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 

The UK & the EU: Ambrose Evans Pritchard here cites an analysis by France Stratégie, an agency of the French state, which strongly suggests that the UK is not the egregious disaster story that many supposed. As this revised narrative takes hold, it will greatly alter the post-Covid political landscape, claims AEP.  

Spain: A topical cartoon:-

Cosas de España/Galiza  

Last week, I asked several Guardia Civil officers about the number of people who could be together in a car and, contrary to my expectation, was assured the limit was 4. Yesterday, we learnt that on Sunday 5 people were fined €600 each here sin Pontevedra because the Xunta, as of Saturday, had banned folk who don't cohabit from being in the same car. It says something that neither I nor any or my friends knew about this until yesterday. So, bang goes our trip up the coast and the money we'd have spent on hotels, etc. in our destination. I think I did say recently that, in these times and places, it helps to be tolerant of arbitrariness. Not to mention police officiousness. But, hey, you can always appeal, if you think you've been wrongly fined . . . 

Which reminds me . . . The latest national change is to oblige us to wear masks all the time in public, not just when we're within 1.5m of others. Which doesn't seem to fit with diners here being told last week to raise and lower their masks when dining alone at tables at the obligatory 2m away from other tables. It looks like the Galician Xunta had taken advantage of its power to introduce a harsher rule than the national one. Just to ensure we were all confused to the max.

Talking of arbitrariness and confusion . . . 2 days ago, 40 Brits were sent back to the UK on the plane they'd arrived at Alicante on, despite having documents said to be valid by both the UK and Spanish governments. The new 'useful but unnecessary' TIE cards were said - wrongly - by the local border police to be obligatory. Having expected this sort of thing, I got my TIE as soon as I could last year and pressured my 'too busy' daughter in Madrid to get hers, to replace her green A4 certificate of permanent residency. Enough in theory to get back into Spain but very possibly not in practice.

Maria's Tsunami: Day 58

The UK  

An extract from the AEP article cited above: We can see in hindsight that the UK began the war on Covid much as it has begun almost every major war over recent centuries: half asleep, in utter shambles, with obsolete contingency plans. But - suggests AEP - as ever, the UK finally got its act together. Saving Boris Johnson's skin in the process. Contrast M Marcon and Frau Merkel, who seem to be increasingly out of favour right now.

Talking of times past . . . Back at the start of the 20th century, the eminent British politician, Sir Edward Grey made this aside about 'progress': As if anything could be good that led to telephones and cinematographs and large cities and the Daily Mail. Well, he was certainly right about the egregious Daily Mail, which - sad to say - is not only still with us but more popular than ever. So it must be doing something wrong.

The UK & Coviod

France: British residents in France have until 30 June to start exchanging their driving licences, lthough talks are under way to extend the deadline. Meanwhile, there’s said to be a debacle. Which, aptly enough, is a French word imported into English.

English 

Having come across the expression yesterday, I confirmed my understanding that 'snide remarks' are those which are 'derogatory or mocking in an indirect way.' I imagine those who have a fondness for these lose friends over time. 

Finally  . . . 

Another topical cartoon:-

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 

Spain: Not good news at all . . . As a 4th wave looms, only half of 80 year olds have been vaccinated, with Galicia having one of the poorest records so far. 

Germany: Continuing ructions between Berlin and the regions on how to prevent another wave.

Cosas de España/Galiza  

During my walks in the forest behind my house, I regularly come across low granite walls half (or more) hidden by undergrowth, such as this one:-

So, are they merely (expensive)boundary markers? Or are they evidence of habitations long abandoned?

I didn't peruse the Diario de Pontevedra yesterday so was pleased to receive this report from Lenox Napier, of a local driver who's beaten the national record for the total of on the spot fines? He might just be one of the 2 people who pulled out right in front of me at separate junctions yesterday morning . . . 

Talking of things that annoy me . . . As I passed a restaurant yesterday, a woman came out of it on my left, fell in behind me, passed me on the right and then crossed within inches of my face to get to her front door on our left, not 30m from the restaurant. If this sort of thing didn't happen every day, I'd have concluded she was, at best, absent-minded or, at worst, downright rude. But as it is, it was merely yet another confirmation that the Spanish 'have no concept of personal space'. And that we foreigners just have to inure* ourselves to this. As I might before I die.

Maria's Tsunami: Day 57

Germany

The advance of the Greens towards power, courtesy of a civil war in Mrs M's party.

The USA

The US's inequality is a reflection of the deep racism that built this country, says the chap interviewed here.

The Way of the World

If you're not familiar with transhumanism, click here. And be afraid . . .

Spanish & Galician

A month or three ago there was a bit of a debate around what letters don't exist in Gallego. The most obvious ones are J and Y, which become X and I. Yesterday, after seeing kilo written as quilo, I checked on the letter K. In fact, there are just over 40 words in the dictionary of the Galician Royal Academy, just as there are in that of the Spanish Royal Academy. But all of these are foreign words. The letter K is clearly not native to either Spain or Galicia. But, given that the word for the Basque language is Euskera/Euskara, I imagine their Royal Academy's dictionary will feature this letter quite a lot. The dictionary of the Catalan Royal Academy - yes, they have one too - seems to contain around 120 words featuring the letter K. Again, all foreign as far as I can see.

English/Spanish

To separate the wheat from the chaff:-

Separar el polvo de la paja

Separar el grano de la paja

Separar el trigo de la paja. I wonder if this one isn’t just a literal translation. So not in use in Spanish.

Finally  . . . 

Worth quoting: My favourite line from Hancock’s Half Hour is when, as chairman of the jury, his ignorant but hilarious summing-up begins: “Magna Carta! Did she die in vain?”

*Just for Perry: To inure: To accustom (someone) to something, especially something unpleasant.

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 

On the issue of returning to normal in the UK. . . . Many politicians fear being pulled up for calling for a herd immunity strategy last year, and they feel they have to make up for it by going for a zero-Covid strategy now. Despite the fact that - as with flu - it's unachievable. As I’ve said a few times, Covid responses have always had more to do with politics than anything else. And will go on doing so for a while yet. Not just in the UK, of course. Bureaucrats aren’t known for relinquishing control.  And this is The Age of the Bureaucrat. Nowhere more so than in the EU. If technocrats can be considered bureaucrats. Which they surely can.

Cosas de España  

Later than any reasonable person would have expected - and possibly stimulated by the plague of Frenchfolk coming here for Easter - Spain has imposed a Covid test requirement on those coming by land. I don’t know about boats but suspect not.

HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for this item on a ‘hippie’ village up near the León-Galicia border. 

A couple of my neighbours are spatting about an issue I think I mentioned a while ago - not enough parking spaces in front of our houses. Which spotlights the question of whether one can park in front of a gate which, in theory, is used for garage access but which doesn't have on it an official No Parking sign(un Vado) rented from the local council. I was planning to raise this at the next meeting or our Comunidad but will now wait on events. 

En passant, Spanish friends all felt it'd be a waste of time getting a community-wide 'agreement' not to park in front of each other's gates, as this would be ignored both by residents and their visitors. The only practical solution, they insisted, was to pay for a vado and then call the police, if it was ignored. Which might well be a valid view but not one which will ensure good neighbourly relations. But, then, neither does the current stand-off. And maybe I'm being too 'British'.

Talking of cultural norms . . . A friend who's recently begun to teach English privately has had her first taste of Spanish 'informality' - the failure to advise that the pupil won't be coming this week. This is so common an occurrence that tyros are always advised by experienced colleagues: If at all possible, get your money upfront and never give any back for lessons missed. And never compensate with a replacement lesson. The worst example of this lack of consideration/thought-less-ness happened to my daughter, when an excellent weekly pupil simply stopped coming after months of lessons, without saying anything at all. A high-level businessman, to boot. Whom you might have thought would have a degree of courtesy. But, anyway, one gets inured to it.

Cousas de Galiza

Maria's Tsunami: Days 55&56   

Germany

It seems that the country’s poor vaccination performance is down to its excessive efficiency. Which I guess is counter-intuitive

France

Ambrose Evans Pritchard has harsh words to say about Macron, ending with The European political order as we know it may soon be over.  

Quote of the Week

Vaccines were supposed to liberate us, not expand the surveillance state.

Finally  . . . 

Since November 2019 there's been a place in Madrid called La Pollería. Or 'The Prickery'* which sells phallic-shaped gofres, Now there's one in Valencia too. Ironically enough, very near Plaza de la Virgen.

*Or maybe 'The Cockery' . . .  Pollo: Hen. Polla: Cockerel; Cock: Penis (in case you hadn't twigged).

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 

Following my questions of yesterday, a corollary has been posed this morning -  Is there a politically painless exit from the strategy of periodic lockdowns? Only, I guess, if and when governments say there's now an acceptable of deaths. Possibly after everyone over 80 has died and the oldest person in the country is 79. . . I jest, of course. But not much.

As we wait for this moment, you might sympathise with this view: It was the woman on the TV who finally broke me. Pinch-faced, bespectacled, stats-drunk, finger-wagging, power-tripping and headmistressy, the immunisation tsar was telling us “it is very important we don’t relax too quickly”. We might have vaccinated millions of people, said the head of immunisation at Public Health England, but as long as there was still a small chance of someone, somewhere, contracting a tiny speck of “serious disease”, 65 million people would simply have to get used to masks and social distancing, possibly for “years”. Big events would be “monitored very carefully”, and people might not be allowed abroad until “other parts of the world are as well vaccinated as we are”. But this is total madness, I thought. . . . This is the language of someone who is seriously frightened. Everywhere it is the same: terrified people seem unable to make sensible decisions because of the previous bad decisions they have made, or situations they haven’t predicted and have lost control over. Back to the (dominant?) issue of a sensible exit, 

Spain: 

1. The ban in travellers from the UK has been lifted, in time for the tourist season. Though pessimists see August as the first month of permitted departures/arrivals. Despite the vaccination success of the UK. 

2. The current overview here is that cases have fallen considerably since the beginning of the year but are starting to rise again in some parts. Authorities are concerned Easter will bring a fresh spike. Our 4th wave, in other words. 

3. A worrying graph?

Cosas de España  

Permitted inter-regional traffic this Easter

If I ever knew, I’d forgotten that there’s a political party in Spain which promotes a Spexit. At first glance, it looks rather left wing. Somos España es el partido de los millones de españoles que ven los problemas que anegan el país pero no tienen vía práctica para solucionarlos. Es el partido de los que no quieren 17 chiringuitos partitocráticos repartiéndose el país como si de una tarta se tratara. El partido de los que prefieren empleo y riqueza a servir a políticos, empresarios y especuladores sin escrúpulos. El partido de la política seria, que no busca llenarse los bolsillos. SOMOS España es tu partido.

The UK  

From the columnist I cited above: Are we seriously going to have to put up with months, possibly years, of do-gooders fear-mongering about the possibility of a third wave?  Boris Johnson is no longer a risk-taker, having stupidly taken too many risks in the early stages, allowing Britain to soar to the top of the list of most-affected countries and threaten what most obsesses him: his political legacy. We are now suffering a second time to save Boris’s fragile view of himself, because he didn’t take our lives seriously enough in the first place. Spot on.

The Way of the World

Welcome to the woke age of cinema - where 'historical dramas' peddle revisionist lies.  See the article below.

English

You doubtless know what a CEO is. And possibly even a CFO. But let's hear it for Chimpo. Or Chief impact officer.

I suggested yesterday that 'legacy'  now meant 'previous¡. On reflection, better alternative might well be 'old-fashioned'. Or 'previously dominant' Reflecting the fact they still exist. 

Finally  . . . 

If you're wondering why so much media attention is being given to a big boat stuck in the Suez Canal, it's because it's nearly identical to the worst-case scenario for the global trade of goods by sea, or about 90% of the total of world trade. The knock-on effects - eg on prices - are very significant.

THE ARTICLE 

Welcome to the woke age of cinema - where 'historical dramas' peddle revisionist lies. In ‘Ammonite’, film-maker Francis Lee has usurped and misconstrued the life of paleontologist Mary Anning in favour of titillation: Zoe Strimpel, the Sunday Telegraph

Even 5 years ago, it would have been hard to argue with a straight face that a film about a 19th century lady fossil scientist stood as a symbol of one of the great and most menacing social ills of our time. 

Well, welcome to 2021, a year that – while promising in other ways – seems destined to build on the horrors of its predecessor where woke hegemony and its penchant for ceaseless propaganda, distortion and revisionism are concerned.

It has long been obvious that we are living in an age in which historical accuracy has been superseded by the demands of a raging fixation with identity politics and political correctness. But what is becoming freshly apparent is the growing role that TV and film – most of it made by people who have drunk deeply from the trough of woke kool aid – are playing in distorting the past.

The order of the day seems to be historical dramas, based just enough on historical figures and events to lull audiences into believing they can rely, broadly, on what they are seeing. But their makers have different ideas. The latest example of this troubling revisionist impulse is the film ‘Ammonite’, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, which began streaming in the UK on Friday on Amazon Video and the like. It was immediately the recipient of gushing praise, especially from the Left-wing press. The film is meant to be about Mary Anning, the 19th century paleontologist (played by Winslet) who made groundbreaking fossil discoveries on the Jurassic Coast. She is a fascinating, totally unsung woman, the story of whose discoveries alone could easily have carried a brilliant, enriching film.

All of this was ignored by Francis Lee, the film-maker, who chose instead to focus not just on Anning’s sex life but on an entirely speculative, seemingly fabricated lesbianism with geologist Charlotte Murchison (Ronan). Lee himself is smug about the “storm” this decision has caused, proud of how he has put one in the eye of homophobic western culture and historical tradition. Odd, then, that he seems blind to the fact that he – a man –  has usurped and misconstrued the life of the only significant female paleontologist in history in favour of titillation.

Lee explained himself in the tortuous logic of the self-styled progressive, demanding: “After seeing queer history be routinely ‘straightened’ throughout culture, and given a historical figure where there is no evidence whatsoever of a heterosexual relationship, is it not permissible to view that person within another context? Would [critics] have felt the need to whip up uninformed quotes from self-proclaimed experts if the character’s sexuality had been assumed to be heterosexual?”

It’s not clear what he’s complaining about, since many reviewers, especially in the lefty press, have mooned over ‘Ammonite’. But for people like my parents – interested in history, science and extraordinary women – it was a disaster. My father wrote to me after hearing Lee interviewed on the radio. “Who knows or cares what he was thinking?” my father wrote. “He has written the fake history and that will now forever occupy the landscape.”

But ‘Ammonite’ is just the latest in a growing line of such output. ‘Dickinson’, a 2019 drama about Emily Dickinson, featured the famously reclusive 19th century poet as sexually fluid – she actually twerks in one scene. Meanwhile ‘Jamestown’, about 17th century settlers in America, had young wives demanding an end to rape, and Hulu’s 2020 drama about Catherine the Great didn’t bother with history at all.

Who cares, you may ask? Well, ‘Jamestown’ or ‘Dickinson’ alone might not change the course of historical understanding. But other shows will – and have. Take ‘The Crown’ and ‘Bridgerton’, both watched by tens of millions of Netflix subscribers last year. ‘The Crown’ was based on living characters and real events that most people dimly recognised, so it appeared to be history. Even so, it manipulated reality – and the extraordinary achievements of Margaret Thatcher – in accordance with the politics of Peter Morgan, its maker. ‘Bridgerton’, meanwhile, was a costume romp but encouraged viewers to “learn”, misleadingly, that Queen Charlotte was black and that history has been racist in portraying the Regency court as largely white, which it was.  

History is under siege everywhere from university classes to museum exhibits – and newspapers of the most respectable hue. In 2019, the New York Times launched its 1619 project, an attempt to rescript American history so that it revolves around the date the first slaves were imported, and comes to supersede 1776, the date of American independence. The year 1619 is indeed a terrible and important one, but it’s not where American history starts – and ends.

But in the golden age of streaming, it’s film and TV that packs the biggest punch. Nearly 30 million people watched the latest season of ‘The Crown’ in the week after it launched, while 82 million saw ‘Bridgerton’. That’s a lot of people imbibing “history” written by politics. ‘Ammonite’ is unlikely to reach such figures, but in turning a precious bit of women’s history and science into a leerathon, it’s arguably done just as much damage.  

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 

One or two readers might have noticed that yesterday's Covid Overview wasn’t that of Private Eye's medical correspondent but was, in fact, reportage from the magazine itself. The real Overview is below . . . Sorry for that.

How many permissible deaths? This question is regularly answered by governments in respect of several causes, including road accidents; criminal activities; flu; cancer; obesity-related conditions; mistakes and negligence in the healthcare system; and inadequate resources in the latter. Sooner or later, this will have to be done in respect of Covid. When governments will stop acting as if they can eliminate the virus and so reduce the incidence of death to zero. Of course, they won't tell us their answer but they will, one assumes, remove most or even all of the legally-imposed restrictions and allow people to live and die, as they do in respect of other fatal factors.

After I wrote that paragraph, I read this comment: The UK, alas, is one of the most unequal rich countries where thousands of people die prematurely from all sorts of the avoidable diseases every year. So no surprise we have had so many avoidable deaths from Covid.

See the reference to obesity levels in the Overview

Another question  . . . Why are footballers still allowed to hug and kiss after goals, and managers permitted to shake hands? Do they have some immunity that the rest of us lack?

Something to ponder: Now we're starting Groundhog Year again, we are at least doing so with the benefit of vaccines and much better (though not perfect) testing. In other words, the Russian roulette that is Covid has now had most of the bullets taken from the barrel. However, unless vaccines are made available to the world, the barrel could soon fill up again with variant bullets. So, it's good to see the UK and EU agree on this and have brought the stupid Vaccine War to a quick end. One hopes.

Ooops . . . I spoke too soon. Just seen this.

Cosas de España  

Ever wondered where  CC was buried? We might know one day. When the woke brigade will probably destroy his bones. 

Among the major cases going at snail's pace through the Spanish courts at the moment - at least until such time as the statute of limitations ends it and the accused are released - is one involving an ex senior police officer - José Manuel Villarejo. Because no one in Spain can be kept in jail for more than 4 years(sic) while awaiting trial, he's been released for the moment. The case has been described as one of the most complex and voluminous in memory. So, perhaps I can be forgiven for not understanding what the hell is going  on. I believe it has something to do with corruption in the PP party, before and during the time it was in power. Involving large cash payments from major Spanish companies. And possibly involving the royal family. I'm hoping one day there'll be an Idiot's Guide to it, in Spanish or English. Me dará igual.

Cousas de Galiza

Maria's Tsunami: Days 53&54  

The Way of the World/Quote of the Week

Woke sexuality has descended into incomprehensible jibber jabber. It is entirely disconnected from reality: the reality of philosophical logic, the reality of biology, and the reality of common sense. 

English

The word legacy seems to have taken on a new meaning - previous. As in the legacy media and legacy benefits. A euphemistic use, then. 

Finally  . . . 

The sun has been shining here in Galicia for 2 weeks now. Quite possibly unusually. I blame it on AGW. For which, I can occasionally give some thanks. For small mercies.

THE ARTICLE

1. An Overview: MD, Private Eye:

A nation divided

Britain, as ever, is divided. The rich and mobil want to move on quickly from the pandemic, have already booked two summer holidays (one abroad and one in the UK, just in case) and are chuffed to bits they invested in vaccine companies. Many are breaking the rules already. They aren't remotely interested in a public inquiry, just grateful for the vaccines in more ways than one. Then there are those struggling to move on from the pandemic, either because of grief or long-term medical or economic harm, and they want answers and acknowledgement in an inquiry so we don't repeat 

the same mistakes again. The government, meanwhile, doesn't want anyone to look in great detail at why the UK has suffered 125,000 Covid deaths and counting. Time to move on and upset the nurses ... 

Nurse! The screams . . .

The government has argued since 2010 that it is better to employ more nurses on lower pay than to give existing nurses a decent pay rise. So it's not surprising Boris Johnson is doing so again, even though some of our most experienced nurses have less to spend since the Conservatives came to p0wer. In 2010/I1, the top of the band 5 pay scale for nurses was £27,534, and in 2019/20 it had risen to £30,112. After adjusting for inflation, this represents a 9% real-terms fall. 

Johnson chose to exploit photos of shattered nurses with mask-pocked faces for the "Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you're doing all you can to stop the spread of Covid- I9 poster campaign. So he can't complain if the nursing unions counter with: "Can you look them in the eyes and tell them they' re not worth more than a 1% pay rise?" With around 35,000 NHS nursing vacancies, Johnson is banking on nursing applications going up regardless, both out of inspiration and desperation as alternative jobs disappear. 

However, the key problem in the NHS is staff retention. Many staff go into the job with the best intentions but leave when they are so over-stretched they cannot provide the safe, high quality, compassionate care they envisaged when training. And they are at constant risk of suspension and litigation for mistakes made while working in such an unsafe system. Then there is the Covid risk. A larger pay rise would not change this; but given the levels of exhaustion, post-traumatic stress and long-Covid symptoms staff are suffering, it would at least have acknowledged how valued and vital their work is. 

Teachers first 

All frontline staff should have priority vaccination.. This is not because they are at higher risk of death; it's because they are moving and perhaps spreading around communities to provide essential services that would cease if they went off sick with Covid. 

This applies particularly to teachers. The welfare of children in any society should be paramount. If we foul our nest, we foul our future. Any teacher who catches Covid can't teach, so their students will fall even further behind. We should vaccinate teachers to protect children's education. This would ave the added benefit of a rewarding and reassuring those entering crowded classrooms with poor ventilation and new variants afoot.

Priority Ventilation

Schools must stay Safe to stay open. For an airborne virus, this means keeping the air flowing. In the US, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has issued detailed guidance guidance for schools and childcare, urging the opening of windows, the use of Portable air cleaners and child-safe fans, and improved building-wide filtration. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) settings must maximise ventilation to bring as much outdoor air into classrooms as the system will safely allow. 

The aim is to improve air filtration as much as possible without significantly reducing airflow. The use of portable air cleaners with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters is encouraged wherever possible. Activities, classes and lunches should be outdoors when circumstances allow. 

In the UK, by contrast, filtered, flowing air is not seen as a priority. The typical state-school classroom contains 31 people and has poor ventilation; and teaching periods last up to 2 hours before children and teachers leave for a break. No wonder the chief medical officer for England Chris Whitty is already predicting another surge. 

Test priorities 

THE UK government abandoned community testing at the start of the pandemic but then rebounded by spending £37bn with the aim of providing outsourced "moonshot" testing for the entire population. The Commons public accounts committee verdict is damning: "Despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project, NHS Test and Trace cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic, and the promise on which this huge expense was justified - avoiding another lockdown - has been broken, twice." Test and Trace must also "wean itself off its persistent reliance on consultants and temPorary staff." 

So why is Test and Trace not delivering when the vaccination programme is? Vaccinations have the massive advantage of using an existing NHS database to trace patients, and tried and tested NHS roll-out programmes used every year for Ru. Test and Trace had to build its own database and employed temporary, outsourced staff who had never done this type of work before. Health secretary Matt Hancock's hubris and faith in technology led him to believe he could build a better app than Apple or Google, and control a highly complex and uncertain operation from the centre. 

The other huge advantage of vaccines is that people generally want one, whereas they don't want to be told they have a positive test, particularly if they have no symptoms, and be ordered to isolate at home for no (or less) money and cough up all their contacts. Many people don't answer the phone, turn their tracing app off or just don't do as they're ordered. The government keeps crowing about how many tests it does - more than any other country - but these make no difference to infection rates if you can't persuade people to do the right thing. This is why Test and Trace should have remained within the NHS and local authorities, where local experts would have stood a better chance of getting a handle on local outbreaks. 

Finally, test results can be hard to interpret. The accuracy of testing changes with disease prevalence. If you do mass testing when infection levels are low, as they are now, you get far more false results. Many - perhaps most - of the positive lateral flow test results in school are currently false, and not always being checked with a more accurate polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. Even if that is negative, in some schools the entire class bubble is still ordered to isolate at home for IO days. This makes no sense to MD. 

Priority PPE 

In the NHS 77% of staff arc women and yet their personal protective equipment (PPE) was designed for men and doesn't fit or protect women as well, the BMJ reports. Female stalT say that goggles slip, gowns are too long, face shields push against breasts, and respirators don't fit their faces. 

Much of the most protective equipment is designed with Caucasian men in mind so BAME women often fail "fit tests" on two accounts, and have to choose between sharing powered respirators (often in short supply and inadequately cleaned), or wearing items that simply don't fit and let the virus through. Very few feel brave enough to refuse to work when staff levels are so low and patient demand so high. An inquiry is needed to see if this has contributed to staff illness and death from Covid. 

The solution - to design bespoke respirators ind PPE - is more expensive; but 3D printing is already being used to develop personalised respirators from facial scans. Globally, hospitals with the best PPE have had fewer staff deaths and less intra-hospital spread. The government must decide whether personalised PPE is a priority. 

Public fatness 

'Public health has never been a priority in the UK. We have shocking levels of obesity and this as contributed to shocking levels of death when the virus was allowed to spread. Ninety percent of global deaths have occurred in countries with high rates of obesity. No country with high death lies has less than 50% of its population overweight. Vietnam has the lowest Covid death rate in the world and the second lowest level of overweight people; the UK has the third highest death rate in the world and the fourth highest obesity rate. It doesn't prove cause and effect, but it's highly suspicious. 

In the UK, 80% of adults carry excess body fat and so are at high risk of premature death, not just from Covid but diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and suicide. You name it, obesity increases your risk of it. It should be a priority.

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: See below the latest Overview from MD of Private Eye.  

Cosas de España 

The 2nd ‘article’ below is something I recorded when teaching as an 18-19 year old in the Seychelles islands. Reading it now after many years made me laugh again. At the same time, I have to confess it reminded me of Spanish politics. In which the Presidenta of the Madrid region can tell voters It's 'a choice between communism and liberty and accuse her opponent of being the candidate of the squatter, the seizure and the cobbles who wants all of his opponents flung into jail and an ETA environment out on the street. Adding that: If they accuse you of being a fascist, you must be doing something right. Or pretty far right in her case. Then there's the General Secretary of the even-further-right Vox party, who’s accused the same chap of abandoning the elderly in residences and trying to bring communism to Spain. In his latest book, Paul Preston claims the Spanish have always been betrayed by their politicians. It’s hard not to agree with this assessment.

Cousas de Galiza

Yesterday, a friend of mine, eating and drinking on a terrace, was reminded by a police officer that she needed to constantly raise and lower the mask she had around her neck. The officer then went on to fine the woman at the next able as he'd seen her move her mask from her arm to her face as he approached the place. Did I say semi-police state?

The UK 

Britain's tabloid press is infamously bad. Scurrilous even. Not least of all the - phenomenally successful - Mailonline. This week - ever willing to prioritise bad news over good - it's given its readers all the side effects of the AZ vaccine. These, it claims, include:-

Losing teeth 

Flatulence

Retirement

Taking up smoking

Insect bites

Bouts of crying

Excessive blinking, and

Fear of death

Who was it said: No one has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people?

The UK and The EU and Covid

Well, knock me down and call me Mother . .  President Macron has acknowledged that Europe faces a vaccine shortage because it lacked ambition and urgency in the race to find a remedy. 'We are perhaps too rational', he admitted. Speaking mainly of his compatriots, I guess. Or maybe just himself.

In the end, the EU stepped back from its threat to impose a ban on the export of vaccines to Britain. Nor did EU leaders endorse any of the other wilder ideas, such as seizing factories and waiving intellectual property rights. Rightly so. No possible good could come from deploying such powers - for the EU, for Britain or the world.

But a PR victory for the EU mandarins? At least on the Continent, if rather the opposite in the UK.

English

New word for me: To flense: To slice the skin or fat from a carcass, especially that of a whale.

Finally  . . . 

I have Spotify but with ads. Or should I say 'ad'. For, every few minutes some bloody UK government announcement comes on, starting with "UK nationals: Because the UK has left the EU . . " It's driving me nuts - even tho' I can (and do) end it by tapping a key on my laptop. I’m pretty sure it's meant to push me toward the premium service.

THE ARTICLES

1. An Overview: MD, Private Eye:

Bouncing Checks

It was obvious from the start the government's Covid "bounce back" loan scheme was open to fraud - but comments from the senior police officer responsible for doing something about it show the crime is set to go largely undetected, never mind punished. 

With £45bn doled out on almost 2m loans with next to no checks but a 100% government guarantee, law enforcers know there's a problem. The Eye has learned that a sample seen by the British Business Bank which organised the loans showed that a third of applications - for amounts up to £50,000 or 25% of a business's turnover - were dodgy. Prior income was exaggerated or sometimes invented, with some claimants buying dormant companies to present as genuine businesses and using the cash to spend on luxuries. 

Leading counter-fraud efforts is the City of London police, whose assistant commissioner Angela McLaren recently wrote a letter, headed "Bounce Back Loans" and seen by the Eye, to colleagues around the country. She pointed out that "a decision was taken at National Tasking Level (endorsed by the National Police Chiefs' Council and the Home Office) that Policing will not routinely investigate or prioritise public sector fraud investigation [ie Covid fraud] at the expense of core business". 

Staff from a unit that looks at public sector fraud, the Essex-based National Investigation Service, have been seconded to the business department to look at "serious and organised crime threats linked to the loan schemes". But there are no more than 10 in the team, along with a similar number of civil servants. Few are actual police officers with powers of arrest. Real police officers may be called in but only, reiterated McLaren, in cases that "involve clear links to serious organised crime and core policing business". Other Covid fraud on taxpayers, often running into tens of thousands of pounds, is not on police radar. 

Nor is it beeping on the banks' radars. They have little incentive to chase funds because a full government guarantee means loans can sit on their balance sheets for years without requiring them to declare losses as they would on other bad loans. Over time taxpayers will quietly cough up billions in guarantee payments. 

The handful of arrests for bounce-back loan fraud - linked to obvious organised wide-scale scams - have generated useful publicity for Inspector Knacker and were used by the director-general of the National Economic Crime Centre, Graeme Biggar, as evidence to a committee of MPs that "we are on it". But the reality is that hundreds of thousands of fraudsters will escape scot-free, with none but the big-time gangsters held up as a deterrent to fiddling government support schemes when, inevitably, they come round again . 

Sick Decisions

Low sick pay has contributed to Covid- l 9's spread in the UK, yet Mitie, a leading government contractor, has not paid sick pay on key Covid-19 and NHS contracts. 

When firms don't pay company sick pay, workers get only minimal £95-a-week statutory sick pay (SSP). This discourages them, especially the low-paid, from responding to symptoms, testing or properly isolating. Mitie has an ongoing contract to run many Covid-19 test centres - in a deal worth £32m over just the first six months. 

In January, Mitie's Inverness test centre was closed after a Covid-19 outbreak among staff. Scottish investigative website the Ferret spoke to workers who said nearly half the 40 staff were infected, they were not properly sent home to isolate, and cleaning was poor. Mitie rejected many of the charges but could not deny its workers only get the minimal £95 SSP. 

Mitie has also run sick-pay-free cleaning and catering services in hospitals. It has 400 staff, for example, at West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust, where the GMB union's members campaigned last year to receive full wages while sick rather than SSP, because they were on the Covid-19 Frontline. 

In April, the NHS trust agreed to pay Mitie extra to fund the scheme. But in October the sick pay scheme was stopped without notice and staff were put back on SSP as the pandemic's second wave hit. GMB members, reps and officials campaigned again, and this month the trust and Mitie reinstated full sick pay, backdated to cover those who had to take time off last year. 

The Eye asked Mitie why it doesn't pay all staff full sick pay automatically. It said the terms of pay and sick pay "are set by our clients", adding that it has "regular and open dialogue" with them to explain "the benefits of paying full sick pay rather than statutory sick pay, particularly during the Cov id-19 pandemic". 

Mille made £48m annual profit. according to its latest accounts, so it's not short of cash. But it is arguable that it and its clients - essentially the government - are jointly responsible for the sick pay crisis. The Department of Health and Social Care priced the outdoor testing centre contracts without sick pay included. In hospitals, NHS Improvement introduced guidance and payments underwriting sick pay for subcontracted staff last year - but payments stopped in October. 

The GMB said that without its campaign in West Herts, staff would still not get sick pay, but it "applauded" West Herts NHS Trust for using its own cash to cover the reinstated sick pay as the government was no longer funding it. 

Brussels Sprouts

Panicked by its botched vaccine procurement and the glacial pace of vaccination rollout across the EU, the European Commission just keeps digging. 

After its decision to block a delivery of 250,000 AstraZeneca vaccines to Australia prompted angry reactions, the EU seems to have twigged that this kind of overt vaccine nationalism doesn't look good (though Boris Johnson seems to have got away with it, telling Ireland only last week it would have to wait until the UK was vaccinated before any     · .~ 

UK supplies would come their way). 

The commission's spin machine, meanwhile, has been tasked with pumping up the bloc's contribution to international vaccine supply, particularly the World Health Organization's Covax programme, which is supplying (albeit slowly) developing countries with vaccines. 

The arrival of the first Covid vaccines in Uganda prompted the EU's diplomatic unit, the External Action Service, to proclaim: "Uganda receives 1st batch of Covid-19 vaccines thanks to #TeamEurope". "The arrival of the vaccines in Uganda is a significant moment and a concrete example of global solidarity in action," said Attilio Pacifici, the EU's man in Kampala. "After months of work, we are seeing the EU Vaccines Strategy bear fruit." This is, to put it mildly, over-egging the pudding. 

The EU also claims that #TeamEurope "is the biggest donor to the Covax facility and has provided more than €2.2bn". But most of that has come from national governments, entirely independently of EU institutions - and US president Joe Biden has trumped them anyway by pledging $4bn to Covax, 

The EU has even sought to claim credit for Israel's successful vaccination programme, with European Council president Charles Michel saying: "Israel has incontestable scientific capabilities. But it has neither developed nor produced any vaccines. Most vaccination technologies have been initiated or developed in Europe." 

Still, the EU's vaccine supply boasts pale compared with Michel's sophistry about vaccine exports. After claiming, wrongly, that the UK and US had imposed "an outright ban on the export of vaccines or vaccine components produced on their territory", Michel denied that the EU had done any such thing: "The European Union, the region with the largest vaccine production capacity in the world, has simply put in place a system for controlling the export of doses produced in the EU." 

Indeed, and that authorisation mechanism, which allows the EU to block any vaccine exports to a country deemed "non-vulnerable", was used by the commission and Italy to block Australia's AstraZeneca delivery on 4 March. "The facts do not lie," added Michel. How right he is. 

2. Political life in the Seychelles a few decades ago . . . 

Surrounded by such Arch Supporters as Mr Nicholson Stravens of Pointe Larue, Mr Norman Mancienne of Glacis, Mr Davidson Chang Him of Bel Ombre, Mr Ange Cadeau of Plaisance, Mrs Daisy Benoiton of English River, Mr Uranus Bibi of Victoria Market, Mr Philip Jumeau of Rochon, Mr Joseph Max of Benezet Street, Mr Leonnel Luch of Pointe Conan, Mr Antoine Samson of des Camells, Mr Francis Mein of St. Louis, Mr Eugene Marie of Roche Bois and many other local personalities, Messrs Mancham and Joubert had the crowd with them, for them and in love with them. This was too much for Africa-trained politician Philibert Loizeau who kept on interrupting the meeting with jungle-type audacity. Whereupon a lady spectator remarked: "La verité y offense son maitre".This was too much for Loizeau who threatened to slap the woman. This, of course, was poor political diplomacy for it caused many to remark - If already he behaving like this. what won't he do, given power, after Independence?  Rifred Jumeau - with an air of gentlemanship seldom seen in the past - then came towards Loizeau and dragged him away. But the latter was not to behave. A few minutes later he emerged on the other side of the field - just a few yards from blushing Rene - determined to carry on with his cheap political monkey tricks of interrupting the truth. René called him aside and spoke to him but Loizeau showed no sign of discipline. 

P. S. Gérard Hoarau was an exiled opposition leader from Seychelles and was head of the Mouvement Pour La Resistance (MPR) that sought the peaceful overthrow of the France-Albert René regime which had come to power on 5 June 1977 in a coup d'état. The opposition was based in London. He was assassinated on 29 November 1985 by an unidentified gunman, on the doorstep of his home London.

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 

Some sound advice.

Spain: The European Commission has asked Spain for ‘coherency’ on travel restrictions within its own national territory and on journeys to and from other European countries – underlining that the risks linked to the spread of Covid-19 are similar – in the case of both internal and cross border travel. Spain’s Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya defended that the travel restrictions imposed by Spain are ‘aligned’. She could have fooled me. 

Cosas de España  

From 30 March, British tourists will be allowed to come to Spain again, to join the Germans and French folk already here in large numbers for an Easter break, despite the fact 3rd or 4th waves are surging back home.

A whole raft of PP ex-minsters - including the ex PM - are denying there was a chest of black cash in their HQ and that the party treasurer - as he claims under oath - gave them great monthly wads of the stuff in brown envelopes. No one in Spain believes them, of course. Including themselves, I imagine. But it won't do their lucrative corporate careers any harm. A 'low ethics country', as they say.

Cousas de Galiza

An episode of a series called Un Asunto Privado is being filmed in Pontevedra city. Here's a press foto. I assume the 'female actor*' will take off her 21st century puffer jacket before they actually shoot the scene:-

Blimey! IMDB calls her an 'actress'. How very 20th century.

This is a wall of one of the 2 weeds called Japanese knotweed, and very pretty it is too. Actually pinker than it looks here:-

A Brit couple coming from Portugal this week to meet their lawyer here and armed with the appropriate bits of paper, were told by  police officer he was going to fine them. Not speaking Spanish, they called their lawyer, who was told by the officer that it was because they were in a camper van. But said lawyer was smart enough to persuade him to desist. Confusing rules permit arbitrariness. I’ve been assured by 3 Guardia Civil officers now that I can have 3 passengers in my car next week but I won’t be surprised if another one tries to fine us €600 each. You’d be forgiven for thinking they’re on commission.

Maria's Tsunami: Days 51&52

The UK 

Boris Johnson lives to joke, to prick pomposity (as he sees it) with a flippant statement, delivered tongue-in-cheek, preferably amid an avalanche of alliteration. This is his schtick. Clowning around is a key element of his style: it cheers up his supporters and enrages his opponents, who make the mistake of thinking he’s an idiot which, in turn, leads them into making fatal strategic errors. BUT . . . it’s not an approach suited to the row over access to vaccines. Joking about greed is not going to help us secure supplies when some in Brussels are convinced we’ve already grabbed too many. So it’s unhelpful for the prime minister, someone the EU and its leading member states are predisposed to hate, to casually introduce a caricature anti-Anglo Saxon meme and boast about the unfettered greed of perfidious Albion. It risked handing the incompetent commission political cover and allowing his opponents to say that he has ceded the moral high ground. His ill-judged attempts at humour only encourage stereotypical views of Tories and their capitalist cronies. All that said: He is a joker, not a real-life Gordon Gekko. How very true. Is no one capable of convincing him of this? And of the need to get a bloody hairstyle that doesn't encourage the image of a clown? 

BTW  . . . His remark was also silly because it’s not true. The success of the British vaccine programme is not down to greed. Collaboration between an enlightened private sector and the quicker-moving parts of government and the NHS are what did it. . . . It is deeply frustrating. Johnson is highly educated and surely understands the difference. But for the sake of a daft joke he has handed his enemies a weapon. Essentially, he just can't help himself. A lability in a crisis. 

The EU 

What’s clear is that the EU is unable to assess risk rationally and is too bureaucratically rigid to respond to fast-moving events. What would you expect - even in non-crisis times - of a committee of 27 members? 

Oh, dear . . . It was an extraordinary story – the European Commission had turned detective to find AZ's secret stockpile reserved for Britain. During a surprise raid, an elite unit of Italian military police, acting on EU orders, discovered 29m doses at a factory near Rome. The discovery appeared to confirm the EU's long-held suspicion that AZ was giving the UK special treatment, secretly exporting doses to its home country while failing to deliver on contracts agreed with Brussels. Yet, as EU officials later admitted, the allegation, briefed to the Continental press, simply wasn't true. In fact, most of the doses were destined for the EU itself, with the remainder headed for poorer countries across the world. A Portuguese ex-minister called it possibly the "most embarrassing day in the EU's history". I'm not sure that's an accurate statement.

The USA

Intriguing . . . Having dropped 11 points in a decade, the USA has fallen behind Argentina and Mongolia in a global ranking of political rights and civil liberties.

Oh, Lordy, Lordy . . . Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell is defending herself in a billion-dollar defamation case by arguing that “no reasonable person” would mistake her claims that the election was stolen from the former president as fact.

The Way of the World/Social media

How bleak it is that every dumb teenage remark is logged so it can be used to destroy adult lives. This has to end. But how? A cultural shift backwards??

English

To Americans – or at least Californians – phrases like “speaking your truth”, “reaching out”, “what you’re sharing with us” sound perfectly normal. Most of us in Britain, however, are left either squirming or scratching our heads. To us, it’s baffling: the bombastic jargon of corporate press releases, melded improbably with the mushy blathering of self-help books. We don’t get it.

Which reminds me . . . Yesterday I wrote quite to very optimistic. Later I recalled that, 30 years of experience with Americans had taught me that quite and very mean much the same thing to them. Whereas, in British English, the meaning of quite can be anything from very bad to very good.  Tone is critical here.

Finally  . . . 

Although an ex-RC atheist, I don't begrudge anyone their faith, especially as theism can be a source of humour to me. Someone in Madrid recently held up a sign saying: I shall die when God is ready. I'd have thought it was when your body was ready. Which, sadly, can be after your mind has gone before. Which God doesn't really seem to care about. He's only interested in your soul, I guess. The only one of the 3 things I can't find.

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 

Learning lessons. 

Reading that article might well convince you of the accuracy of this statement: History may well conclude that the lockdowns were a dreadful mistake and a grotesque overreaction to a contagion that could be managed without recourse to such measures. After all, national lockdowns had never been part of pandemic emergency planning. But: By the time the world found out that Covid was nasty but not as virulent as feared, it had embarked on a course of action that those responsible could never accept might have been wrong. 

I would add that politics demanded that a collapse of healthcare systems arising from initial failure be avoided at all costs. Including more deaths than there needed to have been. As MD of Private Eye said months ago: Lockdowns are an admission of earlier failure.

Looking ahead rather than behind . . .  The growth of cases of the British, South African and Brazilian variants looks like jeopardising the vaccination certificate scheme desperately wanted by countries such as Spain dependent on tourism. Until, at least, 'adapted booster vaccines' are available later this year. .

Cosas de España y Galiza  

In 2019, almost 84 million foreign tourists came to Spain. Last year, far, far fewer.  The Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism says he’s confident Spain can recover around 40 million tourists this year. I fear he's being quite to very optimistic.

Some good news . . .  Ten epic bike routes around Spain.

Pertinent headline: Tourism in Holy Week. Why can't I go to next door Asturias when Germans can come to our Rias Biaxas resorts in Galicia?

The UK 

The government’s plans to allow international travel to recommence from 17 May are expected to be delayed, possibly until the end of June – which would be a further blow to Spain’s tourist industry.  

The UK and The EU and Covid

If you take the Pfizer vaccine, 280 materials go into making the vaccine, 86 suppliers supply those materials from 19 countries around the world. If you start putting up barriers, other countries may follow suit in terms of some of those vital raw materials that are required. If we start that, we are in trouble: Boris Johnson? No, the Irish prime minister.

Scapegoating Britain will not save Europe from a self-made disaster. Bris Johnson? No, Ambrose Evans Pritchard here.

Germany

Fear is back among many Germans - and not only fear, but anger. [Many Spaniards, by the way, are angry that there are so many Germans here in Spain, in the Balearic Islands and on the mainland.]

Finally  . . .  

It’s very hard to believe but true that, at the start of 1914 - after years of tension over naval expenditures - relations between Britain and Germany had become very good indeed. In fact, if the midsummer Balkans crisis of that year had been left to these 2 superpowers of the time, it’s very probable that there wouldn’t have been either the First World War or the Second World War. As it is, the former saw the death of 3 empires. Including that of Germany, which - surprisingly - included islands off China and Japan.

We are all still paying the price for the actualities of 1914.

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 

UK: Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths plumme. BUT: From the Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: The idea of ‘zero Covid’ is an illusion. The most likely scenario a year from now is seasonal outbreaks with lower mortality rates

The EU: The EU finds itself in the early stages of a deadly 3rd wave. 

Cosas de España

Here's more on one of the 4 ways for 'non-residents' hit by the post-Brexit 90/180-day rule to legally circumvent it.

And here's Lenox Napier on owning a car in Spain.

Cousas de Galiza

Now that I'm allowed to go into Pontevedra city again, I've noticed the first example of something I've waited years to see - an unneeded local(shop space) used as a home:-

This is in a street in which I've seen many small shops open and close over the years. Several have stayed closed, leading me to ask why these aren't converted into dwellings. Maybe Airbnb and the huge growth in camino 'pilgrim' numbers have finally incentivised this, and there'll now be a growing trend. If so, it might end the common (and ugly) sight of a block of flats with the entire ground floor of locales all boarded up.

And now that I'm allowed to sit on the terrace of my watering hole again, I noticed 2 things last weekend:-

1. There seems to be a growing custom/obligation for young women to carry a small, ugly dog. Usually in their hands but sometimes in a handbag,

and

2. Even when I'm sitting shirt-sleeved in the sun, many local folk are still sporting jackets, or even overcoats and scarves. It's always wise in Galicia to anticipate a sudden change in the weather but I do find this a tad extreme. I know the forecast was for a temperature of down to zero in parts of Galicia but, as far as I know, this certainly didn't happen. Not in Poio or Pontevedra at least.

Maria's Tsunami: Days 49&50. For poetry lovers.

The UK 

British hoteliers fear that holidaymakers are “abusing” flexible booking policies to secure breaks at home and abroad for the same period to maximise their chance of a holiday. They fear they'll be hit with a wave of cancellations, if international holidays are given the green light, with people taking advantage of cancellation policies designed to offer peace of mind. Who'd have thought it? Arguably, you'd be daft not to do it..

The EU 

The EU's vaccine nationalism is even more dangerous than it looks. In an age of pandemics, Brussels’ bid to disrupt global supply networks sets a disastrous precedent. So says an ex British PM here.

And another DT columnist sees the Commission's current actions as rather inconsistent with its 'founding myths'. Anyone really surprised? They are myths, after all.

Social media

At  last, something to help deal with scammers.

Finally  . . . 

HT to Lenox for this. . . For political reasons, Spain has never recognised Kosovo, nor even its name. And now refuses to display its flag or play its anthem. The Spanish football federation has caused controversy by referring to Kosovo as a “territory”, as opposed to a country. So, how will an independent Scotland be treated, one wonders.

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 

Spain: German tourists have been flocking to Mallorca since Friday, with tens of thousands more planning to enjoy an Easter break in the Balearic Islands – whilst citizens living on mainland Spain are not allowed to travel there during Easter. They all have to provide PCR test results not more than 72 hours old at the airport showing they are Covid-free.

Cosas de España

An editorial from the (sort-of-left-of-centre) El País on depressing political developments here. More depressing than usual, I mean.

Talking of politics . . . An imminent punch-up over new housing laws.

This cartoon would be very apposite for Spain . . . .

Cousas de Galiza

Bit of a scare this morning when an English language journal suggested we’d be confined to our townships over Easter. Fortunately, it was a mistake. My trip up the coast is still on.

Here's the mayor of Pontevedra et al in the chozo/chouzo/choza/chouza I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, when the whole area was mired in mud and the video from it I posted showed only cloud and rain. And not the Dawn Marshes below the recently deforested area.

The UK and the EU 

The EU claim that it has a (war-inspired) legal right to take over any intellectual property it likes has its equivalent in the 1985 UK government attempt to take over - under a 1939 law - the DNA fingerprinting technology my company had licensed from its inventor and future Nobel Prize winner. For the record, this was foiled with the help of, first, Mr Thatcher and, then, Mrs Thatcher. Who realised how unwise it was in an inter-connected world for governments to expediently steal technologies. One wonders if Brussels will also see sense in due course. Sadly, mere bureaucrats rarely do and the EU doesn't have a wise political leader. Or any political leader, for that matter. Only a puppet with  a committee of real leaders somewhere in the background. Led by a German leader who isn't exactly covering herself with glory at the moment. 

The EU 

I saw this after I'd written the previous paragraph . . . The EU needs sane and sensible voices to end its vaccine delusions. So, I'm unlikely to disagree. 

Quote of the Week

In these post-shame days, guilt is not necessarily the mother of consequences. Not in the political sphere, anyway. Either in the UK or the EU.

Finally  . . . 

The local sparrows and greenfinches have grown fat and lazy on all the seed I buy for them. I very much hope they haven’t got slower and less alert, as I’m pretty sure I glimpsed a swooping sparrowhawk(gavilán/gabilán) twice over the weekend. If so, it’s hardly likely to move on, given the rich and easy pickings. And, if it takes any of 'my' blackbirds, I'll have to shoot it. Or at least try to trap it and release it on the border with Asturias. Or, closer, Portugal.

 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 

Covid-19 and its possible nemesis, the vaccine, have presented us with an existential dilemma, all about understanding risk. You  can say that again . . .

The UK: Holiday  bookings soared a couple of weeks ago, for Spain Greece and Italy in particular.  Certainly in jeopardy now. Will they get their advance payments back?

Cosas de España

Here are some ‘eco tours’ you can do in Spain, if so inclined.-

1. A 6-day search for bears and wolves in the Cantabrian mountains, with accommodation in low-key guest houses.

2.  A minimum-impact Camino pilgrimage: El Camino del Reciclaje — or the recycling route — with 450 registered eco-hostels on the caminos Frances, del Norte, Ingles and Portugues, and a simple plan: pick up rubbish left by others, drop it at recycling stations and for every 3 stays at approved accommodation they will plant a tree. 

3. A Solar-powered farm: Casa Olea, located  in the Sierra de Aracena, between Cordoba, Jaen and Granada. Three self-catering cottages with private pools on a gentle slope above a wildflower meadow that has never seen pesticides, in the cork oak and chestnut forests 60 miles northwest of Seville. There’s yoga; a farm shop selling local olives, cheese, wine, seasonal fruit and veg, and most parts of the pig; and magnificent walking, 

Cousas de Galiza

Yesterday’s newspapers featured the mayor of Pontvendra looking at newly discovered petrogliphs up in the forest behind my house. Here’s one I snapped last week. Given the flatness of it, I wondered if it’d been used for sacrifices. And why it looks like a tortoise but isn’t called A Tartaruga, instead of A Pietra do Monte Tomba.

Yesterday I suggested you looked for inconsistencies in our new Covid rules, born of tension between the conflicting aims of preventing gatherings and yet giving succour to some industries. Today, a new one has arisen; what on earth are we allowed to do by way of numbers in a car, in the face of everyone wrongly in it being fined €600? For, if individuals who either have a relationship or live separately alone can visit each other in their homes, why can’t they be in a car together? The answer to this will determine whether 6 of us take 2, 3, 4, or even 6 cars on a short trip up the coast. Or a taxi or hired mini-bus, if bizarrely, this is allowed . . .

Maria's Tsunami: Day 48

The UK

Middlesex University is cutting its ties with the UK’s biggest provider of homeopathy training - The Centre for Homeopathic Education - after it peddled vaccine misinformation and encouraged the use of potions made with phlegm to protect against and treat Covid-19. One's compelled to ask why was there a tie in the first place. Money, I guess 

The UK and the EU

Waging war over vaccines can only end in tragedy for Britain and the EU. How very true.

 Spanish

New word for me - pachanga

1. Danza originaria de Cuba.

2. Fiesta, diversión bulliciosa.

3. Partido informal de fútbol, baloncesto u otros deportes.

English

Someone is described The Times today as A smug, spiky Manolo’d death eater. I’ve no idea at all what it means. Possibly women in the fashion industry.

Finally  . . . Quote of the Week

It’s funny, isn’t it, how people who spend their lives telling people they are compassionate and forgiving, somehow turn out to be not compassionate and forgiving at all.

Especially in these Woke Times.  

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: For one reason and another, at 8%, the vaccination rate is well below the (poor) EU average of 12%. Not surprising then, that in the face of a 3rd wave of several variants, another national lockdown is imminent. Things probably wont be helped by the thousands returning home after an Easter break in Madrid or the Balearic Islands.

The EU: Meanwhile, this is the Times' take on the current situation. I've no idea if it's an exaggeration or not: Europe has slipped further into vaccine chaos after France continued to question the safety of the AZ jab and Germany said that EU delays meant there were not enough doses to avert a 3rd wave. The German health minister has said that vaccine shortfalls have left lockdowns as the only defence against a new wave sweeping across Europe. “We are in the 3rd wave, the numbers are rising, and the proportion of mutations is large", he added. “There is not yet enough vaccine in Europe to stop the 3rd wave through vaccination alone. Even if the deliveries from EU orders now come reliably, it will still take several weeks until the risk groups are fully vaccinated. Only then can we also talk about the broader opening of society. So we will still need a lot of staying power.”

Spain: One wonders how many of the French and German trippers have brought the latest variants with them and what impact this will have on the infection rate here.

The UK: Who'd bet against increased restriction on EU visitors? 

Cosas de España

If, like me, you don't follow Spanish politics very closely, this article will be useful as an update after a 'tumultuous week'. It's depressing to note that the PP president of the Madrid region is perfectly happy to have a pact with the far-right Vox party to stay in power.

Hmm. According to a new documentary, Franco stole nuclear weapons secrets from his American allies as he pushed Spain to develop its own arsenal, according to research showing how close the fascist dictator came to getting the bomb. His regime used the Palomares incident in 1966, when a US plane dropped four hydrogen bombs in a refuelling accident over the Mediterranean, to gather fragments of the weapons to further the 'Islero Project'. I guess he failed.

Lenox Napier gives us an entertaining picture of his latest hometown here. It doesn't exactly stimulate me to make the trip to see him I've been planning for whenever. But, on the other hand, it was  never going to be touristy trip. And I can visit nearby Almería city. And I've always wanted to see the miles and miles of plastic sheeting down there.

Sangría: I'm not sure I haven't already posted this guidance from the admirable Mac75 on how to make this.

Cousas de Galiza

Some answers to Easter-time questions from the Diario de Pontevedra. Pick your own inconsistencies:-

Q. Can I go from Pontevedra to La Coruña?

A. Yes

Q. Can I go outside Galicia?

A. No

Q. I'm in Madrid, can I go to my holiday home in Galicia?

A. No

Q. Can I go back home to Galicia from my uni outside the region?

A. Yes

Q. Can I go to my parents' house if I don't live with them?

A. No

Q. Can my partner visit me in my home?

A: Yes, if you live in different houses.

Q. Are there  more exceptions?

A. Yes. Anyone who lives alone can visit any other person who lives alone.

Q. Can I have my friends come to eat in my village property or in a garden

A. No, not if it's a private house.

Q. Can people who don't live together hire a rural guest-house?

A. Yes. But only 4 people inside it.

Q. We are 6 friends. Can we drink together in a bar?

A. Inside only 4. On a terrace 6 is OK.

Q. Can 6 of us meet in the street or go on a picnic'

A. Yes. It's outside

Q. Will there be processions?

A. No.

Maria's Tsunami: Days 46&47. With a pertinent comment on the Madrid scene.  

The UK

Just in case you subscribe to the myth that the Magna Carta of 1217 was the foundation of Britain's parliamentary democracy, here's something about a 1258 development which is said to be a much better candidate for this honour. Most interestingly, they were the first government documents published in English after the Norman invasion of 1066 - the beginning of the end of French as the country's official language. Though not its (Latinate) influence on English vocabulary, of course,

The Way of the World 

An experience of the UK's outrageously expensive but far-less-than-perfect Test & Trace system: My father was taken into hospital last week and found to be Covid positive. Two days later the landline rang; it was Test and Trace to inform him he'd tested positive. Which he kind of knew but still. The caller then politely asked if it was OK to refer to my octogenarian dad as “he”, or was another pronoun preferred? Every teenager I have retold this to has been mightily impressed. Dear dog.

A woke chap's view of our obligation. Why it’s time to join Generation Woke

Spanish

Here's a shortish list of Spanish proverbs, with their (alleged) English equivalents. You'll have to add the accents to the Spanish versions.

Finally  . . . 

Useful to have this confirmed but it's possibly oldish news . . . Electric hand dryers have officially been shown to leave poorly washed hands dirtier than old-fashioned paper towels.

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'

As usual on Fridays, my thanks to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for a couple of today's items.

Covid 

Vaccination percentages of respective populations: Britain 40;  the EU 12; Spain 13. But Galicia only 8.

Spain: I fingered Madrid the other day for raising the national infection rates. This article rather endorses this allegation. 

Cosas de España y Galiza   

Spain will be the 7th country in the world and the 4th in Europe to allow physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia for long-suffering patients of incurable diseases and people with unbearable permanent conditions. In contrast, Portugal’s Constitutional Court this week blocked proposed legislation, arguing that the bill was imprecise in identifying the circumstances under which life-ending procedures could occur.

Thanks to a deal between Spain and the UK, Gibraltar will cease to be the tax-haven Madrid has long accused it of being. I guess they’ll move on to Andorra next. Ha ha(Jaja)

Click here for an insight - in Spanish - on how Spaniards are different from others.

Despite protestations to the contrary, the use of plastic by supermarkets seem to have relentlessly increased over the years. So it’s good to read of this Mercadona plan.

Everyone here knows of the tricks use by employers - especially in the hospitality area - to minimise salaries, social security payments and taxes. Not to mention job security. A few weeks ago the Hacienda (Tax Office) announced it was starting a campaign against abuses. I guess no one was surprised to see the number of temporary contracts suddenly decrease by 61,000 in just 2 weeks.

Centuries ago, there  used to be a kingdom of León. This encompassed what are now known as Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria, and even some of Portugal, I believe. But it was subsumed in the all-powerful Castilla - of Reconquest fame - and the modern region (or Autonomous Community, as they're officially known) is Castilla y León. The Leonese would like to revert to a separate region , with Zamora and Salamanca snatched from CyL. I doubt it'll fly,

The UK

The Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is a very decisive person. So, it's a tad surprising that her response to being found to have committed the (resignation) offence of lying to to the Scottish parliament has been:-

Oh, I just don't know 

whether I should stay or go*

So, I'll ask my sycophantic Yes men

If I should answer Yes or No**.

* But should this be 'gang'**

** And should that be 'Nae'?

The UK and The EU and Covid

A Personal perspective: From the (very slow) start, the lockdowns in the West have been all about politics - the saving of national health services and the avoidance of the electoral consequences of failure to do this. Arguably, saving lives has been subordinated to this superordinate objective. And now the vaccine rollouts in the UK and the EU are bedevilled by politics. It does tend to endorse the view that you're better off having a system of government where you can kick out of power the incompetent and the corrupt. Is this a bill that the EU Commission fills, I wonder. Mrs Van de Leyden in particular. 

In the case of the EU, someone has said, it's all political because it's about the future of integration. Personally, I don't doubt this. So, of course, was the reaction to Brexit.

I said there'd be a 3rd . . . Woe 3: The vaccine fiasco will ignite a second eurozone crisis that will bring the EU to its knees. As spring unfolds, we will see plummeting confidence in eurozone economies and a panic in the bond markets that drives up borrowing costs. The full article rationalising this depressing prediction is below.

The Way of the World 

It’s clear that Covid will change the world in two profound ways. It has forced the West to confront the true nature of the Chinese Communist regime and the dangers of our ever-increasing economic dependence on it. But perhaps the bigger change is the realisation that in a crisis, borders reassert themselves. Every big country or bloc will make significant efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in medical supplies as a result of this pandemic. The first wave of globalisation, which started in the 1870s, was ended by the First World War. The latest wave, which started around the turn of the century, maybe ended by Covid.  From this article.

Finally  . . .  

There seems to be a pattern emerging in my spam emails . .  Special elongation: White wife finds elongation secret from African tribesmen.

The question in a UK TV quiz: Which famous sitar player founded the National Orchestra of India?

The answer: Ghandi.

I know a very good joke which also ends with this name. But it's too long to write here. Plus it's about both the Northern and Southern Irish and wouldn't go down well with  woke folk. Not to mention everyone Irish!

THE ARTICLE

The vaccine fiasco will ignite a second eurozone crisis that will bring the EU to its knees. As spring unfolds, we will see plummeting confidence in eurozone economies and a panic in the bond markets that drives up borrowing costs:  Matthew Lynn, The Telegraph

Angela Merkel’s panel of economic advisers have cut their growth forecast for this year as the country battles to contain a third wave of Covid-19. President Macron is locking down the Ile-de-France, the powerhouse of the French economy, as hospitals are overwhelmed with patients, while the OECD has sliced its projections for the continent.

With infections and casualties plummeting in Israel, the UK, and the United States as vaccine programmes ramp up, Covid-19 is finally coming under control everywhere – except, of course, for mainland Europe. So far that has mainly been a health catastrophe, but very soon it will turn into an economic one as well. Greece sparked the first eurozone crisis, but the vaccine debacle will ignite the second one. 

The EU was already stumbling its way from one vaccine blunder to another. It ordered too few shots, spent too little money to ensure adequate supply, put an obscure Cypriot party hack in charge of the most important government programme since World War II, and then lashed out at the companies making the vaccines in a blind panic.

Now, presumably working on the premise that once you are in a hole the only option is to keep digging, half the continent, including Germany, France and Italy, have put the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab on hold while some statistically insignificant side effects are investigated. We will find out soon enough what the cost of that is in lost lives. With infections rising, even as the spring weather arrives, and hospitals filling up again, the toll will likely be a heavy one. But very soon it will be a financial crisis as well. Here’s why. 

First, economies will remain locked down for far longer than necessary. Right now, the differences are hardly noticeable. Israel has opened up again, but few other countries have managed to do so. Over the next few weeks, however, that will start to change, and dramatically so. As the UK and the United States cruise past 60 to 70 per cent vaccination levels, shops, restaurants and gyms will be reopening. Their economies will be growing in the 7-8 per cent range compared to zero in the EU. That is a vast gulf. At the same time, trashing property rights, and arbitrarily seizing vaccine production plants, will make it virtually impossible for multi-nationals to invest in the zone.

Next, borrowing will soar. Across Europe, huge, expensive support measures will have to remain in place, potentially for months, while they are lifted elsewhere. At the same time, tax revenues will remain depressed (closed restaurants don’t generate a lot of revenue). Budget deficits of close on 10 per cent of GDP will roll on and on. That might not matter a lot for Germany, but it does for Italy and France, two of the most heavily indebted countries in the world (they rank in third and fourth place respectively measured by the total amount owed). How much debt is too much? No one really knows, until the markets suddenly decide a threshold has been reached. Once that line is crossed, however, chaos is unleashed. 

Finally, muddled vaccine roll-outs will create a political backlash. We are already seeing that in Germany. Angela Merkel was always the world’s most over-rated leader, but her chronic caution, indecision and dithering, along with her personal responsibility for putting her inept "mini-mutti", Ursula von der Leyen, at the top of the EU, will bring her long reign to an ignominious close, as well as potentially handing power to the first Green leader of a major economy (although, in consolation, Robert Habeck is probably more of a "conservative" than the CDU leader ever was).

President Macron is facing a tight presidential contest next year, amid a deepening crisis, while across the border in Italy it is hard to see the point of having an unelected technocrat as Prime Minister – the former ECB President Mario Draghi – if he can’t get shots into people’s arms. In truth, the eurozone is about to enter a period of fraught political uncertainty at the very worst time.  

The net result? As the spring unfolds, we will witness plummeting confidence in eurozone economies, and a panic in the bond markets that drives up borrowing costs. Global investors have not started to price that in yet. But as the evidence becomes unavoidable, and as the gulf in performance widens, that will change.

It was the Greek crisis that sparked the first eurozone crisis in 2010 as a decade of incompetence and spiralling debt brought the single currency to the edge of collapse. It is now surely inevitable that the "vaccine crisis" will trigger the next act in that unresolved drama. 

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 EU has released details of its plan to set up a travel certificate to help restore freedom of movement within the bloc for those inoculated against Coronavirus. 

Spain: The incidence rate of new cases of Covid-19 has stopped decreasing, and is now above previous levels, at 128 per 100,000 inhabitants for the past 14 days. Thanks largely to laxity in Madrid, I suspect.

As for Galicia, our bars and restaurants now have a later closure hour and higher table occupancy but we've been told that - during the coming holiday weekend and over Semana Santa - we can't have any private meetings with people who don't live with us. So, we can meet with people in bars but not at home. I suspect this irony reflects the fact that the police can check numbers in public places rather easier than they can for private places. A semi-police state now? There's certainly a lot of them on the street. Will they be knocking on house doors next week?

Is there a significant benefit from lockdowns? This article argues that there isn't.

Cosas de España y Galiza   

Spain faces one of the world's biggest problems of demographic ageing. By the middle of the century, those over 65 will have risen from 19 to 30% - an increase of more than 6m people. If there's still an EU in 2050, this will its problem as well, of course.

There are some people in Spain who simply can't just talk but need to shout. One has just come into the bar in which I'm having a coffee. It could be worse; the barman she's shouting at could have had the same habit. This does happen. For example when 2 women of a certain age are exchanging information about their personal lives. Simultaneously.

Maria's Tsunami: Day 45  

The UK and The EU 

Woe 1: The EU’s precautionary principle was causing problems long before their latest farce over vaccines. See the 1st article below.

Woe 2: Mirabile Dictu: Global capital is leaving Europe and coming to Britain. The eye-wateringly large monetary outflows from the eurozone may accelerate into outright flight. See the 2nd article below.

Stay alert: Troubles usually come in threes . . .

The UK and Brexit 

Richard North: [Back in 2016] Predicting an early referendum with "Leave" winning, multiple changes of prime minister, delayed negotiations, and then a botched Brexit, would have been difficult enough to predict. But then throw in the Covid-19 pandemic and you would have needed supernatural powers to be even close to guessing where we would stand. But we now have to add a further element - the ongoing vaccine saga which, rightly or wrongly, it pitching the EU against the UK, and stoking up nationalist sentiment in the baser elements of English society. This is tied up with the suspension by some EU Member States of the use of AZ vaccine, following a number of reports of blood clots in recently vaccinated people.  . . . Johnson keeps referring to our "friends" and "partners" in Europe. It is about time this language was given effect. There were good reasons for leaving the EU, but we are now out. Neither the EU nor its members are our enemies. We can, therefore, do without the bellicose rhetoric. Beating the virus should be our priority – not scoring points in a battle that has already been won.

Sounds about right to me.

The Way of the World 

Writes Joanna Williams here: Truth has become whatever you want it to be. New laws on misogyny or safeguarding women should be based on facts not ‘lived experience’. 
   
Religious Nutters/Crooks Corner

Kat Kerr: St Patrick was a great winner of souls. He is in Heaven, living in a mansion in a field of 5-foot-tall shamrocks that sing to him. They work with Jesus Christ because God has a sense of humor.

He's not the only one . . .

Finally  . . .  
  
My latest funny spam message: My sexual desires make people consider me a slut.  Which narrows the field, I guess

THE ARTICLES 

1. Shunning Europe’s ridiculous view of risk has been the making of us: The EU’s precautionary principle was causing problems long before their latest farce over vaccines: Philip Johnston, The Telegraph.

Have the countries suspending the roll-out of the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid taken collective leave of their senses? Is there something so amiss that merits shutting down a programme of inoculations designed to save thousands of lives and reopen economies without which we will all live in penury anyway?

Conspiracy theorists might conclude that there is a real problem and we are not being told the full truth here in the UK. But, in fact, the Europeans are in thrall to a pernicious concept known as the precautionary principle, which essentially states that if there is something science cannot be certain is safe then don’t do it.

Yet science, as we have seen during the pandemic, is rarely 100 per cent certain about anything. The bizarre aspect of the precautionary principle, however, is that even when the science is almost certain as, say, with the safety of genetically modified (GM) crops, they are still prohibited because there is always a sliver of doubt.

It was the green movement’s efforts to block GM agriculture despite its obvious potential to feed a massively growing world population that led to the promulgation of the precautionary principle. It was a development of something originally called the Vorsorgeprinzip, or foresight principle, and was picked up as a rationale for interventionism.

Since people could never judge for themselves what risks were attached to certain activities, someone would have to do it for them, namely the state. The precautionary principle is a gigantic paternalistic arm around humanity to keep any risk at bay.

In the early part of the century this became central to EU policy making, insinuated into every aspect of regulation, legislation and research. Protecting the public was the justification. Suffocating innovation and common sense was the outcome. It fed into the British public consciousness with the phrase “health and safety gone mad”.

But the implications went far beyond banning conkers in the school playground. Essentially, the precautionary principle is an element of what we would once have called risk management but without the risk, which must be almost entirely removed. The pandemic lockdowns were partly governed by this principle and by another concept called the “reasonable worst case scenario”.

Put the two together with statistical models predicting hundreds of thousands of deaths and politicians are not going to do anything else other than shut down the country. They do not believe people are capable of understanding, let alone managing, risk and in view of the public response to the lockdowns they may be right.

However, while all recent UK governments have subscribed to the precautionary principle they have tended to do so with greater pragmatism than our continental neighbours, reflecting different philosophical heritages, ours Burkean, theirs owing more to Rousseau.

Fortunately, when it comes to the vaccine, pragmatism has won out in Britain with hardly anyone calling for the programme to be halted, though the EU attitude threatens to undermine confidence in the vaccine.

Had the Government followed the precautionary principle slavishly it would not have changed the period between the two jabs from three to 12 weeks to allow for more people to be vaccinated. Yet that decision has been vindicated by real-world data showing that protection is high from the first jab and dramatically reduces fatalities and hospitalisations. As adherents to the precautionary principle we would also be suspending the AstraZeneca programme because of the blood clotting fears associated with it. But we’re not, or at least I hope we’re not.

Elsewhere, in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and a dozen other countries, pragmatic risk management – or even rational thought – seems to have been entirely suppressed by a commitment to the precautionary principle which was embedded in the governance of the EU by the Amsterdam Treaty. Or maybe it is political as more recipients of the Pfizer vaccine have reported blood clotting so why has it not been banned?

Despite the World Health Organisation, the European Medicines Agency and scientists pointing out that the risk from Covid is greater than the risk from thrombosis, their policy makers are incapable of reaching the obvious conclusion.

Since the dawn of time people have had to consider the consequences of taking difficult decisions, from following a mammoth across a swamp to driving along a motorway. There are always risks and assessing them is a matter not only of experience but of circumstance. To err on the side of excessive caution in a pandemic when it comes to using a vaccine known to be safe for the great majority is madness.

No-one suggests it should not have been put through all its regulatory processes. Had thalidomide been as rigorously tested here as it was in the US the birth defects disaster of the early 1960s would not have happened. But the Oxford vaccine was passed for use only after a strict assessment by independent regulators and more than 17 million doses have been administered with hardly any serious ill effects. The 37 cases of blood clotting in people who have received the jab are fewer than would normally be expected.

If we had applied the precautionary principle to mobile phones, as some campaigners wanted, we would still be using the dial up telephone. There were suggestions years ago that heavy use of the phones caused brain tumours and that the masts were responsible for all sorts of ailments. In 2000, the Stewart report on mobile phone safety advocated a precautionary approach, stating that “before accepting a new development we should have positive evidence that any risks from it are acceptably low”.

This suggested that any amount of unknown risk must be regulated away. Had that applied in the 19th century we would have had no trains. Ask William Huskisson, the first railway fatality.

While we have our own home-grown precautionists, risk aversion in Brussels is far greater than it is here. When we were members the battles between the UK and the Commission were more often than not over directives that we considered restrictive and unnecessary but which Eurocrats justified by reference to the precautionary principle. Indeed, it could be said that by repeatedly offending against this country’s innate good sense, it led directly to Brexit.

2.  Mirabile Dictu: global capital is leaving Europe and coming to Britain. The eye-wateringly large monetary outflows from the eurozone may accelerate into outright flight: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The Telegraph

Ursula von der Leyen has invoked the nuclear option of the Lisbon Treaty. By threatening to activate emergency powers under Article 122 she has told the world that Europe is no longer a safe place for private capital or inward investment.
The clause allows Brussels to seize factories, take direct control over the production process, and redirect vaccine flows. It enables war-time occupation of companies.

A regime that behaves like this is liable to impose capital controls without compunction, or block energy flows through the interconnectors, as has been threatened three times already (I keep count). And as we have seen, anything can be politicised, even random stochastic blood clots. Will global pharma ever build a plant again on EU territory after this episode?

“We want to see reciprocity and proportionality in exports,” said Mrs Von der Leyen. Delicious. The EU is currently refusing to reciprocate temporary UK waivers to smooth post-Brexit trade flows or to reciprocate on bare-bond equivalence in financial services.

If these daily antics from Brussels and Berlin continue, the eye-wateringly large capital outflows from the eurozone that have already been occurring may accelerate into something closer to outright capital flight.

HSBC says outflows reached half a trillion euros in the fourth quarter, an annualised pace of 20pc of GDP. It quickened to €250bn (£214bn) in the single month of December. The scale is breathtaking. It happened before the vaccine debacle condemned Europe to an extra quarter of economic recession and social despair.

“Relative to GDP, these outflows were the largest we have seen going back 20 years,” said Paul Mackel, the banks’ currency chief. Hedging contracts have prevented this setting off a disorderly slide in the euro but that does not change the fundamental picture.

You can interpret these outflows in many ways but one thing they are not is a vote of confidence in eurozone growth and recovery, or indeed the political management of the EU. The exodus is likely to gather pace this quarter as American reflation and the vast funding needs of the Biden treasury suck capital out of the global system.

But the accelerant is what the German vice-chancellor calls the vaccine “sh-- show”, made more destructive by the failure of every major EU state to heed the lesson from Britain and to let the B117 variant run rampant. The waning epidemic from the old variant and the rising epidemic from the new variant created an illusory stability in case numbers. Epidemiologists issued warnings. Politicians again refused to listen.

Emmanuel Macron is close to admitting that his political gamble has failed and that greater Paris will have to be shut down within days. He took a “Jupiterian” decision to keep France open, overruling his scientists, his health minister and his premier. He now owns a disaster. What baffles me is that an astute technocrat – au fait with numbers, curves and lag effects – could misread the data so badly.

The consequences of a mushrooming third wave in an unvaccinated population, with no herd immunity until September, is to protract what Keynes called the “long dragging conditions of semi-slump” for many more months, inflicting such damage that the recovery may be sickly even when it finally comes.

While the US is spending $2.8 trillion (£2 trillion) or 13pc of GDP in fast fiscal relief – two thirds this year – the EU has nothing of the kind. The Recovery Fund is for rebuilding later. “It is a medium-term investment plan. It doesn’t do much in the short term,” said Lorenzo Codogno from LC Macro Advisors.

The Recovery Fund will in theory dish out €87bn later this year in grants and loans (less relevant) if recipients meet all conditions. That is just 0.7pc of GDP. It is why the European Central Bank’s Isabel Schnabel has warned that the fund may be “insufficient”, opening a political Pandora’s box.

There is fiscal stimulus worth 2pc of GDP at a national level but the Atlantic gap is huge. Washington is “going big” even though the US output gap will be closed by June, so big that the OECD now thinks America will regain its pre-pandemic trajectory by next year – along with China in this elite club.

Yet Europe is “going small” even though the output gap in the eurozone is still a dire 8pc of GDP, reaching 10pc in Italy and Spain (IIF data). It is Atlantic decoupling like never before in modern times.

The story that has yet to gain media traction is cross-Channel decoupling. It is no longer implausible to imagine Britain leaving Europe far behind over the course of 2021, a remarkable thought given the counter-story in the British lay press is that post-Brexit trade has been a calamity.

Markets have shrugged off the 41pc collapse in exports to the EU in January, deeming it transient noise. One cannot infer much from trade flows that month – except that firms were not ready, and the EU aims to be bloody minded. Companies had stockpiled before and were holding back afterwards in case of border chaos. Only if these patterns continue into March will there be serious grounds for alarm.

For now sterling is in rude good health. The pound has hit a one-year high of €1.17 against the euro this week and is nearing the top end of its post-referendum trading range. Bank of America says the pound is undergoing a “cyclical rehabilitation”. Fears that inward investment would dry up have proved unfounded. “There are clear signs of pick-up in flows into UK plc,” it said.

There has been steady buying of sterling during New York opening hours by US funds. Japan’s giant life insurers and pension funds are scooping up gilts. RBC Capital says they purchased a net $5.5bn of UK bonds in January alone, the highest in five years.

BNY Mellon, the world’s top custodian bank with $25 trillion under watch, says its iFlow data is detecting a marked shift into UK assets by global fund managers. “It is not just a one-off story after the Brexit deal. It has been going on since last year. Funds are rotating back into UK equities,” said Geoffrey Yu, the bank’s Europe strategist.

The UK will reopen and return to growth months before the eurozone. The measurement distortion that overstated the UK’s economic contraction by roughly 2pc of GDP last year will flatter growth this year with a mirror-image distortion on the way back up.

All the stars are aligning for what the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane calls a “coiled spring” recovery. That does not in itself validate Brexit but the spectacle of cross-Channel decoupling will profoundly change the global discourse on Brexit. The real test comes later during the hard grind of the 2020s. But my hunch is that the first year of independence will be much better than almost anybody expected.

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 

Yesterday morning, I wrote of the rising number of cases and deaths in Germany, Italy and, especially, France. By the evening another lockdown had been announced in each of these.

The AZ vaccine: The German claim is that the blood clots attributed to it are of a new type. Hence the suspensions there and elsewhere. Critics say that, even if there is evidence that the attribution to the vaccine is accurate, more deaths will be caused than saved by the application of the (originally French) precautionary principle that dominates thinking in the (overly bureaucratic) EU. There's no shortage of experts - even in Berlin and Brussels - who decry this development, on the basis that there's no evidence that the AZ causes the blood clots and that, even if it does, it's no more dangerous than the other vaccines. Or than life itself. Tomorrow's verdict of EMA is now awaited, at least in those countries which have gone for 'death-engendering' suspension.

The big questions now, include:-

- Even if the EMA supports a return to use of the AZ vaccine, will the spooked public have it?  

- If not, will the relevant EU countries stop talking of suing AZ for breach of contract for a shortage in deliveries?,

- What will these countries do with the stockpile of the vaccine they already have? And:

- Will they return them to AZ, or gift them to 3rd world countries?

Not to mention: Who, if anyone, will be held responsible for the increase in deaths?

As I said yesterday, not a good time to be political leader. In the EU at least.

Cosas de España  y Galiza  

Madrid is reported to be overrun with French and, to a lesser extent, German visitors who aren't allowed to party back home and are taking advantage of the refusal of the Madrid region Presidenta to apply the 'perimetral lockdown' agreed to by all other 16 regions. So  . . .  how many Covid-bearing visitors will be get from the capital? Or from France and Germany? All flights from these countries are said to be fully booked. Effing madness.

At the moment, nothing seems to have been reported about a ban on inter-municipality travel this coming holiday weekend and during Semana Santa. I'm planning a trip with friends to Pontedeume but, understandably, we're reluctant to pay for reservations anywhere.

Maria's Tsunami: Day 44 

The UK

Boris Johnson's government has issued a 114 page Integrated Review of the UK's present and future. For Richard North, it's page after page of vainglorious blather - the very essence of extruded verbal material, as meaningless words spill over the paper to describe a world which exists only in the febrile mind of a man who has completely lost touch with reality. It's all based, says RN, on the vision of a congenital liar with the management skills of a deranged rhinoceros and the technical abilities of a moribund slug. We're not in trouble. We're doomed.  He might well be right but, with some help from the hapless EU, the vaccine success has meanwhile given the prime minister such a 'Boris Bounce' that, despite all the egregious errors of the last 12 months, his party is still ahead of the opposition Labour in the latest polls. So . . . Are most of the people being fooled most of the time?

The EU

Well, Ambrose Evans Pritchard didn't take long to answer my question yesterday of whether the precautionary principle would be the death of the EU. See the 1st article below, headed: The French precautionary principle is literally killing Europe.

It's well known that the founders of the EU felt that crises would give opportunities to take moves towards 'ever-closer union' that the public wouldn't accept in normal times. It might well be that the Covid crisis will not only prove to be an exception but will actually be 'a bridge too far'. With very serious consequences for The Project. Meanwhile, the headlines of the 2nd article below are: EU leaders turn on each other in AstraZeneca Covid vaccine row. European Commission accuses member states of stockpiling vaccines as bloc faces third virus wave. 

En passant, it's astonishing to read that, back in 1911, Germany and France came to the edge of war over which of them would 'own' Morocco, with Spain playing a subordinate role. Even more surprising to read the British Foreign Secretary's comment: There is no conceivable danger of Britain being dragged into a European war, unless there is some Power, or group of Powers which has the ambition of achieving the Napoleonic policy and forcing each [of the others] into the orbit of the strongest Power. Guess which power that turned out to be. For the first time round.

Germany

Here's the (very) caustic view of one German on what's happened in his fatherland over the last decade or so. Ironically, it opens with a line that could well apply to Johnson's UK government: There is an unwritten rule in politics: If you are incompetent, at least you should not be corrupt. Echoing AEP, the author claims that: Germany is falling farther and farther behind with respect to innovation. This could soon become conventional wisdom . . .

The USA

Here's an article on the role the US could play in the European vaccine imbroglio, with some harsh words for continental technocrats who spout the kind of anti-vaxx nonsense that you’d block your aunt on Facebook for.

The Way of the World 

At last, a sensible - if obvious - suggestion: Boys should be taught how to respect women and girls in the streets as part of their sex and relationship education at school. Just one of the ways in which better eduction would contribute to the solution of societal  problems.

Finally  . . . 

In some languages - eg Farsi and Arabic, I think - the P and the F sounds are very hard to distinguish. So telephone becomes telepon. In German, they seem to avoid this by combining the 2 letters, as in Pfalz, Pfälzer, and Pfälzisch - 'words referring to Palatinate region'. 

Talking of languages . . . A while back, I cited the case of the name above a Thai hairdresser's salon that had been mis-translated from English via Google Translate to say something like: There's no one here at the moment. Try later. Now comes this wonderful example from Wales:- 

Only a few of you, at best, will know that the Welsh of this sign - provided by an email from the translator - says: I am currently out of the office. Please submit any work to the translation team. At least, that's what I'm told. For all I know it might not.

THE ARTICLES

The French precautionary principle is literally killing Europe: European leaders have destroyed confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine, meaning even more people will die: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The Telegraph

If European countries are going to suspend the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine every time there is a random stochastic death, it would be better if they handed their stocks immediately to Africa and poorer regions of Asia.[And I said this to local friends this morning.  . . .]

The vaccine saga has degenerated into the most abject spectacle of European misgovernment in my working lifetime – although for sheer ineptitude it is hard to beat the absence of a lender-of-last-resort during the eurozone debt crisis.

It is what happens when you push the precautionary principle to the point of absurdity. Once zero-risk thinking becomes reflexive – and institutionalised in law – it leads you into a cul-de-sac of systemic self-harm.

We have extensive epidemiological data in the UK’s weekly “yellow card” summary of vaccines. As of February 28, there had been 227 deaths shortly after the Pfizer-BioNTech jab and 275 after the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab. It is a statistical miracle that there had not been more.

AstraZeneca reported 15 cases of deep vein thrombosis and 22 cases of pulmonary embolism following the jab out of 17m doses in the UK and Europe. “This is much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size and is similar across other licensed Covid-19 vaccines,” it said. One might (frivolously) infer that the jab protects against these events. 

Belgium’s health council has refused to join the stampede as Germany, France, and Italy are swept along by mood, all ignoring the European Medicines Agency. The Belgians stated that blood clotting cases occur “in the same order of frequency as with the Pfizer vaccine”. Quite. 

What is absolutely certain is that significant numbers of Europeans will die of Covid because time is imperative and they do not have an alternative at hand. These will no longer be random stochastic deaths. People will die as a direct result of the action of their regulators and governments. Others will suffer organ damage and the well-known pathologies of long-Covid.  

Europe’s leaders have by now irreversibly destroyed confidence in the vaccine. Yet France is currently relying on AstraZeneca for over 50pc of its jabs. Italy was counting on it to cover 38pc over the next two weeks. Both countries face a rising third wave that is escaping control.

The feckless handling of AstraZeneca’s vaccine has fed alarmism about vaccinations in general and played to the anti-vaxxers. This will kill even larger numbers. Europe’s leaders should not be surprised if people start to turn against the Pfizer-BioNTech jab since it too – obviously – can be impugned in the same way by random stochastic cases.

The jab suspension makes it even more likely that France’s Emmanuel Macron will lose the political gamble of his presidency. He defied scientific advice in January and refused to impose another lockdown, arguing that every week of delay was a week gained for society and economic recovery.

It was also a week gained for the British, South African, and Brazilian variants. Greater Paris has reached saturation of critical care beds. Patients are being shipped out to the regions. There will soon be Covid TGV trains to Bordeaux. 

This episode of vaccine sabotage more or less guarantees that large parts of Europe will have to follow Italy into partial or full lockdowns through Easter, and probably as far out as early summer. The second tourist season slips away. One can try to calculate the exorbitant economics costs of delayed reopening but the effect is non-linear. There comes a point when the structural damage goes so deep that it never recovers.

I argued last December that Europe’s vaccine travails – already implicit then – amounted to a black swan event for the EU project and risked morphing into a dangerous political crisis. But I never expected to see a collective lurch into scientific obscurantism. 

Where did it all go wrong? The precautionary principle was incorporated into EU jurisprudence with the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 and has become over time the defining ideological feature of an ageing, defensive, status quo society that seems to be afraid of everything.

As it happens, 1997 also marks the moment when Europe began to decouple from the US and go into economic decline, although monetary union also dates from that time and has played a role. It is an astonishing thought that per capita income in the eurozone had actually slipped to $39,928 even before the pandemic hit, while in America it had kept rising to $62,795, according to World Bank data. The post-Covid gap will be even wider.

The precautionary principle has been married with another EU deformity: its slow, rigid, legalistic ethos, and its 190,000 pages of near-irreversible Acquis. The two together have reinforced each other in a paralysing fashion. This regime is perfect for vested interests that know how to play the Brussels game and manipulate the regulatory committees. The zero-risk code can be mobilised to shut out rivals and new technologies that pose a commercial threat.

Is it a coincidence that the EU has become a technology spectator over the last quarter century, while America and China vie for supremacy? Might the precautionary principle be the reason why not a single one of the world’s 20 most valuable tech companies is European, and why the region lags again in artificial intelligence?

It is true that BioNTech’s ground-breaking mRNA vaccine was made in Germany, but its founders are Turkish immigrants and most of the clinical trials took place in the US, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa. It is famously difficult to conduct clinical trials in the EU. 

It is also true that the precautionary principle has made inroads into Anglo-Saxon societies. But only up to a point. The US, the UK, and Canada still cleave towards the ‘innovation principle’, a preference for trial-and-error and a willingness to risk failure along the way — “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. 

You could argue that this philosophy has its roots in English Common Law, a legal culture that loosely permits behaviour unless explicitly forbidden by statute. It is fundamentally different from Napoleonic law that prohibits behaviour unless explicitly authorised – “guilty until proven innocent”. Legal scholars will object to this contrasting schema but it contains a nugget of truth.

The innovation philosophy also has roots in the Baconian Method: the scientific interrogation of facts: the bottom-up empiricism of Francis Bacon and his followers, from Newton through to the Scottish Enlightenment, and beyond. There are great Baconians in Continental Europe of course, but they are not dominant. 

What is dominant is the top-down Cartesian Method instilled into the French civil service, and through them into the EU’s machinery. It has fused with the zero-risk totemism of modern Germans to produce a precautionary monster, and a long list of destructive policies. The consequence of banning GMO crops – that is to say, refusing to use technology to tweak genes for better yields – is that you end up using more chemicals instead. Cui bono?

When Germany began to shut down its nuclear plants in a fit of hysteria after Fukushima, heavy industry turned to coal instead, pushing up CO2 emissions and killing measurable numbers of people with toxic particulates.

The vaccine saga has driven home the point that the British people really are different animals from Continental Europeans, a cultural distinction that dates back at least 700 years and one that is amply explored by Cambridge anthropologist Alan MacFarlane in The Origins of English Individualism. This island Sonderweg is not a myth.

Vaccine take-up has been extraordinary. People have been rational and have shown trust in scientific authority, other than a few pockets contaminated by social media. Sang-froid has prevailed. Europe’s alarmism seems completely foreign at this juncture.

The issue is not so much that the UK has had a good vaccine rollout while the EU has stumbled. It is the mental chasm that matters. We can see more clearly than ever that Baconians cannot share a close political, legislative, and judicial union – tantamount to a unitary state – with anti-Baconians in thrall to an extreme form of the precautionary principle. The relationship is unworkable. 

Europeans have to ask themselves whether they want to end up in a permanent defensive crouch while the rest of the world moves on. One thing is sure: a zero-risk society is finished as a civilisational force. It is dead.

2. EU leaders turn on each other in AstraZeneca Covid vaccine row. European Commission accuses member states of stockpiling vaccines as bloc faces third virus wave.  Justin Huggler. The Telegraph

Brussels blamed EU governments for growing vaccine chaos on Tuesday night as it accused them of stockpiling jabs despite a looming third Covid wave. 

The European Commission's rare rebuke of member states came after 17 countries including Germany, France, Italy and Spain halted the rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine until the EU's medicines regulator completes an investigation. 

On Tuesday, however, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said there was "no indication" that the suspended AstraZeneca vaccine caused fatal blood clots. It will give the result of its investigation on Thursday.

While new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the success of the UK's vaccination programme – with three quarters of over-80s and one in three overall now testing positive for antibodies against Covid – the French prime minister and Germany's national disease centre warned of a third wave.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, urged European countries to follow the lead of Britain's "world class regulator" and continue using the jab, adding that its "real world impact" had been demonstrated in the 11 million British people who had received it.

In what will be seen as a thinly-veiled swipe at countries that have suspended AstraZeneca vaccinations, Mr Hancock added: "We know not only is it safe, it's actually saving lives here right now."

Stella Kyriakides, the European health commissioner, said on Tuesday that vaccination was "more than ever key" and urged EU member states to use every vaccine they had rather than stockpiling them. 

"Even with the immense and regrettable challenges around production capacity and deliveries, there are reports of unused reservoirs of vaccines across the European Union," she said after a meeting of EU health ministers.

"We currently see the proportions of available vaccine doses distributed range from 50 to 100 percent across member states."

There was fury in Berlin at the decision to suspend the AstraZeneca jab, which now threatens to engulf Angela Merkel's government in a political crisis. Her closest ally, the Bavarian regional leader Markus Söder, broke ranks with the chancellor and told German television he was ready to take the vaccine "immediately". 

Her main coalition partners condemned the decision as a "U-turn" that suggested the government has "no clear policy". Opposition parties called on the health minister to resign, demanded an inquiry and accused Mrs Merkel of endangering lives. 

France and Italy signalled that they were ready to lift their ban on AstraZeneca as soon as the EMA gave the green light on Thursday, which would heap further pressure on Mrs Merkel. Mario Draghi, the new Italian prime minister, spoke to Emmanuel Macron, the French president, on Tuesday, and they agreed to abide by the EMA decision.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, who has faced fierce criticism from national governments over the glacial pace of the EU rollout, would "of course" accept the AstraZeneca jab, her spokesman said. 

EU member states have received 62.2 million vaccines under the joint procurement scheme run by Brussels and administered 77 per cent of those – about 48 million shots. About 14.8 million AstraZeneca vaccines have been delivered to EU countries, with less than half, 7.3 million, being used.

The figures include non-EU members Norway and Iceland, which have also suspended the vaccine. 

Sweden, Cyprus, Slovenia and Portugal became the latest EU countries to pause the use of the jab on Tuesday despite the EMA and the World Health Organisation saying it was safe and the EU lagging far behind Britain in its vaccination programme. 

Emer Cooke, the executive director of the EMA, said: "We are still firmly convinced that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing Covid-19, with its associated risk of hospitalisation, outweighs the risk of the side effects."

Some 30 cases of blood clots among almost five million people vaccinated had been reported to the EMA by March 10, but additional cases had been reported over the weekend, Ms Cooke said. She said the EMA-approved Pfizer and Moderna vaccines appeared to be linked to similar numbers of blood clots around the world as the AstraZeneca one. 

Ms Cooke stressed that the EMA would resist any pressure from powerful governments and would be guided by "science and independence", and admitted the regulator was "worried" about the effect on trust in vaccines after the latest twist in AstraZeneca's  tortured relationship with the EU. 

Scientists and politicians in Britain have defended the AstraZeneca vaccine's record. Professor Dame Clare Gerada, one of the UK's leading doctors and a former president of the Royal College of GPs, accused Europe's leaders of "weaponising" fears over the jab and said they should "get a grip".

Boris Johnson would be "perfectly happy" to have the AstraZeneca jab, his spokesman said, adding that British regulators had been clear the vaccine was safe and effective. 

Asked what his message to EU countries would be, Mr Hancock told reporters: "What I would say is that this Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and we should listen to the regulators and the British regulator, the world-class regulator, the World Health Organisation and the European Medicines Agency. "They've all looked at the data. Over 11 million people have been vaccinated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, and we can see in the real world its impact. We can see that it is not only safe but saving lives." 

The Duchess of Cornwall also extolled the virtues of the jab on Tuesday, calling it "very good news" as she visited a vaccination centre at the Finsbury Park Mosque. She said she had received the AstraZeneca vaccine and agreed that "you take what you are given" as she chatted with GP Dr John McGrath. 

Germany's national disease centre warned that the country is now in a third wave that could see it break previous records by Easter, and there were also warnings that suspending the vaccine for just one week could cost the economy £1.7 billion.

In France, Jean Castex, the prime minister, said new Covid variants meant the country was "in a sort of third wave".

Frank Ulrich Montgomery, the German head of the World Medical Association, said: "The bottom line, sadly, is that this good and effective vaccine is not being accepted by the public in many countries because of the row and the suspension."

British-Swedish company AstraZeneca has been at loggerheads with the EU over supply shortfalls since January. On Saturday, the company told the Commission there would be a 60 million dose shortfall in its planned deliveries to the bloc by the end of March. 

France's industry minister, Agnes Pannier-Runacher, said AstraZeneca's CEO was in the "hot seat" over the delivery delays, adding that the EMA investigation was necessary to stop "mistrust" in the vaccine.

But Nicola Magrini, the director-general of Italy's medicines agency, said the choice to suspend was "a political one".  "We got to the point of a suspension because several European countries, including Germany and France, preferred to interrupt vaccinations," he told La Repubblica. 

Belgium and Poland, which still use AstraZeneca, criticised the suspensions. "We are never going to get Europe vaccinated like this. Then we're going to get a third, fourth, fifth wave," said Frank Vandenbroucke, the Belgian health minister.

Michal Dworczyk, the Polish prime minister's chief of staff, said: "It is possible that we are dealing with a planned disinformation campaign and a brutal fight of medical companies."

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 AZ vaccine: We await the critical views of the EMA on Thursday. Meanwhile, medical opinions differ widely on the significance of the (very low) number of cerebral blood clot cases. One does wonder how much is down to science and how much is down to politics. 

A couple of pertinent comments:-

- There is an irony here. The evidence suggests it is unlikely clots are a side effect of the vaccine, and that even if they are it will be through very rare conditions. But they are a known side effect of the disease the vaccine seeks to prevent: Covid.

- The 'precautionary principle' is meant to denote an abundance of caution - an excess of safety, even at cost of inconvenience. But that presumes that doing nothing is safe. In a pandemic, it is anything but.

For me, the main facts are:-

1. Cases and deaths are reducing in the UK, while they're rising in Germany, Italy and, especially, France.

2. The delay my first jab has now been extended. It'll be several months before I can get the second jab and then  travel to the UK to see my about-to-be-born 4th grandchild.

France: Politics again, ahead of presidential elections?? Leading doctors accused President Macron of costing lives by ignoring their calls for a new national lockdown. Epidemiologists said delaying a 3rd lockdown would result in “catastrophe” and poured scorn on claims that Macron has become a self-taught specialist in infectious disease.The leader of the Paris regional council has said the capital and its suburbs are in the middle of a “violent 3rd wave that is going to take lives”. 

It's not a great time to be a political leader but, in contrast, bureaucrats and police forces are having a high old time.

Cosas de España   

Lenox Napier is convinced we're seeing a decline in the fortunes of the ‘centrist’ Ciudadanos party almost as rapid as that of its growth a few years ago. Maybe it should be re-named the Montaña Rusa party. It's been suggested by the party's leader that the PP is using its infamous black-money piggybank to bribe Ciudadanos MPs to turn their coats. Which everyone will naturally regard as plausible.

Wikipedia has pages in many languages, of course, but I must confess to surprise in finding it has not only Galician but also Asturian versions, eg on rollercoasters. Asturiano. Galego. I'm not sure there's much difference.

Cousas de Galiza  

We wait to see whether there'll be new relaxations announced today, specifically as regards the hours bars and restaurants can open. And whether an inter-barrio travel ban will return for Semana Santa at least.

Last Sunday, I sat with friends under a hot sun in my garden, tomando unas copas. When they commented on the unseasonal warmth, I joked that next week we could be there freezing our proverbials off. Sadly, I was right. For this was yesterday's warning: El anticiclón que congelará Galicia: Las temperaturas mínimas irán descendiendo de manera progresiva hasta alcanzar valores negativos a finales de semana. So, from above 20 to below zero. I blame AGW.

Maria's Tsunami: Day 43

The EU

Will the precautionary principle - enshrined in French and EU law - doom the EU over time? No risks equals no advances, it might be said. Effectively, sclerosis. Of course, some would argue this is already happening. Hence the 'sluggishness' of the EU in various fields. AI and electric vehicles, for example.

The UK and Brexit 

Well, at least one committed and right-wing Brexiteer - Richard North - would wholeheartedly agree with the comment of the left-wing columnist, Polly Toynbee, that the Brexit deal was 'astonishingly bad'.  

Spanish/English

A Spanish friend sent me a message containing the word agusto. I finally figured out this wasn't a typo for agosto but for a gusto. But this was not before Google had translated as 'satisfaced'. I can't find this in any dictionary. But Google's own Ngram has it as very much a 19th century word.

English

A Guardian columnist wrote yesterday of suicidal 'ideations'. Another rather uncommon word, I think. Or until rather recently, it seems. A fashionable alternative for 'thoughts'?

Finally  . . . 

A funnier than usual spam email: African priest helps white man gain 6 inches[15cm]. In height?

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'

My thanks to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for a couple of today's items. 

Cosas de España  

As anyone who lives here knows . .  Workers in Spain put in more hours than the European average but it's not among the most productive countries. One possible solution, it says here, is a 4-day working week. Allegedly, the government has agreed to launch a modest pilot project for companies interested in the idea. I await the results with interest.

If this is a success and 4 days become the norm here, it'll mean a change in the motto that The weekend begins on Thursday. Which won't go down well with all residents in fiesta centres such as Pontevedra's old quarter. For what it's worth, my view is that the government would be better advised fulfilling its promise to  do something about the ridiculous Spanish horario, which means people getting home as late as 10 at night.

Brexit, says Mark Stücklin here, has hit the cheaper end of the property market. Down South, at least. Bringing great opportunities for younger Brits who can work on line from anywhere.

Madrid was not the first capital of Spain. Before it came Burgos, Valladolid,  Córdoba, Cangas de Onís, Barcelona, Toledo, Salamanca, Valencia, Sevilla and Cádiz. But not necessarily in that order. Fotos here.

Cosas de Galiza  

Maria's Tsunami:  Day 42

The UK

In contrast with the range of reactions to it, I've nil interest in watching That Interview: As regards the former, here's one British columnist's reaction: Meghan’s fake interview has real-world effects. The Sussexes’ claims have undermined the monarchy and done lasting damage to the Commonwealth. See the full article below.

The Way of the World 

Assaulting anyone, verbally or physically, is wrong. We also know it is disgraceful that many women and young girls suffer harassment, stalking, groping, threat and insult in public places, and sometimes at home. We all shake our heads. Yet meanwhile a whole industry of commercial sexual fantasy profits from depicting the abuse and murder of women. I do not just mean hard porn. . . .  For now I mean something “softer”, peddled by respectable institutions and award winners. When a terrible crime makes us discuss street safety, CCTV, boys’ education, policing and prosecution, this anguished conversation rarely includes or questions the entertainment industry. Night after night on our screens imaginary violence against women is monetised and praised. Full article here.

Identity politics is largely performative. It isn’t primarily about standing up for other people. It’s about broadcasting your own compassion. You can guess what's prompted this observation from another British columnist

Finally  . . .  

Something on the fine city of  Liverpool.

THE ARTICLE  

Meghan’s fake interview has real-world effects. The Sussexes’ claims have undermined the monarchy and done lasting damage to the Commonwealth: Tim Stanley The Telegraph

Two headlines appeared on the BBC News website on the same day. At the top: “Harry and Meghan rattle monarchy’s gilded cage”. At the bottom: “The kidnapped woman who defied Boko Haram”. Well, that puts the Sussexes' problems in perspective, doesn’t it? Yet across Africa, one reads, the Duchess’s story has revived memories of colonial racism, tarnishing the UK’s reputation, and has even lent weight to the campaign in some countries to drop the Queen as head of state.

The only nation that seems to think a lot of nonsense was spoken is Britain. In the wake of an interview that Joe Biden’s administration called courageous, British popular opinion of Harry and Meghan fell to an all-time low, and the American format had a lot to do with it. Oprah Winfrey is not our idea of an interviewer. She flattered, fawned and displayed utter credulity. Imagine if it had been her, not Emily Maitlis, who interviewed Prince Andrew over the Jeffrey Epstein allegations. “You were in a Pizza Express that day? Oh my God, you MUST be innocent! Tell me, in all honesty, though...did you have the dough balls?”

This wasn’t an interview, it was a commercial for a brand called Sussex, a pair of eco-friendly aristo-dolls that, if you pull the string, tell their truth – which isn’t the truth, because no one can entirely know that, but truth as they perceive it. “Life is about storytelling,” explained Meghan, “about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we’re told, what we buy into.” Meghan is a postmodernist. Just as Jean Baudrillard said the Gulf War never happened, but was choreographed by the US media, so the Royal narrative she was forced to live was fake, her public happiness was fake and, following that logic, this interview might involve an element of performance, too.

People have challenged her claims, alleging contradictions and improbabilities, but one of the malign effects of wokeness is that you have got to be very careful about pointing this out. Why? Because wokery insists on treating a subjective view as objective truth, or even as superior, because it’s based upon “lived experience”. To contradict that personal perspective is perceived as cruel, elitist and, in Meghan’s case, potentially racist, so it’s best to wait a few weeks to a year before applying a fact check. In the meantime, affect sympathy. People would rather you lied to their face than tell them what they don’t want to hear.

The result is profoundly dishonest, for I have never known an event over which there is such a gulf between the official reception, as endorsed by the media and politics, and the reaction of average citizens, who are wisely keeping it to themselves. Into that vacuum of silence steps not the voice of reason but bullies and showmen – like Piers Morgan, who said some brash stuff about Meghan’s honesty and, after an unseemly row on Good Morning Britain, felt obliged to resign from his job. “If you’d like to show your support for me,” he wrote afterwards, “please order a copy of my book.” Dear Lord, was this row fake, too? I can no longer be sure, though I despised Good Morning Britain before and still do: it embodies the cynical confusion of emotion and fact, a show made for clicks, where even the weatherman has an opinion.

So what is real in 2021? The Commonwealth, which does a lot of good in a divided world. The monarchy, which has been at its best during the pandemic, doing the boring stuff of cutting ribbons and thanking workers that, one suspects, Meghan never grew into (can you imagine her opening a supermarket in Beccles?). It contains flawed people, but that only adds to its realness, and they can adapt faster than you might think.

Prince William got the ball rolling by telling reporters, who he is trained to ignore, that his family is not racist. His wife paid her respects to the murder victim Sarah Everard, demonstrating that she is neither cold nor silenced. I’d wager Kate does her duty, day after day, no complaint, not because she is “trapped”, as Harry uncharitably put it, but because she loves her family and believes in public service.

Meghan and Harry have indeed prompted the Royal family to change: not in order to endorse their criticisms, however, but to answer them.

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.  Click here for Twenty anniversary events that confirm  Johnson’s criminal negligence  .  . . From an ever-so-slightly biased Alastair Campbell

Spain. And click here for: A Postcard from Madrid: Tapas and beer in abundance — but infection rates remain sky-high. 

Cosas de España  

HT to Lenox Napier of for this item. A government department has been responsible for paying money to the various lovers of the ex-King. Various sources affirm his lovers or liaisons could be counted in the thousands. The problem is these affairs have involved public money. A bit of a contrast with the Duke of Edinburgh, as far as we know.

Cousas de Galiza  

Maria's Tsunami: Days 40&41 

The UK

One of the more publishable efforts doing the rounds . . . 

The UK and Brexit 

Brava Brexit Blues. TBH, I have little sympathy for those who chose to live below the radar and now can’t. 

The USA

Nothing unites Americans more than the idea royals are more racist than them. See the article here.

The Way of the World 

Nice quotes:-

- What needs to be set against the huge positives brought by the internet is the loss of perspective, especially among the young.

- The ability to o keep a sense of perspective on issues of race and gender has become vanishingly rare.

Religious Nutters/Crooks Corner

Self-described “prophetess” Amanda Grace, who said last month that Trump was still president and the impeachment trial against him proved it, has now said that God let him lose the election in order to have more alone time with him. So that he'd become fully Christian. You have to laugh.

Finally  . . . A Tribute, stolen from the Sunday Telegraph:-

Murray Walker's high-pitched enthusiasm and accidental gems were part of the soundtrack of our lives - a true great. His commentary was delivered with such enthusiasm that it led to amusing slip-ups that came to be known as "Murrayisms". Here's a selection of the best:-

"There's nothing wrong with the car, except it's on fire."

"Unless I'm very much mistaken. I am very much mistaken!"

"And now excuse me while I interrupt myself!"  

"It's a sad ending, albeit a happy one, here at Montreal for today's Grand Prix."

"Two laps to go, then the action will begin. Unless this is the action, which it is."

"I'm ready to stop my startwatch." 

"Do my eyes deceive me or is Senna's car sounding a bit rough?"

"And the first five places are filled with five different cars."

"The battle is well and truly on if it wasn't on before, and it certainly was."

"The young Ralf Schumacher has been upstaged by teenager Jenson Button, who is 20."  

"The first four cars are both on the same tyres."

"I imagine that the conditions in those cars today are totally unimaginable."

"Tambay's hopes, which were absolutely nil before, are absolutely zero now."

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 

Spain: At first it was reported that the blood-clot concern wouldn’t lead to Spain suspending use of the AZ vaccine. Then it was reported that 6 of Spain’s regions had done so, as health is a devolved matter, at least to some extent. All I know for sure is that a friend in her early 50s was jabbed this morning, while those between 55 and 80 won’t be done for weeks yet.

Cosas de España  

Speed limits are going to be reduced in built-up areas, it’s reported here. Apparently according to the height of the kerb at the side of the tarmac. Which might be a criterions unique to Spain.

'Loizu Man' died about 12,000 year ago and thoughtfully left his bones where they could be found recently. Apparently - though he probably wasn’t aware of it - he was sitting on the very cusp of evolution, as a member of one of the last societies of hunter-gatherers in the Navarra Pyrénées. Moore here.

Lenox Napier takes us into his Spanish garden - and politics - here.

The UK

That Interview hasn’t done much for the popularity of H&M back in the old country. Especially in the case of M, of whom only 31% now have a positive opinion. But it's higher among younger folk, of course,  

The USA

H&M Corp is said to have a net worth of more than €100m. One can't help wondering what M would be worth now, if she hadn't married into such an awful family. And what she'll be worth in 5-10 years' time, once the deals have rolled in. A canny woman, one might say. And I'm sure she'll find the right in-laws one day.

Opinions abound this week on That Interview and its aftermath, and not just in the UK of course. Below are 3 interesting British takes. En passant, I rather doubt 'Giles Coren' is reader Perry's nom de plume . .  . 

The Way of the World 

The complexities of modern life . . . Following the murder of a young woman walking home in London around 9pm, a Scottish member of the House of Lords has suggested all men should be banned from the streets after 6pm. Questions being asked of her include:-

- Would all Muslims be banned if one blew himself up in a Scottish city?

- Would she  - as a liberal progressive - ban all men who've tranzed* via simple self-identification into women, retaining their equipment?

- Would she ban all women who've tranzed into men?

*I might have just invented this verb. Though my spellcheck disagrees.

A UK vicar has become an online sensation after a Zoom filter blunder by his wife turned him into one of the Blues Brothers during an online service.

Religious Nutters/Crooks Corner

Televangelist Robin Bullock, who said the Covid crisis could be blamed on people who voted for Hillary Clinton and that President Joe Biden doesn’t exist, now claims prophets have the power to restore Donald Trump to the presidency. To which the only reply can be: Bollox, Bullock.

Finally 

Why ships fly.

Finally, finally . . .

Some readers will have noticed that one of the quotations at the top of this blog is by Christopher Howse. Yesterday, I came  across this Private Eye reference to him, reflecting the fact he’s a Religious Affairs Correspondent:-

I believe the dog in question belongs to BoJo's prometida. Who seems to place more reliance on his promises than the rest of us.

THE ARTICLES 

1. You’ll never guess my opinion about Piers Morgan: Giles Coren. The Times

And do you know why I am not going to defend him? Because I don’t dare. I am afraid of what would happen to me if I did. Which is not to say that if I did dare, I would. Because maybe I don’t agree with him. Maybe I think that everything Meghan said to Oprah Winfrey should be believed, no matter what, because she is a black woman and I am a white man, and I have not lived her experience, so am in no position to make a judgment.

But you will never know. Because I will never tell you. Because I don’t dare. Do you think I want to lose everything, like him, and have to go back to night shifts and bar work? No, sir.

Once upon a time, I, too, was a controversialist. Indeed, initially, I did it just for fun. In my student days I sniffed the prevailing wind on Thatcher, Russia, Israel, football hooliganism, Aids, raves and Princess Di, and argued at parties the very opposite of what everyone else thought, just for thrills and giggles. Unsurprisingly, I don’t have a lot of friends left from those days, but the ones I do have understand, and love me despite everything (you should be thinking about Piers here, even when I’m not telling you to).

Later, as a journalist, I was not especially controversial because I didn’t have the confidence to be. I wrote tight, funny little pieces about nothing very important, mostly food. Then a rude, sweary email I sent to a colleague went viral, in the days before things went viral, and ended up on the front page of The Guardian. And everything changed.

Initially, I was mortified. I feared that people would take this one stupid email, written drunk in the middle of the night, to stand for my entire life’s work and I would be ruined (spookily, within months, a social media site called Twitter would be launched to monetise this very principle). But that isn’t what happened. What happened was that television and literary agents emailed me to drool, “you’re so hot right now”, and I got a six-figure book deal, two megabucks glossy magazine columns and a TV career across three channels.

I earned more in a year from one outspoken email than I had made in ten years of even-handed commentary, and the die was cast. From now on, there would be no more “six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other” stuff from me. It would all be about taking an indefensible position, such as “tax fat people directly to punish them for eating too much”, “education is a waste of time” or “kill all dogs”, and defending it to the death.

Obviously, I didn’t really hold all these positions. But I held some of them. And the game was seeing if you could tell which. Apart from anything else, being wilfully controversial was just so much more efficient, in terms of filling space and getting attention (keep thinking about Piers) than being thoughtful, clever or truly funny. I also joined Twitter, where I said outrageous things and swore a lot, quickly accruing 200,000 followers (back when that was a lot) and regularly being told that my angry tweets were my “best work”.

Then, in 2017, in the week the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I wrote a column asking where the case left me, a middle-aged narcissist compelled to interact professionally with younger women. We’d had three days of comment pieces on what a monster Weinstein was (and he is, and I said so) but I felt that my job was to give a viewpoint you hadn’t heard yet. Turns out it wasn’t. Led by a handful of furious junior Guardian hacks, Twitter went tonto. So I took legal and reputational advice, issued a fulsome apology I didn’t feel (which Piers has signally refused to do) and it went away.

Except it didn’t. Now that they had me in their sights (“they” meaning “young left-wingers excited by the opportunity for collective action” — I feel no need to apply dismissive labels), they doubled down hard. They dug up decontextualised tweets and half-sentences from ancient pieces and formulated, first, the case that I was a racist, which trended at number one on Twitter, then a homophobe, number one again, and finally, on the basis of a piece I had written in 2015 about going on holiday with my daughter, a paedophile.

I hated it. I began to weaken. I remember moaning to Piers about it a couple of years ago (he’s not a friend but he’s a solid enough bloke with time for other people he perceives as not threatening) and him saying, “Why on earth do you care? I really couldn’t give a shit what they say about me!”

God, how I envied him the not giving a shit. Look at the towering personal fiefdom this not-giving of shits had built for him! I wished I could be that strong. But I wasn’t. I gave a shit the size of China. Every time I wrote an opinion about anything, people (young, left-wing people) lined up to shout “racist!”, “sexist!”, “homophobe!”, “paedophile!”. And I just couldn’t handle it.

So I left Twitter for a year, without explanation or apology, and by the time I re-joined they had forgotten about me. It was that easy. I write more precisely now, rarely pretend to have an actual opinion and life is peaceful once again. But I have not been silenced. I have not been cancelled. Because (I hope you’re still thinking about Piers) I never really had any opinions anyway.

This week — a week full of big, massive opinions — a writer I admire, a sort-of friend, tweeted (in a tone shared by many others): “White men can’t understand that sometimes, just sometimes, their opinion is neither relevant nor required.”

But some white men can. I can. Which is why, for slightly different reasons than Piers, I haven’t got an opinion for you this week. And may never have again.    

2. Meghan and Harry blew the chance for royal renewal   Trevor Phillips. The Times

I have too much skin in the game to be neutral about the row sparked this week by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. I am a black divorcee in a mixed-race marriage. Like Harry I have fathered two mixed-race children. Their mother is herself of mixed heritage. One daughter has recently given birth to my first grandson, a gorgeous melange of genes from four different continents, whose skin colouring may not be a million shades off Archie’s.

And though I have thankfully never sunk to the despair described by the duchess, our family has spent more than two decades watching helplessly as my older daughter battled a severe eating disorder. Hours before writing these words she and I bade farewell on a familiar threshold: the specialist unit to which she admits herself periodically when the daily struggle against her demons proves just too exhausting.

Add to all this the fact that, like the Sussexes, I have spent more time on the enemy radar of British newspapers than I would have liked, and that legitimate criticism has far too often strayed into racial prejudice that should shame those — on the left and right — who wrote it.

So from whatever point of view, I watched their interview with Oprah Winfrey with a deep sense of sorrow. I think there is some truth in the Sussexes’ accusations. But it could all have been so different. They, not just the palace, bear some responsibility for the blunders and misjudgments of the past three years.

None of us can truly know what the duke and duchess experienced when they talk about the toll on their mental health. I am no professional, and the therapy-speak they use is alien to British ears. But I do know what it feels like to have to pin your teenage child to the floor of a speeding car to prevent her throwing herself out of the door. I understand what it is to hear that she may not live long enough to go to university. I have met the girls with whom she shared the hellish wards reserved for the most distressed, and learnt not to look away when she tells me that I’ll never see one of them again because she has taken her own life. So I don’t take the duchess’s words lightly, even though her Californian vagueness on the subject doesn’t help. In my experience anyone with a diagnosable mental health condition is not only willing but eager to explain precisely what they think is wrong with them.

But it is hard to imagine that any family or firm, no matter how callous, would knowingly ignore such distress, as the duchess alleges happened to her. It puzzles me that the duke, having led the young royals’ Heads Together campaign, could not draw on its resources to support his own wife. This is not scepticism on my part; it is, perhaps, hope that if any good comes from this interview, it is that we become a country in which mental and emotional difficulties that affect so many cease to be silent, forbidden territory.

By contrast, there are no positives to draw from the duchess’s insinuations of racial prejudice within the royal family. Britain now stands in the dock internationally as a breeding ground for casual racial bigotry. Brits will see some irony here. Most of the finger pointing comes from the United States, a country where young black men are frequently gunned down by white police officers; where black families on average have one tenth of the wealth of white households; and where, outside work, people of different colours seldom mix. As for our European neighbours, aside from tiny Malta, people of colour in every EU country are more likely to report racial harassment than here in Britain; rates are over twice as high in Germany, Italy and Ireland.

Yet many of the duchess’s supporters have taken her words as confirmation that Britain is an irredeemably and uniquely racist society. The Sussexes told Oprah that there had been “conversations and concern” about the colour of her unborn child’s skin among unnamed royals. Crucially, because Winfrey failed to ask, we have no idea what Harry’s response was. The duchess’s enemies will quibble about the fact that she and Harry differed in their recollections of when and how many times this took place. But I believe what she says. It is almost certain that members of the family speculated about whether the child would look more like his mother or father. Any clan in which that conversation does not take place would be a pretty heartless outfit; even the Addams family were able to lampoon the inevitable cooing over their new baby :

Gomez: “He has my father’s eyes.”

Morticia: “Gomez, take them out of his mouth.”

But as Sir Ken Olisa, a black businessman who serves as the Queen’s lord lieutenant in London observed, we do not know the context or intent of the remarks, which makes all the difference in the world. His own (white) mother-in-law fretted for days about her first grandchild’s likely skin tone: “I just don’t know what colour wool to buy” she said to her daughter. It is equally possible that what Harry experienced was some antediluvian pearl-clutching from one of the royal family’s less sophisticated members. No tribe is without its embarrassing uncles and aunts: Windsor weddings are rich in such individuals. In such a big family, it’s likely there were conversations of both kinds.

Generally speaking, if both parents are Caucasian, there’s not going to be much doubt about skin tone so the talk is of eye and hair colour. Among black families like mine, we ponder other features — quality of hair, shape of the nose, hue of skin. In mixed families, the range of possibilities can be gloriously infinite. Of course, it can feel like a very different conversation depending on who is speaking. And concern might not be for the image of the family, but for the child herself.

The parent or grandparent of a black or mixed-race child knows that no matter how talented, intelligent or spirited your offspring, he or she will face prejudice of some form or another. One of my daughters carries my dark colouring while the other could easily pass for Spanish or Italian. At various times in their lives they have been treated differently by others. Any family that fails to confront the fact that being non-white in a largely white society will influence the life chances of even the most privileged child is simply delusional.

But on the evidence presented so far, the royal family looks no more or less prejudiced than any other family in multiracial Britain. However, the same cannot be said of the royal household — the palace bureaucracy. The Prince of Wales may seem an unlikely hero of wokeism but he has had his moments. After the urban riots of 1981 and 1985, Charles decided that his charities needed a more ethnically diverse leadership. One palace adviser suggested that he should take reform a little more slowly; after all, the boards had been monopolised by white Old Etonians so perhaps he should recruit the odd Old Harrovian or Wykehamist before leaping to the product of a Tottenham comprehensive? Charles ignored the advice and went ahead anyway; I became the first black face at his board table.

That said, it should not have been a surprise to anyone that Meghan would face a sometimes hostile press, irrespective of her colour. All female additions to the royal family have had a rough time: Diana, Fergie, Sophie bear witness to that. And who would have changed places with Camilla Parker Bowles in the wake of Diana’s death? Prominent black women, from Shirley Bassey to Diane Abbott, have been targeted at least as often. Meghan is not wrong to call out racism in the British media but it was naive to expect anything else.

Could things have been different? Yes, I think so. Meghan had an admirable pair of role models for being a successful “first black”: Barack and Michelle Obama. Obama’s record in office is middling to average: cautious at home, largely invisible abroad. His limited health reforms were stymied by his lousy succession planning. But none of that mattered. His main task, as far as history is concerned, was to be a successful first black president. By his eloquence, personal dignity and intelligence he effectively neutered race as a barrier to high office in America. In fact, it is unthinkable that in future any party could offer Americans a presidential ticket without at least one person of colour on the ballot. Without Obama there would be no Kamala Harris.

By contrast, Meghan and Harry blew the chance to normalise diversity within the royal family — an epic fail in a country where we have more people of colour in high ministerial office than the whole of the European Union put together. A Conservative administration counts among its top team Priti Patel and Kwasi Kwarteng. The electorate appears utterly undisturbed that the runaway favourite to be our next prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is the son of East African Asians. Each of these people has had to deal with dreadful treatment by the media, and not just the tabloids; Priti Patel’s portrayal as a bull with a ring through her nose by The Guardian was not only more hurtful personally but, in my view, politically far more offensive than anything levelled at Meghan. The duchess lacked a canny, steadying hand to guide and protect her. As chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, a job which guaranteed trouble, my inner team was led by a black woman, Colleen Harris, a veteran of both No 10 and the royal household. Like me, Harris is of Guyanese heritage, leading Prince Charles to christen us the Guyanese mafia. In her first big role, in the Downing Street press office, a reporter inquired “So, if you don’t mind my asking, how black are you?”. She replied crisply “black enough” and put down the phone. Meghan could have done with some of that toughness; and, by the way, it was known to the palace that she was available.

Instead, Meghan has placed a bet on TV therapy. It is a poor gamble. Oprah offered the facsimile of the analyst’s couch without any of the benefits of self- examination. I cannot believe that the couple had no idea what questions would be asked. Surely their deal with the streaming service Netflix would have clauses requiring consultation on the content of such a high-stakes interview. At the very least, Netflix would have wanted to be sure that they gave away nothing that would be of subsequent value.

So what we witnessed felt more like a performance. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. This was an encounter between two accomplished actresses, one of them twice Oscar-nominated, brilliantly scripted to convey a narrative that would exalt the couple and bury the royal family. I don’t think it will work out that way. Viewers who did not come to the programme with minds already made up might have wondered why there was no mention of the duchess’s father and half-siblings, whom the Sussexes have allowed the media to present as trailer trash.

And Oprah missed what should have been the most important question of all. When Meghan met Harry, she claims she knew little about him or the royal family. Even so, two facts that most of the world knew about Harry were that he had once worn a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party and that he had called a fellow army officer “my little Paki friend”. He has apologised profusely for both transgressions. But the issue was never raised by Oprah. In a world where far too many communities are divided, the story of how these young lovers managed to get past that history could have been a true moment of openness, generosity and forgiveness. Those qualities are badly needed in a world where, partly thanks to the cesspits of social media, too much bigotry still flourishes.

Instead we were given the Disneyfication of difference. The duke and duchess have fled the poisoned palace, leaving their relatives trapped by its dark intrigues. The account we heard of the past was a black and white story of heroes and villains, of victims and persecutors. But the reality of our modern world is a struggle for understanding between the past and the present, of failed attempts at reconciliation, of trade-offs between justice and tribal self-interest.

The day that Meghan and Harry wed, I believed that they might bring to life Nelson Mandela’s injunction to “let your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears”. The handsome couple baring their souls in a Californian garden wanted us to believe that they had chosen hope. But the truth told by their actions is that their flight to the west coast is really driven by bitterness, anger and fear.

3. Oprah with Meghan and Harry: You can be a courtier or an interviewer, but not both.  Hugo Rifkind. The Times

For me the most interesting, human bit of all of this was the few short minutes we saw in the California royal chicken coop, with them all squatting in the sawdust. Did we know they had chickens? Is that why Meghan’s dress looked like it had bird poo on the shoulder? They built it for rescued battery hens. “Well, you know,” Meghan said, “I just love rescuing.” Oprah will have known that bit was gold, which is why it made the broadcast. Although she didn’t chase it up. And that, I think, was everything.

Winfrey’s comfort zone is the emotional. That works with these two, because that’s their comfort zone too. It’s a valid approach and whatever Piers Morgan says about it, a princess talking about being so miserable in her palace that she ponders suicide is not a story to be sniffed at or doubted.

What Winfrey doesn’t do is nail stuff down. Her follow-up questions are “What??” or “Wow!” or sometimes a combination of the two, delivered solely through the medium of her eyebrows. This works when you want to eke out more of the same. But it doesn’t do detail.

Some of the follow-up questions I would have liked to hear would have included, “Wait, you seriously faked your own wedding?” and “The archbishop was in your backyard?” Or perhaps something along the lines of: “Harry, although it is sad to hear that you’ve been cut off by your family financially, am I right in thinking you’re still a 36-year-old man who is worth an estimated £30 million?” I would like to have known more about Meghan’s passport being taken away, and whoever it was who said she couldn’t see her friend, and the extent to which her experience really did match that, as the impression was given, of a princess not in Kensington but in Dubai.

Why not ask Prince Harry about Prince Andrew? He’s Harry’s exact parallel a generation up, and I hear he’s been in the news a tad. Might his horrible nonsense of an adulthood not represent quite a lot of what the younger prince is running away from? Why not, indeed, swoop a bit more decisively on the allegations of racism from the royal family themselves? This isn’t just me being a prurient hack; this stuff matters. What we have is a budding constitutional crisis on the basis of Meghan telling Oprah that Harry told her about words unknown said by a person unknown at a time unknown. Important yes, but vague as anything. The whole world wants to know more. And she had the pair of them right bloody there. For ages.

Look, I’m not quite saying I’d rather have seen them interviewed by Piers Morgan. Watching this, though, I did find myself thinking of his unctuous, piss-poor interviews with Donald Trump, which were all about two men flirting and not about the audience at all. Oprah on Trump would have been a vivisection. Here she was little more than a facilitator.

You can be a courtier or an interviewer, but I do not think you can be both. Sorry. But that’s my truth.

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 

Spain: Chafing under the sluggish vaccination rollout, regional health authorities and doctors are urging the central government to widen the categories of people who can receive the AZ coronavirus vaccine. While countries like Germany, France and Italy have expanded the use of vaccine to include more elderly patients, Spain has stuck with administering it to those 55 and under. Critics say Spain’s reluctance to use it  - combined with shipment delays of all 3 vaccines authorized for use in the EU  - is threatening to leave vulnerable people exposed.  Not good news at all.

Cosas de España  

Good to read of the government's insistence it'll be banning the grant of university qualifications in ‘pseudoscience’.

Talking of the government . . . It seems it's finally heeded my regular moans of how I subsidise large families via the high fixed-cost element of my utility bills. A new statute will compel reduction of this from a ridiculous 75% to 60%. Still ridiculously high by Anglo  world standards but  a step in  the right  direction.

Cousas de Galiza

HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for for this video of Galicia almost 100 years ago.

Germany

The demise of Mrs M's CDU? Click here for analysis  of its election prospects, local and national.

The UK and the EU

All very sad . .  . A 3rd wave is sweeping across large areas of Europe and threatens to engulf many countries quicker than they can hope to vaccinate their citizens. In Italy, infections have risen by 50% in a fortnight, and there are now 300 deaths a day. In Hungary, infections have more than doubled in 14 days. In the Czech Republic, they are now so high local immunologists say the country could achieve herd immunity without the help of vaccines. “Fear has turned into anger and exhaustion,” Italy's La Repubblica has said: “We’re waiting for the vaccines like pioneers in a Western movie, surrounded by Indians, scanning the horizon and waiting for the 7th Cavalry.” This is the backdrop to the escalating war of words between Britain and the EU over vaccine exports. The UK, until recently one of the worst affected countries in the world, now has little to fear from a 3rd wave because of its successful vaccine roll-out. See the full article below, with better stats for other countries.

The British view of current spats . .  . It’s the EU that’s making trouble, not Britain. Opinions might well differ across the channel.

Finally 

I wrote an article a while ago, comparing the Irish and Spanish processes for gaining (non-British) nationality. Back then, I said the former usually took 6 months, while the latter could take more than 3 years. That was pre-Covid. I've just been told by the Irish  embassy in Madrid that - after 18 months - they've checked my application and sent it to Dublin for processing. I don't know what this will involve but have been warned that nothing will happen until Dublin moves from Level 5 to Level 3. So, a piece of string. It could be another 18 months, at least. But I guess the Spanish process, for the same reason, has also got a lot longer. Ironically, as a Brit resident here before the end of 2020, I don't really  need to change nationality to preserve my rights. But I paid upfront, so I might as well just wait.

THE ARTICLE    

Europe faces third wave as it lags behind with vaccinations: War of words between Brussels and Britain is fuelled by race against the virus: James Badcock. The Telegraph

A third wave of the coronavirus is sweeping across large areas of Europe and threatens to engulf many countries quicker than they can hope to vaccinate their citizens.

In Italy, infections have risen by 50 per cent in a fortnight, and there are now 300 deaths a day. In Hungary, infections have more than doubled in 14 days. In the Czech Republic, they are now so high local immunologists say the country could achieve herd immunity without the help of vaccines. “Fear has turned into anger and exhaustion,” Italy's influential La Repubblica newspaper said on Wednesday. “We’re waiting for the vaccines like pioneers in a Western movie, surrounded by Indians, scanning the horizon and waiting for the Seventh Cavalry.”

This is the backdrop to the escalating war of words between Britain and the European Union over vaccine exports. The UK, until recently one of the worst affected countries in the world, now has little to fear from a third wave because of its successful vaccine roll-out. But in much of the rest of Europe, where vaccination rates lag far behind, governments face a race not with Britain but with the virus itself.

Ironically, much of the recent rise in European infections has been fuelled by the new “British variant” of the virus that was first detected in Kent.

“We’ve learnt nothing,” was the weary front-page headline in Italy’s L’Espresso news magazine this week. The first European country to go into lockdown last year, Italy is facing calls for new restrictions after it crossed the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths this week. “It is clear that it is necessary to take exceptional measures,” said Vincenzo De Luca, the governor of the region of Campania. “Just as it is clear that we are in the third wave all over Italy.”

Yet the picture is far from uniform across the continent. While Italy and much of Central Europe have seen a steep rise in infections over the past two weeks, in Germany and France they have largely plateaued. 

Germany, which Angela Merkel declared was in the grip of a third wave  a week ago, has not seen a sharp rise in cases, so far at least. Infections have only risen slightly — and deaths and hospitalisations have fallen, despite the country’s low rate of vaccination.  France has been in a third wave since the start of the year but the infection rate has flattened since late January and remains steady, if high. Spain and Portugal appear to be past the third wave, with infections dropping steeply in both countries. In Spain there are at their lowest level since August last year, and authorities are trying to strike a balance between maintaining social distancing and reopening the vital tourist sector. Even in the Czech Republic, which is arguably in its fourth wave and has seen the most cases in the world per capita, infections have finally started to fall.

But vaccination rates remain poor across much of Europe, leaving the continent at the mercy of fresh waves of the virus. While the UK has already given a first jab to a third of the population, Germany, the world’s fourth biggest economy, has managed less than 7%, and France less than 6%. 

Yet despite the acrimony over vaccine exports, there is little evidence of shortages in most of Europe. On the contrary, many countries are struggling to administer what they have to their citizens. According to the latest EU figures, Germany and France have each used less than three-quarters of their vaccine stocks, while Belgium has used less than a third. That is partly down to public reluctance to take the AstraZeneca jab after European governments cast doubt on its efficacy — a recent poll found nearly a quarter of Italians said they would refuse it and demand one of the rival vaccines. But that is not the whole story. In many European countries, the vaccine roll-out appears to have been hampered as much by bureaucracy and incompetence as any controversy over AstraZeneca.

Germany has used  less than half its stocks of the AstraZeneca vaccine — but only a third of its supply of the more popular Moderna jab.  More than 3m people from the most at-risk group — over-80s and those with serious health conditions — have still not had their first jab and there are reports of people in their 90s unable to get an appointment because of overloaded telephone hotlines.

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 

Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine is to be produced in the EU after Moscow struck a deal to have it made it in Italy by a Swiss company which plans to make 10m doses this year, from July . .  . Several member states have approved or are assessing Sputnik V without waiting for the green light from the EMA, because they’re impatient with the EU's s sluggish deployment of vaccines. 

Cosas de España  

Click here for an example of post-Brexit problems for foreigners who want to work here - long faced by both Northern and Southern Americans, of course. Tasters: 1. The amount of stamping and embossing and 'apostilling' makes the 18th century look high-tech. 2. The people are sweet; the system is sour. It rather reminds me of my regular comment that - especially  when it  comes to notaries - in Spain one moves constantly between the 18th and 21st centuries. One result, of course, is that notaries are invariably very rich. A terrible job but very profitable. Spaniards simply recoil in disbelief when told they hardly exist in the Anglo world. They dominate one's official life here.

Cousas de Galiza

A while ago I posted a foto of a tramp/alcoholic/drug addict? sleeping rough near the entrance to one of our pretty mansions. There was just a mattress back then; now there's a lot more 'furniture':-

But  at least it's not where it used  to be, close to the terrace of my drinking hole:

Maria's Tsunami: Day 37: 

The UK

The government says it'll be removing the ban on Brits voting in general elections if they've lived abroad for 15 years or more. How exciting for us. Too late for the Brexit referendum, of course. But there might be another one some day.

If you want to hear a sane voice on that interview, click here for the take of the brilliant Caitlin Moran.

The EU

Jeremy Warner: Blaming AstraZeneca for the EU’s vaccine mess is a shameful travesty of the truth. By treating the company as a political football, the EU only doubles down on the damage it is doing to itself.  . . . I hesitate to join the unseemly cacophony of triumphant Brussels-bashing we see in the UK these days - itself a form of scapegoating for failings at home - but the EU really only has itself to blame for the mess it has got itself into.

The UK and the EU

A new low? A 'shocked and angry' British Foreign Secretary has categorically labelled as 'completely false' the suggestion from the European Council president that UK is guilty of 'vaccine nationalism' by imposing a ban on the export of vaccines and components. Well, either there is or there isn't; it should be susceptible to proof. Neither side is averse to lying, of course, when it suits the politics. You don't have to be Russian or Chinese.

The USA

More than 240 years after thousands of colonists fought against their rebel countrymen in the American War of Independence, the US is once again divided over the royal family. Oprah Winfrey’s interview is the new front line in America’s never-ending culture wars. The Left chooses to listen to Meghan, while the Right sides with her in-laws. More on this here, if you can bear it.

China

A Chinese airline has suspended a captain and a flight attendant [both males] after they'd violently brawled in front of 1st-class passengers - over 'lavatory protocols'.  So . . . a bog-standard fight, then. . . .

The Way of the World  

'Lightworker' is a term coined by the New Age author Michael Mirdad, to mean: ‘Someone who feels an enormous pull towards helping others. It's said to be interchangeable with 'crystal babies,' 'indigos', 'Earth angels' and 'star seeds’. All of whom are 'spiritual beings who volunteer to act as a beacon for the earth and commit to serving humanity.' So far, so very 2021. But what might surprise you is that some New Agers claim Donald Trump is one such lightworker. . . . I kid you not. 

English

A word you'll possibly never need to know . . . Escheat: 

Noun: Under English Common Law, a reversion of property to the state, or (in feudal law) to a lord, on the owner's dying without legal heirs.

Verb: To escheat: (Of land) To revert to a lord or the state by escheat. In banking . . Escheatment is the process of a financial institution handing over unclaimed property to the state. The property has thus become escheated.

Finally 

A reader kindly suggested pouring boiling water on my moth-infested rug - something I'd actually thought of doing before I went looking for relevant products. This morning I recalled I have the 1939 'Book of Hints and Wrinkles', wherein I read this advice: If moths are found  in a rug, lay a  succession of damp rags on it and iron them with a very hot iron until they're dry. This causes the steam to penetrate the carpet and destroy the moth eggs and maggots. So, that's what I did this morning. Until I realised I could just use directly on the rug a steam-iron not available to the 1939 authoress . . .

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 

There's another fine - but UK-biased - review of recent development below.

Cosas de España  

Good News: Spain ranks as one the top 10 countries  of the world for gender equality. I wonder if this is for just 2 of these or for 100+ of them.

Spanish banks are renowned for being both rapacious and inefficient. And not beyond mistakes that always seem to be in their favour. A few months ago, I realised Santander bank - without ever telling me - had started to charge me €12 a month for an account they inherited after purchasing a Galician bank for a pittance. Recently, Santander had started to bombard me with emails on how I could get free banking by selling my financial soul to them. Irritated by this, I belatedly decided last week to make an appointment to go and close the account. This is how it went:-

- I spend more than half an hour on line trying to get an appointment as a private person (un particular) and eventually accept I can only do this as a business person.

- I get a cita with a gestor called María C. M. O. for yesterday at 11.

- I go to the bank, ask for María but am told there's no one of that name working there.

- I'm asked for my ID and then passed to another person.

- I tell this person why I'm there and she goes off to talk to someone

- She comes back and takes me to a 3rd person

- I tell this person - Carlos - why I'm there and again have to produce my ID

- Carlos advises me of what's left after several months of €12 deductions plus 3 charges

- I ask what the charges are and am told: 1. February's €12, 2. 50% of the March charge, and 3. €6 for the transfer to my main bank.

- I point out that 50% of 12 is 6, not the €9 that's actually cited.

- To my not-very-great surprise, Carlos can't explain this and I decide to let it go. But I tell him I'll take the (free!) cash rather than incur the extortionate charge of €6 for a bank transfer.

12. Carlos goes to get the money and I sign a receipt and leave.

In a perfect world, one would have nothing to do with a Spanish bank but this ain't easy if you live here. Even subsidiaries of foreign banks work - in most cases - to Spanish norms and standards. I say this having been at least 30 years with my British bank, which has - in all this time - never managed to annoy me once. Other than when the voice-recognition technology didn't work well when I was in the UK and had to answer 5-10 security questions before making a transfer to one of my daughters.

Talking about how things are done in Spain, Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas cites a report that 12 ex politicians on the boards of 2 energy companies took home €3m last year.

Cousas de Galiza

Bad News: Camino 'pilgrim' numbers in 2020 were 81% down on 2021. For what it's worth, of those that did get to Santiago de Compostela, the profile of the average walker was a male aged 31-45, hailing mostly from Madrid. Though he could have set out from the start of any one of the 40+ caminos now in operation. All authentically dating from many centuries ago, of course.

Talking of the Catholic Church’s ability to make money . . . Lenox cites this report - from a Catholic journal - of the reaction of Spanish bishops to allegations of improper registrations of (tax-free) properties around Spain.  

Maria's Tsunami: Day 36. 

The UK

A very British comment on the M&H saga: It is not Meghan’s race or Harry’s union with a mixed-race woman that many in this country find insufferable but their evident self-regard and self-pity. In Britain it is a cardinal sin is to take yourself too seriously. We like our public figures low-key, self-deprecating, as humble as fame and fortune allow. It does not do to get too grand, even if you are a duke or duchess. Yet, whether they are demanding privacy while courting publicity, or enjoying the rewards of royal titles while shunning the responsibilities, or blathering about public service while ditching the boring old walkabouts in Rotherham, the behaviour of Harry and Meghan smacks of self-importance.

The UK and Brexit 

Regular readers will know Richard North is not Boris Johnson's greatest admirer. Today he says of him: Problems such as these are set to bring the [trading] system crashing down – issues about which Johnson is probably totally unaware, as he burbles about 'goodwill' and 'imagination'. Idiot is too kind a word for this man.

The USA

This article possibly reflects the majority view British of that interview, though it's accepted in the UK that things will be seen very differently in the USA, where the British stereotypical image will be strengthened. But nothing can stop that. Anyway, a wonderful last  paragraph.

Spanish 

Here in Galicia, the  Red Cross is known as A Cruz Vermello. The latter is sometimes seen as bermello. Both are Gallego versions of bermejo, which means red. You'll recognise the cognate ‘vermillion’ in English, of course. Over the years, I've twice stayed in  the village of Casabermeja, north of Málaga. Anyway, the word bermejo is said in the RAE dictionary to come from the Latin for 'little worm' - vermicŭlus.

I'm not sure the word caramba is as heard as much in Spain as it is in Mexico but, anyway, here's something about it. The word carajo is certainly oft heard up here in Galicia. Or, carallo, as it's rendered in Galego. Click here and here for earlier references of mine to it.

English

Relatedly . . . 'Vermicular'

1. Like a worm in form or movement; vermiform.

2. Denoting or caused by intestinal worms.

Finally 

Anyone got advice on how to treat a rug suddenly infested with moth grubs that are rapidly eating it away - after being left alone for 35 years or more? 

COVID REVIEW: MD, medical correspondent of Private Eye

Data not dates 

"Data not dates" is the correct approach to managing a pandemic, provided the data is complete, correctly interpreted and consensually obtained. Overall, vaccines are leading to impressive reductions in infections and hospitalisations, but drug companies do not release all their ongoing trial data in real time, which makes it harder for regulators to spot potential problems. Meanwhile NHS records are a treasure trove of real-world data to help understand Long Covid, and much else; but the data must be anonymised and used with consent. 

Much is still unpredictable. Setting staggered provisional dates for reopening the UK, depending on the data, will need continued support for people and industries facing financial ruin. But having spent a year over-promising and under-delivering, Boris Johnson could pull off the reverse if the data improves quicker than anticipated. 

Working model 

The UK vaccine programme continues to deliver, with a single dose of either the Pfizer BioNTech or Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine resulting in substantial reductions in infection, symptomatic illness and hospital admissions after 3 to 4 weeks. Two doses provide even better protection, particularly for the elderly; but for those aged 80 or over in Scotland, a single dose was associated with an 81% reduction in hospital admission risk in the 4th week. This suggests that staggering the doses to cover more people was a good call. Also, older people in Scotland mostly get the AstraZeneca vaccine, which should give Germany, France and Belgium pause for thought. 

Wilful stupidity 

Joy at the success of the Oxford-AZ vaccine is tinged with despair that some EU governments have promoted vaccine scepticism by raising unfounded concerns about it. Germany started it. On 25 January, a German newspaper quoted a minister who claimed it was "only 8% effective in the elderly". President Emmanuel Macron of France then suggested it was second class. On 28 January, Germany said the over-65s should not have the jab because of "insufficient data to assess its efficacy". 

Angela Merkel, 66, has declined it for herself, and Belgium [and Spain] has said it shouldn't be given to over-55s. True, the OAZ trial data for the elderly was scant. But the European Medicines Agency, the WHO and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) said it should be used in all age groups, now backed up by impressive real-world data. Alas, the doubts are hard to reverse and people of all ages in the EU are declining it and demanding the Pfizer vaccine (which was developed in Germany and is manufactured in Germany and Belgium. France's Sanofi vaccine has yet to appear). 

As of 19 February, just 150,000 out of 1.5m doses of the OAZjab had been used in Germany. 

At vaccination centres in Berlin that only give the OAZjab, fewer than 200 people are turning up for the 3,800 daily appointments. Overall, 7% of German and French citizens have been vaccinated compared to 30% of Brits. 

Individual EU countries have always had the power to set the bar of individual vaccine approval wherever they wished, but to see their citizens suffer and die as a result is beyond stupid, particularly when the UK data is looking so good. Meanwhile, Germany and France still have large waves of infection, and Belgium has even higher death rates per capita than the UK. 

Lesson for teachers 

Teachers do not appear to be at higher risk from Covid than other workers not in health and social care. But if we are opening schools next week to full capacity in the new, multi-variant world, we need to make them as safe as possible for everyone. Getting community transmission levels low enough to be controlled by test, trace and isolate is key. Newer generation rapid lateral flow tests with monoclonal antibodies appear more accurate than the lnnova ones we've bought a mountain of.

If we roll out mass testing in schools and elsewhere to those with no symptoms, we will inevitably discover more positive results (including false positives). That may not mean infections are on the rise, or that those who test positive are infectious, just that we are detecting "symptomless positives" we previously didn't. Evaluation is still needed to determine if this does more good than harm. The same is true of children and teachers in masks (and if so, what kind). 

Vitamin D-Day 

Many doctors are taking Vitamin D every day in the hope of reducing the risk or harm of Covid, but the jury is still out. Small, imperfect studies suggest impressive benefits, but better, larger studies find very few. Definitive randomised controlled trials are underway. MD has taken 10 micrograms of Vitamin D every day for years, because it's hard to get enough naturally, especially in winter. I've also had a dose of vaccine. If I somehow still get severe Covid, I'd ask to be included in whatever trials are going on at the time (including extra Vitamin D) 

Missing inquiry 

One thing missing from the 3rd and hopefully final route map out of lockdown was the announcement of a public inquiry. Unless we fully understand what went right, what went wrong and why, we are likely to sleepwalk into the next pandemic. 

The UK has one of the worst mortality rates for Covid. But instead of just blaming politicians, we all - health professionals, managers, scientists, social media companies, tech and data companies, personal protective equipment (PPE) and test providers, ventilation engineers, journalists, broadcasters and citizens - need to consider what we could have done better. The independent global inquiry into the performance of the WHO, and the response of its member states, is due to report in May. A UK inquiry should follow soon afterwards, building on its findings. 

Dial BMJ for Murder 

There are 2 extreme views on the UK's pandemic management and 125,000 deaths. Boris Johnson believes that: "We truly did everything we could, and continue to do everything that we can, to minimise loss of life and to minimise suffering." 

The British Medical Journal - hardly a fringe publication - takes a different view: "Should Covid deaths be seen as 'social murder'? Or failing that, as crimes against humanity, involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in public office or criminal negligence? Politicians must be held to account by any constitutional means necessary." 

According to the BMJ(13 Feb), "social murder" is a wilful refusal by government to address the social determinants and inequities of health, which have led to a disproportionate number of deaths among the poor and marginalised, including BAME communities. Certainly, successive governments have failed to enact the Equality Act, which includes a duty to address socio-economic disadvantage. This is at the heart of much pandemic death and suffering. 

The Sooner the better

Given that the pandemic threat is continuing, we need a rapid interim report before the winter, when the risk will be highest. This happened after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, allowing life-saving measures to be introduced in stadiums ahead of the next football season, but with the whole truth taking a lot longer to emerge. It would allow the government to acknowledge properly the scale of Covid and non-Covid deaths, loss and harm, and to learn the urgent lessons to prepare us better. Any NHS reforms should also be guided by the inquiry's findings. Meanwhile, a huge wave of pandemic litigation and legislation is building up.

Wave one litigation 

The government is rushing through reforms and contracts under cover of the pandemic, without proper scrutiny, and then trying to keep them secret. Following a Good Law Project challenge, health secretary Matt Hancock has already been found to have acted unlawfully by failing to publish multibillion-pound Covid-19 government contracts within the 30-day period required by law. Hancock has also been asked to refer Centene's takeover of GP services in London serving 500,000 patients for a Care Quality Commission investigation to determine if the private provider is up to the task of taking on such a large chunk of NHS work. 

Open Democracy has just issued a lawsuit over the government's £23m NHS data deal with controversial "spy tech" company Palantir. Data sharing is crucial but the proposed NHS reforms means much of the infrastructure is likely to be managed by big tech firms without public debate or consent. 

A judicial review, meanwhile, is trying to get full disclosure of all documentation and decisions surrounding Cygnus, the government's pandemic preparedness plan. Was it ignored because of austerity cuts? We do not know. 

Legal protection for staff 

NHS staff want indemnity and protection from any litigation pursuant to patient harm, death or denial of treatment during the pandemic because they were doing their best in exceptionally dangerous circumstances, and don't deserve to be hung out to dry for systemic failures. Doctors are also arguing for better whistleblowing protection so they can fulfil their legal duty to raise concerns about dangerous care (the case of a whistleblowing junior doctor has yet to be resolved, but he has carried on serving patients on the pandemic frontline despite having his career ruined for raising concerns about unsafe practices and staffing in intensive care). 

Compensation for harm

Hospitals, meanwhile, face litigation for the many cases where Covid was acquired within their walls. Care homes face litigation for letting the virus in - and may in turn countersue hospitals, the government and NHS England for forcing them to take untested, infected patients. NHS and care home workers are suing the government and employers for lack of testing and inadequate PPE in the face of a known deadly, biological hazard at work. Proving that infection happened in the workplace will be a protracted legal affair. 

Families of those who have suffered or died with non-Covid conditions (eg cancer, stroke, heart disease, learning disabilities) because they couldn't get the care or support they needed during the pandemic are suing GPs, hospitals and care services. Students are suing to recover costs and lost education. Asymptomatic citizens are even suing the government for denying them the right to work because they tested positive for Covid when there is no accepted measure of how a positive test relates to infectiousness. And there will be claims too for alleged vaccine harm, and harms from novel, experimental treatments. 

The legal system, like the NHS, was struggling to cope with demand before Covid, so what should the government do to avoid drowning in litigation? One option is a pandemic amnesty, offering compensation and support to those who have suffered, commensurate to their needs and without a protracted legal battle to prove accountability or negligence. The vast majority of public servants are decent, exhausted and doing their pandemic best. Litigation could be the final straw. 

No jab, no job? 

THE issues of mandatory vaccination and vaccine passports are so legally and ethically complex they require far more than a review by Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove. MD is against mandatory vaccination of whole populations but had to have hepatitis B vaccinations to work as a doctor, which is appropriate for anyone who performs or assists at exposure-prone procedures that risk infecting patients. Covid vaccination take-up has been poorest for NHS and care workers, and previous calls for mandatory flu vaccination have been resisted. There will undoubtedly be legal challenges to whatever Gove's group decides. Better to air them at an inquiry. 

'Covid careful' venues 

PROOF of vaccination or a negative test is being proposed for entry to a whole host of venues, events and countries, although "zero Covid" cannot be guaranteed (no test is 100% accurate, nor vaccine 100% effective). Some people will cheat on their tests. Can Gove cope with the fall-out? 

Data not dates 

"Data not dates" is the correct approach to managing a pandemic, provided the data is complete, correctly interpreted and consensually obtained. Overall, vaccines are leading to impressive reductions in infections and hospitalisations, but drug companies do not release all their ongoing trial data in real time, which makes it harder for regulators to spot potential problems. Meanwhile NHS records are a treasure trove of real-world data to help understand Long Covid, and much else; but the data must be anonymised and used with consent. 

Much is still unpredictable. Setting staggered provisional dates for reopening the UK, depending on the data, will need continued support for people and industries facing financial ruin. But having spent a year over-promising and under-delivering, Boris Johnson could pull off the reverse if the data improves quicker than anticipated. 

Working model 

The UK vaccine programme continues to deliver, with a single dose of either the Pfizer BioNTech or Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine resulting in substantial reductions in infection, symptomatic illness and hospital admissions after 3 to 4 weeks. Two doses provide even better protection, particularly for the elderly; but for those aged 80 or over in Scotland, a single dose was associated with an 81% reduction in hospital admission risk in the 4th week. This suggests that staggering the doses to cover more people was a good call. Also, older people in Scotland mostly get the AstraZeneca vaccine, which should give Germany, France and Belgium pause for thought. 

Wilful stupidity 

Joy at the success of the Oxford-AZ vaccine is tinged with despair that some EU governments have promoted vaccine scepticism by raising unfounded concerns about it. Germany started it. On 25 January, a German newspaper quoted a minister who claimed it was "only 8% effective in the elderly". President Emmanuel Macron of France then suggested it was second class. On 28 January, Germany said the over-65s should not have the jab because of "insufficient data to assess its efficacy". 

Angela Merkel, 66, has declined it for herself, and Belgium [and Spain] has said it shouldn't be given to over-55s. True, the OAZ trial data for the elderly was scant. But the European Medicines Agency, the WHO and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) said it should be used in all age groups, now backed up by impressive real-world data. Alas, the doubts are hard to reverse and people of all ages in the EU are declining it and demanding the Pfizer vaccine (which was developed in Germany and is manufactured in Germany and Belgium. France's Sanofi vaccine has yet to appear). 

As of 19 February, just 150,000 out of 1.5m doses of the OAZjab had been used in Germany. 

At vaccination centres in Berlin that only give the OAZjab, fewer than 200 people are turning up for the 3,800 daily appointments. Overall, 7% of German and French citizens have been vaccinated compared to 30% of Brits. 

Individual EU countries have always had the power to set the bar of individual vaccine approval wherever they wished, but to see their citizens suffer and die as a result is beyond stupid, particularly when the UK data is looking so good. Meanwhile, Germany and France still have large waves of infection, and Belgium has even higher death rates per capita than the UK. 

Lesson for teachers 

Teachers do not appear to be at higher risk from Covid than other workers not in health and social care. But if we are opening schools next week to full capacity in the new, multi-variant world, we need to make them as safe as possible for everyone. Getting community transmission levels low enough to be controlled by test, trace and isolate is key. Newer generation rapid lateral flow tests with monoclonal antibodies appear more accurate than the lnnova ones we've bought a mountain of.

If we roll out mass testing in schools and elsewhere to those with no symptoms, we will inevitably discover more positive results (including false positives). That may not mean infections are on the rise, or that those who test positive are infectious, just that we are detecting "symptomless positives" we previously didn't. Evaluation is still needed to determine if this does more good than harm. The same is true of children and teachers in masks (and if so, what kind). 

Vitamin D-Day 

Many doctors are taking Vitamin D every day in the hope of reducing the risk or harm of Covid, but the jury is still out. Small, imperfect studies suggest impressive benefits, but better, larger studies find very few. Definitive randomised controlled trials are underway. MD has taken 10 micrograms of Vitamin D every day for years, because it's hard to get enough naturally, especially in winter. I've also had a dose of vaccine. If I somehow still get severe Covid, I'd ask to be included in whatever trials are going on at the time (including extra Vitamin D) 

Missing inquiry 

One thing missing from the 3rd and hopefully final route map out of lockdown was the announcement of a public inquiry. Unless we fully understand what went right, what went wrong and why, we are likely to sleepwalk into the next pandemic. 

The UK has one of the worst mortality rates for Covid. But instead of just blaming politicians, we all - health professionals, managers, scientists, social media companies, tech and data companies, personal protective equipment (PPE) and test providers, ventilation engineers, journalists, broadcasters and citizens - need to consider what we could have done better. The independent global inquiry into the performance of the WHO, and the response of its member states, is due to report in May. A UK inquiry should follow soon afterwards, building on its findings. 

Dial BMJ for Murder 

There are 2 extreme views on the UK's pandemic management and 125,000 deaths. Boris Johnson believes that: "We truly did everything we could, and continue to do everything that we can, to minimise loss of life and to minimise suffering." 

The British Medical Journal - hardly a fringe publication - takes a different view: "Should Covid deaths be seen as 'social murder'? Or failing that, as crimes against humanity, involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in public office or criminal negligence? Politicians must be held to account by any constitutional means necessary." 

According to the BMJ(13 Feb), "social murder" is a wilful refusal by government to address the social determinants and inequities of health, which have led to a disproportionate number of deaths among the poor and marginalised, including BAME communities. Certainly, successive governments have failed to enact the Equality Act, which includes a duty to address socio-economic disadvantage. This is at the heart of much pandemic death and suffering. 

Sooner the better

Given that the pandemic threat is continuing, we need a rapid interim report before the winter, when the risk will be highest. This happened after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, allowing life-saving measures to be introduced in stadiums ahead of the next football season, but with the whole truth taking a lot longer to emerge. It would allow the government to acknowledge properly the scale of Covid and non-Covid deaths, loss and harm, and to learn the urgent lessons to prepare us better. Any NHS reforms should also be guided by the inquiry's findings. Meanwhile, a huge wave of pandemic litigation and legislation is building up.

Wave one litigation 

The government is rushing through reforms and contracts under cover of the pandemic, without proper scrutiny, and then trying to keep them secret. Following a Good Law Project challenge, health secretary Matt Hancock has already been found to have acted unlawfully by failing to publish multibillion-pound Covid-19 government contracts within the 30-day period required by law. Hancock has also been asked to refer Centene's takeover of GP services in London serving 500,000 patients for a Care Quality Commission investigation to determine if the private provider is up to the task of taking on such a large chunk of NHS work. 

Open Democracy has just issued a lawsuit over the government's £23m NHS data deal with controversial "spy tech" company Palantir. Data sharing is crucial but the proposed NHS reforms means much of the infrastructure is likely to be managed by big tech firms without public debate or consent. 

A judicial review, meanwhile, is trying to get full disclosure of all documentation and decisions surrounding Cygnus, the government's pandemic preparedness plan. Was it ignored because of austerity cuts? We do not know. 

Legal protection for staff 

NHS staff want indemnity and protection from any litigation pursuant to patient harm, death or denial of treatment during the pandemic because they were doing their best in exceptionally dangerous circumstances, and don't deserve to be hung out to dry for systemic failures. Doctors are also arguing for better whistleblowing protection so they can fulfil their legal duty to raise concerns about dangerous care (the case of a whistleblowing junior doctor has yet to be resolved, but he has carried on serving patients on the pandemic frontline despite having his career ruined for raising concerns about unsafe practices and staffing in intensive care). 

Compensation for harm

Hospitals, meanwhile, face litigation for the many cases where Covid was acquired within their walls. Care homes face litigation for letting the virus in - and may in turn countersue hospitals, the government and NHS England for forcing them to take untested, infected patients. NHS and care home workers are suing the government and employers for lack of testing and inadequate PPE in the face of a known deadly, biological hazard at work. Proving that infection happened in the workplace will be a protracted legal affair. 

Families of those who have suffered or died with non-Covid conditions (eg cancer, stroke, heart disease, learning disabilities) because they couldn't get the care or support they needed during the pandemic are suing GPs, hospitals and care services. Students are suing to recover costs and lost education. Asymptomatic citizens are even suing the government for denying them the right to work because they tested positive for Covid when there is no accepted measure of how a positive test relates to infectiousness. And there will be claims too for alleged vaccine harm, and harms from novel, experimental treatments. 

The legal system, like the NHS, was struggling to cope with demand before Covid, so what should the government do to avoid drowning in litigation? One option is a pandemic amnesty, offering compensation and support to those who have suffered, commensurate to their needs and without a protracted legal battle to prove accountability or negligence. The vast majority of public servants are decent, exhausted and doing their pandemic best. Litigation could be the final straw. 

No jab, no job? 

THE issues of mandatory vaccination and vaccine passports are so legally and ethically complex they require far more than a review by Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove. MD is against mandatory vaccination of whole populations but had to have hepatitis B vaccinations to work as a doctor, which is appropriate for anyone who performs or assists at exposure-prone procedures that risk infecting patients. Covid vaccination take-up has been poorest for NHS and care workers, and previous calls for mandatory flu vaccination have been resisted. There will undoubtedly be legal challenges to whatever Gove's group decides. Better to air them at an inquiry. 

'Covid careful' venues 

PROOF of vaccination or a negative test is being proposed for entry to a whole host of venues, events and countries, although "zero Covid" cannot be guaranteed (no test is 100% accurate, nor vaccine 100% effective). Some people will cheat on their tests. Can Gove cope with the fall-out?

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'

Cosas de España  

The hit on the economy gets personal for Don Quijones of Wolfstreet here.

I've long wondered why empty, boarded  up  - and, so, ugly - retail outlets at ground-floor level of (relatively) attractive flat  blocks aren't fitted out as homes, so it's  good to read this might now be happening, At least in Barcelona.

There are thought to be 2,200-2,700 Iberian wolves in Spain, mostly up here in the North West. There's a ban on hunting them down where they're few in number, but not up here. This is about  to  change, as the government is proposing nationwide proscription. Almost inevitably, this is opposed by  the  governments of  Galicia, Castilla y León, Asturias and Cantabria. More on this here. 

If you're new to Spain, these translations might be  useful to you, on the subject of Spanish time-keeping:

Estoy a punto de irme: Lierally: I'm about to leave. Actual meaning: I should be ready to leave in 15-30 minutes

Estoy llegando: Literally: I'm arriving, Actual meaning: Although, I'm already 15-30 minutes late by your standards, I'm just leaving my place for our agreed meeting  place

Estoy subiendo: Literally: I'm coming up. Ditto, in respect of a get-together at your place. Or at least mine, on top of a hill.

Cousas de Galiza

Because the pressure on hospitals has now eased, as of today we'll be allowed to travel outside Pontevedra's health area. To Vigo or Santiago de Compostela for example. Time for a short camino? And will this freedom last until Semana Santa, so that some of us can enjoy a road trip up into our beautiful Ribeira Sagra/Ribera Sagrada. Or to Os Ancares.

The first fly of the year was swatted today. I like to look on this as giving someone the chance of re-incarnation.

Maria's Tsunami: Days 34&35. Aa bit more on our old stones.

The USA

This column probably reflects the majority British view of that interview, though it's accepted in the UK that things will be seen very differently in the USA, where the British stereotypical image will be strengthened. But nothing can stop that. Anyway, a wonderful last  paragraph.

The Way of the World  

A friend of my younger daughter has sent  me this, with the comment: They could have ironed it:-

He's a comedian in  his spare time as a teacher. But I doubt he'll be  using this line on stage tonight.

Finally 

Lenox Napier ruminates here on the aftermath of death. Maybe, when he eventually has an answer to his questions, he could do us all the favour of letting us know what they are . . 

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'

Cosas de España   

Here’s another way - probably the best if you qualify - of beating the 90-days-in-180 restriction on Brits coming to Spain - the EU Family Regrouping (Marriage Visa).

And this is another nice Spanish Shilling piece from Lenox Napier

Cousas de Galiza

Following last Saturdays's widespread disregard of the rules, the local police were out in force yesterday in Pontevedra's tapas streets. But why they needed to walk around all together in a foursome defeats me. Where they expecting a violent reaction to their presence and finger-wagging?

Here's another BBC Scotland video, this time on Galicia alone. I did fear it merely comprised relevant bits of the joint Asturias and Galicia video of yesterday but, as it’s 7 minutes longer, this can't be so. For those of you still unfamiliar with the dreadful percebes, you can see them at minutes 21 and 36. As I've said - like a bit of rubber dipped in salt water, But that's only my view, of course. Most Galicians have been raised to adore them. I wasn't very surprised the Irish lady promptly reached for her wine.

Here's one side of the border marker up in the forest between Pontevedra and my barrio of Poio, which I wasn't supposed to cross until very recently. The PO stand for Pontevedra, of course:-

And here's the other side of it, on which the PO stands for  . . . Poio:-

So . . . Not a lot of use, if you get caught up there in one of our (allegedly) endless 'Celtic' mists . . .

The UK 

Nice comment: Scotland emerges from the Salmond-Sturgeon wars looking like a banana republic without the bananas. See the article below, which might well contain some truths about all nationalist states/countries/regions.

Germany

Sometime last century, a British politician commented: The question is whether the German government is blundering about, actuated by a sense of its own strength, though without any clear sense of direction. But this wasn't a reference to Germany’s place in the EU. Rather, it was to the Germany of 1906, when - on the back of a rapidly growing economy - it was building up its naval fleet towards the level of Britain's. It made me wonder whether Germany hasn't been wandering between extremes since 1870, when - as Prussia - it defeated France in a war foolishly begun by the latter. And which France has never forgotten, as Germany thus displaced her as the leading power on the Continent. With, of course, pretty disastrous consequences for, first, Europe and, then, the entire world.

The Way of the World  

The woke warning on a beloved children’s cartoon is beyond a joke. Even the most powerful businesses now live in terror of causing offence. The other day, I was about to watch an old film. But before it began, the screen flashed up a stern warning. The film, it said sternly, “includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.” From the tone of this warning, what would you guess I was about to watch? A hagiography of the Ku Klux Klan? A profile of Goering by Leni Riefenstahl? Believe it or not, it was Lady and the Tramp. The Disney children’s cartoon about two small dogs falling in love.

English

1. A hugger-mugger: 

A. Traditional meaning: Disorder or confusion; muddle; secrecy; reticence: 

B. New meaning, as suggested by a Times columnist: A police constable whose sole task for the day is to persecute people flouting social distancing regulations

2. Focaria: Hearth-girl/kitchen maid/'companion of the hearth' - The euphemism for 'wife' used after Catholic priests supposedly became celibate in the 11th century. After which their (many) children automatically became illegitimate under English Common Law.

Finally 

Having watched a film with friends last night, I left their place at exactly 10pm, the hour of the current curfew. The streets were not quite deserted, so not everyone was afeared of the long arm of the law. But, though I wasn't expecting imprisonment and torture, for the first time in my life, I did feel queasy about being a lawbreaker in a public street of a free country. It reminded me of my Farsi teacher, years ago, telling me I could never have any real conception of freedom, as I'd never lived without it. I suspected he was right back then and now I know for sure he was.

THE ARTICLE   

The nasty, ignorant SNP has been unmasked- For too long the Nats have been allowed to get away with telling people like me that we are not true Scots:  Douglas Murray 

In the Western world today, “nationalists” tend to be viewed in a dim light. The term is used damningly of politicians in America, and with deep concern about anyone on the Continent (how much do we love French or German nationalists?). To be an “English nationalist” is to be very nearly accused of football hooliganism. Only two types of nationalist – the Irish and Scots varieties – are widely, mistakenly, regarded as “nice”.

Whatever the causes of this, it finally seems possible that the free ride given to the Scottish nationalists at least might finally be coming to an end. Historically, the bar for their outrages has always been remarkably high. After all, when the Luftwaffe were bombing London the Scottish nationalists of the day cheered the Nazis on. And neither that nor anything else ever seemed to put much of a dent in the political project of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.

Happily, in a denouement both unexpected and pleasing for Unionists like me, it seems to have needed Alex Salmond to hole Nicola Sturgeon below the water-line. In recent weeks the self-regarding Queen of Scotland has teetered. Her grip on her one-party state has faltered. And a cronyistic political settlement has finally been displayed fully on public view: embarrassing, reeking, putrid.

The First Minister currently clings to power by hoping that she will not be found to have broken the ministerial code of conduct. But even if she is found to have broken the ministerial code we should expect her to find some excuse to stay. Because demagogues like Sturgeon always believe that the rules are there to catch out other people, with bad intentions, not great historical liberationist figures like Nicola with all her wonderful, good, bonny intentions.

In the past, before they were in control, the Scots Nats made great play of the importance of ministerial good conduct. Indeed when the then Labour first minister, Henry McLeish, ran into trouble over the subletting of part of his Westminster constituency office, the SNP were in the highest imaginable dudgeon. The first minister’s behaviour must be beyond reproach, they roared.

How different when it is their own gal in charge. In recent weeks almost every branch of the Scottish legislature has fought to protect the Queen Bee. All the while proving nothing but their own deep corruption. As a number of observers have commented, Scotland emerges from the Salmond-Sturgeon wars looking like a banana republic without the bananas. Throughout the recent hearings the behaviour of the Nationalists has been consistently wretched. This week for instance, while the First Minister was giving her evidence, one of those giving a running commentary was Hamza Yousaf, the SNP’s “Justice Minister”. Railing about the whole “house of cards conspiracy” and much more, it presented a conflict of interests that would have been a resigning matter in Westminster. But in the people’s republic of Scotland all such decencies must take a back seat.

Indeed every decency must take a back seat in order to protect the grand political project of ripping Scotland from one of the most successful political unions in history. It is extraordinary what depths the Nationalists are willing to go to as they pursue this project, with its follow-on aim of immediately taking an independent Scotland to Brussels and begging to be allowed into the EU and the Eurozone.

Take Michael Russell, the SNP MSP for Argyll and Bute. This week he could be found on social media berating British journalists who dared to question the Sturgeon government. Russell attacked Scottish-born journalists who now happen to live and work in London as “Scottish exiles”. What a putrid and petty little heart a man must have to speak like that. What is this talk of exiles? Of premium-rated Scots, and the sellout sort who dare ever to go south of Berwick-upon-Tweed and refuse to take the knee before the throne of Sturgeon?

Some of us mind this sort of talk very deeply. We mind the rank, wretched tone that the Scottish Nationalists have managed to introduce into this nation ever since the disastrous project of devolution first began. I was living in Scotland the year that devolution started and I saw and felt then first-hand the way in which the Scottish Nationalists were grinding into gear some of the worst, lowest weapons in the political armoury.

They rejoiced in stoking anti-English sentiment. They rejoiced in their historically ignorant accounts of our island’s history. They rejoiced in stoking up half-baked grievances. Most of all they rejoiced in sowing division. Of pitting Scottish against English and Scot against Scot. Suddenly people like me who happen to be Scottish and English, and fully British, were told that we were not Scots. You might be Scottish and have a Scottish accent, but if you moved to London you became a not-Scot. Unless you moved to London to take an MP’s salary and work to split up the United Kingdom, of course. Then you were a good Scot.

For over two decades the Scottish Nationalists have curdled politics in Scotland. They have turned families against each other, turned neighbour against neighbour and done all of this in pursuit of a lamentable, ignorant political goal. As they have gained control over the levers of education they have sought to indoctrinate a new generation in their putrid nationalistic ideology. And as education standards, health standards and every other standard in public life in Scotland has plummeted under their control, still the Nationalists have the gall to suggest that all of this would be better if only they were given even more power and even more independence.

Many people in the rest of the United Kingdom look at the Scots Nats and are prey to the temptation to let them just sail away: enough of them, they think. Be off with you. But the instinct is an ignoble one. The United Kingdom needs saving in its entirety. And Scotland has a deep need to be liberated from the Nationalists who claim to want to save it and have managed over two decades to do nothing but demean it.

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'

Cosas de España 

When it comes to vaccinations. Spain remains 'different'. Whereas Germany and even France have reversed their stance on giving the AZ vaccine to those over 65, Spain retains its even lower limit of 55. This raises the question of what their scientists know that others don't. But, anyway, the practical effect of this is that next week, here in Galicia at least, the AZ jab will be given to those between 50 and 55, while the more at-risk group of folk aged 56 to 80 will have to wait at least another month, possibly 2 or even 3, for the Pfizer or Moderna product. Which, of course, will mean some avoidable deaths.

How many of Spain’s ex-capital cities do you know, or can guess at?

Very bad news:  Spain's youth unemployment has been high for a decade and the jobless rate for those under 25 is now 40%. Greece comes in second with 34%. Overall: The financial crisis of 2007-08 took an especially heavy toll on Spaniards. Macroeconomic indicators suggest that the covid-19 pandemic is hitting Spain, which is reliant on tourism, even harder.

Cousas de Galiza

This is a BBC Scotland video on Asturias and Galicia. I confess I first thought they were talking Welsh until I figures out it was Scottish Gaelic. But I think there's a bit of Irish Gaelic in it as well, from Muireann NicAmhlaoibh. Needless to say, it majors on Celtic connections.

Maria's Tsunami: Day 33

The UK 

From the end of May, Lufthansa’s budget airline - Eurowings - will be flying Brits to Majorca for the first time. Because - thanks to earlier vaccinations - there is “dreariness in Germany” but “holiday fever in the UK”.

The EU

British historian Robert Tombs explains below why he thinks that: The EU is suffering from a Napoleon complex that will backfire disastrously. Europe is using trade as a weapon, but the result is likely to be the same as the last time this was tried.

The USA

Reflecting on Jeremy Paxman’s comment that any fool can read an autocue, guess what fool I thought of. Not that he could actually do this, of course.

The Way of the World  

That dreadful feud between Meghan&Harry and the British royal family . . . This is an article I've forced myself to read and I cite it here because it's a decent piece and might interest you, dear reader. Love or loathe Meghan? It depends on your age. Ms Merkle’s sister has penned a book which is said to be 'unsisterly' but likely to leave Meghan as 'the ultimate beneficiary. Funny family.

Social Media

Facebook has shut down the accounts of fake Scottish independence supporters being run by Iran. Hundreds of fraudulent online personas, it says, were created there. But for what purpose??

English

A new word for me, seen this morning - a shock. Said to be informal and Australian, and to mean: A person engaged in suspect business activities. The adjective is, of course, shonky and means: dishonest, unreliable, or illegal, especially in a devious way.

Finally  . . . 

We have an asesor in Pontevedra called Blanca Fariña. I’ve known her for years but only twigged this week that her name means White flour. Which happens to be the Gallego street-name for cocaine. Or, as the RAG puts sit: Substancia orgánica que se extrae das follas da coca e que, polas súas propiedades, é usada como narcótico ou en anestesias. You might know if you’ve seen Fariña, or The Cocaine Coast.

THE ARTICLE   

The EU is suffering from a Napoleon complex that will backfire disastrously. Europe is using trade as a weapon, but the result is likely to be the same as the last time this was tried: Robert Tombs, The Telegraph

In those far-off days when the debate over Brexit was still raging, its proponents – including the present Prime Minister – were indignantly criticised for making sweeping comparisons with great struggles of the past: the Spanish Armada, the Napoleonic Wars, even 1940. What could be more absurd, said critics, and what more insulting to our European friends and neighbours than to imply that they had imperialistic ambitions?

All the more surprising, then, when a similar comparison comes from across the Channel. The former French ambassador to the UK, Sylvie Bermann, whose not very diplomatic book Goodbye Britannia has caused a stir, says that Brexit “has succeeded in bringing together a continental bloc of 27 countries. This was the famous blockade organised by Napoleon, and which England so feared.” So says one of France’s most distinguished diplomats.

The comparison of the EU with Napoleon’s Continental System is interesting not only for its threatening tone but for what it may say about the unspoken assumptions of the European elite. First, is the notion that, in a world of hostile blocs, the whole European economy is a weapon to be wielded against an awkward opponent. Clearly, too, a resurgence of the latent French belief that perfidious Albion is always trying to disrupt France’s obviously high-minded plans. Along with this comes the self‑pitying conclusion that Britain – or “England” – is to blame for subsequent difficulties, and that if only we were not so arrogant, we would go along with what the French are trying to do. As Napoleon put it: “All my wars came from England.”

The Continental System – that of Napoleon – was intended to destroy Britain economically after the failure to defeat it politically. “England will weep tears of blood”, as he put it. Europe was still its biggest market, and to hit at its exports would bring the “nation of shopkeepers” to heel.

What of Madame Bermann’s Continental System? Presumably the intention is similar, otherwise there would be no point in the comparison. Aggressive interpretation of the Trade and Co-operation Agreement to maximise non-tariff barriers, extreme applications of the Northern Ireland Protocol to put pressure on the British Government at its weakest spot, the fabrication of health concerns to disrupt existing trade, even the assumption of the power to block vaccine exports: this is all part of the game.

There is another parallel with Napoleon. When France and Britain signed the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, ending 10 years of war, the British regarded it as a first step. George III called it an “experimental peace”. They hoped for further confidence-building measures on the way to normalising relations with the great European empire. But French diplomats were set on exploiting the letter of the treaty to the full, demanding that Britain execute every jot and tittle while they prepared for further conflict.

Can this be the sort of relationship that proponents of today’s Continental System have in mind? If so, they should reflect on how the story ended.

Napoleon’s attempt to subordinate the economic interests of the whole of Europe to his political aim of defeating Britain led to massive evasion of the rules. British goods, even in the days of sailing ships and horses and carts, reached the Continent by semi-legal and illegal means, to the great profit of those involved. Some of Napoleon’s satellites refused to join in. People rebelled against the economic cost, even his own politicians. His great empire eventually fell apart.

And today? Will Europe, led by an unyielding France, allow its interests to be subordinated to an ideological vision? Or will businesses and their employees accept that Brexit has happened and that a mutually beneficial relationship is in their interests? German exports to the UK, one of its most important markets, have slumped. French senators have expressed worries for their own businesses. Napoleon’s use of the Continental System not only to damage Britain but also to profit France, including at the expense of its allies, was a further reason for their disaffection. The French government today is similarly intent on benefiting the Parisian financial sector by forcing business away from London, even if this – by general admission – will cost other European businesses dear.

It’s easy to see parallels. But there is also a big difference. Napoleon was a man of undeniable ability, drive and vision. The leaders of the EU today are daily proving their lack of these qualities. I would not have believed them capable of the ineptitude shown over the Covid crisis, the recklessness of their suspension of the Northern Ireland Protocol for transparently specious reasons, their amoral haste to draw closer to Russia and China, and even the refusal to allow export of the Oxford vaccine to Australia.

“It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder,” said the clever cynic Talleyrand of one of Napoleon’s decisions. What would he say of the EU today?

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'

Cosas de España 

We're heading, it seems, for a Semana Santa in which no inter-regional travel will be allowed. Assuming the intransigent Madrid region plays ball.

Behind my house, work’s been going on for months on the restoration of a path up from the road to behind the houses built illegally between 2004 and 2008. And which are still mostly unoccupied. As seems to happen so often in Spain, the work is episodic and no one seems to know - or even think about - when it'll be finished. Of course, here in Galicia winter provides the handy excuse of rain but, in fact, the problem really seems to arise from the practice of working on several projects at the same time. What I've called displeasing all the people all the time. The best attitude to strike in these circumstances is resignation at the fact things take longer than they theoretically could. Or should. In other words, lowering your expectations. And disbelieving every estimate you're given.

The always-informative and entertaining Lenox Napier cites - in Business Over Tapas today - this report on police developments aimed at the worst kind of Brit down on the Costa del Crime. And also writes here on Spanish versions of 'whatsisname'. Good to learn of yet another word in Spanish for 'whore'. I do wonder if any other language has more.

Cousas de Galiza

The Voz de Galicia today focuses on our infamous feísmo - ugliness - and talks of (yet another) plan to do something about it. I wonder if this will benefit the street in Pontevedra's old quarter I wrote about 2 days ago.

Maria's Tsunami: Day 32. Cue queue confusiom.

The UK 

Boris Johnson: He used to joke that he saw the job of the journalist to throw pebbles at a window and scarper before seeing where they landed. He seems to have adopted that as a political philosophy and surrounded himself with like-minded individuals. Good to know he and they arerunning the government in a time of crisis.

Meanwhile, the BBC's ex-star interviewer, Jeremy Paxman - talking about some of the organisation's highest-paid employees - has likened the job of news-reading to mere 'reading aloud', and as both ‘pointless’ and ‘something any fool could do’. Which is surely right, albeit rather controversial.

Germany

Hans Globke, it says here, was a Hitler ‘henchman’ and became the true architect of modern Germany. It seems not a lot of Germans know this. Never mind foreigners.

The Way of the World 

Something I'll have to research . . . Men's grooming in 2021 requires make-up, beard maintenance and 'tweakments'. Or cosmetic surgery, as we used to call it. While 'make-up' includes Boy de Chanel Foundation, at 55 quid for - naturally - a rather titchy bottle.

Finally 

Back at the start of the 20th century, Britain had a Minister of War. I imagine all the other Great Powers - France, Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungary and Japan - also had an equivalent. A form or nominative determinism? 

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' 

Cosas de España 

A nice question - Could the Covid-19 pandemic put an end to bullfighting in Spain? 

A friend send me this old BBC feature. I do hope Spanish readers understand that the chap's got his tongue firmly in his cheek.

I’m not sure I agree that the Spanish princesses have done something terribly wrong. 

There was a nice program on the Santiago de Compostela on the Smithsonian channel this morning. I was intrigued to hear the suggestion it'd originally been a pagan pilgrimage route. To caves where female spirits/goddesses lived, for example. But I wasn't surprised to hear Santiago constantly pronounced with a long Anglo A before the G. The As aren’t different in Spanish; both are short.

Cousas de Galiza

 The folk of W/NW Iberia.

This is a foto of a couple of bars on the edge of Pontevedra's old quarter, taken midday last Saturday, after restrictions were eased on Friday. Neither the owners nor the customers are abiding by the residual regulations:-

I heared things changed on Sunday, after the  police had started to issue fines. But this wasn't obvious to me as I walked home through the main tapas zone around 2pm.

A couple of people were kind enough to tell me yesterday of this Guardian article on 'Galician Noir'. As I've yet to catch up with Scandi Noir, it's not surprising I hadn't heard of this. And neither am I surprised at the (false) picture of a permanently rainy region.

María's Tsunami Day 31

The UK

I noted yesterday that Boris Johnson was getting a free pass on his administration's disastrous handling of Covid. Today, Richard North - writing about a growing spat with the EU re Northern Ireland - says that: The odd thing about all of this, is that Johnson seems to be riding above the fray. Despite this being his own personal "oven-ready" deal, currently he is taking no flak for what is proving to be an unworkable shambles. But there must surely come a point when the mud starts to stick. One would certainly hope so.

Meanwhile . . . Britons are racing to book holidays in Spain this summer following the announcement that a ‘green corridor’ could be set up for vaccinated travellers. This has been sparked by comments made by the Spanish Minister for Tourism confirming that Spain and the UK are in “discussions” over lifting travel restrictions for those inoculated against Covid, if there's no collective EU decision on vaccine passports in the next few months.

France, Italy, Germany and The EU

Ambrose Evans Pritchard is on good form below: Macron is the joker now as Europe blunders into fateful third wave of the pandemic. We are only just beginning to glimpse the tectonic consequences of Covid failure for Europe's political order  

The USA/Religious Nutters/Crooks Corner

Just in case you didn't realise it at the time, Donald Trump says his presidency was the most successful in history.

Finally . . .

I read yesterday that the French word 'Plantagenet' came from the Latin for broom - planta genista. This follows on the heels of me writing about the Portuguese and Galician words for broom - giesta and xesta, respectively. A nice, informative coincidence then. BTW: No one's going to be surprised that the French word for broom is genêt. Or genest before the circumflex replaced the S. As in fenestra/fenêtre. The Spanish word, though, is retama. Which I wasn't surprised to read comes from the Arabic - ratamah.

THE ARTICLE   

Macron is the joker now as Europe blunders into fateful third wave of the pandemic. We are only just beginning to glimpse the tectonic consequences of Covid failure for Europe's political order: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The Telegraph

Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson have swapped places. The French technocrat has become the Covid gambler, hoping to muddle through the third wave with half measures and to wish away the invading variants.

In late January he took one of his Jupiterian decisions - alone - and defied the overwhelming majority of his scientists, something Mr Johnson never actually did despite the media myth in Europe that he was some sort of Bolsonaro. Mr Macron overruled the Conseil Scientifique and France’s epidemiologists, and even his own prime minister. This was a big deal. It was seen as an act of bold leadership by an intelligent man weighing up all the medical, social, and economic variables in their just proportions. He was rewarded with a bounce in the polls.

Every week without a lockdown buys time, he said confidently, a week gained for economic recovery. This is an extraordinary line of argument given everything we have learned over the pandemic. He himself criticised Mr Johnson (unfairly) for delaying in much the same way a year ago before the respass[??] of our Magna Carta rights became routine and when it was perhaps more understandable, threatening to close the French frontier at one point unless the UK followed his lead. But for Mr Macron’s gamble to pay off, it requires stable infection and very fast vaccination. Both are slipping away from him. France’s case count is merely impressionistic but the trend is clear: numbers in ICU beds have risen to 3,544 and are near alarm thresholds in several areas. The share of positive Covid tests is 7.3pc, the highest since last November in the second wave.

What Mr Macron has in fact done with each week of delay is to let new variants take hold. The English B.1.1.1.7  is already 53pc of cases, reaching 90pc in Dunkirk. The South African and Brazil variants top 10pc in eleven French departments, and 54pc in Moselle. The UK’s latest flap over an escaped case of the Brazil case seems surreal when set against events on our Continental doorstep. Yet still he hesitates. The evening curfew has been tightened from 8pm to 6pm as a token gesture, but this chiefly means that employed working people must crush together in supermarkets at the end of the day. Dunkirk and Nice have gone into weekend lockdowns. Paris and 20 departments are likely to follow. France is edging crab-like and slowly towards another lockdown that dares not speak its name. 

It is hard to see how Mr Macron is going to get away with this. And if he fails, his Enarque I-know-best presidency will be damaged beyond repair, with consequences for European politics. As of early March, the eurosceptic Marine Le Pen is France’s dauphine, running almost neck and neck in the polls for a run-off duel. To succeed, he needs lighting-fast jabs with a stretched single dose strategy - the British strategy deemed dangerously irresponsible by his anglophobe Europe minister, Clément Beaune, but rapidly gaining support among alarmed health experts in Germany, Italy, and France itself. 

Instead Mr Macron drifted into the immunisation campaign with a breathtaking lack of urgency, keener to assuage sottish anti-vaxxers than to serve rational citizens. The problem is not just that he rubbished the AstraZeneca jab as next to useless for over 65s when the peer-reviewed science said no such thing, but also that the French authorities refused to sanction its use for the elderly. This derailed the whole vaccination process. France did not have the cold storage chains to deliver the Pfizer-BioNTech jab en masse to care homes or the elderly. Everything got snarled up.  

Three months into the global vaccination drive, barely more than 4 million people in France have protection from a first jab. Just 24pc of the 1.1m AstraZeneca doses delivered so far have been administered. The target was 80pc to 85pc. France has now tweaked the age limit to 75 for certain cases but has not removed the stigma. Mr Macron is belatedly talking up the vaccine but still damns it with faint praise. It is as if he cannot bring himself to accept the real-life data from Scotland and England, as if loath to tell the French people that it cuts hospital admissions by 94pc and slightly outperforms the Pfizer-BioNTech jab.

The Élysée Palace insisted on Wednesday that Mr Macron will soon be opening up rather than closing down. “More normal living conditions are in sight. It is getting closer and closer. We hope maybe from mid-April, and we are preparing for it," said his spokesman. Bet on that if you dare. It is just as likely that a stubbornly high death toll will prolong the agony into late spring, with reopening coming too late to save the 2021 tourist season. Economic recovery may not arrive until the second half of 2021. That would push French public debt through 120pc of GDP and push thousands more firms over the edge, with non-linear risks to the banking system and social cohesion.

Italy is a few days behind France in this enveloping third wave. Infections have been climbing since early February. The Istituto Superiore di Sanità says the English variant has reached 54pc of new cases, with Brazilian hotspots in Lazio and Tuscany. “If we don’t act quickly  we’ll have 30,000 to 40,000 cases a day within a week, just as occured in England,” said Prof Andrea Crisanti from Imperial College.  He told the Piazzapulita TV show that the system of regional "yellow zones" had failed and that Italy’s political leaders do not understand what is happening. “They are talking about reopening. They are absolutely unrealistic about the transmission dynamic right now,” he said.

Premier Mario Draghi refuses to pull the trigger. Restaurants and bars are still open in yellow zones up to 6pm. Cinemas and concert halls will open in two weeks. This is courting fate. Italy’s economy is already on track for another quarter of contraction. If the second quarter blows up as well, the damage from permanent scarring rises ineluctably. So does the likelihood of future sovereign insolvency.  Mr Draghi might find that his own reputation for technocrat competence is on the line. 

Nor is Germany out of the woods. It too refused to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine for the elderly on precautionary grounds, even though the Oxford group was in reality more careful with its original testing than Pfizer-BioNTech, though less slick with PR. This German decision has had the same paralysing effect on the rollout as in France, with the added disaster of a two-factor authentication app that flummoxed the eldery hoping to get a jab. It is not so much a rejection of the AstraZeneca vaccine by the German people that is the problem, though an early smear campaign has caused some of that. It is a largely failure of the German bureaucratic state and the Länder to roll out delivery to those who want it. We did not expect to see that. The result of so many missteps is that just 4.9pc of the German population has received the first jab, even as the English variant hits 40pc of cases.

The mounting scientific reasons for drastic action are, however, matched equally by mounting political reasons for throwing caution to the winds and opening sooner.  “Madame Chancellor, Germany’s Patience is at an end,” was the headline across Die Welt’s front page on Wednesday, by which it meant that there was no longer a justification for the suppression of normal liberties. Rarely in modern times has Germany seemed so torn and confused.

The economic toll keeps rising. Citigroup says the cumulative drop in German retail sales over December and January was 13.2pc, almost double the 7.5pc fall in the first wave. “Another national lockdown in April or May is not yet in our forecasts, but is increasingly likely and would delay the recovery by another quarter,” it said.

The peoples of Europe have mostly forgiven Brussels for botching vaccine procurement, and some have forgiven their own governments for botching the rollout. But that is because they have not yet discovered the price. They have been assured that the pandemic is under control and that reopening is imminent. If they are forced back into another lockdown over the spring because vaccination paralysis has collided with galloping infections, the reckoning will be a sight to behold. We are only just beginning to glimpse the tectonic consequences of Covid failure for the political order of Europe.

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. Click here for an unofficial inquiry into the dreadful performance of the British government over the last 12 months. Best line: What comes through our findings time and again is a tendency for drift and delay. So, who would be responsible for that? And who's getting a 'free pass' because the vaccination program is going well?

Cosas de España 

Living in Spain and wanting to know when it’ll be your turn to be jabbed? This is for you. But it seems to be rather more informative on which group you're in and on which vaccine you'll get than on when you're likely to get it. Too many imponderables, I guess. 

A nice couple of fotos:-

The ex king.When he arrived and how he is now. Sic transit gloria mundi . . .

Cousas de Galiza

There are one or two small bits of Pontevedra's old quarter where the houses are in decay. One of these retains a bar in which I suspect women would feel a little out of place. The houses around it have been gradually gentrified over the last 20 years, though not as rapidly as I forecast years ago. The latest one to undergo this process will be a restaurant with a pensión above it. Here's the place opposite it, yet to get the treatment . . . [This is a video, which I can't get to upload; you can see it here:-]

These are mariscadores - 'shell-fishers' - off a local beach. Given that they congregate both in the process and later in a café or bar, it's hardly surprising they've suffered from a high incidence of Covid:-

The green stuff is an algae that hits our beaches this time of the year.

Like, I think, many cars these days, my Honda Civic doesn't have a spare wheel hub and tyre. Instead, there's a can of foam and a gadget to take the valve out of the wheel so you can then squirt the foam into the tyre. This might well work if you have a little nail-hole but I can tell you it certainly doesn't if you tear even a small hole in the tyre wall on something unseen. And if  you have to drive on a flat tyre only a kilometre to the tyre shop, it'll be useless when you arrive. Even if it was only installed a month ago! So, now I'm wondering if I can get a spare wheel from one of the several scrapyards in the area and put it below the boot, where there's a space for it, hitherto empty.

María's Tsunami Day 30. That 19th and 21st century thing I've talked about . . .

The EU  

Austria and Denmark have joined Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic in breaking away from Brussels' vaccines strategy, raising fears that the bloc's unity is crumbling in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Austria will work with Israel and Denmark on second generation vaccines and 'no longer rely on the EU'. Understandably, this is widely seen as a rebuke to the European Commission-led joint procurement scheme.  

The Way of the World  

Can anyone justify this? . . . The boss of the world’s largest private equity firm took home at least $610.5 million last year and his right-hand man received at least $216.1 million.

Cancelling Dr Seuss is absurd, the last thing we need is kids' books peddling tedious woke mantras. The cull of Dr Seuss’s output by his estate is symptomatic of the cowardice of the publishing industry in its pursuit of "diversity". The company says it made its decision after listening to “feedback from our audiences including teachers, academics and specialists.”  No feedback from children, then – the only “audience” that matters. 

Spanish

'Scrapyard' - Desguace. Writing above, I could recall the Spanish word but, ironically, not the English one.

English

The expression used to be 'bored with' but now seems to be 'bored of'. And no Academy can say this is wrong. Custom and practice is all. People power . . Even if they're actually wrong.

Finally . . . 

I read this question yesterday:- Do men seek power and influence for any other reason than to abuse it? It reminded me that for I've been wont to ask over the decades: What's the point of power, if you can't abuse it? Jokingly, of course.

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. 

Covid  

The Times: European leaders in Brussels have pledged that a vaccination passport scheme will be open to British travellers in time to save the summer holidays. A proposal for a “digital green pass” will be put forward by the Commission on March 17 to “kick start” tourism by the end of June. 

France: It had to happen: France approves AstraZeneca vaccine for over-65s despite Macron's efficacy claims. Germany next?

Cosas de España

It's reported that the disgraced ex King wants to come back from exile to attend a sailing event. To do so, he'd fly to Portugal and then - unlike us vetoed plebs - cross the border with Galicia and drive to a regatta in our local port of Sanxenxo(Sanjenjo). Where, in fact, he spent his last days in Spain, with some sailing mates. 

Needless to say, there’s delight in the tourism industry at the possibility of the post-June return of British holiday makers. Possibly even the drunken vomiters. Which, sadly, is how many Spaniards see all Brits - Los hooliganes.

Cousas de Galiza

We await news today of further relaxations in our post-3rd-wave lockdown. Maybe we’ll be able to leave the Pontevedra ’sanitary area’, as the hospitals here are less close to capacity because of the reduction in case numbers and lower demand on the ICUs. Before the next lockdown is imposed because of a 4th wave arising from last weekend’s - predictably lawless - celebrations. This cycle will only be broken by effective vaccines.

María's Tsunami Day 29.  

Germany

There's a hard-to-credit article below - by a German - which is headed: For Germans, Britain is now the grown-up. To be looked on, he claims, with 'post-Brexit envy'. The problems identified are familiar to anyone living in a country with strong regional governments, whether legally federated or not. It can make for bureaucracy and inefficiency - and a fair bit of corruption - and in (abnormal) times of crisis can mean less effective management of the national challenges. Horses for courses, as they say.

The Way of the World  

Almost 4 in 10 university students are addicted to their smartphones, and this plays havoc with their sleep. A study at King’s College London* found that 40% of the students displayed symptoms of addiction. Almost 70% of these had trouble sleeping, compared with 57% of those who weren't addicted. Those who used their phone after midnight or for 4 or more hours a day were most likely to be at high risk of addiction. Anyone surprised?  See details here.

* My alma mater, as it happens.

The USA

I mentioned QAnon yesterday. This purports to be all you need to know about it.

So, Trump has re-emerged to excite a large crowd of deliriously whooping fans. To say the least, it'd be wrong to suggest such a scene has never been seen in Europe but it's hard to imagine it happening these days. The USA is different, As they should say. ‘US exceptionalism’ ain't what it was.

Finally . . . 

Nice quote from the columnist Tom Harris, talking of Labour's new leader in Scotland: Anas Sarwar has the one quality that all successful leaders possess: he annoys exactly the right people.

THE ARTICLE  

For Germans, Britain is now the grown-up. The UK’s vaccine success compared with Germany has led to unfamiliar feelings of post-Brexit envy: Thomas Kielinger -  long-time UK correspondent of the German daily Die Welt  

As far as a national malaise goes, it doesn’t get much worse. I’m not talking about Covid itself, but rather Germany’s failure to get to grips with it via an orderly vaccine rollout while Brexit Britain races ahead, a malaise that has hit Germany at the very core of its psyche.

You might have thought that it would be Germany, with its much-attested organisational skill, that would have excelled in this field, rather than the Brits and their alleged love of muddling through. But Germany is a federalised country with 17 governments – a national one and 16 regional ones. Under such conditions, organisational skill can quickly turn to chaos. A cacophony of different opinions has arisen, with Angela Merkel having to hold successive summits with the 16 regional, finger-wagging chiefs to find out how best to move forward. Tomorrow, another summit of this kind will be taking place, yet another attempt to cut through a mountain of confusion.

This turmoil has been exacerbated by the AstraZeneca debacle. Some wit let it be known that the vaccine was useless for the over-65s, and within days the “news” had spread like wildfire. A whopping 85 per cent of the 1.5 million doses available in Germany is being stored unused and Angela Merkel has said that she herself wouldn’t take it. President Macron of France has sounded cautious, too. Trust the British, he seemed to argue, in their gung-ho post-Brexit flush of excitement, to run ahead.

Initially, this played well among Germans who by nature pivot towards worrying endlessly; there is a beautiful moniker for it, “Bedenkenträger”, or “doubt carriers”. But now the overload of scientific disputation has led to an atmosphere of utter helplessness as people veer between resignation and feisty incredulity.

In any case, Germans wonder, why couldn’t their leaders come up with an orderly way of distributing the vaccines? But a multiplicity of authorities are all competing for prominence and even their family doctor is so far not allowed to administer the jab. Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, has hardly improved matters, overseeing a mess in Brussels even worse than that in her homeland.

Nobody waxes enthusiastic about the EU any more, and the notion of ever-closer union has evaporated. But Germans are accustomed to Europe as their ersatz identity and political job description, quite apart from enjoying a club with such significant, if endangered, economic clout. Thus they have only ever conceived of Brexit as an act of extreme, self-inflicted harm. Lately, however, they have been disabused of this notion. John Kampfner’s 2020 book, Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country has virtually been turned on its head.

Look how the foolhardy Brits are coping with Covid and the road out of lockdown. Over 20 million British people have been vaccinated since December, compared with around four million in Germany, which is the larger population by about 15 million. Eat your gloomy predictions, ye staunch anti-Brexiteers. No wonder Germany’s Bild, Europe’s largest circulation tabloid, is growing more excited by the day on account of such breath-taking success. “We envy you British”, was their headline last week.

In my own paper, I referred to it as a national crusade, appealing to a deep-seated instinct to prevail against an invisible invader. Of course, the reality of over 100,000 Covid deaths is a fearsome reminder of Britain’s need to get its act together. But getting it together is precisely what has been happening as the vaccine rollout runs along at unremitting speed.

Trust, that’s what it boils down to. Trust is a process of delegation: individuals have to be able to base their judgment on responsible authority. Trust can be cruelly exploited, but a complete lack of it kills. To use Johnsonian rhetoric: “Germany vacillates, Britain vaccinates”. Angela Merkel should go on national TV and have herself vaccinated with the AstraZeneca jab. It is the only way to restore trust in the vaccine and her leadership, and start turning around Germany’s woeful record.

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

Sweden has avoided a lockdown so far: Has its strategy worked? Well . . Sweden may be faring comparably better in terms of excess deaths - the greater-than-usual number of deaths expected in a certain time period. Experts say excess deaths can indicate whether policies intended to combat the pandemic have unintended consequences, such as delaying treatment for other ailments. Click here for the answer to the question posed from ABC News. Or one answer, at least.

Cosas de España

Will Spain follow Germany and allow the Astra Zeneca jab for those over 65, and 55 here in  Spain? I certainly  hope so.

A HT to  Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for this item: We have a new media character - Isabel Medina Peralta, 'the Nazi'. She’s 18, beautiful, and poisonous. Says Vox Pópuli of  her: This is Isabel Medina Peralta: the young fascist daughter of a former PP leader. The young Falangist has caused great controversy after her anti-Semitic speech in an act of tribute to the fallen of the Blue Division. Lenox also quotes El Español: Isabel Medina - the socialist Falangist: her father threw her out of home and her politics has cost her her job. The new face of Spanish Nazism was fired after her fascist and anti-Semitic views came to llght. 

Cousas de Galiza

It was an unusual weekend - very warm and sunny on both days. Having left my back door open, I then had to c<atch and release 3 greenfinches which had flown from the nearby feeding station into my salón. I've heard they're not good to eat . . .

The Voz de Galicia this morning:- The weekend saw the first element of de-escalation, including in the hotel industry. After the excesses of Saturday, waiters yesterday warned customers of the rules before serving them: "Thank goodness the police came and evicted us[sic] from the terraces!" Possibly too late to avoid our 4th wave.

María's Tsunami Day 28.  

Germany

Some strong stuff, which you might be able to read at length behind The Times' paywall here. . . . For us Germans, failure is especially bitter. It should have been the tale of the two German leaders who saved Europe. Last summer Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen set off to liberate the continent from Covid-19, revive the eurozone economy, boost faith in the European Union that had been shaken by Brexit and, by doing so, secure their political legacy as outstanding European leaders. As it turned out, the only outstanding thing about their plan was its abject failure. The European Commission has failed to accomplish its most — indeed only — important task in the continent’s biggest crisis since the end of the war: to secure enough vaccine for all Europeans.  And it is Britain’s incredible success that makes their failure so glaring. With every British jab, the European vaccine failure looks more and more like the tale of two leaders who put ideology over good politics and who were so eager to demonstrate the superiority of Brussels bureaucracy to the nation state that they forgot to do their job.  

Less controversially . . . Germany is under pressure to change its vaccination strategy after her top vaccine regulator acknowledged that advice against giving the AZ jab to over 65s had been flawed.  . . And: A team of German scientists has  called on the government to follow the UK in delaying 2nd doses, after a study showed it could save up to 15,000 lives. The head of Germany’s Standing Committee on Vaccination, has said that errors had been made and that the whole thing had gone very badly.

The Way of the World  

A TV dating show in which couples meet for the first time at the altar has become a sensation this season.

Can anyone really doubt that rolling news and social media companies are 2 large evils of our age? Or, rather, they are catalysts for the endless exposure of human weakness and badness?

The USA/Religious Nutters/Crooks Corner

Stand by but don't hold your breath. . . . A new QAnon claim has it that Trump will be inaugurated on March 20, in a ceremony which will kick off the long-awaited 'Storm' of mass arrests and the deaths of satanic pedophiles in the 'deep state'.

So . . . Is QAnon the only major conspiracy group set up and run by comedians?

English

It's often said there's no English word for the German schadenfreude. But, in fact there is - epicaricacy. Defined as: Deriving pleasure from the misfortune of another. But it does seem to be a recent invention and is unlikely to catch on. As of now, it's not recognised by either the OED or by Merriam-Webster.

Finally . . . 

1. A new habit brought on by Covid.

2. Checking on the invention/acceptance of the word epicaricacy, I came across The Complete, Totally Comprehensive Politically Correct Joke Book, by G. Solomon - dedicated to all those who wish to learn the true limits of politically correct humor. This is its Contents page:-

Blacks 1-3 

Blonds  4-9 

Boys  10-13 

Catholics   14-18 

Children   19-23 

Disasters  24-26 

Doctors  27-29 

Fat people 30-40 

Gays  41-52 

Girls  53-56 

God. 57-80 

Heaven 81-89 

Hell. 90-96 

Intelligence  97-97 

Jews98-110 

Jobs 111-113 

Lawyers 114-129 

Lesbians 130-137 

Men 138-141 

New Yorkers  138-139 

Nurses  140-146 

Pedophiles   147-158 

People.  159-164 

Pilots  165-175 

Poor people  176-181 

Professions   182-185 

Religion   186-203 

RichPeople   203-203 

Sex  204-224

ShortPeople  225-229 

SickPeople   230-238 

Southerns 239-243 

Stealing  244-247 

Stewardesses  248-254 

TallPeople  255-257 

Teachers   259-269 

Violence  270-272 

Virgins  273-292 

Women 292-299

Need I add that it comprises 300 blank pages? Which you can download as a pdf . . .