see you now!; My, how you've changed!

2. Un atracón: Excess; Binge.

Finally . . .

Amusing aphorisms: 1. When one door closes and another door opens, you're probably in prison.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Expats certainly have Spanish cities in high regard, it seems.

Galicia is fighting against Catalan equalisation proposals which would mean higher income and inheritance taxes here. Looking at the tables, I was astonished to see that the Madrid region was among the lowest tax-takers in every category. Doesn't seem fair. 

Thanks to the pandemic, there are 32 hotels for sale here in Galicia, one of them for a mere €3.7m. 

Given the concerns about 'aerosols' being implicated in causing infections, I was rather surprised to see a group of 5 or 6 Galician bagpipers(gaiteros) parading through the centre of the city yesterday.

Here's María's Riding the Wave - Day 14

The UK

Watching the England-Wales rugby match on the Welsh channel yesterday - the only one showing it - I saw the Welsh for England given as LLoegr.  Which bears no relation to any other word I know. Checking on Google for the Welsh for 'England', I was first given 'England' but I eventually got LLoegr to come up, and compared it with these:-

Irish Gaelic: Sasana

Scots Gaelic: Sasain

Breton: Bra-saoz 

Cornish: Pow Sows  (Pow is country, region, land)

Easy to see these are all cognates, whereas Welsh isn't. Odd. Especially as the Welsh for  the English language and an English person are (cognates)Saesneg and Sais. One explanation offered is that the word Lloegr means ‘lost lands’ which would make sense in the context in which the distinction from Cymru (Welsh for Wales and meaning ‘countrymen’) needed to be made at the time of the Saxon invasion. When the (alleged) Celts were driven Westwards into the Welsh mountains.

Austria

The village of Fucking, in Austria, is to change its name. The locals are sick to the back teeth of sniggering foreigners taking photographs of the sign bearing the name, stealing the sign and even, on a few occasions, filming themselves engaging in the activity mentioned, with the sign in the background. They’ve plumped for  . . . Fugging. 

Argentina

I've steadfastly ignored all the OTT articles about Maradona, except the one below. It's by a writer - John Carlin - whose articles on Spain I've enjoyed. And it's really about Argentina, not Maradona.

The USA 

The words to the US anthem - The Star-spangled Banner - were written on board a British ship, by an American who'd witnessed the bombardment of Baltimore . . . But the tune is that of a British drinking song - 'The Anacreontic Song'. A tad ironic, then. You can hear it here and here, with the words. I think the second one is the same guy in various wigs, singing in different ranges. It’s been pointed out that the Myrtle of Venus is vesica Pisces and the Bachus vine is the phallus. So a pretty dirty song to those with a Classical education. 

The Way of the World

BBC Lincolnshire has suspended its football pundit he described a scuffle on the pitch as “handbags”. Never mind that Collins dictionary defines “handbags” as “an incident in which people, especially sportsmen, fight or threaten to fight, but without real intent to inflict harm”. The BBC says “listeners” complained. How many, you right-on dweebs? And why didn’t you tell them to get a life?

French MPs are considering a bill to curb la glottophobie — the prejudice against regional and lower-class accents. 

Eton College students are in open revolt against their headmaster as a row over free speech threatened to boil over into a major fall-out. Pupils have accused it of acting in a “heartless and merciless” way by dismissing one of its masters amid a dispute over a lecture that questioned “current radical feminist orthodoxy”. They’ve signed a petition accusing Eton of “institutional bullying”, claiming it was a “gross abuse of the duty of the school to protect the freedoms of the individual”. And so it wokefully  goes.

Spanish

Cabincore - El estilo de la montaña. Seems to mean wearing wellies with every outfit.

Finally . . .

Stupid question in a British newspaper: Is this dramatic stretch of Somerset England's best-kept seaside secret? Not now, mate.

 THE ARTICLE 

Maradona remembered: Adios, Saint Diego. Argentina cries for you.  John Carlin. The Times

Three official days of national mourning, flags at half-mast, queues two miles long filing past a coffin lying in state at the presidential palace, police dispersing hysterical crowds with tear gas, Covid be damned. Jack Charlton did not get that after he died earlier this year. But Charlton was not Diego Maradona, and England is not Argentina.

It has already been suggested in the Argentine media that November 25, the date of Maradona’s death, should be declared a public holiday. It would be surprising if it were not. Or maybe Argentina will choose the day of his birth, October 30 — or perhaps June 22, the day it defeated England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-finals, led to victory by the man who scored the two most memorable goals in football history.

That was the defining moment in Maradona’s life, the one that raised him to the sublime in the eyes of his compatriots, for whom he became not a footballing god but God himself, Dios.

Defeating Germany in the final was a footnote. Beating the English (los piratas, as every Argentinian learns to call them from an early age), the old enemy that had crushed them in the Falklands conflict four years earlier, and doing so with a goal that hurt the English all the more for being so utterly unjust and then with the greatest one ever scored in a World Cup ... all this sealed Maradona’s role as Argentina’s redemptive hero, a status no amount of drug abuse or buffoonery would efface, a light that no failure — not even his abject management of the national team in 2010 — would dim.

I was at that game in Mexico’s Azteca Stadium. I had interviewed him there, on the grass, 24 hours earlier. Half a dozen other English journalists were there, but I was the one who spoke Spanish, so I asked the questions. The consensus was that we should try to get him to declare war on England, or at least to say that the game would be revenge for the Falklands humiliation. But no — for once in his life he played the diplomat. I insisted, but there was no getting round him. “Come on!” he cried. “You journalists, always trying to stir up controversy! It’s just a game of football. A big game against a big rival, sure, but just a game.”

God lied. But it was divine intervention that gave Argentina victory by two goals — two miracles — to one. I and the other 120,000 spectators in the Azteca saw that he scored the first with his hand. Only the referee did not. The second — well, years later I got hold of the tape of the commentary on Argentina’s biggest radio station. Here is an attempt at a translation:

“Diegooooooooooooooo!” the commentator howled. “Maradooooooona! The greatest player of all time! ... What planet did you come from? ... Argentina 2, England 0! Diegoooooooool! Diegoooooool! Diego Armandoooo Maradonaaaa!” . . . The commentator paused for breath, stilled his bursting heart, let out a strangled sob and then began again, his voice softer, more fervent, more awed. “Thank you, God, for football ... For Maradona ... For these tears ... For ... this ... Argentina 2 ... [sob now clearly audible] England ... 0.”

Had Maradona not scored those goals, had he not declared that the first one had been God’s work, had England won an evenly poised match, Maradona would not have spent the next 34 years of his life as Argentina’s Napoleon. Argentinians would not have built a church in his name, would not have sung songs casting him as Jesus Christ, would not have responded to his death the way the British did to Winston Churchill’s or the South Africans to Nelson Mandela’s.

Argentinians are a people hungry for heroes, hungry for some glorious history, hungry for expiation of their sins. Possessed of a sharp sense of collective failure, they know that as a nation they blew it. The best-educated people in Latin America, living in a land outrageously rich in natural resources, they were three times richer than the Japanese a century ago; now they are many times poorer.

Argentina is the only country I know, and I have filed stories from 60, that is visibly tattier and more underfed than it was half a century ago, when I lived there as a child.

Nostalgia is the national characteristic, expressed in the tango and in a hopeless longing to recover the lost glory of a century ago, when a Polish or Italian immigrant was as likely to seek their fortune in Buenos Aires as in New York. There’s a hankering, too, for the Europe their ancestors left behind. Vivimos en el culo del mundo — “We live in the arsehole of the world” — is an expression you hear 10 times a day in Buenos Aires. Argentinians have a love-hate relationship with themselves, as they do with the English, who do have a rich history, who have done things, invented things, conquered the world — not excluding the Falkland Islands, a stain on the national honour of which every child is reminded at school.

Maradona wiped the slate clean on June 22, 1986. Argentinians clung onto the myth of Maradona the redeemer with the despair of drowning men. He gave the most football-mad people in the world what they wanted, Evita Perón in boots. He was a natural-born demagogue and they hung on his every utterance, even when he was so drunk or drugged or sick he slurred his words, to his dying day.

I went once to the Church of Maradona in the city of Rosario. The faithful — who at one point numbered about 250,000 — wish one another “Happy Christmas” on the day of Maradona’s birth. The other big holiday of obligation is, yes, June 22. “For us Argentinians that victory against England is the Maradonian Easter,” the church’s founder told me. “It’s the Sunday of Resurrection.”

The church has its own version of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Diego, who art on the pitch, hallowed be your left foot, thy magic dazzle our eyes, let thy goals be remembered, on earth as in heaven.” And then they have the hymns: Our Beloved Diego, sung to the music of Schubert’s Ave Maria.

Maradona believed it. I saw him on TV 10 years ago on a show watched by the whole of Argentina. He emerged on stage out of a nitrogen cloud, singing, 

I sowed joy among the people, I bathed our land in glory.

If Jesus stumbled, why should not I?

The studio audience joined in with goggle-eyed fervour, stamping and waving Argentine flags. There was not a suggestion of irony from them or from Maradona. No sense of the ridiculous, no awareness of the spectacle’s utter madness — surpassed now, as was entirely to be expected, by the wild excess of pomp, melodrama and grief that has greeted the saviour’s death.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

It's reported that Pontevedra is the only Galician city with an increasing rate of Covid infections. And that medics allege it’s the fault of poorly-managed testing. I'm not at all sure how but I can say I've driven past the PCT testing point several times in the last week or so and have never seen a car waiting to enter it. Lots of car-parking space, arrows and ropes but no cars. Odd

It looks like I'm going to have to wait until April for my jab. Which might well kibosh a planned/hoped-for trip to the UK in March for the birth of my 4th grandchild.

My preferred supermarket chain - Mercadona - says it's going to pull out all the stops to reduced plastic packaging. Which rather surprised - and pleased - me, as I've had the impression for a while they were going n the opposite direction.

Large jellyfish have appeared in the river that flows round Pontevedra city. Global warming?

I had some wine delivered at the primera hora yesterday. As usual, this turned out to be 10am. Endorsing my long-held view that the standard adjustment measure for Spanish times - midday, lunchtime, dinnertime, etc. - is the addition of 2 hours. At least.

Here's Lenox Napier - on his Spanish Shilling page - talking of the plight of many Spanish villages suffering from 'bloodletting'. Of which we have quite a few in Galicia.

And here's something on one of our famous castros, from Max Abroad. Who does a fine job finding appealing places around Spain.

The UK/The EU

The British media continues to talk of Brexit happening at the end of this year, when in fact it took place at the end of last January. What we're nearing is the end of the transition phase, when there will or won't be a trade deal. No one knows right now.

The Way of the World

High culture: Cambridge University’s leaders have become embroiled in a free speech row with dons who are refusing to back a new rule requiring them to be “respectful of the diverse identities of others”. The Council of the 800-year-old institution has proposed a series of updates to free speech rules but academics have argued that the changes are “authoritarian”. Critics say the changes are “no doubt meant well” but the vague nature of their wording mean that they could be used to undermine academics’ freedom of speech rather than protect it.

Low culture: Caffeine hybrid shampoo - German engineering for the hair. Dear dog. How gullible do you have to be to pay a premium price for that?

Finally . . .

Life and its coincidences are sometimes eerie. Or 'spooky, as Dame Edna would say. Last night, I had the Manfred Mann song 'Come Tomorrow' going round and round my head. Typing this post, I switched on the the TV, to hear . . . guess what. Followed by the Moody Blues, whom I saw in The Cavern, back in the (famous) day.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant. 

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'*   

  Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spa

This is a decent overview of the political landscape here. Hard to disagree with the comment that Spain’s culture wars look set to ramp up.

Are there political parties to the right of Vox? Unfortunately, says Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas, citing this article.  

Yesterday's lists suggested those born in Spain 1946-64 are the Transition Generation. Elsewhere in the world, these are known as Baby Boomers. María advises that this label is used in Spain  for the next cohort - Generation X. Confused? Well, Spain is different, they say. See here for the all labels used for the 20th and 21st centuries. Interesting to see that my parents were of the  'Silent Generation'.      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers

There's a nice example here of both Spanish bureaucracy and the risk of relying on only a notary when buying or selling property in Spain.  Don't listen to the agent!

María's Riding the Wave - Day 13  

The UK

My passport renewal. . .  1. It was my old passport that I mailed at midday, not my application, and 2. I missed out a 5th foto rejection reason - 'Your eyes appear to be closed'. As if.

I wonder if anyone understands the government’s new 'tiered' restrictions. More importantly, I wonder what percentage of the population will abide by them. The ones who haven't had their businesses closed down, I mean.

Judging by all the Xmas ads, there's been an explosion in mixed-marriages since I left the UK in 2000. A wonderful development, of course.

The USA  

In a preview of how much damage a conservative majority on the Supreme Court can cause, the justices ruled 5-4 late last night that religious institutions do not have to abide by a public health order in New York limiting how many people can gather in one place. More here.

Finally . . .

Another random quote, to  raise a smile:  I performed badly in the Civil Service Exams because evidently I knew more about economics than my examiners: John Maynard Keynes.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

 Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

This year, divorce rates have fallen, while domestic violence cases have risen. I guess one can see through this apparent inconsistency.

This might only be in Spain:-

Generación T (de la Transición): 1943-63

Generación X: 1964-1981

Generación Y (Millenials): 1982-96

Generación Z: 1996-2010

With all the cafés and bars closed - and no public facilities available - where do you go when you're caught short? The museum, if open? The nearest centro comercial, possibly 15m walk away or more?

María's Riding the Wave - Days 11&12  

The UK

Yesterday I made a successful internet application for a passport renewal. But it took 8 attempts at a digital foto before the government site accepted one - 5 by me and 3 by the neighbour whose help I enlisted. Reasons given:- Not enough natural light; Too many shades of colour behind my head; Not enough space around my head; and: Not enough kilobytes. I mailed it midday by registered letter(certificado) and was astonished that the Correos clerk didn't ask for my NIE/TIE, explaining this would only be necessary if I wanted an invoice, not just a tique.

The USA  

Myth busting here.

Given where Trump seemed to get his ideas from, it could've got/gotten a lot worse during the next 4 years,  . . A former Olympic gymnastics champion rumoured to be in a relationship with President Putin is paid £7.7m pa as head of a pro-Kremlin media group. Ms Kabaeva previously hosted a TV chat show but is not known to have had any experience in media management.

The Way of the World

The idea that defined the West now threatens us . . . Individualism  was a formula that worked for the West for a few centuries. The future may look very different. See the article below.

Finally . . .

The world's best footballers:-

Neymar 1.75m

George Best 1.75m

Pele 1.73m

Messi 1.70m

Maradona 1.65m

Cf. Average height for UK males 2019 1.75m(5'9)

I'm only 1.73m. To think, what I could have been . . .

This is what makes football special; you don't need to be be tall or physically powerful to play it. Or even excel at it.

P. S. Ronaldo 1.85m. Lanky bastard.

BTW . . . Maradona’s downfall was caused by a combined addiction to drugs, drink, eating and sex. Bit of a glutton, then. Or perhaps he just couldn't make up his mind.

THE ARTICLE

Idea that defined the West now threatens us:  James Marriott, TheTimes

There’s an endearingly ambitious academic discipline called cliodynamics which aims to predict the rise and fall of civilisations using mathematical modelling. Cliodynamics has been in the news this year because its most famous proponent, Peter Turchin, a biologist previously famous for studying the population dynamics of pine beetles, made a series of predictions a decade ago that an “age of discord” was due to begin in 2020.

Joseph Henrich is a Harvard anthropologist whose new book The Weirdest People in the World identifies one big theme in western civilisation: individualism. Henrich argues that the unusually individualistic psychology of westerners makes them radically different to most other societies in the world. This might sound trite but Henrich makes a convincing argument showing how, over centuries, individualism freed westerners from the restrictions of social networks based on kinship, such as tribes and families. We became more mobile, better at exchanging ideas and more adept at co-operating in large non-familial organisations such as guilds, scientific societies and nation states. These changes fuelled innovation and growth, propelling the West to its economic, technological and military ascendancy.

Henrich doesn’t speculate about how the West’s individualism is shaping modern history. But if you buy his idea that individualism defines western civilisation then it’s not hard to speculate that the individualism which once propelled us to global dominance is the same force now fracturing our society.

A battery of social experiments illustrates the extraordinary individualism of the modern West. When asked by researchers to complete the phrase “I am”, westerners opted for words that described their personal attributes and achievements (“I am smart”, “I am a lawyer”, etc). Others, by contrast, referred to their family relationships and social roles (“I am a brother”, “I am a friend”). In another experiment participants were told to draw a diagram showing their relationships to their friends. Non-westerners usually drew everyone the same size whereas the citizens of western societies depicted themselves as bigger than their friends. (“Americans,” a researcher noted, “tend to draw themselves very large.”) If that stuff sounds hokey, think of the psychological gulf which separates American politicians debating questions of “liberty” and “freedom” from Chinese leaders devising policies to promote “the harmonious society”.

Criticisms of individualism are common across the political spectrum. Left-wing writers point to the damage caused by unrestrained economic individualism. On the right, commentators lament the decline of the family. Donald Trump highlights the danger of extreme narcissism. In his long refusal to concede the US election result, Trump placed his own ego above the democratic conventions that bind American society. But the social forces swirling beneath Trump are more dangerous. The emergence of an extreme intellectual individualism is one of the most significant dangers of our era.

Henrich shows how, in the 15th century, the advent of printing presses accelerated individualism by enabling men and women to interpret scripture for themselves rather than rely on the teachings of religious gatekeepers. This tendency towards intellectual self-determination is a theme in the history of western culture and one that reached its dangerously logical conclusion in the postmodern philosophy of the 1970s which taught that the truth is relative, and everyone’s interpretation of reality is as valid as anyone else’s. This thinking lies at the heart of our modern culture wars, which are defined not just by clashing opinions but clashing definitions of reality itself.

Those culture wars, of course, have been exacerbated by the advent of the internet, an information revolution at least as psychologically significant as the invention of printing. Where the printing press democratised the interpretation of information, the internet offers us the opportunity not just to interpret information but to mould it however we want. The conspiracy theorist who claims to have “worked things out for myself” is the ultimate intellectual narcissist. But we are all implicated: social media companies flatter us with algorithmically curated timelines which reflect our own views back at us. This is not just individualism but a form of infantile narcissism which allows us to perceive reality as nothing more than an extension of ourselves.

If you’re looking for a way to understand the turbulence our society is going through, then Henrich’s take on individualism is the most compelling I’ve read this year. With western individualism in crisis, it’s hard not to notice that the rising power in the world is China, a much less individualistic society. Individualism does not guarantee geopolitical dominance. It was a formula that worked for the West for a few centuries. The future may look very different.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*    

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

It was disappointing to read - and not just because I'm British - that proficiency in English in Spain is still low. I seem to recall president Zapatero promising that all this would change once hundred of thousands of native speakers started teaching in Spanish schools. From what I hear around me in Pontevedra's bars, there certainly are quite a few of these (young and unqualified) assistants in Spain. But they don't seem to have had much effect on national competency. Apart from keeping the price for a class to what it was 19 years ago. So, in real terms, now half of what it was then.     

And not just in English . . . A relevant comment: Failure to produce political consensus has been a hallmark of all of Spain’s attempts at education reform in a country where students regularly underperform in the PISA international assessment program.

The latest major reform - assuming it gets through parliament - will be the 8th since 1978 and is A replay of the discord triggered by the 7 earlier reforms. More here.

Of course, it doesn't help if you're up against the interests of the powerful and entrenched Catholic Church, as well having to satisfy - or at least not alienate - nationalists in Cataluña, the Basque Country and Galicia. And to be operating where politics in this young democracy are rather tribal. 

I see the dreadful potholes in the backroad I use to get to my the parking lot in Lérez were filled in 2 days ago. I might be very wrong on this but it already seems to me that the top level of the new tarmac has sunk. Another chapuza?

The EU

Says the writer of the article below: A new 'Iron Curtain' is descending on the EU, and threatens to collapse the project. . .  Brussels may now have an even bigger problem than Brexit to deal with.

The USA  

I'm afraid I have to report there's no truth in the rumour that the turkey refused to pardon President Trump  in the annual White House ceremony this week. Though one turkey did pardon another, of course.

It may never be known whether Donald Trump truly believed he won the 2020 US election, or if the last 2 weeks have been an extended face-saving exercise. . . . It was reportedly decided that Mr Trump would never need to formally concede, but could begin the transition.

Who'd believe a novel or film with this plot?

Spanish

Two words new to me yesterday:- 

Zozobra: 

1. Restlessness/anxiety/distress/anguish which doesn't permit calmness, because of something bad threatened or already suffered.

2. Capsizing

Ahijada: Goddaughter

The Way of the World

Zozobra in context/action.

Finally . . .

I read that there's something called The Power Hour. I like this comment on it: It's nice that someone has written a book about getting up an hour early called How to Focus on Your Goals, but what if your goal is to be less tired?

THE ARTICLE

A new 'Iron Curtain' is descending on the EU, and threatens to collapse the project

Brexit is a non-issue compared to the deepening East vs West rift    Jonathan Saxty, Daily Telegraph

The clock might be running down on Brexit but the EU may now have a more serious problem on its hands. 

Last week, Hungary and Poland vetoed the bloc’s €1.8 trillion budget and recovery package, responding to plans for a new mechanism which would allow for the reduction of funds if member states violate ‘rule of law’ principles. 

Poland and Hungary claim this is a power grab, and that Brussels is trying to bully conservative eastern and central European states. The rule of law mechanism only requires a qualified majority to pass. However unanimous backing is required to allow the EU to raise funds to finance the recovery plan and budget. 

France and the Netherlands suggested pushing ahead with an intergovernmental plan which excludes Hungary and Poland. This however is considered to be complex and possibly premature.

Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union allows for the suspension of certain rights, such as voting, from a member state. However, there is no mechanism to expel a member state.

Many businesses are depending on the cash and, given the ‘second wave’ of coronavirus hitting the continent, concerns are mounting that the Visegrád Group allies could undermine a recovery in the bloc. 

The veto is likely to exacerbate tensions not just between central and eastern European member states and those in the West, but among Western European member states too. Already this year, ‘coronabonds’ were shelved after heated debate, while financial agreement was only reached after concessions to the so-called ‘Frugal Four’. 

Without a December deal, the EU would have to resort to an emergency spending programme which would extend 2020 spending ceilings but allow money to flow only to some ringfenced areas. 

The veto is yet more evidence of a new Iron Curtain coming back down the spine of Europe. This Iron Curtain is however cultural, not economic. Brussels has made no secret of its displeasure that many central and eastern European states will not sign up to ‘progressive’ values. 

For the likes of Hungary and Poland, their view of the EU as a kind of EFTA-plus organisation runs counter to the ambitions of Berlin and Paris, never mind the goals of federalists. 

For all the talk of certain south European states being the Achilles heel of the EU, central and eastern Europe states – most having retained their own currencies – are generally better placed to extricate themselves from the bloc. 

While it is commonly believed that central and eastern European states will not leave the EU owing to the financial benefits, evidence suggests these countries are benefitting less from the EU as their economies grow (ironically the EU may have helped them get to the point where they have less need of the EU). 

According to the European Commission, GDP forecasts for this year suggest that Hungary (-6.4%) will fare better than both France (-9.4%) and Italy (-9.9%), and even the EU27 (-7.4%). Meanwhile Poland (-3.6%) will fare better than Germany (-5.6%).

When it comes to budget balance as a percentage of GDP, Hungary’s figure of -8.4% is the same as the EU27 for 2020, while Poland’s figure (-8.8%) is better than those for both France (-10.5%) and Italy (-10.8%).

In terms of Government debt as a percentage of GDP, Hungary’s figure for 2020 (78%) is not only lower than those for France (115.9%) and Italy (159.6%), but the EU27 as a whole (93.9%). Moreover Poland (56.6%) again fares better than Germany (71.2%).

Anyway, money is unlikely to induce Hungary and Poland to change their beliefs. A victory for the two states may in fact encourage other central and eastern European states, not least Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Indeed, while not actively joining the veto, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa wrote that it would not be appropriate for a body to adjudicate in disputes over the rule of law. No doubt other central and eastern European leaders sympathise.

Central and eastern Europe states are particularly sensitive to perceived infringement on their sovereignty. While Western Europe is de-Christianising, central and eastern states are re-Christianising, the faith having been a rallying point against communism. 

Central and eastern European member states want a better standard of living, but not at any price, least of all (as they see it) at the cost of their sovereignty and identity. Brussels may now have an even bigger problem than Brexit to deal with.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

 Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Luis García Montero, a poet who heads the Cervantes Institute has this to say on the controversial issue  of Spanish ceasing to be the vehicular language: We should be very wary of language differences being used to foster tensions and hatred, when our cultural diversity — including minority mother tongues that deserve democratic support — is part of our strength. The government, meanwhile, says the real priority is for students in bilingual regions to master both their territory’s languages. But a lot of folk aren't listening to these voices. Says the FT: The centre-right PP argues the legislation represents a “break with our systems of liberties and constitution”. And, on Sunday, demonstrations were mounted in dozens of cities against the measure, which still requires Senate approval.

The FT adds that: The battle has exposed the tensions over education and language in Spanish society. It also highlights the gulf between the minority government — which owes its hold on power to Catalan and Basque nationalists — and the opposition, which views accommodation with such forces as wholly illegitimate and an insidious threat to the Spanish state. The government says the allegations over language are a diversion from the main planks of the bill: an attempt to modernise rote-based teaching and to level the playing field between state institutions and privately run, frequently religious schools that receive public funding and educate a quarter of the nation’s pupils. But when Spanish governments turn their minds to education, intense political conflict is rarely far away.aster both their territory’s languages. Ain't that the truth.

Locally, the mayors of both Pontevedra and Poio don't seem to be listening to the point about people mastering both official languages. Everything they issue is only in Gallego these days. I'm not sure 'twas ever thus.

This chap could be a teacher:-

In fact, he’s the head of one of the most vicious of  our drug clans. I believe his son is currently being prosecuted for a hit and run offence. For the second time.

María's Riding the Wave - Day 10   

The UK

Richard North this morning on Brexit: We're still none the wiser as to what the immediate future might bring. Johnson is quite capable of blowing it at the last minute, but he is equally capable of conceding a disastrous agreement and going to the country telling everybody how "fantastic" it is. The man truly is that much of a moron. Not BJ's biggest fan, then.

The USA 

Below are 2 lists, Trump 1 and Trump 2. The first comprises all the negatives in the article I cited yesterday and the second is a list I posted a while ago of all the adjectives applied to Trump since he became president almost a century ago. It's interesting to note that, comprehensive as it is, the 2nd list lacks some of the characteristics in the first. I do hope future historians are grateful for this labour of mine. But, anyway, as I look beyond my lifetime, I see folk shaking their heads in disbelief that such an appalling dolt could have become President of the most powerful nation in the world. What I can't see is an answer to the question of whether the USA will have healed its divisions by then. But I  certainly  hope so, both for its own sake and for that of every other democracy in the world. If it's successful, then whether it's Republican or Democratic matters little to me. Though it will to others, of course.

Spanish 

Belén: Bethlehem; Nativity Scene/Crib; Bedlam

English

Bethlehem: 'Bedlam', from the old Bethlehem Hospital for the insane.  

Finally . . .

Another random quote, to  raise a smile: Mona Lisa looks as if she's just been sick, or is about to be: Noel Coward.

TRUMP 1

He’s lacking in:-

Class

Credibility

Warmth

Compassion

Wit

Wisdom

Subtlety

Sensitivity

Self-awareness

Humility

Honour

Grace

Humour: His idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, or a casual act of cruelty.

Irony

Complexity

Nuance

An inner soul

Depth: It’s all surface

On top of this, he’s:-

A crowing, jeering troll

Petty: A Picasso of pettiness

Prejudiced

Both nasty and stupid

A bully: Except when he’s among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. He punches downwards and likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – especially when they are down.

The Shakespeare of shit

TRUMP 2 

Adjectives applicable:

A: Arrogant, Autocratic, Alienating, Anti-intellectual, Angry

B: Bullying, Boastful, Braggart, Belligerent, Bigoted, Blowhard, Bad-tempered

C: Chaos-creating, Clueless, Cheating, Combative, Child-like, Childish, Cruel

D: Disruptive, Dishonest, Deluded, Divisive, Destructive, Disorganised, Devious, Dangerous

E: Exaggerator, Egotistical, Egocentric

F: Fox News-Obsessed, Follicly challenged, Fraudulent, Fantasist, Fast-food-Guzzler

G. Garrulous, Global-warming-denying, Gaffe-prone, Grandstander

H: Hyperbolic, Hateful, Heartless, Humourless, Hollow

I: Idiotic, Insulting, Insensitive, Irreligious, Incompetent, Inconsistent, Ignorant, Islamophobic, Inattentive, Insecure, Inimical, Incoherent, Illogical, Irrational, Intemperate, Inept, Impatient, Intimidatory, Insane?

J. Jealous

K: Kinglike, Kinky, Know-all

L: Liar, Lazy, Low esteemed, Loutish

M: Moronic, Misogynistic, Media-obsessed, Menacing, Mad?

N: Nauseating, Narcissist, Nasty

O: Obsessive, Orange-hued, Obnoxious

P: Paranoid, Putin-admiring, Petty, Pussy-grabbing, Populist, Posturing, Pugnacious, Poseur, Philandering, Phony, Politically inexperienced, Psychologically suspect.

Q: Quixotic, Querulous

R: Russia-dependent, Rabble-rousing, Reckless, Racist, Resentful

S: Short-attention-spanned, Self-centred, Self-obsessed, Stupid, Self-vaunting, Susceptible to flattery, Swaggering, Small-minded, Self-interested,  Shallow Showman, Self-deceiving.

T: Twitter-obsessed, TV-obsessed, Tyrannical, Trade-disrupting, Threatening, Triumphalist, Thin-skinned

U: Unfriendly, Unfaithful, Unintelligible, Unreliable, Unwilling to listen, Unaware, Untrustworthy, Unpredictable, Undisciplined, Un-self-aware,

V: Vocabulary-deficient, Vengeful, Victim, Vain. Vulgar, Vindictive

W: Wearisome, Weird, Whoring, Worrying, Wrathful, Wrong-headed, War-mongering

X: Xenophobic

Y: Yankee . . .

Z: Zig-zagging

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid

The UK: Headline: We’ll be living with the devastating costs of the Covid pandemic for decades. Probably true. No, certainly true. But not realised - 'appreciated' ain't the right word here - by most.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

National Geographic says that one of its Best in the World Destinations for 2021 is Vitoria in the Basque Country - usually designated on maps with both its Castellano and Basque names, as Vitoria-Gasteiz. The NG claims the cities are all  'timeless wonders' which will 'define our future travel'. Beats me. I’ve been there and the only thing I recall is the menú del día which featured lamb shins consisting primarily of small, thin bones. I must return. BTW  . . . I did think for a while the city’s name really was Vitoria-Gasteiz, not one or the other. You can read about it here.

Inheritance tax rates differ in Spain between the 17 regions. In 2019 - a record year - 3,134 Galicians renounced their inheritances, so as to free themselves of the burden of the estates’ debts they'd have to take on. Oddly, the first half of this Covid year saw the number fall by 50%.  I’m not clear why. Do dead people really have fewer debts this year? Or are the inheritors in a worse financial state in which to face this problem?

I stress that the police cars ITV farce I mentioned yesterday happened in our rival city of Vigo and not here in lovely, efficient Pontevedra.

On the steep hill below my house, there are 2 semicircular chevron bits, at junctions with side roads. Over the years, I’ve noticed that - unlike me - 100% of other drivers curve round these, even though one can easily see if there's a car coming in the other direction. And that at least 90% of these - unlike me again - don’t signal at all when they get to the roundabout at the bottom of the hill. This strikes me as illogical but I think I know the reason behind it.  

María's Riding the Wave - Days 8&9  

The UK

"More good news from Boris Johnson" says the headline. It used to be "from the government". I guess this is what they mean when they say UK politics have become more 'presidential'. Thank God that works in the USA. 

Talking of which . . .

The USA 

Beat this.

Spanish 

A conundrum . . . Yincana: Both Google and Reverso give this as ‘gymkhana’ but Reverso adds ‘scavenger hunt’. Google also has Gincana in Spanish and Xincana in Gallego. But none of the 3 variants is in the RAE dictionary. Too modern? Too foreign(ish)?

Finally . . .

Another random quote, to raise a smile: There are 3 kinds of people in the world: Those who can’t stand Picasso; those who can’t stand Raphael; and those who’ve never heard of either of them: John White. 

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid

A nice commentary on the vaccines in the first article below

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

A company called Interias provides bespoke tours around Spain, Portugal and Andorra. Plus Lourdes in France. Here's something about their planned promotional video for Galicia. And here's  the (short) video itself. I won't comment this  time on Galicia's claims to be Celtic. Let alone its claim to be uniquely Celtic.

Early last week it was reported that the police had fined the owners of several cars in a carpark for not having had their annual inspection. The interesting aspect was that they were all police cars. Late in the week, it was reported all the cars had now had an inspection. Odd that the owners didn't, like the rest of us, have to wait weeks for an appointment at one of the ITV inspection centres.

A meme - The Galician phone company - 'R' - has jumped on the bandwagon - Venres neghro R do 9 ao 30 de novembro.

María's Riding the Wave - Day 7.  

The USA 

An interesting perspective  - The USA is Ancient Rome.

So, what next for the lovely Ivanka, other than a pitch for the Presidency in 2024? See second article below

Finally . . .

Another random quote, to  raise a smile. For some: Modern art is  what happens when painters stop looking at girls and  persuade themselves they have a better idea: John Ciardi.

THE ARTICLES

1. The Vaccine: Rod Liddle in The Times

I am not an anti-vaxxer. I do not believe, as many do, that it is the quick route to a one world government presided over by flickering-tongued reptilian overlords or, worse, communists. My rules for whether or not to have a vaccine have always been simple: is it for the good of the community, and do the risks associated with contracting the illness outweigh the risks of the vaccine itself? So with Covid I’m about 50% convinced. Here are the reasons for my doubts.

First, the government has drawn up a list of 11 priority categories for vaccination. Among the first five — those who will get the vaccine first — are the aged, from over-65s upwards. At first sight this seems sensible, because the virus has proved most lethal within those age groups. The problem is, these are the people least likely to catch Covid.

If you examine the excess death statistics for the UK, you will find that remarkably, the over-85s — the most vulnerable category of all — have shown a negative excess death rate for the past four months. In other words, fewer are dying than usual. This suggests to me that the very elderly have been taking precautions that have, by a useful corollary, protected them from other life-threatening infections.

Might this not be our best form of protection in future? To take personal responsibility for our safety, as the elderly are doing? The French, incidentally, have drawn up a different list of prioritised citizens — it includes those who deal with other members of the public: hospitality workers, cab drivers, health workers and so on. This seems to me far more sensible. Although I would also make sure Kyle Walker and Mo Salah got vaccinated every five days.

But then there’s this. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, suggests we will still need to socially distance even after we have received the vaccine. So, the government is faced with persuading a population to receive a vaccine, which may have fairly unpleasant side effects, to protect them for a few months from an illness that in 95% of cases will not affect them unduly (indeed, they may not even be aware they have had the illness), even though it will not allow them to return to anything approaching a “normal” life.

They may need to have the vaccination — two shots, remember, spread over a few weeks — three times each year. All this to protect a very small tranche of the population, the very elderly, who, while most at risk from the lethal effects of Covid, are also least likely to get it and are dying at a lesser rate than in previous years. Does this make much sense?

2. Ivanka’s turned into Pariah Barbie: trashed and abandoned in a New York minute. Camilla Long, The Times

In her memoir about the collapse of her husband’s empire, Barbara Amiel recalls how she couldn’t stop crying after Conrad Black was arrested on suspicion of fraud. She’d listen to Andrea Bocelli crooning Time to Say Goodbye daily and would fantasise about the glittering revenge party she’d throw at the Savoy “for the friends who stood by us” after he got out of jail.

Dancing with a dead man in front of dead people to dead music is just about how I’d sum up the life that is facing the Trumps. Every time I read about Ivanka or Melania, I wonder: what will happen to Eva and Blondi now? If you thought the humiliation of the election was awful — if you cringed at Rudy Giuliani’s running-espresso hair dye — then you have no idea what acute social torture is being lined up for the Trump women if they dare to sneak back to New York in their acres of camel bodycon.

Ivanka could be openly “harangued” if she so much as turns up anywhere “cool like the Waverly Inn”; if she dares to appear at the opera “with her thousand-dollar hair”, an actress said last week, she might easily be “ejected”. She will be ignored by people she thought were beneath her, such as shop girls or hairdressers; her art collection is “virtually unsaleable”. As for work, two investigations have been widened to examine her stake in her father’s business — most New Yorkers see her as a loathsome “opportunistic grifter”, says a friend, who committed “class betrayal” when she obviously started supporting her father. No one will admit being friends with Ivanka, said one television writer on Friday, “and people admit to being friends with Henry Kissinger”.

She is fated to be “an ageing, corrupt, villainous Barbie”, said Republican Steve Schmidt, and will be “paying the price” for what she did. “There will never be a Met Ball for you again,” he added. This is the strongest curse anyone in New York society can issue.

Above all, they will be reminded that they are trash and people always thought they were. On Tuesday a hatchet job by Ivanka’s former best school friend appeared in the pariah’s monthly, Vanity Fair. You had to read it to remind yourself how efficiently unpleasant the rich can be once you’ve fallen from grace.

Ivanka could always pass, she wrote, for “polite” and “refined” in places such as Newport, Rhode Island — a place so snobby the locals call the Kennedys “white trash” — but everyone still thought her father was vulgar and a social embarrassment. Even Florida rejected him: he’s fought legal battles with Palm Beach for decades.

He was “insecure” about the posh old clubs, telling diners at Mar-a-Lago that they were “a dump”. You think: why is this woman waiting until now to say this? Couldn’t we have used it four years ago? But that’s the problem with rich people. They’re shallow cowards, who’ll only pile on once they’re sure someone’s out of favour or, worse, running out of cash, as Trump might be.

Only now, for example, do we learn Ivanka was a mean girl who once “blamed a fart on a classmate” at Chapin, the upper-crusty New York school where Trump sent her in the hope he might erase the family’s clumpy German roots (Trump’s grandfather sold horse burgers and prostitutes). Only now do we learn she orchestrated a famous Chapin “incident” in which she goaded classmates to flash their breasts at “the hot dog man” out of the window of their classroom and later pretended she was nothing to do with it. Only now do we learn that Ivanka might not — spoiler alert — really like poor people, asking her friend “why would you tell me to read a book about f***ing poor people?” after she recommended a novel about a man who ran a diner.

The feeling among sniffy New York circles is she will have to move to Florida or, even worse, Texas, where she can mobilise troops for what will inevitably be her presidential bid. How will she fare among the Darleens at the Dallas spring galas? New Yorkers can’t wait to find out.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid

A nice overview in the article below

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

I don’t recall seeing this annual report before. And don't really know what to make of it. But it seems we’re lucky to have the Quirónsalud group here in Galicia.

How's this for chutzpa/cara? The company responsible for the AVE high-speed train is promoting the now-open Galicia-Madrid stretches with journey times promised in 2018 which don't accord with actual times. Is there no Advertising Authority in Spain to stop this sort of dishonesty? Which is beyond mere ‘puffery’.

Talking of Madrid, here’s some lovely fotos from the city’s archives.

In the 19 years I've been here, 2 female ‘celebrities’ seem to have got younger, rather than older - Ana Rosa Quintana(64) and Ana Obregón(65). Quite remarkable. I think La Obregón (a 'socialite') once put this down to only ever washing her face with soap and water . . . I must try it. Thorough perhaps it’s a bit late.

María's Riding the Wave - A sombre Day 6 

The UK

Richard North (a temperate Brexiteer) here looks into the nearish future . . An extreme version of Brexit was always going to be unsustainable and, therefore, unstable – meaning that it could never be the last word. By going too far out on a limb, the [extremist] Brexiteers may end up with nothing other than the break-up of the United Kingdom. 

The USA 

A must-read article on the ongoing American 'civil war'.

If you don't fancy that long read, here's a must-see video on Goldenhair.

The Way of the World

Black Friday started it. Now we have Black Pre-Friday from Harnet and, from the Gadis supermarket chain, BlackGadis. Or, as we used to know them - 'sales', 

Spanish 

Chungo/a: The RAE: 1. ’Of a bad aspect; in a bad state; of bad quality’.  Una película chunga. El tiempo está chungo; va a llover otra vez. 2. Difficult, complicated. Con ese rival, lo tiene muy chungo.  

Finally . . .

What has happened to architecture since the Second World War that the only passers by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a guide dog? Bernard Levin(1928-2004)

THE ARTICLE 

Talk of ‘beating Covid’ was always nonsense

After immersing myself in the science, it’s clear to me that phrases like ‘all-out war’ only scared the nation out of its wits  Matthew Parris. The Times

I’m trying something new here. Such is the imperfection of our knowledge about Covid-19 and how best to handle it, that perhaps a little humility is called for.

I myself was being a bit cocksure when, in a Times column three weeks ago, I accused scientists of sunding “cocksure” while ducking big questions. But, turning away wrath, an organisation called the Science Media Centre rose to the challenge, and put the questions I said had been ducked to a range of experts. Many answered. I then asked further questions, about “herd” immunity and the possible evidence that London is developing some resistance to the virus. Again, a range of scientists sent me answers: often tentative, often admitting ignorance.

It is these experts’ thoughts, suggestions and admissions that I want to discuss. I’m reluctant to attribute to individuals my own summaries of their (often lengthy and dense) submissions. My responders have been (professors all, except for one. I’ll draw from tens of thousands of words a few pointers to what we do and don’t know. I’ve sensed disagreements here and there but overall there’s a consensus on the big questions, if not always on how the answers have been presented, or what context or caveats should have been flagged up.

Facemasks, my responders appear to agree, have not been absolutely proven to work, but it’s likely they will help as there is now broad agreement that Covid-19 spreads most often and most easily in exhaled water droplets, rather than from surfaces.

How about “herd” immunity? This is the point during a virus’s spread when so many people have had the disease and gained immunity, or a degree of resistance, or, of course, died, that the virus runs short of new people to infect. Past this point its prevalence begins to decrease. All agree on this, with one important reservation to which I’ll come later.

But when is this point reached: at 20, 50, 60, or 80% of the population? There is widespread agreement among the experts that, at the outset of the crisis in March, the figure was thought to be between 60 and 80%, because this virus is very good at spreading itself. And that’s what government was advised. Ministers took this as a massive fire alarm, because the hospitalisations and casualties involved in getting to 80% looked unacceptable.

However, many of my responders now think that in addition to the antibodies our immune system produces there may be other kinds of partial resistance in the body’s armoury, and that this may explain why cities like London, which took a big hit in the first wave, may not be so badly hit the second time round. Herd immunity as a concept begins to come apart if we make too concerted a mental grab at it, and some of my responders emphasise that it only works perfectly if you assume that everyone experiences infection in the same way.

My impression is that the “80%” herd immunity stuff in March was an over-simplification born partly of gaps in knowledge and partly by a widely shared feeling that there was an urgent need to wake up non-scientist politicians (and the public) to the scale of what might happen if the spread were not suppressed.

Crude projections that took no account of “mitigation” (the way people might — indeed would — modify their behaviour to stop the virus spreading) frightened ministers and the media. Some scientists felt the need to shock because an alternative approach, simply to “let the virus rip”, might indeed have produced shocking results. They were not claiming anything that conflicted with the state of knowledge at the time, but their wider, non-expert, audience (us) drew a scarier and less complicated message than if we’d understood the assumptions behind the projections.

And politicians (and, to some degree, experts) allowed a feeling to grow that I believe has damaged both our understanding of science and our understanding of how and why we need to modify our behaviour. I characterise this as the “all or nothing” approach to the pandemic. This approach emerges in the vocabulary of “war” on Covid-19, or “beating” the virus, or (in the prime minister’s as-ever memorable but misleading phraseology) “wrestling the virus to the ground”.

This “war on Covid” metaphor has bled into the popular attitude to social distancing, hand-washing, mask-wearing and the like. There’s a creepy feeling that once the enemy — the virus — “gets in” to a railway carriage/car/sitting-room/ office then, as in the film Alien or with the vampire’s bite, all is lost. As though a belt of trees planted as a windbreak has failed in its purpose if any gust gets through. As though the individual who forgets his mask or shakes hands has breached the dam, and we shall be swept away. The implication is clear. The dam holds or the dam collapses. Either mankind wins or mankind is beaten.

But this, meant to be a rallying war cry, could so easily become a counsel of despair. Not one of my responders suggested that we could “eradicate” Covid-19. “The herd” (wrote one of them) will never be “immune”: the virus will be contained, that’s all. It will lurk. Take-up for vaccination may prove patchy: the disease, after all, is not believed by the great majority to threaten them personally. Every nation will have its peculiar difficulties. New Zealand, Australia and many Asian countries now aiming to eliminate the virus will wonder how they can ever open themselves up to the world again. Here in Britain I can see an idea regrettably gaining ground that if the very old, obese or unwell don’t want the disease they can always get the vaccination.

But in the end the world, including Britain, will learn to live with this disease, and the sooner we develop coping strategies the better. It will never be all or nothing. It will always be a matter of balancing medical against other human needs. My temporary immersion in “the science” this month has shown me that, from the very start, few scientists ever suggested otherwise. One could wish they had been more explicit and that our politicians had not taken the easy, lazy course of scaring a nation out of its wits.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

I've admitted to confusion re plans to stop Castellano being the 'vehicular language' for education. Today's Times has an article (behind a paywall) which begins thus: A law scrapping Spanish as the common language in schools prompted uproar in parliament as critics called it a blow against the culture of Cervantes. The reform passed yesterday was part of an education bill introduced by the left-wing coalition. It was included as a sop to Catalan separatists who help the Socialists to remain in power.  The bill has proved divisive as many view Spanish as a national heritage. The end of its official status in schools is seen as ceding ground to separatists. The government is depending on Catalan and Basque separatists to pass a budget that is crucial to its survival before the end of the year. I imagine there'll be more fireworks quite soon. Possibly more than the would be in, say, Wales if something similar were done there.

Optimism re the Spanish economy. Something in short supply right now.

Every year I look at the marks required - via the Selectividad exam - for courses in Galicia's universities. And every year I shake my head in amazement that the marks demanded for several subjects are higher than those for medicine and dentistry. And that a nursing course demands higher marks than those for courses regarded as more difficult/important in the Anglo world. For example:-

Santiago

- Maths + Physics: 97% 

- IT + Maths: 95%

- Medicine: 91%

- Dentistry: 86%

- Nursing: 78%

- Psychology: 74%

La Coruña. 

- Business Admin + Law: 80%

- Physiotherapy: 80%

- Nursing: 78%

Pontevedra

- Physiotherapy: 76%

- Nursing: 76%

Vigo

- Biomedical engineering: 82%

- Nursing: 78%

- Business Admin + Law: 76%

As usual, the mark for a simple Law course is among the lowest. I must check with my doctor neighbour, Amparo, if it's true that Spain has some of the cleverest nurses in the world. And some of the thickest lawyers. If so, no wonder the latter have a status here far below that of notaries and registrars. Who are boring but very bright indeed. Maybe France is the same.

María's Riding the Wave - Day 5 

Spanish 

Una coscorrón: A tap/bop/little rap on the head. But also a 'noogie', which is said to mean - in the USA - 'A hard poke or grind with the knuckles, especially on a person's head’. You live and learn.

However you translate it, you can't get away with giving your child one. Not in Pontevedra's main shopping street anyway. You’ll be 'denounced’ and fined. 

Finally . . .

I enjoyed seeing Fred Astaire and Judy Garland - 2 geniuses - in Easter Parade on BBC last night. They certainly don't make films like that any more. As someone wrote: Easter Parade features two of the best known entertainers in movie history, glorious music, fresh Technicolor and amazing dance routines. Prepare to be entertained and amazed! There is no other way to describe the creative, fun and bedazzling colour, costumes and dances. See here for one of the numbers. Time to remind ourselves of the appraisal of Astaire at his first audition. Can't act. Slightly bald. But can dance a little. He didn't get the part. A Decca moment, then.

P. S. Here's my favourite Fred Astaire performance, with the astonishing Rita Hayworth. Una peliroja, by the way.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*   

Covid

Interesting facts: Taiwan has a population of 23.8m. So, not a small country. Its Covid death rate per million is 0.3 (sic). Compared with:-  

Belgium 1294

Spain 899

The UK  783

Italy 781

The USA 772

France 715

Sweden 624

Portugal 357

Germany 161

Japan 15

China 3

Taiwan hasn't imposed any lockdowns.

Scarcely believable. But doubtless lessons have been learned ahead of the next virus epidemic to hit Europe and the USA . .  .

Meanwhile, here's an early analysis of Taiwan’s success. And here’s a later one from The Lancet medical journal. 

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

As we all struggle to enjoy life under Spain's latest mad lockdown - due to end in 17 long days on December 6 - it’s good to know this.

I’m frequently reminded of the statement that the imposition of a lockdown is an admission of failure.

Seen en route to and in the centre of Pontevedra city yesterday:-

- 5 or 6 driving school cars, all with 3 people in them.

- 100% mask compliance among those walking around.

- 2 young women with masks down, sitting smoking on church steps, a metre from a parked police car

- People on (separate) benches in the main square with masks down, eating their lunch or drinking a beverage.

- The usual group of 8-9 ne'er-do-wells sitting and talking/shouting with masks down at the edge of the main square.

What does it all signify? Don't ask me.

María's Riding the wave - Day 4.    

The USA 

A Republican analyst has pointed out that, in that country so apparently divided between the far left and the far right, the 'Independents' outnumber the supporters of both of these put together. So, would a 'centre party' be impossible to create? If so, would it succeed? I guess that the belief is it wouldn't. As with a potential 'centre-left' party splitting from the far left elements of the UK's Labour Party, to end the current schism in it.

Finally . . .

Research is said to have shown that this is the song appearing most often in the playlists of car drivers around the world.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

 Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

There are a lot of pigs in Spain, meeting the need for the many fine pork products on sale here. The story/myth has it that pig breeding rose grew when offering pork was seen as a good way to establish whether converted Moors really were no longer Muslims. Anyway, this article suggest pigs aren't always well treated on Spanish farms. As someone who worked on such a farm during my school holidays and swept and hosed out pens every morning, I'd just add that it's hard to keep pigs pristine clean.

When I moved to Spain in 2000, there were almost 50 banks operating here - many of them 'savings banks' under dubious political management. Each had high urban visibility - albeit sometimes only locally - with several branches manned by staff numbers way above levels in the Anglo world. What a change. As of today, there are only 5 banks and this will fall to 3 when BBVA and Sabadell and Caixabank and Bankía complete their mergers. Inside the banks that remain, it's also a different world, with far fewer of the desks which allowed customers to have a face-to-face chat without prior appointment. Both branches and ATMs have fallen in number. As, of course, have interest rates. But fees and commissions are again on the rise. Not the best demonstration of customer service ever observed. Years ago, I joked it wouldn't be long before fee-inventive Spanish banks charged you merely for breathing the air in their branches. Time to resurrect that exaggeration?

Here in Galicia, Abanca has gobbled up all the other local banks and is now seen as a Galician champion, an image it relentlessly projects. It's true that it operates primarily in Galicia but but, in fact, it's ultimately owned by this Venezuelan chap -  Juan Carlos Escotet.

I wonder why Pontevedra’s closed retail outlets are often replaced by dental surgeries or plushly fitted-out opticians. Not to mention jewellery stores. Good for many laundering, perhaps.

María's Riding the Wave - Day 3:  

The Way of the World

Authoritarianism is a form of government characterised by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting. The political scientist Juan Linz defined authoritarianism as possessing 4 qualities:

1. Limited political pluralism, realised with constraints on the legislature, political parties and interest groups.

2. Political legitimacy based upon appeals to emotion and identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognisable societal problems, such as underdevelopment or insurgency".

3. Minimal political mobilisation and suppression of anti-regime activities.

4. Ill-defined executive powers, often vague and shifting, which extends the power of the executive.

Anyone spring to  mind?

Nutters Corner

Christian Right activist and conspiracy theorist Mark Taylor, the guy who said last month that criticizing Donald Trump is an affront to his faith, is now saying that anytime Trump talks about a potential COVID vaccine, he’s really talking about arresting Satanic people-eating pedophiles.

Finally . . .

The wit and wisdom of Dave Barry: In Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken-salad sandwich, you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish-English dictionary, turns out to be "Ell with the Big Access". . . . Perhaps not his best.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid  

Below is an impressive letter to the French president from more than 200 lawyers, expressing concerns about the latest lockdown there. Some very good point and some nice phrases.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Under the midday sun in Pontevedra's main square yesterday, mask-wearing and social-distancing were being observed by all. Except for a group of 6 or 7 sitting on the edge of the square. A daily congregation spot for the city's (ofttimes raucous) drunks, drug addicts and beggars. The response of the local police was noteworthy. Or, rather, the lack of it. A patrol car passed twice but did nothing. I was left wondering if they'd be so lenient with a group of more normal folk. Who'd be better able to pay the fines, perhaps. The wages of sin?

Talking of groups, we know have La policía de balcón. Balcony police. People who report their neighbours for Covid transgressions. An activity known in British common parlance and in kids' talk as as ‘snitching’. ‘Ratting on’, in the USA, I believe.

I need, this morning, to check out driving schools. Are there still 4 people in a learner's car - the instructor, the pupil and 2 other learners in the back? And are the tests still taking place, with the examiner, the learner and the instructor all in the car? If so, it'd be material to know the rate of Covid infection among people who clearly can't be 2 metres apart. And if it isn't higher than elsewhere . . . ??

Incidentally, I think it was reader María who pointed out that having the instructor in the test car provided scope for secret hand signals to the driver being tested. But maybe this never actually happens.

Is Covid a boon for the press? Now that I can't read a paper for free in a café, I've taken to buying one each day. Are there many others doing the same, outnumbering perhaps the cafés that aren't doing so?

The USA 

 Spanish

To snitch. Delatar; Soplarse de alguien.

English

Coming soon to all dictionaries . . . . A new (combination) word - ‘non-zero’. Maning 'some’.  As in:-

Were your [Republican] observers in the counting room?

There was a non-zero number of our observers there.

Finally . . .

In various  guises . .  . The wages of sin. Just in case you were wondering.   

THE ARTICLE  

After saying there was 'no question of lockdown', Emmanuel Macron has announced what many feared: the implementation of a new national and mandatory lockdown. We are lawyers and jurists of all specialities and from all parts of France and write to express our indignation at the injustice of this measure. After being astonished by the first lockdown, we believe that such violations of our freedoms and ways of life are neither viable nor legitimate. Lockdown will have major collateral consequences that will be more harmful than the virus itself.

While we agree with the President’s statement that nothing is 'more important than human life'. But a national lockdown is an approach reduced to the biology of life alone, forgetting that health is also, according to the WHO definition, 'a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity'. Protecting life therefore implies taking into account all its aspects, which are as much social, cultural, spiritual, political and economic as they are health-related.

We understand the anger and concerns of doctors and health workers and we ask the Government to provide them with the necessary means to exercise their professions. Supporting hospitals ought to have been the government’s priority over the last six months. Instead, it allowed itself to be overwhelmed. It now prefers brandishing the threat of a collapse of the health system - to impose measures that are arbitrarily described as a last resort so as not to have to consider other options (which do exist). This insults both doctors and the French people, making them believe that they are not capable of managing the crisis we are going through.

We are deeply concerned about the future of this zero-risk society, which would be ready to stop living so as not to die.

By putting a large part of the country on hold, the Government is sacrificing the bravest of our people: entrepreneurs, the self-employed, craftsmen - those who took risks to invest and create, giving this country colour and life, as well as their employees. Yet the human and social misery that will result from this lockdown (bankruptcies, depression, suicides, poverty, psychological disorders, renunciation of care) will also lead to many deaths, but necessarily less visible in the short term... If support measures have indeed been announced, they have been taken at the price of an unprecedented debt which will ruin our children and the political room for manoeuvre of our nation.

If we are at war - as the government has repeatedly declared - it is courage that we need, not governance by fear. Moreover, this fear is often irrational. Let's remember that the median age of death is 84 years old, according to the latest statistics from Santé Publique France. Forcing the majority of the population into inactivity, preventing any war effort, any start is a curious way of fighting a battle.

We are deeply concerned about the future of this zero-risk society, which would be ready to stop living so as not to die. Ready to sacrifice practically everything - its normal living conditions, social relations, work, and even friendships, affections and political and religious convictions - because of the threat of infection.

As lawyers, we also warn in particular about twisting the law. Any state of exception, even justified by an exceptional health situation, implies a risk of drift. Thus our law is now subject to the technical-scientific injunction of doctors and the Scientific Council, who impose their vision to the detriment of a more global political vision which must balance different interests.

Recalling that the WHO has highlighted the harmful effects of lockdown and drawing on the work of the European Lawyers' Institute for Human Rights and the Human Rights Institute of the Paris Bar, we argue that national lockdown is disproportionate in its infringement of our public freedoms, unjust, contrary to the common good and therefore illegal. The Government must adapt its measures to protect the weak and those exposed to the most serious forms of the pandemic without sacrificing all the citizens who enable countries to survive.

We join many entrepreneurs and mayors who have sounded the alarm. We therefore call on the executive to allow the forces of life in our country to get out of lockdown and we call on the elites of all sides to make their voices heard to protest against these measures which will hit our most humble citizens the hardest.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid  

This is a hard-hitting and thought-provoking editorial from the British Medical Journal, entitled: When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die. The opening paras:-

- Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

-Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health.1 Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.

I, for one, am troubled by the speed with which the Pfizer vaccine approval process has been progressed. And now there’s a suggestion it might only be 50%, not ‘more than 90%’, effective.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Denmark has culled it many millions of mink. Which is troubling for Galicia, which has 84% of Spain’s breeding farms for these. The situation has been described as as una bomba de reloxería, or a time-bomb. So, what’s the plan?

Here's 9 minutes on Spanish bureaucracy. Is it  really as bad as some say it is? 

And here's a brilliant Spanish commentary on the challenge of dealing with these folk. Not much of an exaggeration. Though I have to say, I’ve been pretty lucky. Perhaps because there’s fewer immigrants up here in Galicia and demand is lower. But I still always carry a variety of reading matter.

María - as was to be expected - has renamed her blog, which is now called Riding the Wave. And here’s the first episode.  

Finally . . .

The Spanish for mink is visón. Not be confused with hurón, which is a ferret. But don’t be tempted go into a ferretería if you’re looking to buy one.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid  

It’s a tad worrying that the Pfizer vaccine is reported to give you a bloody huge ‘hangover’.

Better news - albeit from the notorious tabloid Daily Mail - is that an arthritis drug might significantly cut Covid deaths.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Unlike in the Anglo world, Spaniards don’t have freedom to leave their assets to whomever they wish. There are laws which compel bequests to spouses and kids. But this wouldn’t be Spain, if the law were consistent throughout the 17 Autonomous Communities of this de facto federal state. A few even allow total disinheritance and Covid has driven up this testamentary element. At least where it’s possible.  Sharper than serpents’ teeth, ungrateful parents . . . .

Flashback

March 2004: The Spanish government have confirmed it was probably Al Quaeda who set off the bombs, as I had always thought. This is a potentially catastrophic admission for them on the morning of the general election and it will be very interesting to see how today goes. No one gave the Opposition much of a chance until this happened. 

I attended the big demonstration of solidarity in the town on Friday evening. It was probably the biggest gathering in the history of the town and it was very dignified and impressive, one of many which took place throughout Spain The one here, though, was very quiet - as befits a very conservative town. There was no chanting and little movement around the crowded streets. ln fact, it was rather like the usual evening paseo but on a massive scale. People indulged in what they normally indulge in here, showing off their fur coats and talking to their friends and neighbours.  

The USA 

Yesterday’s MAGA march on Washington seems only to have been a success in the eyes of Mr Trump. A man who's gone grey overnight. Stress, no doubt. Or fear of prison.

The Way of the World

MacDonald’s - ‘just in time for Christmas’ - have introduced their biggest ever burger.  What we were all waiting for.

Here’s an interesting article on rights.  

English/Spanish

Etymology 1: To ambush: Emboscar. 1. An ambush: Una emboscada.  3. Wood/forest: Bosque.  Or a lot of bushes . . .

Finally . . .

Etymology 2: My birth town of Birkenhead is so called because it was once covered with birch trees and the name means ‘the birchen headland’. Possibly of even less interest that my note yesterday about The Wirral.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant. 

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'*  

Covid 

More here on the value of vitamin D. In which, it’s said, the Spanish have less than pale-skinned me.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

I believe Education is a field devolved to Spain's 17 regions ('Autonomous Communities'). Despite that, every new national administration seems to generate much political heat by introducing a new superordinate law. These all go by a series of letters, the latest being the LOMOLE, to go with the earlier LOMCE and LOE. All very confusing. Details of the latest proposals here. 

I know, of course, that the Spanish keep strange, late hours - for example (pre Covid) going out to eat as late as 10pm. Nonetheless, it struck me as odd that, when I did my usual nocturnal trip to the bathroom at 4 this morning, there was the sound of a TV or conversation coming from next door. 

Una matanza is ‘a ‘slaughter. It's usually used - in Galicia at least - to mean the annual pig-killing 'ceremony'. But it also features as a place name around the Hispanic world. Here's an article on one of these - a private property in Almería and the location of a long-ago slaughter of Moors. This comes from Lenox Napier, of Business Over Tapas.

Here's María's Falling Back Chronicle Days 60&61, in which she confesses to struggling with internet examples of my hometown Scouse accent. Which, by the way, doesn't extend to nearby Manchester. Which has its own (horrible) accent.

The EU

On the topical topic of VAT rates for masks, it seems the new Spanish IVA rate of 4% is not the lowest in the EU. Finland, The Netherlands and Belgium have a nil rate, to compare with Denmark's 25%. You can see the full range of rates here.

And this is the official statement on the setting of rates.

Brexit

Richard North today: In all senses, this is a battle that no one can win. It is just a question of who walks away with the least damage, and the longer it takes, the more damage there will be to both sides.

English

If you go to Google dictionary, you can find out how the word 'irreparably' is pronounced. How it ain't pronounced as is ir-repair-ably. Except on yesterday’s BBC 3. Which used to be the repository of Standard/Received/Queen's English but clearly isn't any more. 

English/Spanish

In English, an 'aerosol'  is normally a can of spray. In Spanish, the same word - el aerosol - also means the spray itself. Any sort of spray, for example from the nose or mouth. I realised this when reading an article on how Covid 19 is spread, headed: Ciencia dice que predomina el contagio for aerosoles, pero Sanidad no lo ratifica.

Finally . . .

I was born, a while ago now, in Birkenhead, on the eastern side of the beautiful Wirral peninsula but only now have checked on the meaning of its name  . . . It literally means Myrtle corner, from the Old English wir, a myrtle tree, and heal, an angle, corner or slope. You live and learn. By the way, most Wirral folk have a Scouse accent, ranging from weak to strong, the closer you get to the river Mersey and Liverpool on the east of the peninsula. On the west side, they specialise in Posh Scouse. As do some Liverpool-based folk I know.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant. 

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'*  

Covid 

Good news: An MS drug almost halved hospitalised patients' risk of severe Covid symptoms. Those given the inhaled version of interferon beta-1a treatment were twice as likely to recover within 14 days as those on a placebo.

Reasons for wearing that mask.    

A hard-hitting video, aimed at Spain’s young.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain 

I lose track of Spain's 'language wars', even in the context of only Galicia. There seems to be a move being planned by this government to stop Spanish (Castellano) being the 'vehicular language' for education but I can't be sure about this. If so, is the pendulum swinging to the other extreme? And is it to appease the Catalans?

The oposiciones are government exams in all sorts of fields where the Spanish government is more involved than it would be in the Anglo world. I’ve always assumed these were for young people but I’ve recently learned you can go on taking them throughout your career, e. g. in Medicine. And now I read that the profile of the average opositor is: ‘In work and over 55’. You live and learn.

For those of you lucky enough to be able to get out in Madrid.

Here's María's Falling Back Chronicle Day 59, asking whether enforced cultural changes will be  temporary or permanent. I agree with her view on this

The UK

The former chief medical officer says the UK prepared for wrong sort of pandemic: Scientific advice to focus on influenza threat meant the UK never put plans in place to tackle a major coronavirus. I think we knew this of this incompetence months ago. And its consequences - principally horrendously destructive lockdowns. Abject failure, but not unique to the UK. And compare the response of the Taiwanese government, recently cited here.

English

Stiffrump: An 18th century word, meaning: An obstinate and haughty individual who refuses to budge no matter what.

Finally . . .

A couple of less serious Spanish comments on the vaccine . . . 

And a nice video . . . 

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid 

First comers for the vaccine in Spain will be healthcare workers and ‘the elderly’.

Meanwhile more good news from Spain - The government is slashing VAT/IVA on masks to the minimum permitted by Brussels of 4%.

I’m a tad  worried to see that 'frozen finger' has now been identified as a possible symptom/effect of the virus. I get a frozen thumb from time to time. But perhaps this doesn't count as a 'finger'.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain 

It's becoming a Spanish speciality . . . 

I confessed the other day to confusion re respective Covid restrictions in the UK and Spain. And now I have to admit I was surprised to hear from my daughter last night that - at least up to 11pm -  life continues as normal in Madrid - in contrast to Galicia, where the entire hostelería industry is closed, sacrificed on the altar of Covid. Other than the places offering take-away stuff. I mean, aren't Madrid's figures worse than ours?

Which reminds me . . . As I sat in Pontevedra's square at midday yesterday, sipping a coffee and reading a paper, I noticed a couple of plastic boxes nearby, apparently abandoned by someone who'd brought their lunch to eat al fresco in the square. One contained some sort of salad and the other - bizarrely - a stack of butter. A couple of ravenous seagulls approached them, inspected them and then summarily rejected them. One wonders why. Perhaps seagulls aren’t healthy eaters.  . .  Of course, the other question is why were they abandoned in the first place.

The government has announced there'll soon be even more reasons for diligent Guard Civil officers to fine drivers and take pants off their licence. One provision will be the removal of the allowance of 20% when overtaking another car. So, what will it be? If, indeed, it remains at all.

The greedy Franco family - having lost the battle to keep a mansion 'donated' to the Caudillo by 'the grateful Galician people' - are now trying to keep their grubby hands on various (priceless?) treasures from Santiago cathedral and from the library of an eminent local author. As you'd expect. They never disappoint.

Here's María's Falling Back Chronicle Day 58.

The EU

An unusually optimistic Ambrose Evans Pritchard writes below about Brexit and future US relations with both the UK and the EU.

Spanish

Reading my diary of my early years here and, in particular, of my dealings with various workmen, I'm reminded of the word chapuza. Meaning 'bodge'. To bodge - chapucear.

Finally . . .

Along with most/all of the country, we have a curfew in Galicia from 11pm to 6am (I think). Seems a tad pointless when there’s nothing open to go to. I guess it keeps young folk from boozing in the street, with or without masks. In theory.

THE ARTICLE  

Trump contaminated Brexit, but Biden could be its saviour

We may find that the President-elect proves to be the best thing that has happened to the UK's departure from Europe:  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph.

Donald Trump has been an unmitigated disaster for Brexit. He has contaminated the brand. By hijacking Britain’s pursuit of sovereign self-government for his own mischievous purposes, he linked the Brexit cause to four years of Trumpian assault on civility and the world’s institutions. Anybody who follows global commentary knows that the reputational damage has been calamitous.

There is a Burkean conservative case against a restless EU project that is forever seeking to accrue more power and keeps disturbing settled practice with one vaulting treaty after another, mostly on thin popular consent - or, as with the Lisbon Treaty, against explicit refusal of consent.

There is a liberal, globalist, free-trade case against an EU that is more protectionist and hostile to innovation than its defenders admit, and less green than it pretends.

There is a Left-wing case against an EU captured by corporatist elites, with a “neo-liberal” austerity architecture set in stone under the Acquis, making it impossible for any genuinely radical government to push through transformational change ever again. It outlaws the sort of Roosevelt reflation that Joe Biden proposes for America.

There is a constitutional case against an EU with its confederate lines of accountability, uneasily joined to federal bodies of immense power - commission, supreme court, central bank - that operate beyond Democratic oversight. There is a case that Britain’s position as a non-euro member is unsustainable in an EU constantly creating fiscal machinery to shore up a dysfunctional monetary union.

Yet the world knows none of this. All has been conflated with Trumpism because that is an easier narrative. It is why even a well-informed politician such as Biden could slip into caricature, calling Boris Johnson an “emotional and physical clone of Donald Trump”.

Biden no doubt regrets this comment. It is patently untrue. The Prime Minister has nothing in common with Donald Trump, other than a willingness to break crockery from time to time. His intellectual range, his multicultural tastes, and his ecological streak, are sui generis.

This is not to deny that there was a darker Trumpian element to Brexit that pushed numbers over the top in June 2016. But it was not the essence of Brexit. A long list of EU states have a bigger problem with far-Right nativism than the UK.

As a matter of raw realpolitik, the only redeeming feature of Donald Trump’s identification with Brexit - or so it seemed - was that the prospect of a fast-track US trade deal would leave the EU with a stark choice: either agree to a “Canada-style” relationship with the UK on normal terms; or risk losing the UK into the American economic orbit. It came to nothing.

With Trump on his way out, we can start to decontaminate the Brexit brand and reframe British independence within the normal parameters of diplomacy.

Biden will have been briefed that Borisian Britain is aligned with his views on: the Paris climate accord; funding for the World Health Organisation; the Iran nuclear deal; and the Democratic front against the Sino-Russian strongman axis.

It is true that Brexit removes a close US ally from the top table of EU decision-making but it does not therefore follow that this devalues the special relationship and makes the UK “less useful” to Washington, or that Biden will fly over a forgotten London to the hotspots of Berlin and Paris.

The flip side of the coin is that the EU will become an even more prickly animal. Its Gaulliste push for “strategic sovereignty” in defence will take on stronger anti-American undertones.

Biden will, like other presidents before him, find that when push comes to shove, the UK is a reliable soulmate and the EU is not. Indeed, he already knows this from fifty years at the heart of US foreign policy.

He will face a tray of files on his Oval Office desk marked “Europe being bloody difficult”, such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop gas pipeline (Nord Stream 2) intended to undercut Poland and Ukraine and strengthen Vladimir Putin’s energy stranglehold, all with German collusion.

He knows that the EU plays it both ways with China, hoping that it can straddle - and profit - as a third force in global affairs, while the two superpowers struggle for ideological supremacy. But refusal to take sides between the democratic West and Xi Jinping’s totalitarian nightmare is no longer a respectable option. London and Washington at least see eye to eye.

Biden will be exasperated by the collapse of the Data Privacy Shield agreement, ending the free flow of data across the Atlantic because the EU deems US protection to be inadequate. He knows that the EU’s push for “technological sovereignty” is intended to lock digital data inside the EU bloc rather than letting it leak into the cloud under the control of Microsoft, et al.

Claims that he will seek a trade deal with “big fish” Europe before bothering with “minnow” Britain skips over the fiasco of the TTIP transatlantic talks during the Obama years. They ran aground over farm goods and food standards. The EU wants things all its own way: access for its industrial exports; but no access for US agricultural exports. Fresh talks today would be even more futile. The Greens are now a larger force in the European Parliament.

The fact that the next president understands the Good Friday Agreement - unlike most EU leaders - is a help, not a hindrance. He knows that it depends on both communities and furthermore that heavy-handed misuse of the Irish Protocol by the EU could itself be a threat to stability, a point brought home this week by the joint DUP-Sinn Fein letter to Brussels warning of food shortages.

Biden’s initial, irascible reaction to the Single Market Bill suggests that he may not be fully aware of the provocations that led to this legislation. He will be guided by Dublin but he will also see through Brussels humbug soon enough once his team has mastered the dossier.

My advice to Boris Johnson is let the Lords quietly finish off the bill and look for other remedies if the EU tries to close its legalistic trap, exploiting the fine print of the Protocol to extend state aid and regulatory control over great swaths of the UK economy. You have to pick your fights with care.

British-American relations were close to rupture after Suez In 1956. The election of America’s first Irish Catholic president four years later ushered in the glory days of the special relationship. John Kennedy got on swimmingly with a Tory toff. We may look back and find that Joe Biden is the best thing that ever happened for Brexit.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid 

Good news from Spain.     

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

My thanks to María for confirming you are allowed to lift your mask to eat and drink in the street. She also endorses my thought that this is being done by folk who previously didn't go home during the 2-3 hour 'midday' break but resorted to a menu del día. And will continue to do so from one of the restaurants - not so many - offering take-aways. I do wonder where we'll all sit when it's raining . . . 

I'm now confused around the normativa about shops. Can 'non-essential' places stay open? I ask because I noted those shops open yesterday included barbers, sweetshops, ice-cream parlours and clothes retailers. Plus, of course, cake shops. 

Here's María's Falling Back Chronicle Day 56.      

And here's a defiant - and cheesy? - video on the Galician response to the virus. Several Pontevedra city scenes therein. As there are here. A reminder - It isn't actually raining at 2.38. They used a hose.

If you're not sated yet, there's a short (adulatory) Economist article on our region below. Long time readers of this blog will be familiar with everything in it. Including my added comments . . .

The USA

TV networks are paying less and less attention to the Trump campaign’s allegations that fraud robbed him of election victory. Even Fox, who cut away rom a press conference in which Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, alleged widespread fraud.

English

Current linguistic fads:-

- Exponential

- Tipping point

- Baked in

- Inflection point - Probably meaning: turning point; tipping point; crossroads; pivotal moment   

THE ARTICLE  

Us Gallegos : Galicia shows how devolution can work: An idiosyncratic region that remains comfortable in Spain      The Economist, Nov 7 2020

It’s a place apart, a land of mists, forests and long Atlantic rías (inlets); of pilgrim routes to the vast medieval cathedral of Santiago de Compostela; remote from almost everywhere, its people famous for their caginess. 

Today Galicia stands out for two other reasons. The first is that since democracy arrived 4 decades ago, it has progressed from being one of the poorest regions of Spain to enjoying an income only slightly below the national average. Its second peculiarity is that like Catalonia or the Basque Country it is a cultural nation but, unlike them, it is one that is comfortable in Spain. Separatism is the pursuit of a fairly small minority. 

Its economic success is broad-based. Apart from Europe's largest fishing industry, shipbuilding, dairying and timber, Galicia has two industrial mainstays: Inditex, based near A Coruña, has grown into the world's biggest provider of fast fashion through Zara and its other chains. A vast Citroen plant near Vigo anchors 30,000 car-industry jobs. The regional government has invested European funds in motorways: it is still six hours to Madrid, but it used to take twice as long. A high-speed railway link should be completed by 2022. 

TThere are other factors behind Galicia's success. A tradition of dividing farms among all children led to rural poverty (and emigration) but also to a culture that values private property, the leira (homestead) and hard work. 

Alberto Nunez Feijoo, the president of the regional government since 2009, highlights Galicia's political stability. Mr Feijoo is from the conservative People's Party, which at national level has become increasingly centralist. In Galicia it has adopted a strong regional identity that Mr Feijoo calls Galleguismo. "We have defended Galicia as a place that has its own language, culture, heritage and special characteristics," he says. This has "halted nationalism". [Not in Pontevedra city, it hasn’t]. At an election in July, Mr Feijoo retained his absolute majority of seats in the Galician parliament, another rarity for Spain. 

Critics complain that he has failed to halt an exodus of talent, as young professionals seek opportunities abroad. In fact, Galicia has seen more immigrants than emigrants in this century. But it is an ageing society. The dynamism of the coast contrasts with a depopulated interior, prone to forest fires. The Covid-19 pandemic, although mild in the region, may expose flaws in the Galician formula (with cases rising, on October 30th,Mr Feijoo restricted movement into and out of the main towns). "The economic model gave priority to cement over knowledge," says Xose Manoel Nunez Seixas, a historian at the University of Santiago de Compostela. 

Galicia suffers the vices as well as the virtues of Spanish devolution. It has 3 airports, where 1 would do [To say the least]; Gallegos cross the border to Porto in Portugal for many international flights. Politics features localism. Abel Caballero, the mayor of Vigo since 2007, has made a successful political career out of battling Mr Feijoo. He wants the high-speed train to go straight to his city, rather than via Santiago. That would cost €2bn to save just 15 minutes, says Mr Feijoo. 

A nationalist party came second in the election. Its leader, Ana Pontón, wants Galicia "to take our own decisions" on energy, infrastructure and taxes and "the right to decide" on independence. She also wants 50% of teaching to be in GaJlego. But most Gallegos seem happy enough with what Mr Feijoo calls "cordial bilingualism" rather than the language war of Cataluña. The nationalist vote seems to have a ceiling of about 25%. "The Gallego has ambitions to lead Spain," says Miguel Conde-Lobato, an advertising man in A Coruñaa. "We're more interested in captaining the ship than capsizing it."  

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

I hadn't realised Lenox Napier's research for his estimable Business Over Tapas extends to the Faro de Vigo but he's kindly sent me this report of the dastardly and disastrous theft of 5,200 cockles of 'enormously scientific value' which were being used for vital research purposes.

A UK friend recently commented on how difficult it is to keep up with changing regulations/restrictions. 'You're lucky', I said. 'You have only the UK to think about. I have one daughter there  and one in Madrid and I live in a community which makes its own rules, different sometimes from those in Madrid and elsewhere.'

In respect of a minor element of our local rules . . .A reader and I have briefly discussed if it's permissible to raise one's mask for second to eat, drink or smoke in the street. Particularly if there's no one anywhere near you. He/she says it's not, but none of my Spanish friends agree, so far. These might all be wrong but how to find out, other than by doing it in front of a policeman and seeing whether you're warned or - more likely - immediately fined? This is not an academic question for me, as I intend to continue with my morning constitutional around town and to drink a take-away coffee en route. An internet search, in Spanish, threw up nothing dated this month and didn't answer my query. Anyone got a definitive reference? María?

Talking of being fined . . . Yesterday, for the first time in 19 years, I had my alcohol level checked by the Guardia Civil. Fortunately, I was below the max, after just a single glass of wine in town to celebrate my birthday. Anyway, this happened at the odd - to me - time of 9pm. I wondered if it was because Guardia Civil officers are rather bored these days, having little to do but run these checks around the clock. It's a bit too early to see it as the annual Xmas campaign, which we're always warned about in advance.

There was another GC patrol on the main road as I came back home at 11.30 this morning but I wasn't stopped this time.

This a roadside house in my barrio of Poio. Like most of its generation it's no longer occupied and, like nearly all of them, it it’ll one day give way to a 5-7 storey block of flats. Which is a shame. I don't think there's anything like the UK's National Trust to save at least some of them, to remind us of how architecturally superior things used to be:-

María's Falling Back Chronicle Day 56.      

The Way of the World 

These are the world leaders who, says the BBC, hadn’t congratulated Joe Biden as of yesterday:-

Russian President Vladimir Putin

Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa

Estonian Interior Minister Mart Helme

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Chinese President Xi Jinping

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un

Notice any other similarities?

Spanish

From the Faro de Vigo article cited above: Ir al traste: Literally: To go to the fret. Idiomatically: To fail.

English

To beclown: this word seems to be still in use in the USA and means: To make a fool of oneself or another; To make into a clown; To clown around. Interestingly, Google's ngram has never heard of it, either in America or British English.  

Finally . . . 

In the latest podcast from The Rest is History, the historian of ancient times avers that, the more he studies modern history, the more he thinks everything goes back to the early Persian empire. Before Axlexander got to it. By coincidence, in an Indian song on the radio this morning I heard the work zendegi, which means 'life' in Persian. And turns out to mean the same in Hindi. I wondered what it'd be in Sanskrit but only came up with this page. No words beginning with Z . . . 

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid

Could an iodine mouthwash be a new weapon against coronavirus? One of the world’s leading authorities on infection in the mouth and nose believes the answer is yes. BUT: Sceptics say that the effect could last just a few useless minutes, and point to a mixed bag of results for the mouthwash against viruses such as colds. AND: Though the mouthwash is well tolerated, there may be unforeseen risks and little gain. Hey, ho. Research continues

Meanwhile, see the latest UK overview from Private Eye’s MD below, with details of Taiwan’s success. Which shames other governments

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Our ex king Chapter 4: The British connection . . .   It's reported that attempts to transfer funds from an account registered in Jersey - with a reported balance of nearly €10 million -  were recently detected by Spain’s anti-money laundering authority.

Cosa de España: Here's something that happened back in 2003 and possibly wouldn't happen now . . . I had a very Spanish experience yesterday, trying to get the guarantee for my mobile phone. There’s an obsession with paper and formality here. If I were working here, it'd surely drive me mad. As it is, I can bear it most of the time but, us with yesterday, I sometimes find it just too much. The sequence:-

1. Buy phone. Am told I need to come back in 2 weeks to get the guarantee 

2. Go back 2 weeks later and am told I need not only the receipt (which I have) but the instruction book from Siemens, which I don't.

3. Return (visit 3) to be told that all the documents have to be taken to the supermarket's central office (a hundred yards away) to get an "official receipt' issued. Then I've to take all the paper to the Information desk (100 yards more) to get the documents stumped and the guarantee issued.

4. Go to the office. The woman takes my papers and asks me for my ID number. This happens for virtually everything you do in Spain. I'm surprised no-one asks me for it when I put money in the pool machine. She goes away for 5 minutes and then gives me back my papers, stapled to the official receipt. 

5. I go to the Information desk. The guy looks through the papers and then tells me I need something which is missing

6. I explode and take back the papers from him. 

7. I go to the desk of the company which sold me the phone and demand help. The girl accompanies me back to the Information desk and the guy duly stamps the Siemens instruction book. 

So, something that would take 3 seconds (if that) at Dixons ("Here's your guarantee. Would you like to buy our phenomenally expensive 5 year extension?") has taken me at least an hour and generated a lot of frustration. And no-one seems to think it strange or ever says "I'm sorry you've had a wasted journey". It's as it they think that the whole point of time is to waste it, one way or another. It beats me how companies can afford (except through low wages) the costs which go with this inefficiency. I imagine it'll change when Spanish companies have to get slimmer after wages have risen to German levels.  

María's Falling Back chronicle, Day 55. 

The USA

Only in America?  A Woman has tried to sue Donald Trump for deceiving Christians and ‘dooming them to Hell’. She says Trump’s not a Christian because his actions are decidedly un-Christian. But, because he lied about being a Christian, other believers followed him, which meant they were sinning. And because they sinned, they’re now doomed to go to Hell. Which means she won't be able to love them for eternity.

Finally . . . 

PRIVATE’ EYE’S ‘MD’

The nuclear option 

Is a month of another lockdown long enough to get the virus under control in the UK? And how will we keep it there? Boris Johnson made no mention of fixing test and trace at his press conference, preferring to fantasise about imminent vaccines, better drugs and the army delivering 15-minute self-test kits to ''whole cities ... within days". But is there an existing route map out of the pandemic that avoids lockdowns, excess deaths and economic carnage? Step forward Taiwan ... 

The Taiwan way 

The Sars-CoY-2 virus may be rising again across Europe and America, but Taiwan hasn't had a locally transmitted infection for more than 200 days. This is all the more surprising given it's a crowded democratic island of23m people off the coast of China, with direct flights to Wuhan and many densely populated cities. 

Many residents live close together in apartments. In Sars 2003, it was the third worst affected country; yet in 2020, it has had only 555 confirmed cases and seven deaths, with no lockdowns and no second wave. 

Equally impressive, GDP is predicted to grow by 1.56% in 2020 and life is near to normal. On 8 August, Taiwanese singer-songwriter Eric Chou held a concert at Taipei Arena for more than 10,000 people, indoors and with no social distancing enforced. No outbreak followed. Sports, music, shopping, dining, drinking and dancing venues are at full capacity. How? 

The scars of Sars 

Taiwan began building an emergency response network for containing infectious diseases after Sars in 2003, which also originated in China and was more lethal than the current version but less infectious. As a result, countries closest to China bore the brunt, with Taiwan having hundreds of cases and 73 deaths. Hospitals had to be barricaded off. It became clear that unconstitutional emergency measures might be needed at the first signs of a pandemic and the habits of handwashing and mask-wearing became widely accepted, further reinforced by bird flu and HIN I outbreaks. 

Sunflower Movement 

They're used to living under high alert in Taiwan. Beijing has more than 1,600 ballistic missiles pointed at the island. In the spring of 2014, student protesters took to the streets in Taipei to express outrage at the incumbent KMT Nationalist Party's attempt to fast-track a trade deal with China. This "Sunflower Movement" continued into the 2016 election and helped the Democratic Progressive Party (OPP) win power, with academic Tsai Ing-wen becoming Taiwan's first female president. Public trust in her leadership has been crucial to Taiwan's pandemic success. 

Crack hacker 

Equally crucial to the country's success is digital minister Audrey Tang. Tang, a transgender civic hacker, was working in Silicon Valley when the Sunflower protests started but returned home to set up broadband connections and a digital strategy that helped the protesters win the political argument. On gaining power, the OPP appointed Tang as digital minister and used her expertise to crowdsource and share opinions to inform government policy- thus gaining public support for pandemic measures. 

Listen to whistleblowers 

When Chinese physician Dr Li Wenliang blew the whistle on the outbreak of a new Sars-like virus in Wuhan at the end of December 2019, his warning was reposted by a citizen on a Taiwanese civic network and taken seriously. In January, Taiwan set up a Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) even before Wuhan went into lockdown. ft introduced travel restrictions and established quarantine protocols for high-risk travellers. Flights from Wuhan were suspended. 

Border control 

As an island nation, Taiwan realised immediate and lasting border control was the best chance of keeping the virus out. It was right. Today, and for the foreseeable future, it has a 14-day quarantine from all destinations for all arrivals, whether Taiwanese or foreign. There is "symptom-based surveillance" before travellers board flights. Arrivals can choose to go to a hotel for 14 days of physical quarantine or stay in their homes if they have their own bathroom and put their phones into the "digital quarantine", which tracks movements. They get US$33 a day as a stipend, but if they break the quarantine they are fined a thousand times that. Compliance is very high, as much from public support as fear of a fine. Taiwan provides meal and grocery delivery for those quarantining and friendly contact via Line 

Bot, a robot that texts and chats.  Track & trace, Taiwan-style 

Taiwan was ahead of the game going into the pandemic. In 2017, in response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, its centre for disease control developed a comprehensive, digital national contact tracing platform (TRACE). This was adapted for Covid in mid-January, and by the time the first infected person was discovered on 21 January it was possible to track the travel and contact history of every single patient. This kept the outbreak at a manageable level, allowing nearly all contacts to be traced, which in turn kept the numbers low- a virtuous circle, only possible thanks to immediate action before infections got out of control and widespread public support. The more successful track and trace is, the more public support it gets. People allow their phones to be tracked because it gets results. 

For each confirmed case, 20-30 contacts have been reached. 340,000 people have been under home quarantine, with fewer than 1,000 fined for breaking it - an impressive 99.7 compliance rate. As health minister Chen Shih-chung puts it: "We sacrificed 14 days of 340,000 people in exchange for normal lives for 23m people." 

Trust the people 

They have also been clever in Taiwan in situations where people are warier of tracing, such as nightclubs and bars. Based on work with HIV positive communities, they trusted venues to come up with their own contact tracing systems using codenames, single-use email or prepaid mobile phone numbers. This avoided data being sent to central government. 

Public trust is also high because digital networks are used to ensure transparency and information flows from the top down and the bottom up. Tang and fellow hacktivists have set up Taiwan, an online democracy and brainstorming site, to involve citizens rather than just dictating rules to them. Public involvement has improved the pandemic response and nurtured civic pride. 

The mask debate in the UK is hugely divisive, but in Taiwan they were rolling them off the production line and banning exports in January. Production increased from 2m to 20m a day. The aim was to have enough for everyone using a lightweight design that could be worn comfortably for a day. The vast majority of citizens comply. 

Humour, not rumour 

Taiwan has 3 pillars to its pandemic response: fair, fast and (surprisingly) fun. Rather than scaring the shit out of citizens with relentless killer virus death statistics, it uses humour: a cute dog called Zongchai, a shiba inu, which translates key messages into easily understandable pictures. For physical distancing, the caption says: "If you're outdoors, please keep two shiba inus awa y... If you're indoors, keep three shiba inus away from each other." Maybe you have to be there, but it seems to work. 

Humour is also used to stamp out fake news and conspiracy theories. One rumour, started by a toilet roll manufacturer, was that shops would run out because the same paper was being used to make face masks. Tang's team released a meme featuring Taiwan's premier Su Tsengchang semi-naked, with the caption: "We only have one pair of buttocks." It stated that the pulp in toilet paper was from South America and mask materials were all locally sourced. The meme spread much faster than the conspiracy; the ridiculous over-buying of bog roll stopped. 

National health system 

Taiwan has a well-funded and efficient single-payer health system covering the entire population. Unlike in the UK, citizens do not live in fear of accessing medical care in case they pick up Covid. In Taiwan there have been no waves of non-Covid deaths either. People with cancer and heart disease feel safe to seek help, and the health system is not overloaded. 

Suppress or simmer? 

Taiwan has a third the population of the UK so copying its suppression strategies would be more complex. However, Great Britain and Ireland are islands, and so could enforce Taiwan-style border quarantines but have chosen not to. New Zealand and Australia have much stricter border controls which allow citizens far more freedom within them. Local outbreaks still happen, but Victoria managed to suppress 700 new cases a day to less than a case a day. As they go into summer, the virus should be easier to control. 

The UK let the virus simmer over summer, rather than suppress it, with patchy testing and poor public compliance. So the second wave is much bigger than it needed to be. Hence the fears of NHS winter overload and another lockdown. But lockdown is like doing urgent heart surgery with a chainsaw. Don't do it and the patient dies quickly; do it and the patient still dies, but a little more slowly. How do you trade off the years of life saved from avoiding Covid with the years of life lost from suicide, poverty, domestic abuse, home heart attacks and other harms of lockdown? 

Can T&T be fixed? 

Suppressing a highly infectious virus that spreads without symptoms in sudden waves is extremely hard, and probably not possible without border quarantines to keep new outbreaks at a traceable level. Across Europe, T &T systems have failed to suppress a second wave. In the UK, £12bn has been spent on a largely outsourced system, but the message that local tracing gets better results is filtering through. 

More than I00 local authorities in England now have "tracing partnerships" with Public Health England. Blackburn with Darwen went live at the start of August and reached nine out of ten cases that the national system couldn't get through to; Calderdale council reached 86% of cases that otherwise wouldn't have had their close contacts identified. 

These partnerships should help provide financial and social support, and access to food or medicines. Local authorities know where their pockets of hunger and poverty are and urgently need the resources to tackle them. Local tracing is funded from a share of £300m government funding plus £8 per head for enhanced tracing and enforcement in areas in higher-tier restrictions. But it's a fraction of  what the private sector has been given. Local authorities must be fully funded to trace and support, with the help of local NHS and GPs, so when the numbers come down to a manageable level, we can keep them there. Next time we have to suppress, not simmer. 

Waiting for utopia 

Global herd immunity is the utopia of public health. It means enough people on the planet are immune to a disease, either via vaccine or exposure, to allow those who are still susceptible to travel freely without getting infected. Herd immunity could theoretically happen with Sars-CoV-2. And if we find a vaccine that works, we wouldn't have to vaccinate the entire population, just enough to keep the R number below 1. However, even when epidemics appear to have ended, they can fire up again quickly, and seemingly at random. No one is out of the woods yet. 

Herd resistance 

Many respiratory viruses mutate at random, which means immunity is never lifelong and vaccines are only partially effective and have to be repeated annually (eg for influenza). Even without vaccination, some people are more resistant to these viruses. Others are just better at washing their hands. 

The cold coronaviruses that infect humans give immunity that lasts from a few months to a few years, and Sars-CoV-2 may be similar. However, cold viruses are so common that enough people either have resistance to the current virus, or some cross-resistance from previous cold viruses, to hold infections in check. 

Sars-CoV-2 can be deadly, but was only the 25th commonest cause of death in the UK in August and is now the 11th. It may well be that most countries will end up in this state where the virus joins the many other causes of death each year, but not at a level that overwhelms the NHS. If we're all going to end up in this state eventually, the question becomes: how much damage are we going to do to ourselves in getting there? 

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

 Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

First none arrived and then 3 come along all at once. . .   Juan Carlos, the disgraced and exiled former king of Spain, is facing a third corruption investigation in a further blow to the reputation of the monarchy.

The Irish dimension . . . The [Mexican] owner of Killua Castle, in Co Westmeath, has been named in the Spanish press as one of two men at the centre of an investigation into the finances of the former king. JC took his latest misress there 3 years ago, it's reported.

Day 2 of EC2, and, yes, there certainly are at least cake shops selling coffee and croissants to go in town. I look forward to the day when they master how to serve black coffee in a container that doesn't burn your fingers off within 10 seconds. And which tastes OK.

There were also one or two restaurants offering take-away food yesterday in Pontevedra city. But the vast majority are shuttered,But the vast majority are shuttered, though there'll surely be more open today. But my problem will be that luras (Gallego for calamares) are not so good when cold. And they lose heat pretty quickly. I'd have to eat them immediately in the main square to enjoy them and this goes completely against Spanish cultural norms. I've already had some stern looks for eating a croissant and drinking a coffee as I walked. Though not simultaneously, of course. So I sat down on the steps of church to finish the croissant, before chucking the coffee. Conceivably less unacceptable to the locals.Especially if they assumed I was a gypsy, there to beg. Desperate times, desperate measures.

Cosa de España . . . The blinds shop was again closed yesterday and the blank sheet was still flapping on the door. I've told them I’ll pay in cash if they send someone to my house for it.

María's Falling Back chronicle, Day 54 

The UK

Hmm.  . . Biden will now wage war on Brexit as the British outpost of Trumpism. The next few months will be rocky for Downing Street. Johnson's Brexit agenda is seen by the new president and his team as trans-Atlantic Trumpism. If Donald Trump carries on legal guerrilla warfare against Biden, Anglo-American relations will suffer. If he goes gracefully, the Biden team might decide to adopt reconciliation all round. Trump defiant means the war of 2016 could spread across the Atlantic as a Biden Administration sees Brexit as part of that battle. 

Fingers crossed, then. The ones that aren't burnt, of course.

The USA

There was only one possible reflection on that extraordinary broadcast from the Trump bunker last Thursday night. How did this ludicrous, dangerously ignorant man ever become president of the United States? That is not a rhetorical question. We need to know how and why this was possible, not only for the sake of America’s political future but for ours, too.

So . . . Trumpism. What is it and will it live on, whatever the character and eminent failings of the man who created it? See the article below. 

Spanish

There's polar views here in Pontevedra on whether many Spaniards say 'Contra mas' instead of 'Cuanto mas'. My own observation - from an admittedly smallish sample of 8 - was that those who said it was vulgar but common - if you see what I mean - have lived outside Galicia. Whereas those who’d only lived here said they’d never heard it. But, then, last night a Madrileña friend who lives  here told me it was typical of Gallegos. 

Finally

Am I the only one who finds the BBC’s classical music channel - Radio 3 - to be obsessed with the human voice, as opposed to instruments? And Classic FM to be obsessed with only a small selection of ‘favourites’? The former doesn’t run ads but all the same . . .

THE ARTICLE 

His wild swing missed but Donald Trump has beaten America into his image:

Is the outgoing president the worst in US history? For all his erratic, divisive behaviour, he will shape the country for decades to come:   Robert W Merry, journalist and publishing executive, and author of Where They Stand: the American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians:  The Times 

You cannot argue with history. It goes its own way and buries its own dead. Often it renders its judgments with slow deliberation, and sometimes it alters those judgments over time to make things interesting. But it always has the last word. This is particularly true of history’s verdicts on American presidents, as reflected in the surveys of presidential scholars that have coalesced over decades into a substantial body of thought on presidential performance. Those surveys represent the closest we can come to history’s judgment.

I predict it will stamp him as a presidential failure but also a figure of historical significance. This seeming paradox will be lost on many Americans, mostly the paladins of the country’s establishment and the top 10% of its populace in wealth and income, the elite class of highly educated movers and shakers who have benefited from the economic and social policies of the past 40 years while large numbers of Americans have suffered. While considering Trump’s presidency a nasty nightmare, this elite class has consoled itself with the thought that when he goes, Trumpism will go with him.

It won’t. In his first campaign and presidency, Trump has pulled together a knot of political adherence that will linger long after his departure. Thus did the 45th president transform the debates and faultlines of American politics. The closeness of his re-election bid, far more impressive than the polls and pundits had predicted, can be attributed in part to his striking capacity to galvanise the devotion of millions of Americans agitated by what they consider the failings of the country’s leadership class.

Yet the establishment paladins and the top 10% might console themselves with the reality that he could never build upon that knot of political sentiment and create the kind of governing coalition that every president needs for success — and for re-election. He lacked the intellectual tools, political acumen, rhetorical touch and perhaps the fundamental decency to effect that. Therein lies his failure.

Trump’s presidential approval ratings, as reflected in public opinion surveys, accentuate both his deficiency in office and his dialectical significance. His record of approval is intriguing, because it fluctuated only in a narrow band of modest but ironclad political esteem, largely from a low of about 39% to a high of 43%. The approval quotients of most presidents fluctuated far more widely and often reached much higher levels, depending on how things were going in the country. Barack Obama’s ratings went from a low of 40 to a high of 57. George W Bush had a gaping range of 27 to 71. Bill Clinton’s was 37 to 61. Ronald Reagan’s yearly average in the Gallup poll fluctuated from 43 in the recession year of 1982 to 60 in 1985-86, when the economy was soaring and the Iran-Contra scandal had not yet emerged.

This tells us that Trump touched a nerve of powerful sensation when he crafted his 2016 campaign as an assault on the nation’s elites and the Washington establishment. Both main parties had embraced an ethos of globalism, lenient immigration, free trade, anti-nationalism, identity politics and cultural liberalism. This was the outlook of nearly all elite institutions, including the Democratic Party, top universities, influential think tanks, mavens of popular culture, the big banks, big tech, big corporations, and most of big media. But more and more Americans were beginning to chafe under its influence.

They still do, which is why Trump’s approval rating still had a floor on election eve of about 39% and why he pulled about 70 million votes to his banner in last Tuesday’s balloting. Almost no matter what he did, his supporters saw him as standing between themselves and the political forces they consider inimical to their interests.

The historian Walter Russell Mead, of the Hudson Institute and Bard College, writing shortly after the 2016 election, identified these Trump voters as “Jacksonian” — named for the country’s first populist president, Andrew Jackson — meaning they reject the elite concept of America as dedicated to the fulfilment of a universal mission of global betterment. Rather they see America’s governmental role as fulfilling “the country’s destiny by looking after the physical security and economic wellbeing of the American people in their national home”.

Mead wrote that these people came to feel besieged, their values under attack and their future threatened. Then came Trump — “flawed as many Jacksonians themselves believed him to be” — who “seemed the only candidate willing to help fight for [their] survival”. That is what got him elected, and it is what gave him consistent approval ratings, however modest.

A more recent take on all this came from John J Mearsheimer, of Chicago University, in a provocative speech delivered to an audience of the American Political Science Association and reprinted in the journal PS. Mearsheimer shares Mead’s perception of a rising wave of populism in America, but he puts it in terms of liberalism. Equals v nationalism. He sees liberalism as focused intently on the sanctity of the individual and of the individual’s right to have as much freedom as possible in his or her personal life. Also, liberalism is universalist in outlook, meaning its adherents believe its core principles apply to all mankind, everywhere and at all times, and that America’s mission, therefore, is to spread those principles. That is why they are globalists and do not care much for sturdy borders or nationalist sensibilities. Humanitarian war-making, however, is a natural part of their ethos.

Mearsheimer sees nationalists, by contrast, as particularists, believing people are “born into and thrive in social groups that mould their identities and command their loyalties”. And the most significant of all social groups is the nation. That is why nationalists care about civic cohesion, the idea of a unique culture, territorial integrity and sovereignty.

These two “isms” are contradictory in many respects and hence often in conflict. But they can sometimes become nicely intertwined in ways that create a harmonious balance. That has been the case in America for much of its history.

It has not been the case, however, in the post-Cold War era, when liberalism rose to near hegemonic influence in the American polity. Then it unleashed a frontal attack on nationalism, seeking eventually to marginalise or even nullify it. And it seemed to be working. Liberalism, with almost no serious opposition, pushed with abandon its tenets of individualism, universalism, the virtue of the transnational elite, the sanctity of identity thinking and America’s missionary zeal overseas. As the historian Jill Lepore, a universalist liberal herself, wrote: “It appeared to some globalists that nationalism had died.

It hadn’t. Mearsheimer believes liberalism can go only so far in threatening nationalism in any polity before the forces of nationalism fight back hard. Trump served as the vanguard of the nationalist pushback. Mead and Mearsheimer believe he somehow saw instinctively what no other politician of either party perceived: that Jacksonian nationalism represented a nascent force in American politics waiting to be activated and exploited. Mead calls it “the truly surging force in American politics”, while Mearsheimer posits that when liberalism and nationalism truly collide, “nationalism wins almost every time, because it is the most powerful political ideology in the modern world”.

Perhaps. But establishment forces in America have been doing all they could to kill it, along with the Trump presidency. In this effort they have received considerable help from Trump himself, and here is where we get to his presidential failure.

No president can succeed in office unless he builds upon his core support and pulls together a governing coalition. Nate Silver, the political analyst and polling-data-cruncher, has written that a president seeking a second term probably will not succeed unless he captures an approval rating of at least 49% at election time. That means Trump needed to get his approval quotient up by seven or eight percentage points to succeed.

How could he have done that? Through accomplishment, by getting things done. By historical standards, though, Trump’s performance record was thin. He seemed to think that his words could define his actions, whereas in politics, only actions define actions. He was the president of conservative talk radio, of bombast and braggadocio, of the phony brutality of video games, of reality-TV. He not only did not talk to those Americans who were not already in his camp, 60% of the electorate, but also consistently insulted them.

Meanwhile, as history will record in its unsentimental way, he did not accomplish what he was elected to do. He campaigned against those “forever wars” that have kept America bogged down in the Middle East. But, while he avoided American involvement in new wars, he has not extricated the country from the old ones. US troops remain in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Trump’s truculence towards Iran and his effort to join Israel and other regional nations in isolating Isis in its own neighbourhood could spark a hostile reaction that would draw America further into the Middle East quagmire.

Or consider immigration, the most incendiary of the country’s wedge issues. Civic anxieties have magnified substantially in recent years as the proportion of foreign-born residents has reached historic highs and as more and more Americans have lost faith in the willingness of the nation’s elites to deal with the issue in good faith. Having established his credibility with those increasingly anxious voters — however obnoxiously — Trump was positioned to fashion a comprehensive solution showing compassion for many illegal residents (particularly the “dreamers” brought to America as children through no fault of their own) while taking stern measures to stem further inflows.

But that would have necessitated a capacity for the president to talk to the American people as Franklin Roosevelt or Reagan did, in lucid, explanatory language designed to persuade through reason and logic. Trump could not do that, and so he resorted to executive actions that will promptly be reversed by his successor. The acidic issue will continue to eat away at the nation.

On healthcare, Trump promised to “repeal and replace” Obama’s Affordable Care Act, but the Republicans could not come up with a credible replacement, and Trump lacked the leadership to pull the party together on the issue.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic, and Trump could not muster the kind of forthright, coherent, consistent leadership needed in such a crisis, with the result that he looked clueless, hapless and incapacitated. The episode revealed something about the president, missed by many of his critics but captured with acuity by Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for The New York Times. In debunking the notion that Trump represented some kind of mortal threat to the republic, Douthat noted that Trump, unlike some past presidents of note (Jackson, Lincoln, FDR), did not seek to use the Covid crisis to enhance his authority. “Great men and bad men alike seek attention as a means of getting power,” Douthat wrote, “but our president is interested in power only as a means of getting attention.”

Just so. And attention-starved presidents cannot succeed in the office because they cannot step back from themselves sufficiently to grasp the imperatives of the nation, even if they possess the capacity to address those imperatives, which Trump does not.

History will not be kind to this man. Most likely it will not place him at the bottom of the heap with James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson. But he will not be much above those losers. He will get credit perhaps, as he should, for stepping out of nowhere and grasping some troubling emergent realities of American politics at a time when no one else could see them. But, if Mead and Mearsheimer are correct that Jacksonian populist nationalism represents “the truly surging force in American politics”, and that nationalism, in competing with liberalism, “wins almost every time, because it is the most powerful political ideology in the modern world”, then Trump’s White House occupancy will go down in history as one of the greatest missed opportunities in the annals of the American presidency.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

 Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Today is the first day of EC2 (El Contenamiento Dos) and I wonder if, on my permitted walk, I'll pass a café allowed to sell coffee and a croissant 'to go'. Or whether any of my local friends has opened a private café in their kitchen.

Cosas de España . . 

1. I need to check on this but I'm sure Banco Santander gave me the message yesterday that, if I use my credit card at their ATMs - my debit card doesn't work - they will charge me only 3 euros if if take cash from my current account, but 9 euros if I take it via my credit card account. Regardless, I assumed, of whether or not I pay it off at the end of the month. Spanish banks have always been infamously rapacious but now - having closed most of their branches and reduced the level of their service - they’re all ramping up their charges as fast as they can. Of which there's quite a range.

2. A foreign friend this week asked me if her bank really could change the conditions of service - i. e. their charges - without telling her anything. My reply: My UK bank sends me regular letters on this but, in 19 years, I've never received anything by way of advice from any of the 6 Spanish banks I've used. A different concept of customer service.

3. Three days ago I tried to make a bank transfer to the blinds company but their IBAN was rejected. As they insisted it was correct, I tried another 3 times, without success. So, I said I’d call at the shop yesterday and pay in cash, for which I was thanked. When I got there at 12 - the equivalent of 10 in almost every other country in the world - it was closed. With only a bank piece of paper flapping on the door. Maybe I was supposed to write my own message.

Lenox Napier of The Spanish Shilling has a few choice words here about the traffic cops, with which, I'm sure, we can all sympathise. Except perhaps the solicitous reader who commented a few years ago that one could only be fined if one broke the law.

María's Falling Back chronicle Day 53.

The USA

Kanye West stood for president this time and says he'll do so again next time round. The estimable Caitlin Moran suggests that: America might have lost its goddamn mind — but not quite enough to make Kanye West its president. But who really knows?

Meanwhile, Joe Biden says he'll work towards a 'more perfect Union', which might strike some of us as a rather weird thing to say right now, as we gaze on the current state of the (alleged) Union. Biden’s phrase comes from the Preamble to the American Constitution. When such a goal might well have looked more achievable than it does now.

The current state of play. The Loser-in-Chief:-

Anyway . .  There’s a nice balanced article from Matthew Parris below, on Things Trump Got Right. Which I don’t deny.

Spanish

I didn't know that the Guardia Civil traffic cops were known as Los primos - The cousins. HT to Lenox for this.

And a HT to my daughter's Madrileño partner for this on a common error of native speakers: Otra muy comun es decir “contra mas” en vez de “cuanto mas”. Casi todo el mundo se equivoca en est.  Por ejemplo: "contra mas tiene, mas quiere” en vez de “cuanto mas, tiene mas quiere”  But perhaps this is only true of Madrid.

Finally

If you ignore the tail, most snakes are very short: The witty Dave Barry

THE ARTICLE 

Let’s face it, Trump got many things right  Matthew Parris, The Times 

My own response to the (presumably) outgoing US president began in disgust but has edged not to admiration — never that — but a wary appreciation of what he’s been right about. President Trump has shifted the shape of American policy both at home and abroad. There have been some appalling missteps but in a handful of big ways, more than his critics on the left are prepared to allow, this reset was urgently needed.

The Trump presidency was ahead of almost all of us in its visceral understanding of the threat to the West posed by communist China. Clever people have been muttering about this (some, like our last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, more than muttering) for decades, but Trump took the bull by the horns. Post-Trump, neither his own country nor Europe will ever be able return to their relaxed confidence that China’s rise can happen in a way that meshes easily with western interests. Trump saw that it must be at best a scratchy business. He saw that crude shin-kicking has a role in international affairs. He saw the same with North Korea, too.

And there were shins that needed kicking. Our European Nato allies, reluctant to pull their weight in contributions to the organisation, deserved it, and from Trump they got it. In the coronavirus pandemic the World Health Organisation, from which Beijing has blackballed Taiwan’s membership, made a disgraceful start by ducking that island’s warnings about what was happening on the Chinese mainland. Trump gave the WHO both barrels.

It’s all very well for those of us who see the importance of “multilateral” institutions like the WHO and its parent United Nations to bewail America’s turning away; but if President (as I hope) Biden is to re-engage, then Washington will now start with a much stronger hand. Somebody has to play hard cop. Trump had a gut appreciation of that.

We British should stray only hesitantly into commentary on American domestic affairs, so I’ll venture just two thoughts about Trump as a national leader.

First, the political climate in which the last Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, could even think about calling Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables” had lost its bearings. Trump can be criticised for weaponising the tens of millions who fall through the gaps in the American dream; he can be criticised for over-steering; but he effected a radical course-correction that the Democratic Party must get behind if it is not to flounder in the years ahead. And, laugh as we might at his “beautiful wall” solution to America’s porous southern border, we’d be fools to laugh off the discomfort felt by millions that the influx across that border has been out of control.

Second, although America clearly has a tremendous problem with its police culture, elements in the Black Lives Matter movement started threatening public order in a way which, were I living there, would have alarmed me too: not so much for my own safety as for an erosion of respect for the rule of law that “liberal” America (including Biden) seemed nervous of calling out. In calling it out, Trump undoubtedly dog-whistled to racists and bigots, but he spoke for many who were not racists or bigots. When he publicly insulted the government of China, he dog-whistled to jingoists and xenophobes, but he spoke for many who were neither. When he spoke for left-behind blue-collar America, he dog-whistled to many rabble-rousing rednecks, but he spoke for many more thoughtful Americans, too. When he abused Angela Merkel in personal terms, he dog-whistled to many foolish isolationists, but he spoke for many who were rightly resentful of EU protectionism.

And here we come to what it is about Trump’s successes that so profoundly depress me as a commentator who would hope to place myself among the thoughtful centre-right in politics.

Are we entering an era in which the right’s only route to power in democratic politics is via the nastier kind of populism? Is there no longer hope for intelligent right-wing parties that do not clothe themselves in vulgar demagoguery? Can right-of-centre thinking no longer be sold except on the populist ticket?

I cast my mind back over our own British Tory political history. I think of Lord Salisbury’s deep and eloquent scepticism about change; of Stanley Baldwin’s appeal to all that was mild, moderate and commonsensical in the English character; of Churchill’s deft blend of what was rousing and what was prudential; of Harold Macmillan’s alloy of paternalism with the common touch; of John Major’s huge appeal in 1992 with gentle conservatism delivered from the soap box. And then of David Cameron’s increasing struggle to define a compassionate and tolerant Toryism that could keep the nasties on board.

But most of all I think of perhaps the last Tory leader to walk successfully the tightrope between intelligent right-wing politics and populism. Margaret Thatcher (for whom I slaved in the dungeons as an aide before she became prime minister) had a super-keen ear for the discontents of what snootier colleagues would have called the ordinary people, but combined it with an equally keen brain for policy, and a deep distrust of mob rule.

Will she, and her mentor Sir Keith Joseph, prove the last to harness a muzzled kind of populism? These days the intellectual right often seem cold and emotionally disconnected: so horribly uncharismatic in an internet age when deference to intellect or expertise is dead, and many operate more on sentiment than logical analysis.

Trump saw that. But how, if not in The Donald’s way — through appeal to an unconsidered kind of patriotism and crude messaging about looking after our own — does the 21st-century centre-right bridge the gap between popular concerns and right-of-centre solutions?

Prominent in commentary in the weeks ahead will be the view that Trump’s administration got many things right, but that Trump was a slob, and a dreadful salesman for Trumpism. But what if it’s worse than that? What if only slobs can sell conservatism to 21st-century electorates? Truly, as Gove said, does wisdom take many forms: and Donald Trump’s may have been a terrible kind of wisdom.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid 

It's interesting to see that the differences in the responses of Spain's 17 'autonomous communities' don't cause the comment/disquiet that Scottish, Welsh and English differences cause in the UK. Spain is, of course, a de facto quasi-federal state. I wonder what happens in the real federal state of Germany. Are there differences there? If so, are they controversial?

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

More pessimism on the economy ‘going forward’.

Wow!    

Here's a couple of local headlines which raise serious questions:-

1. The police in Galicia issue fines to 25% of truck drivers, and

2. 90% of the bills in the files of Galicia's municipalities are irregular.

What can they portend?

María's Falling Back chronicle, Day 52. 

The UK 

The view of at least one one annoyed Brit: It’s hard to guess how long the British public will comply with increasingly restrictive government edicts that demand great sacrifices from us while signally failing to create a Test and Trace programme that is fit for purpose. That social contract has been well and truly broken. The latest statistics show the £12bn system is mired in difficulties; it reached just 59.9% of cases in England, down from 60.6% for the previous week. How can we trust a government that doesn't keep its promises? That forcibly separates families, turns care homes into jails for 97-year-old grans and closes down society wholesale at the point where figures show localised lockdowns are working? For many months now we've been fed mealy-mouthed excuses. The truth is this: there is no excuse. 

The latest development undermining confidence there: The Covid graphs were wrong in suggesting daily deaths would soon surpass the first wave. The Government has been forced to reissue key charts used to justify the second lockdown, after admitting projected fatalities were overstated.

The USA

I can't think of any European country in which I'd be unhappy for my daughters to live. Sadly, I can't say this of today's USA, notwithstanding many happy visits there before the turn of the century.

Here's an article entitled American Requiem, on the rank failures of the liberal elite. Don Quijones' selected quote: The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies . . . It supplies the world with its nightmares now. 

Below is Ambrose Evans Pritchard's nice take on Trumps's most recent insane antics.

The Way of the World 

The Tinder Years . . . ?

Finally

For history buffs . . . A highly recommended new (British) podcast: The Rest is History.  [If this link fails, C&P this: https://play.acast.com/s/the-rest-is-history-podcast ] It's not one by comedian Frank Skinner.

THE ARTICLE

Trump has committed sacrilege and set in motion a fateful chain of events: The President used his late-night declaration of victory before he had earned it to concoct a false narrative as an electoral fraud victim. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph 

Donald Trump has denied his likely successor the consecrating ritual of concession. America’s mechanism for handing over power has broken down.

There is no constitutional procedure for removing a president who refuses to accept defeat, if that is what occurs when the final votes are tallied. The Founding Fathers assumed and hoped that incumbents would behave with honour, though Thomas Jefferson always feared that a new Caesar might one day overstay his welcome - with Alexander Hamilton immediately in mind.

President Trump’s late-night declaration of victory before he had earned it was an act of political sacrilege. It was also ruthlessly focused, the opening move of a scorched-earth strategy long-prepared by his inner circle should he be at risk of losing the vote. His allegation of a giant “fraud on the American people” was not a reckless off-the-cuff remark in the heat of the moment. Leaked tapes from his Election Day Operations team leave no doubt that this gambit was pre-planned, a calculated move to discredit in advance what he knew would be a late surge of Democrat votes as postal ballots are counted. This "blue shift" syndrome has become a pattern of US elections, and vastly more so this year after 100 million people voted by mail or in advance.  

Trump has striven for weeks to taint postal votes and to impugn the credibility of the US electoral system - breathtaking chutzpah given that he controls the Justice Department, and that Republicans dominate the executive machinery of some swing states.  He urged his supporters to vote only in person, aiming to create an even greater cleavage between the party colouring of the two sets of ballots that could then be exploited. This has been his strategy ever since Joe Biden pulled ahead in the polls.  It led to the spectacle that we have all just witnessed: an early Trump lead in several states evaporating later. It is an invitation to conspiracy theories, all assiduously amplified on social media, with militia waiting in the wings.   

The situation is dangerous and has nothing in common with Al Gore’s demand for a Florida recount 20 years ago. Trump has lost the popular vote and probably the electoral college vote, yet he is pulling out all the stops to subvert the result before this can be confirmed. A machinery for legal guerrilla warfare has been set in motion across the battleground states and will now cause weeks of havoc. Have markets understood the gravity of what is unfolding?

America’s succession process relies on the virtues of Cincinnatus. “Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” says Amherst law professor Lawrence Douglas. He says there are design flaws in the architecture of the Twelfth Amendment and in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that make easy prey for an abusive president.  States are not obliged to follow the outcome of the popular election when they allocate their vote in the electoral college though they always do in practice. If doubts can be sown about the validity of the election - or if enough street disorder can be rustled up - the state legislatures have the constitutional power to appoint anybody they want. 

As it happens, these bodies are mostly controlled by the Republicans in swing states. So what will Mr Trump’s allies in the Pennsylvania General Assembly do if the Democrats win a narrow victory (I write before knowing the outcome) given that he already alleges a stolen election? At what point do they tell their party leader that enough is enough? 

It comes down to whether judges often appointed by Trump are willing to strike down votes because the ballots arrived late - though posted in time - or had a slightly smudged postmark, and whether the Republican 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court will validate such suppression. I doubt that they will, but upon this question may now hang the fate of the republic. 

At the least, Washington faces weeks of paralysis and legal fights until the "safe harbour" deadline for the electoral college votes on December 8, and before the new Congress validates the presidential count on January 6. This chaos will happen in the middle of an escalating pandemic. Nothing like it has been seen since the four-month Interregnum in 1932, the Winter War, when Herbert Hoover denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as a “march on Moscow” and sought to sabotage his reflation policy in advance by tightening the Gold Standard.   Confidence in the banking system collapsed during the hiatus. It was the closest that America came to political break-down during the Great Depression. It was also the moment when Japan invaded China, and Hitler took Berlin, and the world suddenly changed.

What might Xi Jinping do to Taiwan while Donald Trump is distracted with his army of lawyers, and America is tearing itself apart? The autocrats will surely relish the spectacle of a US president behaving as they do. It is the ultimate propaganda coup. 

Whatever happens over the coming weeks, the Blue Wave has sputtered out. The Democrats have failed to capture the Senate. They may even have lost seats in the House. Their mandate for a radical leftward turn has evaporated.  It has long been an article of faith among Democrats that ‘demographics are destiny’, and that the party’s ethnic and sectarian coalition must eventually prevail by force of numbers. But this election has been a wake-up call. There has been revulsion against identity politics and corrosive segmentation, and above all against the "cancel culture" of Antifa statue-smashers. The Democrats lost ground to Latinos in Florida and South Texas, despite the "Wall". This may shock some but it should be no surprise given the business ethic of Latino immigrants, and their Catholicism, and their family ties to countries with Trumpian caudillo traditions.

Markets must now confront Washington gridlock and diminished fiscal stimulus, already reflected in the plummeting yields on 10-year Treasuries, but not so far on Wall Street. For a brief moment Bidenomics had us all in thrall. It looked as if there might be a $7.9 trillion Keynesian blitz to "run the economy hot". The strategy was consciously modelled on Roosevelt’s wartime expansion from 1941 to 1945. It aimed to leap-frog supply-side constraints and achieve a virtuous circle of productivity growth, this time relying on the war against carbon as the catalyst instead of military-industrial mobilisation against fascism.

Joe Biden will not be able to push these vaulting plans through Congress even if he does make it into the White House. The green deal is largely still-born. His front-loaded $1.7 trillion Gosplan for 500 million solar panels, 60,000 wind turbines, and the like, will be torn to pieces by the Senate. The equity markets had come to salivate over the exorbitant sums. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Moody’s all concluded that Bidenomics would turbocharge economic growth. They will now have to settle for thinner gruel.  

The planned $2 trillion of pandemic aid to cover furloughs and insolvent states is for the birds. It is not clear what skinny version will emerge from a lame-duck Congress in this political climate. Don’t expect it soon.

All told, the markets face a harsher economic winter. The V-shaped rebound has faded. Investors must instead navigate the second dip of an enveloping ‘W’ without much help from Washington.  Nor is it obvious that a Democratic White House eager to regulate and a Republican Senate less inclined to spend will do much for the animal dynamism of American capitalism. Bet on bipartisan comity and a business boom if you wish. I am fetching my tin helmet.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid 

The growing relevance of T-cells. 

See below for a provocative article which might just be on the button.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Well, the cacerolazo was even more ineffective than I feared. No sooner was it over than the Galician government, the Xunta, announced that, as of 3pm Friday, the entire hostelería(hospitality) industry in the region will be closed down for a month. Effectively a second lockdown, albeit slightly less restrictive than the first one. Assuming this time we're allowed out into the street. To participate in the evening paseo, for example. 

I think we're still allowed to gather outside with up to 5 people with whom we cohabit but, as I live alone, there goes my social life for a while. It won't be a great birthday this year.

From my salón window, I can see a long horizontal gash in the forested hillside above Pontevedra city. This is the A-57 bypass, a public-works project which competes with the AVE high-speed train for the lateness record. Some would say it's unnecessary, as we already have the AP-9 autopista to serve its purpose. But, anyway, there's been no work on it for quite some time and I mention it now only because of a press report that the first 6km stretch from Pontevedra to Barro will be finished by ‘the end of 2022’. It's always the end of some year in the near-middle distance. Especially in election years. I have a small doubt it won't be open in my lifetime. But no one seems to care. No protests in its favour, as far as I can tell.

María's Falling Back chronicle, Day 51. 

The USA

Well, I think we can now make a good educated guess at what went on in those closed, no-notes-taken meetings Trump had with Putin and Kim Jong Un; they were tutorials on how to ignore the democratic will, ride roughshod over the democratic process and stay in power, come what may.

Here and here are couple of those US religious nuts and their truly preposterous claims and predictions. Wasn't it an American - H. L. Mencken - who said No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people?

The second of these cretins was once a Congresswoman. Dear Lord!

Spanish

- A grandes rasgos: Roughly/broadly speaking. Except, I guess, when numbers are to 2 or 3 decimal places, as they often are here.

Finally

During my (hitherto) daily short drives on a back road to and from my parking place on the Lérez side of O Burgo bridge, I have to negotiate 4-5 huge potholes that get bigger by the hour. And are currently highlighted by a white circle painted around each of them. This is doubtless ahead of repair. Which takes place every few months. I wonder if one day they'll do this properly. Or even re-tarmac the entire road. After all, if they've got so much  money to splash out on the bridge, why ever not?

Somewhat ironically, this is the road learner drivers have to take for their test. And then - over a narrow one-lane bridge - to a short stretch of tarmac pitted and rutted by large trucks driving to a large industrial unit alongside the AP-9. I feel for them. And almost forgive their roundabout stupidities.

A HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for the news that a confederation of book shops has started a service for readers - todostuslibros.com - due to open next week. Let’s hope this isn’t a Galician prediction.

THE ARTICLE

Covid is nowhere near dangerous as our pathological obsession with abolishing risk

Our fanatically simplistic approach to problem solving may turn out to be one of the biggest threats to society in the 21st century:   Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph

Today’s rotten win for Covid authoritarianism has similar perfume notes to the Iraq War. A weak Prime Minister has been bounced into a second lockdown by state scientists and their dodgy dossier of data. MPs yesterday voted “blind” on fresh restrictions without having a chance to fully digest the guidelines. A modelling blitzkrieg has petrified the masses, as three quarters back No 10, according to the polls.

Outnumbered lockdown-sceptics have put up an impressive guerrilla fight, trying to strangle the Government’s mangled modelling at birth. In this, Carl Heneghan has proved a hero, blasting No 10’s false and outdated projection of 4,000 daily deaths by next month. Still, this week we were routed. Sir Patrick Vallance’s slick disclaimer that there is a difference between a “prediction” and a “scenario” confounded scientifically illiterate hacks with depressing ease. The counter-argument – that even “scenarios” can be judged by their quality, assumptions, and usage – was too convoluted to go mainstream.

The lockdown-sceptic mission to expose the deeper flaws at the heart of the modelling backed by the scientific establishment is only now warming up. This week, Steve Baker MP raised the findings of a recent paper on the methodological issues that shame the field of epidemiological modelling with ministers and select committees. But this fight will be vicious. Infectious disease epidemiology is a backwards, inbred and bullying discipline. As the field struggles to explain why it has barely moved on from 1920s theory – ignoring major mathematical leaps – it is closing ranks, as dissenting academics are intimidated.

But if lockdown-sceptics are going to win this war against the establishment, they also need to capture hearts and minds at the terrified grassroots level. They can only do this by finding a powerful way to articulate that society suffers from top to bottom from a collective sickness: the inability to deal with risk.

While one notorious estimate by academics recently gathered at Oxford that there is a 19% chance of our extinction by 2100 may be a tad pessimistic, today’s “superwicked” threats to humanity make the Saddam bogeyman seem like Hammer horror vintage. The uncertainty of these risks is a killer. Deadly viruses can be leaked from labs that are actually trying to protect us by better understanding the world’s deadly pathogens. Deciphering the tipping points for global warming is beyond current science. What it will truly mean if AI surpasses general-level intelligence is beyond the human mind.

As the risks facing society become more complicated and terrifying, we are collapsing into a collective form of OCD, as we fanatically narrow the focus of our concerns. Not unlike the individual who suffers from an obsessive psychiatric illness, as a society we have started to seek order in rituals we can carry out with brittle meticulousness, even though deep down we know they are harming us.

We can – and we must – go after dodgy modelling, but we need to recognise it as a symptom of the illness, not the cause. Like other practices that have soothed and beguiled humans over the centuries, such as storytelling, magic, art and spiritualism, modelling is just the latest way we have found to simplify and interpret the world.

So how do we expose the dangers of this collective sickness, and hammer home that civilisation’s future hinges on our ability to deal with risk? Better illustrating that eliminating one risk triggers a thousand more might be one place to start. This won’t be easy with Covid. Lockdowns kill those least visible in society. The state has no indicator for measuring food poverty. There is a six-month delay in suicide deaths being registered, because of the need for a coroner’s inquest. Security protocols make keeping a log of domestic abuse victims next to impossible (case workers can’t follow up on women who provide only an email address for contacting them in case their partners have the password, for example).

The irony is that, in the absence of accurate data, modelling-sceptics need to be willing to fudge their own creative calculations. One study, which has logged likely and moderately likely suicide deaths to speculate that child suicide may have risen during the pandemic, shows how researchers can still build a picture without all the information. Lockdown victims can be modelled just like Covid deaths. The resultant figures may prove inaccurate. But therein lies the 21st century’s great challenge: as Sweden testifies, our politicos need to become both more comfortable with ambiguity and more balanced.

Above all, the guesswork and mysteries around modern dangers cannot remain the dirty secret of elites. That may seem a tall order: Covid has taught us that the instinct for self-preservation – not sunlit optimism or an appetite for risk – is the lifeblood of populism. But so it is the lifeblood of politicians. And deceitful triumphalism – whether that’s “defeating” a virus or “waging war” on terror – has a habit of catching up with leaders.

Tony Blair’s inability to grasp the need for the centre to shift from managerial control-freakery to realism about risk finished him, and doomed the Left for 20 years. Switchers to Farage’s new Reform party would do well to write to their Tory MP and remind them.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant. 

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'*  

Covid 

Germany. A lockdown even there. 

It comes to something when the best overview - albeit only for the UK - comes from the satirical magazine, Private Eye. See the article below. Jump out comment: Lockdown is as a last resort that  proves you have failed in the basics of public health.

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

New allegations of corruption against an old man who was once a much-loved young hero. Sic transit gloria . . .

I arrived in town at 12.30 yesterday, to face/hear the threatened cacerolazo in full swing, which went on until 12.45 and which was pretty noisy. But effective?

Elsewhere, the reactions to anti-virus measures have been more physical. As the government is said to be considering a 2nd lockdown from November 9, we could see a lot more of this.

Here in Galicia, a local paper tells us that: 60% of drivers re-offend but only a 3rd are fined. And that: More than 100,000 Gallegos admit to driving without a licence (and, thus, insurance). No wonder our premiums are said to be the highest in Spain. 

María's Falling Back chronicle, Day 50.

This looks like being a good read: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War: The tragic idealism of the International Brigades, by Giles Tremlett. I’ll let you know.

The USA

The Democrats' failure to understand the nature of Trump's appeal has left us with this near-perfectly divided result. We will have the worst possible result. Even if Biden edges it, this election will be a pretty much perfect exemplification of the implacably divided state of the nation. If Trump barricades himself into the White House and drags the whole thing into the courts, the battle will break out in the streets as well and this will begin to look like civil war. He is already challenging the legitimacy of the process – as indeed he began to do weeks ago in anticipation of precisely this outcome. 

Perhaps only one thing is for sure right now  . . . Trump's repugnant behaviour will certainly become more egregious if he manages to win a second term.

What a divided nation. A paradigm for no one. A bloomless rose.

A curse on  both  houses?

The Way of the World 

What chance democracy? In the UK at least. See the 2nd article below.

Finally . . . 

As coincidences go, this was an apposite one . . . Reading my diary for late 2000, I noted that I had, indeed, laid small granite stones on the surface between the path and lawn back then. Which gradually disappeared below the sward. I also discovered that there'd been at least 4 leaks from this (relatively short) pipe, rather endorsing my vibration-against-the stones theory.

THE ARTICLES

1. Private Eye: A UK Overview, from the medical correspondent, 'MD'

We are not alone ... 

Like the UK, many countries are experiencing a second wave of Sars-CoV-2 infection, even Germany. It's hardly surprising as the virus spreads invisibly in the air and on fingers, often asymptomatically. It will wax and wane for some while yet, particularly indoors and in poor ventilation. 

In the first wave, the UK came near the bottom of the Euro league for preventing both Covid deaths and harms and non-Covid deaths and harms. There have been almost 800 excess deaths from heart and circulatory diseases in people aged under 65 since the pandemic began, perhaps because they were unable or unwilling to seek treatment. 

The latest analysis of 2I industrialised countries published in Nature Medicine put England and Wales second (behind Spain) in per capita excess deaths between mid-February and May, with a 37%  increase from the five-year average. Scotland was fourth. As the senior author, Professor Majid Ezzati, put it:  "We cannot dismantle the health system through austerity and then expect it to serve people when the need is at its highest, especially in poor and marginalised communities." The chance of the UK now topping any table for good performance in the second wave would be extremely unlikely. The best we can hope for is to faiI better.

An unbeatable virus? 

In January, MD thought a pandemic could be prevented because the SARS virus would behave like the 2003 version. I couldn't have been more wrong. Sars-CoV-1 was actually more virulent than its successor. But it was less infectious, and infections were easier to spot and contain because they usually involved obvious symptoms, and that is when most spreading occurred. 

This year's SARS is a bugger to control because some spread occurs pre-symptomatically and most of those infected have no or minimal symptoms and come to no or minimal harm. This makes it doubly difficult to identify spreaders and persuade them to make huge sacrifices for others that may involve considerable health and economic self-harm, and possibly job loss. 

Catch-a-virus 22 

If  a harmful, contagious virus gets out of control (again), you have to act. But your actions may not work or may do more harm than good. More people may die or be harmed from non-Covid causes than Covid, and lockdowns may worsen public health and immunity so people come to more harm if they do catch the virus. 

Worse, we don't have much solid evidence to support any course of action in the long term, or reliably predict the benefits, risks and alternatives. It's a huge gamble with no obvious winner. No matter what your favourite expert says (there are no true experts in pandemics; just expertise in myriad disciplines), decisions are riddled with uncertainty. The known unknowns arc overwhelming, never mind the unknown unknowns. It's the mother-of-all Catch 22s. 

Learning from the best 

To control a pandemic, you need a world class test and trace system and world class public compliance. We have neither. As a safety net, you need world class levels of public fitness, so more people make full recoveries from infection, and world class health services that can cope with a surge of infection without closing down the non-infection work. And you need a world class welfare state to help the long term sick and unemployed. As Boris Johnson has discovered, merely calling something "world class" doesn't make it so. 

The British position 

There are some things we should have fixed in the first lockdown (eg emerging with a fully functional, joined-up test, trace, isolate and support system) and  some things we couldn't fix that quickly. 

Waiting times and health and social care staff shortages were at an all-time high before the pandemic and have grown worse. We built all these amazing Nightingale Hospitals that could have been used as "fever hospitals" to allow the rest of the NHS to focus on non-Covid work, but we couldn't staff them. So they were barely used. 

The health of the nation is also poor. The virus is more likely to harm those with chronic disease and frailty, and there are 15 million such people in the UK. It is impossible to shield so many and, even if we could, many would refuse to be shielded. We are not China, but we do do lockdowns. 

The lockdown paradox 

Lock down is regarded as a last resort that  proves you have failed in the basics of public health. If you can't put out the fires of infection before they spread out of control, you flood an entire community, drowning those who can't swim. And the later you leave lockdown, the longer it takes to work. Non-Covid harms rise dramatically and people are so stir crazy by the time they get out, they ignore all the rules in favour of human company. 

We know this from lockdown number one. It did rapidly cut transmission for a short while, but now we're back where we started. Do we twist or stick, go regional or national? 

Regional or national? 

Labour's Keir Starmer is siding with SAGE and a two- to three-week national circuit-breaker lockdown for the whole of England, similar to the Welsh "fire-break" that adds the cherry of denying English entry from high risk areas. 

Boris Johnson favours a regional approach that is proportionate to the current levels of prevalence. Neither will work if they are introduced too late (SAGE advised a break on 20 September; Starmer's suggestion of overlapping with half- 

term is too late). More pertinently, if testing, tracing and pubic compliance don't improve dramatically, we'll be back where we started within a month of stopping. 

Meanwhile, Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, believes the regional tier system won't be enough, but has assured us that "we will be better at dealing with the virus next winter". 

Non-compliance 

Long before the Cummings effect, MD predicted that non-compliance would be the future key factor limiting our pandemic response. The British don't do what experts advise, certainly not in the long-term. Only a third of patients take their tablets properly; a third take them sporadically and a third hide them in the cupboard under the sink.

Research suggests that to improve compliance with health advice, people have to trust the person giving the advice, to feel involved in the decision making, and be given an honest appraisal of the pros and cons of any option. Advice has to be easy to understand and follow, and affordable. People have to believe they are benefiting. Did all that sacrifice during lockdown number one do more good than harm, or are we back where we started but a lot sicker and poorer? 

Pandemic compliance 

Pandemic compliance adds an extra level of complexity. People who arc struggling but at low risk of harm from the virus are asked to make huge sacrifices (eg lose their jobs) to prevent others being harmed. In doing so, they harm their families. 

People are more likely to comply if they're harmed by the virus or know someone who has been.just as smokers are more likely to stop after a heart attack. But the vast majority aren't harmed even if they do get the virus, so many people are finding reasons not to download the official NHS Covid-19 App, to isolate or to quarantine. Until this is addressed, all funher restrictions will fail in the long term. 

Role models 

Just as a smoking doctor is worth billions to the tobacco industry, a rule-breaking leader is the virus's best friend. US president Donald Trump's survival wasn't that surprising (the majority of 74-year-old men do survive). Far more surprising if his behaviour hasn't seeded super-spreading. 

In the UK, Margaret Ferrier MP and Johnson's chief aide Dominic Cummings have likely damaged the pandemic effort by refusing to resign after travelling with symptoms (and in Ferrier's case, a confirmed infection). 

Herd immunity mirage 

Herd immunity means getting the R number below I permanently, without the need for control measures. Generally, it requires a vaccine and even then you get outbreaks if vaccine levels drop, the virus mutates or immunity is only transient. 

The mirage of herd immunity often happens temporarily. Things seemed to go swimmingly in the summer when the R number was below I; but our over-confidence turbo-charged the second wave. Holidays abroad, Eat Out to Help Out, sending schools, universities and workers back all at the same time - the mirage soon vanished. 

Grounds for optimism? 

There have been widespread outbreaks across Europe but so far death rates haven't risen to the levels seen this spring. There is always a delay between the two; but it could be that those most vulnerable to the virus have already died (at an average age of 82.4 years in the UK) and there will be fewer deaths now. There will still be plenty of harm: the average age of those in hospital is 58, and many will survive with long-term ill health. Few if any patients were denied a ventilator in the first wave, but many health and care staff are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted going into the winter. Give them a virtual hug. And the right PPE. 

Get fit for life 

Nobody knows how this virus will behave in future, but we do know your chances of being harmed by it are higher if you have one or more chronic diseases and obesity. 

On 20 September, SAGE published a lengthy analysis of"non-pharmacological interventions", including the "circuit break". However, it completely omitted lifestyle modifications that not only would improve Covid recovery but would also reduce the risk of the far more common non-Covid harms (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, mental illness, etc). There is very strong evidence of health improvements from stopping smoking, cutting alcohol, better sleep, better diet, regular relaxation and exercise. No drug comes near to matching these benefits. For a fraction of the cost of containing Covid, we could have improved the health of the poorest: big increases in years of healthy living; fewer premature deaths from just about all causes. 

Risk communication 

Risk communication has been poor in this pandemic. Relentlessly focusing on a single cause of death leads to woeful risk management. Daily Covid deaths not only need to be presented in the context of deaths from other causes, but we also need to know the "years of life lost". 

Many of the excess cardiac death have been in the under 65s, but the average age of a Covid death is 82.4 years, above the average Iife expectancy. It may well be that Covid deaths have zero effect on average life expectancy, whereas the preventable non-Covid deaths from cancer, heart disease and miscarriage do. 

Isolation help 

Fewer than 20 % of people are isolating properly, and all other measures will fail unless we fix this. Individuals and regions simply will not comply if they struggle to put food on the table or fear losing work. 

Going door to door and supporting people to do the right thing is tough, demanding front-line work. Local authorities that have cracked it are using local people with contact tracing expertise and local knowledge. The exclusion of GPs from testing and tracing has been a huge error. The £I 2bn outsourcing bill invested locally could have delivered better results and left permanent structural improvements in public services. 

But this government prefers to fund the private sector and management consultants. 

Kindness and self-care 

The government clearly isn't capable of protecting your health, but you are. If you can, try to get outside, stay active, socialise safely, eat food that's delicious and nutritious, take vitamin D, have five portions of fun a day, relax and sleep well. If you live in a lower risk area, you might frequent local cafes, pubs and restaurants, but follow the rules. Well ventilated venues are safest. If you 're shitting blood or have a new lump, ring your doctor. 

If you don't have long to live, make up your own rules. 28,000 more deaths have happened at home this year, partly because people don't want to be separated at the end of life. Who can blame them? 

At 58, MD is the average age of a Covid hospital admission, and I'm taking all sensible measures to avoid infection. 

However, my personal risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer and mental illness is far higher. Life is about balancing all sorts of personal risks and then helping those who are less fortunate. For every decision, think: "ls it intelligent? Is it kind?" 

2. The dictators have taken over. Peter Hitchens

There was once a famous Chinese executioner so skilful with his razor-edged sword that crowds would pay to watch him behead criminals.  One day he came to a small provincial town where the authorities had given him a large fee to do away with a notorious killer. He entered the arena and made several elegant and delicate passes with his weapon. The condemned man sat gloomily before him, looking unimpressed with all this fuss. ‘Just get on with it!’ he growled.The executioner bowed politely, smiled and said softly: ‘Kindly nod, please.’ The murderer did so and his head, already parted from his body by a stroke of incredible swiftness, tumbled from his shoulders.

I think we in this country are like that condemned man. A terrible thing has been done to us but we have not yet realised it. It may even be that the British Revolution, a horror that this country has repeatedly escaped by good sense and natural conservatism, has actually taken place.

In a lecture of astonishing power and force last week, the former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, revealed in sad detail what has happened to our country in the name of Covid.  I have placed a copy of it and a recording on the Peter Hitchens blog and I strongly advise you to read and watch it. It says that Parliament has been elbowed aside by Ministers who rule by decree.

Now, Jonathan Sumption is not just a brilliant lawyer. He is also a distinguished historian.  Last year he gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures, and they were the best for many years. If he has any politics I have no idea what they are, but he uses language with immense care. If he says this ‘has been the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country. We have never sought to do such a thing before, even in wartime and even when faced with health crises far more serious than this one’, then you may be sure that this is so. When he says ‘Ministers are accountable to no one, except once in five years at General Elections’, you may be sure that this is true. This a complete breach with centuries of law and tradition, and who can say where it might end? When he points out that laws, backed by tyrannical, ruinous fines, are now made at televised press conferences and enforced by bluff by police forces operating far beyond their authority, then it is happening.  He accuses the Government of showing ‘a cavalier disregard for the limits of their legal powers’. This, he says, is how freedom dies. And behind it lies an astonishing, previously unnoticed seizure of economic power, which has made the entire Covid panic possible. 

By long tradition, Parliament has had ultimate control over the Government’s purse strings. It must permit major spending specifically. Without this power it is just a mascot or a toy.

That power has been abolished. Back in March, unnoticed by almost everyone, Parliament vastly increased the Government’s freedom to spend what it liked. The old limit, for emergency spending, was increased from a mere £11billion to almost £270billion a year.

I cannot say where or how this will end. It is my own growing belief that Johnson and Hancock do not understand what they are doing. Their decision to strangle our struggling economy once again in an alarmist shutdown is one of panic piled on panic and is visibly destroying the NHS they claim to be saving, as well as laying waste to those jobs and businesses they have not yet ruined or obliterated. I see them as two schoolboys on the footplate of an old-fashioned steam locomotive, clattering into deepening twilight, too scared to call for help, too vain to admit their error. They started it moving by accident, foolishly pulling and pushing at levers whose functions they did not know. Now they cannot find the brakes. The safety valves are blocked. The whistle screams, the pace gathers. Alas, the rest of us are trapped in the lurching, bucketing train behind them, unable to reach or influence them, let alone stop them.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

Covid  

This pandemic has served to expose not only the incompetence and dishonesty of politicians almost everywhere but also the dysfunctional nature of some models of government. Nowhere more so than in the USA, where we wait to see if the election result brings closer the forecasted civil war. Or at least uncivil violence. Whatever happens, can this country ever again lecture the rest of the world on democracy and good government?

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Talking of civil unrest. These reports - here and here - are disturbing.

The owner of my regular bar was yesterday preparing posters protesting against the death of the hostelería (hospitality) sector. I think there might be a street demonstration/parade today. If this fails, there'll be a cacerolazo/cacerolada, which is the mass banging of metal pans on balconies which I think became fashionable here during the late Franco era. To me this smacks of frustration born of impotence. 'We can't actually do anything, so we'll just make a lot of noise'. Dare I say, very Spanish in this regard . . . ?  

Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas recently wrote of the (literal) disappearance of his bank branch. Last night, I discovered that the one whose ATM I use on the way into town had gone. Though not quite spectacularly as Lenox's . . .

This is the 2nd of the 2 ATMs on my route to disappear. What a contrast with the crazy (phoney-boom/carpetbagger) years of 2002-08, when banks went berserk opening (employee-heavy, expensive) branches as fast as they could. And competed by offering free gifts of bed-linen, crockery, kitchen appliances and the like. Indeed, one bank - the Andalucian CAM - opened 2 branches within 50m of each other in Pontevedra city. Like most - if not all - of Spain's local (and usually corrupt) 'savings banks, it's since ceased to exist. Gobbled up by a real bank, Banco Sabadell.  

Here’s Day 49 of María’s Falling Back Chronicle, giving us more details of the Galician/Celtic celebrations of Samhain.   

The USA

Donald Trump claimed yesterday he wasn't/couldn't be a 'second place finisher'. What he meant was 'loser', his biggest insult for others. Anyway, we should soon know how successful was his pitch of 'Yes, I'm a monster but vote for me in you own economic interests.' 

Finally

In the last few days, I've had 2 leaks in the water pipe running between the edge of the path and my lawn. Said pipe is surrounded by small granite stones which I laid on the surface many years ago. When I asked the plumber if vibration against these was the cause of the leaks, meaning I should remove them, he said it wasn't and I needn't. It later dawned on me that it was perhaps too much to ask a plumber to endorse something that would  reduce his income prospects.

Incidentally 1: I was telling my Madrid-based daughter and her Spanish partner about this yesterday. They thought my (alleged) Galician pronunciation of fontanero (plumber) was hilarious.

Incidentally 2: The Galician word is fontaneiro, displaying the frequent one-letter difference between Castellano and Galego. It's the diphthong which Castellano speakers find funny.

Here's something which appeared on my lawn yesterday.:-

It's the first time this has happened in 19 years, leaving me wondering if it's a result of the water leaks. Or just normal levels of Galician 'precipitation'.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.

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'*  

A HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for 2 or 3 of today's items.  

Covid 

The ICUs of eight regions, on the verge of collapse’says La Vanguardia here.  

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

Black humour? 

Of course, burial service folk are not helped by a medieval law about an obligatory over-speedy process, demanding burial or cremation within 48 hours. As if freezers  hadn't been invented.

From Mark Stücklin’s Spanish Property Insight here: Higher property taxes on the way as Spain’s shaky foundations get hammered by Covid-19. 

As Cataluña faces the prospect of another coronavirus lockdown, the region’s government has announced it is investing €2.5m to establish its own space agency and a further €18m in launching six communications satellites, says The Guardian here.  IGIMSTS. 

Only 9 driving school cars seen this morning during my 2-3km drive to my parking spot in Lérez. But, then, it is a sort of holiday and, most relevantly, the test place is closed. The last of these was being taught to signal right as she was going straight on. At - you've guessed it - a roundabout.

Lérez, by the way is at the bottom of this fine painting of O Burgo bridge in the 17th century. Both towers and the Pontevedra city walls have all gone, sadly. And there's now a petrol station at the Lérez end, where the trees were. Rumoured for some time to  be going.

María has confirmed that the driving schools of Pontevedra are still a racket. As I expected.

Talking of beautiful things in Spain, try this -   a photo-gallery of some Mozárabic churches.

Almost a propos . . .  Muslim refugees uncover Sephardic roots in Spain. See the nice article below.

Maria’s Day 48.

Ireland

Over 80% of those reported for brothel-keeping are women.

I doubt this is true of Spain's (many, many) brothels.

The USA

This is the world's most powerful man. And he might well still be in a few days'/weeks' time:-

Meanwhile . . . Armed groups prepare for violence on election day in key swing state of Pennsylvania. Similar scenes are playing out across America, leaving a country bracing for chaos.

And . . . What a surprise! Trump's boasts of help from Sean Connery fall apart. In respect of planning permission for his Scottish golf course.

Finally

I had  no idea that Marbella owed so much to Sean Connery.

BTW . .  Does everyone know that 'Sean' is a version of Juan/John?

THE ARTICLE

Muslim refugees uncover Sephardic roots in Spain: After more than 500 years in exile, one expulsion for being Jewish,nother for being Muslim, and years living in Palestinian refugee camps, members of the Iskandarani family have been given Spanish passports and can return home.

Heba and Rewa Iskandarani, Palestinian refugee sisters aged 26 and 20, received the passports after fulfilling criteria under a government scheme inviting Sephardic Jews with roots in Iberia to apply for citizenship.

The pair, born in Dubai to a Palestinian refugee father and a Lebanese mother, had no idea their family had Jewish heritage until 2016 when Heba, frustrated at being stateless, started to research their history to see if they could claim a nationality that would entitle them to a passport.

Having faced down her Muslim family’s initial scepticism about their Jewish ancestry, put in four years of investigation and overcome bureaucratic hurdles, she and her sister received Spanish passports last month.

“I wept and shouted with joy. I now have basic human rights to be accepted in society as an equal individual,” Ms Iskandarani said. “For the first time in my life I feel confident and free.” Previously she had to use a document identifying her as a “Palestinian Refugee of Lebanon”, which made her “feel ashamed, and less than other people”.

Ms Iskandarani, who lives in Dubai but is studying for a doctorate in planning at Birmingham City University, said that when she first mentioned their Jewish heritage, “my father thought I was insane”. She took a DNA test that confirmed her father’s family came from Iberian and north African stock. Family documents and oral tradition revealed great uncles with names such as Reuben and Jacob.

To amass the evidence needed to apply for the passport she recruited a US historian who traced their lineage to Barcelona, where an ancestor, Abraham, belonged to a wealthy family of tax collectors who owned vineyards. “They were stripped of their property, which was given to the church, and expelled,” Ms Iskandarani said.

In 1492 after the victory of the Catholic monarchs over the Moors at Granada, Spain’s 300,000 Jews were forced to convert or leave. Over centuries the Iskandarani family moved from Morocco to Alexandria, where they converted to Islam, before moving to Jaffa in Palestine. But they were again expelled when the city became part of the newly created state of Israel in 1948, fleeing to Lebanon where they lived in Palestinian refugee camps.

Before Spain’s offer closed last year, after registering 132,000 applicants, the sisters had to rush to learn Spanish to meet the deadline. When they arrived in Spain to submit the application, they travelled to their ancestral street in Barcelona’s old Jewish quarter. “I couldn’t believe it because when my sister and I arrived there we saw a Palestinian flag hanging from a balcony,” she said. “It was like a sign from God that we had arrived home.”

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant. 

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'*  

Living La Vida L 

Critics of Juan Carlos, the former King of Spain, fear that the immunity he enjoyed while he was on the throne will allow him to be spared prosecution over the multimillion-pound corruption allegations against him. Lucky chap.

The Galician government on Friday afternoon implored university students not to go home for this 3 day weekend. Here they are at Santiago station later in the evening, complying with that request . . .

And here's a comment from a previous reader to the paper in my regular  café yesterday:-

Reader María wrote in July about her daughter's driving test. This reminded me of this blog entry of 15 years ago: Two of the young female members of the English Speaking Society have taken and passed their driving theory test this week. They said they had to study with a local driving school and that the (obligatory) cost for this was around 350 euros. Apparently there is a cartel here in Pontevedra city and this raises the price to way above what it is in other large towns in Pontevedra province. Now, they have to incur even more (obligatory) expense doing the practical exam. Twenty lessons at 20 euros each plus the exam fees. Quite a racket. . . .  I have no idea if things are still as bad/corrupt/expensive. Maria?      

All that reminds me that, when I first came here, I thought that the 2-3 extra people in the instructors' (full) cars were members of the students' families. But they turned out to be other learners. So, 3-4 pupils all paying the same inflated fee, I guess. No wonder there's so many driving schools still teaching folk how to negotiate roundabouts contrary both to the advice/instruction of the Guardia Civil and to common sense. The bane of my life, as I travel 4 times a day on the test route . . .

Here are Maria's days 46 and 47, on the Spanish custom of decorating graves on November 1. I suspect that, even back when a practising Catholic, I would have thought it odd to lay out large sums for flowers to put on a corpse but, of course, I find it even stranger now. That said, if you believe your loved one is looking down from Heaven, I guess it makes sense. Anyway, here's what Pontevedra's main square looked like yesterday.       

Being authentically Celtic -  - Galicia naturally harks back to the end-October pagan celebration of Saimaín/Samhain, popularly seen as the Celtic New Year and an ancient festival of the dead. Click here and here on this. The latter is in Spanish but it has a video in English abut the appropriate altar for the occasion.     

The Way of the World 

How modern democracy has given rise to lockdown totalitarianism: The expectation that an omniscient state can prevent every death has led us down a dark path. See the article below.

 Finally

To patriotic Spitfire enthusiasts, it has been a source of embarrassment for many years that the only way the Second World War fighter planes can take to the skies is with replica propeller blades made in Germany. Now, a UK manufacturer has produced authentic propellers granted a certificate of airworthiness by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

THE ARTICLE

How modern democracy has given rise to lockdown totalitarianism: The expectation that an omniscient state can prevent every death has led us down a dark path       Janet Daley 

When a British police commissioner publicly threatens to invade people’s homes at Christmas to break up “illegal” family gatherings, you know that you have entered a new political landscape. At least, new for modern liberal democracies. That sort of edict would scarcely have been noticed in the totalitarian states of the old Soviet bloc, or in the distant darker periods of Western history. How in the name of God, have we got here? That such a statement could be uttered – as it was, for the record, by David Jamieson, West Midlands police and crime commissioner last week – let alone regarded as unsurprising, is an indication of some much larger phenomenon than a viral epidemic.

Indeed, we have known, within living memory, virus threats before which were arguably more tragic in their consequences than this one. The terrible, uncontrollable epidemics of polio in the 1950s killed or paralysed, not the frail elderly, but millions of children and young adults: hence its alternative name, “infantile paralysis”. The Hong Kong flu in the 1960s took roughly 80,000 lives, most of them young, not old.

These events were horrific – but it seemed never to occur to governments at the time to shut down normal social and economic activity in a crude attempt to prevent human contact simply because that was the only apparent means for fighting a contagion that had no cure. Why ever not? Why is this so commonplace now – we are heading into another national lockdown this week – when it was apparently unthinkable then?

Something in our political culture, and our view of ourselves, must have changed very drastically – and oddly almost without our noticing – for the founding  principles of liberty (not to mention the basic understanding of what gives meaning and value to human life) to be so readily discarded.

You may say that this present emergency is unprecedented. It isn’t – although detailed reporting of its progress and unlimited speculation about its possible future course certainly is. Interestingly, I have met only two people who have any recollection of living through the 1968 Hong Kong flu epidemic. Both of them were schoolchildren at the time who  had personal experience of classmates who were affected by it. But I am willing to bet that no one who has lived through this past year will ever forget it.

So the epidemic may not be unique but the response to it is – and the response has affected more lives than the virus. A good many people feel that these extraordinary governmental interventions are a sign of progress: the logical conclusion of our enlightened concern for others. This is a plausible and perhaps admirable interpretation. But let me, for the sake of argument (since we have an awful lot of time on our hands for arguing at the moment) put forward another possibility.

It might not be a coincidence that these extraordinary acts of repression by governments – in many ways more severe and intrusive into private life than those imposed in wartime – seem to be consistent with quite significant shifts in popular assumptions (or, to put it more aggressively, changes in fashionable thinking). There are two tendencies which are worth noting here. They are actually conflicting but it is perfectly possible for an entire society to believe two contradictory things at once – just as it is for an individual.

The first is probably the most obvious: the belief that the state is now morally responsible for all outcomes. The establishment of social democracy as the prevailing governing system in the advanced nations of the West, bringing with it powers to distribute wealth and prevent gross inequalities, seems to imply that the state is now morally responsible for the welfare of everyone. From this principle of total responsibility it follows that every instance of ill health or death is the direct fault of the Government – even if those who are dying have reached the age at which it is statistically normal for them to die. The state must promise not just the best healthcare it can provide, but a kind of immortality: every death should be preventable. Every death (at whatever age) is a political failing. Those who govern must not only be infinitely caring, they must be omnipotent.

The secularism of modern democracy adds more weight to this. To accept any death (at any age) seems like a medieval fatalism which modern progressive thinking should reject. Along with the passive acceptance of mortality, the notion of acceptable risk – and the individual’s right to choose it – has to go out the window too. We must all look after one another – and we must all be responsible for the fate of everyone.

So nobody can put himself in danger because any unnecessary risk would cause damage to the society as a whole: if I am reckless enough to catch the virus, my healthcare will be a charge upon the state and put everybody else at a disadvantage. So I cannot expect to have any automatic right to do this. It is not just my own business if I endanger myself by breaking the lockdown rules: it is everybody’s business, and that justifies the government in enforcing controls on behaviour that would once have been unconscionable.

You may find this world view attractive. Many people do. But it is important to understand that it is a step in the direction of totalitarianism, perhaps of a benign kind, but once totalitarian forms of rule are installed, they are difficult to remove when they cease to be benign.

But this collectivist ethic is strangely contrary to the other strand of popular consciousness which is playing a major role in today’s events. This is the legitimising of chronic hypochondria. I cannot remember a time when there was such a neurotic obsession with health as a positive condition rather than a simple absence of illness or disability.

Ironically this more or less permanent state of anxiety about one’s individual well-being (which is really a form of narcissism) sits side-by-side with the unselfish commitment to the well-being of society at large. Maybe we have managed to create, with our conflicting compulsions – on the one hand, unrealistic expectations of comprehensive, government-enforced social responsibility, and on the other an equally unrealistic idea of an individual right to be free from pain or suffering – the perfect climate for the mess we are in.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.