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  

Spain:  

1. The national incidence rate has increased again, for 100 to 107 per 100,000 inhabitants for the past 14 days. For those 20-29, it's now 251

2. The Majorcan student madness resulted in almost 1,200 positive cases. Pontevedra is reported to be the place worst hit by infected returnees. And some restrictions have been-reintroduced in the city.  

4. Vaccination rates. Galicia has the best record, while Madrid has the worst in mainland Spain. It also boasts one of the highest incidence rates, thanks to the laxity of the business-friendly PP president. .

The UK:  The new Minister of Health has opened the way for EU travel to resume with an NHS app that will enable Brits to prove they're fully vaccinated, bypassing Angela Merkel’s quarantine demands. The app has been updated to serve as a Covid passport that will enable Brits to prove they're fully vaccinated, show a negative pre-departure test or show that they've had the virus in the past 180 days. It's now ready to be integrated into the EU's identical green pass system, which will allow people to travel freely throughout the bloc.

The Delta variant: The UK Health Ministry says no fully vaccinated person under 50 has died from the delta variant, even though younger age groups now make up 90% of cases.

Italy: England fans won't be able to to to Rome, should their team make the Euros final. Unlike ‘important’ officials, who will be.

 Cosas de España/Galiza

Spain Considers a National Digital Currency Alternative to the Euro. I wish I knew what that meant.

I spent a pleasant 2 hours in the Museo de la Historia de Madrid yesterday. It has a marvellous display of magnificent fotos taken during January's unprecedented snow blizzard - Storm Filomena. Well worth a visit.

Madrid is certainly different from Pontevedra in a number of ways:-

- No newspapers in bars/cafés - 'Because of Covid'.

- Money not accepted in some shops and bars, only cards - 'Because of Covid'.

- No biscuits with your coffee. [Nowt to do with Covid]

- Prices for several everyday things up to 50% higher [Because of Covid??]

As regards prices, my daughter and I agreed that - thanks to a guild-protected monopoly - pharmacies must be one of the most profitable businesses you can get into in Spain. A probiotic that I've started to take cost me €15 here, against €12 in Pontevedra. And it's c.€8 on the net. . . . As in Pontevedra, here in Madrid you can sometimes see 3 pharmacies from where you’re standing.

The good news is that you can get nice Galician empanadas here in Madrid. Though I do wonder whether Hecha en Galicia means, ‘Made in Calle Galicia’ . . . That's how you get here.

I was (almost) pleased to see a young woman in the Museum of Madrid's history being chastised for having let her mask to the tip of her nose. But I guess the attendants have little else to do but be zealous.

María's Final[???] Stretch. Days 24-25. Those bloody stupid/normal kids . . .

Portugal 

Who can keep up anywhere? After 'days of chaos and confusion', Portugal has announced that children under 18 won't have to quarantine on arrival, so long as they're accompanied by a fully vaccinated adult. Initially, it seemed only children under 12 were exempt, leaving many family holidays in doubt.

Spanish

I learnt several new words in the museum yesterday. Like currutaco for coxcomb. And petimetra for quaintrelle. Now I just have to find out WTF quaintrelle means . . .

English

Quaintrelle: 'A woman who emphasises a life of passion expressed through personal style, leisurely pastimes, charm, and cultivation of life's pleasures'. Wish I knew some of these . . 

Finally  . . .

I think that, if I were a woman who’d lost out on an Olympics 1st place medal to a trans woman, I'd take my silver medal to a jeweller and have it gold-plated. After putting out a contract on the ‘winner’, 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.  

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'

Covid  

Spain: 

1. Though the death rate remains low, the incidence rate has increased from 95 to 100 per 100,000 for the past 14 days. In 2 regions - Andalucia and Cantabria - it's over 150. 

2. Majorca's Green status is in danger in the UK, after a massive number of Spanish young folk became infected after post-exam beach parties and a concert there.

3. Following these celebrations, infections have been reported in 8 regions of Spain. Says The Times: The country’s slow vaccination programme means that almost none of those aged 17 to 21 have been inoculated. Actual numbers here.

The UK: Spain and Portugal either have are about to introduce new restrictions on unvaccinated Brits. As someone has written, it now looks like no summer family holidays for Brits in Europe this year. Other than in Gibraltar, of course. Devastating for the Spanish tourism sector.

Australia: The prime minister has vowed to keep the nation’s borders closed as part of his government’s attempt to grapple with rising cases of the Delta variant. The spread of this is said to threaten to wreck Australia’s successful efforts to suppress the coronavirus.

The Delta variant: A well-known Brit has warned that, firstly, you can get this despite being fully jabbed and, secondly, that the initial symptoms - before it hits you hard - are 'very, very similar' to a light 'summer' cold. Only a PCR test will reveal what you actually have. Bearing mind, he says, that you're very infectious, such light symptoms shouldn't be ignored.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Spain in Africa: Lenox Napier takes a quick look at this here.

This is the 'famous' Pollería in the Madrid barrio of Chueca, where the ice lollies come in the shape of penises (pollas).

The queue, I'm told, largely comprises young women. Given that Chueca is the gay barrio of the city, this possibly came as a surprise to the entrepreneurs who erected the business, as it were.

Here in Madrid, it's rare to see any of the idiots weaving in and out of pedestrians on e-bikes or e-scooters wearing a helmet. This, too, is illegal. And unenforced, apparently. What's less rare is seeing them go the wrong way down a one-way street

Train travel: 

1. Yet more hassle with Renfe's web page. See the details in the Special below. It might help others trying to buy a ticket on line. Or at least be some compensation.

2. Another nice email from Adif the train operator, telling me, effectively, that my beisbol cap left on the train was filched. I can't lay claim to an iota of surprise.

The UK

Opines a newspaper leader: Authority must be ethical. It needs to be about public service, not selfish interests. It needs to be open and transparent. It needs to be held by people committed to maintaining standards of honesty and integrity. And yet, if we are truthful, far too many institutions in Britain, and far too many people in positions of authority, fall short. These possibly include the Prime Minister himself, of course.

Talking of Johnson . . . If there's one thing he has a genius for, it's sophistry. Ambiguous statements intended to make you draw an inference favourable to him. So it is that yesterday he claimed, in respect of the belated departure of the Health Secretary: When I saw the story on Friday, we had a new secretary of state for health on Saturday. Said hapless secretary, of course, resigned because of pressure from his own party and the public, not from the Prime Minister, who had publicly supported him.

Possibly more than you need to know on this subject but a Times reader has commented: Johnson is the most accomplished and successful liar in public life – probably the best liar ever to serve as PM. Some of this maybe a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice has allowed him to uncover new possibilities. And said reader has added these comments, allegedly from an ex Conservative MP: He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, and the obvious lie. Which is, I guess, in line with what I wrote above. Lloyd George springs to mind as the only possible competitor for these honours.

O tempora! O mores!

Finally  . . .

Possibly because it's quite large, my mask tends to slip down towards the tip of my nose, though my nostrils remain covered. I'm rather tired of zealots ordering me - albeit only inside buildings (and trains) now - to raise my mask until the top of it is at the  bridge of my conk. Does this happen to anyone else, I wonder.

A RENFE SPECIAL

The Good News

- There's now a box next to the One Way/Return box which asks you to enter your discount entitlement, including via the Tarjeta Dorada. I'm pretty sure this wasn't there last week.

- When you get further into the process, there's a box in which to enter your Tarjeta Dorada number. This is above the line which asks if you have valid discount. I'm 100% sure this wasn't there last week.   

The Bad News 

It took me well over an hour to buy a ticket on the net this morning. Problems arising:-

1. After selecting a preferente ticket. I was told there were no tickets available on that train for those not in a wheelchair.

2. After I selected a normal ticket and entered all my data, my debit card was rejected 3 times by my bank. I've no idea why. Never happened anywhere else before

3. I tried to change my debit card but could find no way to do this.

4. So, I selected New Card and was told to enter the details in the next section.

5. But there was no section, or at least not until I'd confirmed I'd wanted to pay.

6. I entered my credit card details but the card was rejected twice.

7. The third time I entered the details, it seemed to work, but

8.  After 45 minutes to get to this point, I then I got the dreaded Renfe message: We can't deal with you now. Please try later.

9.  When I tried later, again using my registered account, the price had literally doubled.

10. So, I logged out and started the whole process yet again. By this time, not in a very good mood . . .

This time it finally worked and I got confirmation of purchase, at the price originally quoted. By which time - at 11am - I felt in need of a G&T. And I knew it would have been easier to make the 40 minute metro  trip to Chamartín station and back.

I have wondered if it's only me who has this hassle with Renfe but I know my daughter does and a friend has told me this week he does. Most tellingly, you can easily find Google searches under Is Renfe's page the worst on the internet. Click here and here, for example. The second one contains some very sound advice when facing this challenge.

What the hell, I’ll save you some trouble . . .

- Buying tickets on Renfe is quite possibly one of the worst travel experiences one can have.

- The poor website design and seemingly impossible network results in many headaches as purchase attempt after purchase attempt get denied and timeout. This process repeats itself several times over such that many people often just give up on trying to get the deal and spend more money at a 3rd party websites to get past the time required to get Renfe to work altogether.

- Website is constantly full of bugs and issues. Totally unacceptable. Laughable. The train service ,on the other hand, is excellent. [Agreed]

- Booking on the site often feels like performing an activity on the internet from the mid-1990s. Some computer in their system, located in some part of Spain, has likely not been updated since then.

I don't seem to be alone. To say the least.

My daughter says she always uses the phone. She’s fluent in Spanish but says they have English speaking operators. These might just be the correct numbers to call for this:-

- Information (24 hours a day), Reservations, Telephone Sales, Changes and Cancellations: 912 320 320 [Not free]

- Group Coordination Office: 915 066 356 (09:00-14.00 Monday to Friday) /gruposcercaniasmadrid@renfe.es. 

-  Accessibility. Request assistance to the station platform service: 900 920 922. [Free!]

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. HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for this citation of advice on getting your Covid certificate.

The UK v. The EU: Today Germany will attempt to secure an EU-wide ban British travellers into the EU, regardless of whether or not they've been vaccinated. The German chancellor wants to designate UK a “country of concern” because the Delta variant is so widespread. For obvious reasons, the plan will be resisted by Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Malta but backed by France.  

Cosas de España/Galiza

Another HT to Lenox Napier for this citation - All you need to know about those mobile, hard-to-see radar machines.

Time to point out, as Lenox does, that a volte-face on reckless driving has led to a massive decrease in deaths on Spanish roads. Down, I think, to less than a 5th of what they were when I came here in 2000. Sad to say, in Galicia, is now seems to be more dangerous to use a zebra crossing than to travel in a car.

A friend who's new to Spain and who's started teaching English to kids has asked me if it's normal for parents not to tell him when their child isn't coming to the class. I told him this is a problem all private teachers face here, as this seems not to be considered impolite in Spain. His real challenge, I added, is to determine if the no-show is a one-off or permanent. I suspect the Spanish attitude is: "Well, he could always call to find out". And I've assured him that, if he does call - there'll be copious apologies for not keeping him informed. And possibly for ending a vital source of income. After the event.

María's Final Stretch, Days 20-23 

I enjoyed the ethnic museum in Grandas de Salime cited by María the day I aborted my attempt at the Camino Primitivo after only 3 days. Read all about that here. And my advice on tackling the punishing Primitivo here. Which I still find very funny, even if I did write it myself . . .  My fotos of the museum can be found among these.

Update: I’ve received a nice email from Adif, telling me they're checking if they've got my beisbol cap. So far, so good.

The UK & Brexit

The positive/optimistic view: Even at this early stage, it’s clear Brexit is altering the balance of power between labour and business, causing wages to rise, while allowing the creation of a regulatory and worldwide trading regime that suits the UK – and will ultimately boost our prosperity. See the full article below.

The USA

Donald Trump has held his first rally since leaving office, in Wellington, Ohio. These are 5 things said to be learnt from it, none of them very surprising:-

1. Trump will exact revenge.

2. Trump's base is huge - but there are cracks in it.

3. Immigration is a winning issue

4. Many believe his stolen election claim.

5. He has returned to social media and claims he will start his own social platform in addition to joining Rumble.

The Way of the World

With its genius for turning good things bad and true things false, woke ideology has decided that even basic standards of coherence and accuracy themselves are evidence of a white, male Euro-centric (and therefore bad) worldview. At a number of universities in Britain, good spelling, proper grammar and robust essay structure – not to mention concepts like facts, truth and argument – all now fall under suspicion. 

English

Pronunciation. I may well have admitted before that, as a teenager, I thought 'misled' was pronounced myzled, not miss-led. Only by reading it out loud in class - twice! - did I discover my error. Of course, I knew of the miss-led pronunciation but assumed it was one of those cases of 2 options running side by side. Possibly.

Finally  . . .

Not easy to forget - The blistering heatwave of summer 1976. In this cool and damp end to June it may be difficult to believe that on this day 45 years ago the UK’s highest temperature for the month, 35.6C, was recorded at Southampton. This fell during a heatwave of 18 consecutive days with temperatures at 30C or more in southern England. It was the hottest, driest and sunniest summer in the UK’s history. After 2 or 3 years of drought, it shone an alarming light on how critical water supplies were in much of England, and that London is one of the driest capitals in the world, with annual rainfall similar to Barcelona. Who knew? Manchester, on the other hand, has a reputation for endless rain. Just like Galicia. In both cases, it's undeserved. But impossible to scotch.

Note: If you’ve arrived here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try this.  

THE ARTICLE 

Brexit is shaking up the balance of economic power. Brexit is allowing the creation of a regulatory and worldwide trading regime that suits the UK – and will ultimately boost our prosperity: LiamHalligan, The Telegraph 

I was in a studio at LBC radio when the Brexit result was confirmed in the early hours of June 24 2016. Sleep deprived, and full of caffeine, I’d been glued to live feeds of currency markets and other financial indices, giving regular updates on sterling losing ground as the result became clear.

“The British people have spoken – and the answer is we’re out,” declared an ashen-faced David Dimbleby, as shocked as the rest of the broadcast media establishment. For all the warnings Brexit would be bad for the UK, the majority of those voting had opted to leave.

Over the last five years, a lot has happened. For one thing, much of our political and media class spent until December 2019 trying to reverse the referendum result. The parliamentary shenanigans, as countless MPs went back on their manifesto promises to honour and implement the referendum result, were dark days for our democracy. I think historians will look back and conclude the “second referendum” crowd were wholly in the wrong.

But eventually, after a spate of all-night parliamentary sittings and a dramatic snap election, Brexit finally “got done” – up to a point, anyway. For it was only at the start of this year that the UK finally left “transition”. And, of course, negotiations and flare-ups between the UK and Brussels will continue. That’s partly because the Eurocrats are determined to make clear that leaving the European Union is difficult – pour decourager les autres, – discouraging other members of the 27-nation bloc from leaving, should they not want “ever closer union”. But ongoing cross-Channel tensions are inevitable. Big, powerful nations don’t always see eye to eye – whether they are in the EU or not.

The pound plunged as the Brexit result came through five years ago. But the fact that sterling is now almost exactly where it was during the months before the referendum – against both the dollar and euro – is barely commented upon.

That’s because arguments about the economic impact of Brexit have been overshadowed, of course, by Covid – which has seen the UK economy contract by almost a 10th last year, the biggest GDP fall in 300 years. But it’s clear, even at this early stage, Brexit is changing our pattern of trade.

UK exports to the EU were, in fact, falling as share of our total exports long before Brexit – down from 55pc in 1999 to 43pc just before the 2016 referendum. Our EU exports have been below 40pc of the total for some years – if you include the “Rotterdam effect”, which recognises some British goods sent to the huge Dutch port, while counting as exports to the EU, are destined elsewhere.

The UK has exported more to non-EU nations than to the EU for many years, even before Brexit. That trend will continue. And the UK’s trade with the EU, as well as shrinking, has long been in deficit – despite our membership of the EU’s single market and customs union. Our non-EU trade, in contrast, while growing, has been delivering repeated surpluses – adding to national wealth. This was a major part of the economic logic of Brexit.

Another pillar of the argument to leave was that fewer than one in 10 UK firms exported to the EU, yet all our companies had to comply with EU regulations, which tended to be dirigiste and restrictive and over which British lawmakers had little control.

The UK’s trading relationship with the EU is clearly important – and trade won’t stop, despite the inevitable scratchiness in current relations. Neither side wants that, especially the EU, which continues to run a large surplus with Britain – so a lot more French, German and Spanish jobs and wealth rely on cross-Channel trade than vice versa. The economic case for Brexit was also based on the shifting balance of the world economy. When the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973, the bloc accounted for 38pc. That figure is now just 15pc, despite the EU today comprising far more member states.

Free of the EU, the UK is cutting bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) more advantageous than the EU-wide deals Brussels agreed on our behalf. Already, Britain has already rolled over 66 of the EU’s 70 free trade agreements – a major achievement, for which Liz Truss, the Trade Secretary, deserves credit. The UK also has new preliminary trade pacts with important commercial partners including the United Arab Emirates and Australia.

And, of course, we’re set to join the Comprehensive Partnership on Trans-Pacific Partnership – a group of 11 nations around “the Pacific Rim” – including Japan and Canada, as well as Mexico and Peru. CPTPP is a trade agreement between nations accounting for 13pc of global commerce. If Britain joins that would make 16pc – more than the EU27.

What’s more CPTPP is primed for growth, its share of the world economy set to expand to almost 25pc by 2050, by which time the EU will account for just 10pc. Powerful demographic and technological trends ensure that, over the next two decades, 90pc of global growth will happen beyond the EU – and that’s an estimate from Eurostat, the official Brussels statistical agency.

The “Commonwealth”, meanwhile, is often derided as Britain’s “lost empire” – yet this voluntary 53-nation group includes the biggest economy in Africa and second largest in Asia, a third of the global population and a fast-rising share of global GDP.

Trade is increasingly less about distance than digital and cultural connections – particularly for the UK, the world’s second largest services exporter. The Commonwealth nations share a common language and legal code, plus strong blood and cultural ties, providing a perfect platform to expand the UK’s trading footprint as we move on from our fixation on Europe, and focus more on the world beyond.

These early Brexit years are tough – not least for our fisherman, as that sector’s transition period runs its course. And Brussels seems determined to make the operation of the Northern Ireland Protocol as difficult as possible, taking serious risks with the peace process.

Yet even at this early stage, through the Covid storm clouds, it’s clear Brexit is altering the balance of power between labour and business, causing wages to rise, while allowing the creation of a regulatory and worldwide trading regime that suits the UK – and will ultimately boost our prosperity.

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/Galiza

The economy:-

1. Bad news retrospectively.

2. Bad news prospectively.

Albert Solà  . . . Just a common man or a prince from the wrong side of the blanket?

There's a lot more English spoken on the streets and terraces of Madrid compared with Pontevedra. Meaning I have to be careful about making injudicious remarks out loud to my daughter.

On Friday - before the regulation eased - I was surprised how many people in Dos de Mayo square weren't wearing masks. Yesterday, I was surprised how many people were still wearing them, despite the restriction having ended. This might well have been older folk. 

Something that didn't surprise was the 3 or 4 youths riding their e-scooters round the plaza at 15-20kph, weaving in and out of the kids playing there. This is illegal but, of course, inconvenient rules are to be ignored in Spain. I doubt anyone else there even noticed this, never mind thought about it and regarded it as reckless.

The UK

Are things there really this bad? Decadent Britain is sleepwalking into a vortex of permanent decline. Lockdown has precipitated a pernicious cultural revolution that will make us poorer and less free? See the full article below.

The USA

This crime was new to me.

The Way of the World/Social media

As if teaching in the UK wasn't tough enough already . . .  Teachers have become “incredibly anxious” because they are constantly braced for their pupils to pounce on any micro-aggression. Teachers face a "righteous generation looking for their teachers to trip up.  

TheTimes has an automatic censoring system for comments on its articles. Readers have used these descriptions to identify forbidden words that will cause your comment to be cancelled:- 

- 'list' preceded by a word that means the darkest colour.

- A large linear earthwork, roughly tracing the border between England and Wales, and constructed by Offa. [Dyke]

- The first name of Lupin, the amateur gentleman thief created by the writer Maurice Leblanc. [Arsène ]

- An alternative name for a donkey.

- Boris Johnson’s initials.

Quote of the Day

Before Prince Philip adopted his maternal grandparents’ surname of Mountbatten, his family name was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. This should have become the name of the British ruling house but, as one writer observed, “it sounded too much like Borussia Mönchengladbach’s back 4 to be passed off as typically British.”

Finally  . . .

I replaced my lost baseball cap yesterday, in Decathlon. Albeit somewhat flimsier that the €23 cap bought in a hat shop in Pontevedra, it did only cost me €2.99.

Note: If you’ve arrived here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try this. 

THE ARTICLE 

Decadent Britain is sleepwalking into a vortex of permanent decline. Lockdown has precipitated a pernicious cultural revolution that will make us poorer and less free: Allister Heath. The Telegraph.

What has happened to Britain? Why does it feel as if, almost uniquely, we will never quite recover from Covid? The pandemic is almost over, and yet it has changed Britain far more profoundly than countries with different political traditions.

I will mourn the liberal-conservative Britain of yore, beloved of those who didn’t like being told what to do: the Government felt obliged to sacrifice it in the panic that followed Covid. Harsh restrictions and social distancing saved tens of thousands of lives, but they also precipitated a far-reaching cultural revolution that will make Britain permanently less free, prosperous and civilised. Lockdown’s catastrophic collateral damage, combined with a series of pre-existing errors such as Boris Johnson’s spending spree, his net zero agenda and the housing shortage, mean Britain faces years of social and economic decline, tax rises and inflation. The Tories may be riding high in the polls today, but they will soon have to grapple with some nightmarish challenges.

All societies impose taboos – prohibitions the origins of which are not always understood but which help define a community. Britain’s included an aversion to ID cards, a belief that the state had no right to tell us what to think or wear, and that it was none of officials’ business whom we chose to consort with.

Yet such traditional restraints on power are fragile. Once they are widely broken, they cannot be reinstigated: we have turned from a society where none of us knew our NHS numbers (or even that we had one) to a country which relishes the idea of “Vos Papiers, S’il Vous Plaît!”. Until Covid, it would have been unthinkable for a government to shut airports: now it’s just another tool to fight disease. We have normalised the abnormal. This applies equally to economics: if printing money works for Covid, why not for HS2? If higher benefits buy votes during a pandemic, why not all the time? Decline and fall takes many forms.

The next steps are obvious: there will be a push for digital IDs, with health and financial data connected; for state bodies to be granted the right to track us, using our phone signals (to facilitate contact tracing); travel bans will be imposed at the first sign of any new virus; and furlough and mass state intervention will be the norm during every downturn. There will be work from home orders, remote schooling and lockdowns come the next bad flu season, all to “save the NHS”, and the national debt will eventually reach Italian or Japanese levels. There will be no tax reform or supply-side tax cuts.

The Overton Window of the politically possible will have shifted in a statist, authoritarian direction, and the public will plead for more. Infuriatingly, the Government’s structural incompetence and the general uselessness of the Civil Service won’t be fixed, even though doing so would be the natural lesson to learn from our Covid failings.

In many ways, we have become more continental: instead of assuming that anything that isn’t explicitly forbidden is permitted, the Covid mindset is to ask what is allowed. Our taxes and spending levels will go up, paradoxically for Brexit Britain. For centuries, England has been an individualistic nation, embracing property rights, geographic mobility and the nuclear family; this is one reason why the Industrial Revolution happened here and why London is such a tolerant and dynamic city today. Greater collectivism will come with many downsides: herd-following societies aren’t conducive to entrepreneurialism, scientific innovation or risk-taking.

The end of sound money and the prospect of higher inflation will also damage the UK economy’s reputation, and impoverish millions. Ditto the return of envy and class warfare: Covid restrictions have helped entrench a zero-sum vision of society. The apparent hypocrisy that it is possible to attend a football match or G7 meeting but not a school prize-giving is proving corrosive: if not everybody benefits, why should anyone, many ask?

One side-effect of Covid is that risk is seen as an unmitigated evil. In a free society, doctors advise and patients choose; in today’s medical-state, people are deemed too stupid to make their own decisions. Freedom is subordinated to the new quasi-religious imperative to “protect” the NHS. But as with all false idols, worshipping it can lead to disaster – in this case, worse healthcare than other nations.

Johnson’s erstwhile libertarianism, his lack of judgmentalism, his opposition to sin taxes: it’s all gone, replaced by ever greater amounts of social control. And once the principle of eliminating health risk is conceded, why not environmental risk? If we shut down to save the NHS, why not ground planes to save the climate? Is that also not an emergency? No wonder some greens aren’t keen on returning to the old normal.

One risk we don’t care about – other than that of a public finance implosion – is what is happening to our children. Starting in the 1990s, the establishment began to realise the scale of the calamity that had befallen schools as a result of the nihilistic reforms of the 1960s. Tories and Labour strove to raise standards, with league tables introduced in 1992, Tony Blair’s specialist schools and academies, and Michael Gove’s shake-up. The unions were crushed; the primacy of phonics reestablished; and there was a renewed emphasis on discipline, uniforms, parental choice and traditional values.

All of that now lies in tatters. Children have been dramatically deprioritised; exams have been devalued, grade inflation is back and the message is that schooling is a second-tier consideration in Britain. It is a cultural ruination, one of the fastest regressions of modern times.

Not everything is going wrong: the Government is waging a surprisingly successful war on woke. Brexit is going well, with trade deals galore, a home-grown immigration system and plenty of promise. Excellent reforms are being made to the constitution and to human rights law. But Covid has proved a disaster for Britain, cancelling many of the good things Johnson was planning, while exacerbating the impact of his bad tendencies. Unless the Government gets a grip, what ought to be a time of renaissance will instead be remembered as just another period of crippling, debilitating national decline.

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: Here’s info on the UK government’s rules re travel to/from the Balearics. As I understand it, from 30 June you can go there and return to the UK without much hassle and expense. Until the EU stops you from doing so, that is. Probably  quite soon.

Cosas de España/Galiza

The new face mask rules, as of today.

There’s now a cheaper high-speed train, on the usual priority route(s). As ever, nowt for us in the North West. It’s called the AVLO, from AVE+Low cost, I guess. Some details here.

Spain takes another good step in its post-civil-war direction.

I left my newish beisdbol cap on the rack above my seat on Thursday's train. This morning, I was pleasantly surprised to see that both Renfe/ADIF and the city of Madrid have an email via which one can report losses. But, of course, I've no great optimism that it was handed in. Should this happen, I will - with delight - report the fact of recovery.

Here’s Lenox on how to be really Spanish. All very true but the rubbish problem is lower in Galicia. Except in the forest behind my house, where the dumping is on an industrial scale. And near the contenadores.

The UK

In a survey of 20,000 young people, the best sign that somebody is old was said to be asking for a cappuccino. According to 52% of those asked, only 'ancient' people do this.

Post Brexit roaming charges. Reality bites.

The Way of the World

The absolute problem of fundamental human rights: What to do when one of yours clashes with one of mine? See the article below.

English

These are said to be the ten most annoying mispronunciations of native speakers in the UK: 

1. Pacifically for specifically (35%)

2. Probly for probably (28%)

3. Expresso for espresso (26%)

4. Specially for especially (25%)

5. Artick for Arctic (19%)

6. Nucular for nuclear (19%)

7. Tenderhooks for tenterhooks (18%)

8. Excetera for et cetera (18%)

9. Assessory for accessory (15%)

10. Triathalon for triathlon (9%)

 A few days ago, I predicted that - through increasing usage of a 'mistake' - the gerundive ending would over time shift from ING to IN*. Today I read that a linguistics expert has said: Language is always changing, and this can apply to pronunciations of words and not just word meanings and grammar. Once the new pronunciation takes hold in a society, then it’s no longer an error but an innovation. That's English for you. The other example I can think of is the insertion of a semi-glottal stop in words like hospital and total.

*The 2  most public exponents of this are the Home Secretary and Sky News' political editor. I confess to find them both irritating.

Finally  . . .

I said above it was this morning I found the Renfe and city of Madrid site but it was actually 4am, after I'd been woken by a mosquito that had already got me twice. This is my first experience of a mozzy in Madrid and I wondered if it was one of the awful tiger variety - from voracious droves of which I sometimes had to flee in Jakarta. I recall reading a report that these were making their way into Spain.

My daughter confirms that there's a plague of the insect in Madrid  and this article talks of the tiger variety being here since 2017.
 

Note: If you’ve arrived here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try this. 

THE ARTICLE

The absolute problem with human rights. Allowing the 18th-century notion of unalienable rights to become embedded into law has contorted our common sense. Matthew Parris. The Times

Rarely can a columnist say with confidence that on something controversial in the headlines, he absolutely knows what you, the reader, think. I say that, though, this morning. You think it’s sensible for the government to propose, as they did last week, that care home staff in England who come into contact with elderly residents should be required to be double vaccinated against Covid-19. So do I.

In what way, then, should we call the proposal controversial? Well, here’s The Guardian. “The controversial measure sets up a likely battle with staff in both services and could lead to the government being sued under European human rights law . . . for breaching the freedom of people who work in caring roles to decide what they put into their bodies.”

And here are just a few of the comments from care staff during the long public consultation the government conducted beforehand. “Forcing people to have vaccinated [sic] . . . is against human rights”; “It’s a breach of human rights forcing us to have this vaccination . . . It’s basic human rights!” “[it is] against my human rights to be told I can no longer work in the care sector if I do not have the vaccine”; “Its [sic] all about choice and that is a basic human right.”

I don’t cite these responses as being persuasive. They are nonsense. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been consulted and indicated no objections, and doubtless the case would fail before the European Court of Human Rights. No, I offer this simply as an example of how deeply into our popular culture, as well as into judicial and political thinking, the idea of “basic” “fundamental” or “unalienable” human rights has now penetrated. So deeply that people start challenging obvious, life-saving common sense.

This column’s aim is to question the whole concept of fundamental human rights. It is so deeply flawed as to be fatal to all legal reasoning built upon it. We took a wrong turning in 1791 which has by degrees led us, via the American and French revolutions, into a terrible mess.

The flaw is irremediable and voids the concept from the start. Take the issue in question. Here, the care home resident’s “right to life” trumps the care-worker’s “right to liberty”. As it must. In any ordinary use of language, two assertions of rights which conflict cannot both be “fundamental” or (in the words of the American Declaration of Independence) “unalienable”. To settle the conflict, one or the other “right” will have to trump another, in which case the trumped right will have proved anything but fundamental. The person who claimed it will have been stripped of it — or “alienated” from it.

This problem does not apply to other kinds of rights, and the common law and statute which deal in them understands that. There are limits and they are adjustable. Your “right” of way may have to be suspended for urgent earthworks. Your right to free speech may be limited by the laws of defamation. But the concept of “fundamental” rights aims to take rights to a different and deeper level. The revolutionary idea is that all human beings have these rights at all times and cannot be deprived of them.

But they can and sometimes they should, and frequently they do; and everybody knows it.

The philosophical muddle we’ve landed ourselves in stems from an important failure in the English language. “Fundamental human rights” started as an Anglo-Saxon concept, rooted logically in a divinity. But in a world in which we humans and our courts are to be the adjudicators, our language needs a different word. English can only offer the Latin “desiderata”, and that’s never going to catch on. Desiderata are “things that are desired”; everyone knows that settling conflict between them may require compromise or even the extinction of one desideratum in favour of another.

A culprit in all this is an 18th-century book by the English-born American, Thomas Paine: Rights of Man (1791), justifying revolution. It was a huge hit and his thinking had already found its way into the 1776 American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The French revolutionaries were more circumspect in their 1789 declaration, which acknowledged limits to rights. But within decades the language of unalienable rights had rooted itself in progressive thinking: beginning a long journey that led to the postwar Geneva Conventions, the European Convention on Human Rights, the related United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and our own British human rights legislation. These are long and intricate documents, but underlying them all you can see the shape of the 18th-century thought that we have been given (by God?) certain rights that no government could take away. Subtract God and what do you have? A rather cloudy idea of something called “natural” law, at whose core remains that hoary old phrase, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

And here’s why it isn’t workable. “Life” — this cannot be unalienable or fundamental; we manufacture and export weapons of death; we switch off life-support machines; we deny NHS patients access to prohibitively expensive drugs. “Liberty” — this cannot be unalienable: your liberty to roam may conflict with my liberty to enjoy my own property without trespass. “The pursuit of happiness” — ditto: such pursuits conflict all the time. They are not absolute and must be adjudicated. But if not absolute then the adjudicator must weigh one desideratum against other, conflicting desiderata. And that’s what adjudicators have always had to do, before and after Paine: Jefferson, Lafayette, Geneva, the European and UN declarations. They add nothing to the process.

The words “fundamental” and “unalienable” serve only to confuse both legal and commonsense reasoning. Look at the real moral and legal dilemmas we’ve faced in recent years: refugees versus host population; unvaccinated employees versus their customers’ lives; trans people versus feminists; prisoners on parole versus possible victims of recidivist crime; pregnant mothers versus the unborn child. The language of unalienable rights in such cases is entirely unhelpful. “Rights” or desiderata vary, of course, in importance; but the importance will depend as much upon the facts of each case as on the moral category into which we have placed the desideratum.

I am well aware that my thinking here will (in the philosopher David Hume’s words) “fall stillborn from the press”. But for more than two centuries we have been wandering up a blind valley in our obsession with unalienable rights. In time, maybe some time yet, we will come to understand that.

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: From 4am on 30 June, the Balearic Islands will be on the UK Green list, allowing vaccinated folk go to/return there without needing PCR tests or quarantine on arrival.

Think Spain on this. Bottom line: If the Amber status of the rest of Spain isn't changed to Green until after summer, it will be too late to save the British tourism market this year. This, however, assumes that folk from the UK would be allowed into the EU this summer even if Spain were changed to Green.. On that . .

The EU: Predictably. President Macron has joined Mrs Merkel in demanding a ban on visitors from the UK. This, of course, is because of the prevalence of Delta there. But the British view is that its citizens are being penalised because the UK has both the world's best variant surveillance science and also the most extensive testing capability. As someone has put it: One of the reasons that Britain has had such a noticeable problem with variants compared to elsewhere is that we are actively looking for them. Even Trump got it right on this: The more testing you do, the more cases you find. But this ain't going to butter any parsnips in the EU's capitals. Or not the northern ones anyway.

Malta: Despite being moved to the Green List, the island has announced new travel restrictions for British holidaymakers. Possibly the first but certainly not the last.

Cosas de España/Galiza

I trained down to Madrid yesterday afternoon. During the 6 hour trip, we had 3 different announcers, all giving the messages in both Spanish and English. But so rapidly that I caught just few words in Spanish and almost none in what passed for 'English'. I did understand the Gallego of the first 2-3 hours but this was because it came from a recording.

Despite living in Spain for 15 years, my daughter's still sufficiently Anglo that, this morning, we virtually ran through Madrid's (hot) streets to avoid being late for a meeting of my grandson's playgroup at an entrance of the beautiful Retiro park. We did arrive 5 minutes late but it was another 20 before enough mothers had arrived to justify going further into the park. And one or two joined us more than 30 minutes later.

My daughter and I have both  noticed a lot of German accents in Madrid right now. Probably a lot more in Majorca, as they've been free to travel here for quite some time now. Despite the city's high incidence of covid cases.

The EU

Is it actually doing a good job of convincing residual Remainers that it's a club the UK shouldn't want to be a member of??

Finally  . . .

It's quite possible that you believe the fruit in the Garden of Eden was an apple. It wasn't; it was 'fruit of the tree of knowledge'. Renaissance painters took to representing this as an apple. And Eve as a harlot.

Note: If you’ve arrived here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try this.

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 Delta Variant: Now dominant in Portugal and has appeared in clusters across Germany, France and Spain, prompting EU health officials to warn further action is needed to slow its spread. While the strain still only accounts for a fraction of the total virus cases in mainland Europe, it’s gaining ground. It accounted for 70% of sequenced cases in the greater Lisbon area this month, up from around 10% in May. And for more than 20% in Italy and about 16% in Belgium.

The EU: Angela Merkel would prefer that Germany were not the exception when it comes to quarantining visitors from the UK. I presume she's addressing EU members whose economies are very much dependent on tourism. But is she going to stop tens of thousands of Germans going to London next week to see the match against England? Shades of March 2020, when 10,000 Atlético Madrid fans travelled to the UK. 

Portugal. Restrictions were put in place this week in and around Lisbon.

The UK. Says it all . . .

Cosas de España/Galiza

Those Catalan pardons explained. 

Are the next Catalans in line for clemency the entire Pujol family? This has been virtual royalty in that region for several decades but, throughout, seems to have suffered from Desert Disease - sticky palms. Unsurprisingly, they're said to have claimed to know where all the bodies are buried. Not all of them Catalan.

Talking of corruption, one of Spain's blights . . .  Here's 2 extracts from Lenox Napier's Business Over Tapas of this week:- 

1. Sometimes it’s the innocent-sounding charities. In El Mundo, we read of one aimed at helping children with cancer called La Fundación CIBI which operated out of Barcelona [Cataluña again] and allegedly managed to trouser a million euros in 4 years. The three family members who ran the charity are now helping the police with their enquiries. 

2. In Almería, a local politician and VP of the provincial government was allegedly found to have been taking bribes from a company to obtain their Covid material.  

Europe

The Euros: I've never watched a football tournament in which referees were praised so often. BUT . . . In last night's France v. Portugal match: The Spanish referee seemed to be in danger of single-handedly undermining the good reputation that the officials have built up in this tournament for their light touch. A blow to Spanish pride. Prior to the mistake in giving France a second penalty, el hombre in question had been seen as having an excellent tournament. Will some here assume he was bribed, I wonder? Perhaps more so in our neighbouring country.

The USA/Nutters Corner

A Republican member of Congress avers that Israel and the USA were 'created for God’s glory'. And that she was God's personal choice for her post. This tommyrot appears to cause less head-shaking in the USA than in other developed countries. 

Quote of the Day

If a sock disappears in your washing machine or dryer, it will re-emerge as a Tupperware lid that doesn’t fit any box.

English

I wonder if the word 'shevelled' ever existed. And, if so, whether it ever could have been applied to Boris Johnson.

The origin of the word Leviathan.

Finally  . . .

Well-endowed African priests make a regular appearance in emails sent automatically to my Spam box. They seem to be very busy.

A 'strawberry moon' tonight, after Midsummer's Day. So-called.

Note: If you’ve arrived here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try this. 

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 

India: Oh, no! Here comes Delta Plus . . . 

The UK: Despite D+ being on the horizon, Freedom Day is expected to be 19 July. Meanwhile, restrictions imposed on the general public won't be imposed on football fans and dignitaries coming for matches in Wembley. IGIMSTS*.

Cosas de España/Galiza

The 15+ houses behind mine that have lain empty since the end of the phoney boom in 2008 have recently started to sell. I know prices have been significantly reduced but I if whether the main factor is post-covid-city-flight. Given the amounts being spent on preparing the largest one for occupation, I'd guess the new owners are wealthy folk who might normally have wanted to live on the most exclusive street in Pontevedra city. But I'll probably never know.

Good news . . . Reduced electric shock. 

More Renfe hassle. Having found it impossible to find how to insert details of my Tarjeta Dorada discount card on the web page, I went to the station to ask about this. The chap there was very helpful, initially volunteering that this was quite hard to do. We ultimately agreed it was not merely hard but very difficult. If not impossible. He gave me the info I needed to put in the relevant box.

Need I tell you that no variation of what he gave me worked on the site? Even worse, the price was now almost double what he'd quoted me at the station - €61 v 33. One way. Fortunately, I'd decided to buy a ticket at the station. 

BTW . . . As before, the reasons given for rejecting my input included 'Number not long enough', 'That type of discount doesn't exist' and - the most ridiculous - 'The date of your card isn't valid'.  Anyone got the answer to this conundrum?

After these failures, I went down the rabbit hole of ticket pricing and discovered several things I didn't know. Specifically: The tarjeta dorada is only the cheapest option when you buy a ticket at the last minute. If you buy early, you can  get the cheapest ticket - the P - which offers 60% off the full price ticket, and the P+, with choice of seat assignment.

I've always found the Spanish approach to numbers rather odd. These are frequently given in the media to 2 or even 3 decimal points, when an integer would be perfectly enough. Or, at most, one decimal point. And I see that the marks required for entry into Galician universities are given to four decimal places. Imagine how you'd feel, if you lost out by 0.001. 

As usual, among the highest marks required is that for physiotherapy, reflecting demand. Is this considered an easy-life option? As ever, nursing also requires very high marks in the Selectividad entrance exam. 

Still on numbers, a Dutch friend has pointed out it's not unusual that an official number given by one state organisation here needs to be modified for another organisation. As when, last year when making my Renta submission, I had to add zeros to the Support Number on my NIE, to take it up to 9 digits. So, imagine my joy to see that this number on my newish TIE already has 9 digits!

María's Final Stretch, Days 17-19

The UK

Richard North today: [Bear in mind he’s always been a Brexiteer, though not remotely a fan of what Cummings and Johnson delivered]. This is the 5th anniversary of the day we went to the polls and set in train the events which were to take us out of the EU. Sadly, this gives us little cause for cheer. The intervening years have been littered by incompetence across the board, from politicians to officials and trade representatives, leaving the public confused and generally unenthusiastic about the process. Details of the disenchantment here. 

Here's a Guardian article cited by RN, exposing the astonishing claim that the UK government expected the EU to be aware that its obligations wouldn't be met in respect of Northern Ireland. YCMIU**. Lions led by donkeys??

The EU

The Empire strikes back. Again. This time it's cultural. Next time?   

Finally  . . .

Google’s Gmail has always been very good at keeping spam emails out of my Inbox. But not recently. I wonder why. Are the spammers getting cleverer? Or have I unwittingly signed up for something by accepting cookies?

* I guess it makes sense to someone

** You couldn't make it up.

Note: If you’ve arrived here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try this. 

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid 

Given the ridiculously delirious way modern footballers celebrate a goal, can anyone be remotely surprised that some playing in the Euros are going down with the virus?

Spain:  Something on mask-wearing (or not) here.

Cosas de España/Galiza

The Catalan rebels will be pardoned today. Those who want to know more about the political turmoil around this development should click here, and also read the 2 articles below, from Isambard Wilkinson in Madrid. And this article raises a good question about it.

Another step into the 21st century by the Traffic Department, the DGT.

Talking about motorists . . . From a taxation point of view  they're low-hanging fruit, both for direct and indirect hits. There are millions of them, and they're all 'rich' but without protest power. A few years ago, the Portuguese government - in a desperate search for revenue - suddenly made all its main roads toll-bearing. Which is why the country is now festooned with overhead gantries bearing cameras to clock you  every few minutes/seconds. Under pressure from the EU - which might not have been truly necessary - Spain is now heading the same way. Here's Lenox on the subject. 

Madrid and Barcelona are said to be permanently losing residents to the countryside.

Talking of the rural life, specifically in Galicia, this is a review of a book by a friend of mine.

And talking of taxes . . .  It's tax deadline time. For those Brits making a 2020 Renta declaration on line, your Support Number is on your NIE/TIE certificate/card, top right. If you still have a NIE, you might have to add  a zero or 2 at the front of it to get to 9 digits. If you have a TIE, it's number on the top right and it's different from your NIE Support Number of last year.

The UK

Who can be surprised at the report which proves- not for the first time - that it's white working class kids who are the least privileged in the UK?

The UK and the EU post Brexit

I'm not sure there'll be widespread grief but, as Richard North long ago predicted, the movement of racehorses between England, France and Ireland has been severely affected by Brexit. Here's a BBC article on the issue. As elsewhere, folk won know know the depth of the shit they’re in - think sausages - are asking/demanding Brussels to give them an exception not available to anyone else in the world. Which might not be legally possible under global rules. Even if the EU was of a mind to grant it.

If I were still in the UK. I think I'd set up a company employing recently qualified vets dedicated 8 hours a day to (maybe) reading but (certainly) stamping official documents. I'd be a millionaire by this time next year . . .

Quote of the Day

Dominic Cummings on Boris Johnson: He’s a pundit who stumbled into politics and acts like that 99% of the time , but 1% not like this. And that 1% is why pundits misunderstand/underestimate him.

Spanish 

As Spanish lacks a neutral plural, traditionally - to increasing controversy - the  masculine plural has done the job of including [those identifying as] female, as in padres(fathers) for 'parents'. Here's a recent example, referring to the date, later this week. when we can cease wearing masks outdoors. 

The text reads: Ugly people. The party ends 26 June.
 English

Regional accents aren't new on British TV but the number of these in which the G is dropped off words ending in ING is slowly becoming dominant, even among government Ministers.  As - in the absence of a national academy - the people rule, we can reliably assume this will be the norm in less than a century.

Finally  . . .

This is a less rude version of the T-shirt slogan I cited a short while ago:-

THE ARTICLES

1. Catalan leader Jordi Cuixart vows to fight on despite pardons: Isambard Wilkinson, The Times

Within the walls of his prison in Bages county, the Catalan separatist Jordi Cuixart greeted the offer of a pardon by the Spanish government with defiance. Speaking on a phone from behind a glass partition the soon-to-be freed Catalan leader said yesterday: “The pardons wouldn’t solve the political conflict between Catalonia and Spain.” Cuixart, 46, is one of 9 jailed separatists convicted of sedition in 2019 for their role in the region’s failed independence bid of 2017. All nine are to be pardoned by Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, in an effort to restart a dialogue between Madrid and Barcelona.

The move has divided Spain but left Cuixart unimpressed. He is willing to back unilateral action to achieve independence if a majority of the Catalan parliament decided. “It is not an act of magnanimity granting the pardons. I should not have been in jail for merely exercising my right to freedom of speech and protest,” Cuixart, the president of Òmnium Cultural, a civil association, said. “I was condemned for asking people to go to vote.” He said that the pardons showed the “weakness of the Spanish state” and that it was a recognition that the courts were guilty of a miscarriage of justice.

Sánchez announced the pardons at Barcelona’s Liceu opera house yesterday, hailing their “usefulness for coexistence”. “To get these nine people out of prison who represent millions of Catalans is a resounding message of concord,” he said. The cabinet is expected to rubber stamp the pardons at its meeting today, which should lead to the prisoners’ release in the coming days.

At the height of the crisis in 2019 King Felipe VI made a rare political intervention in which he condemned the independence bid and angered many by failing to mention a police crackdown in Catalonia in which 900 people were injured.

Sánchez, 49, has sought to sell the pardons as an attempt to reopen dialogue with the regional government, which is run by separatists. However, the move prompted criticism from the conservative opposition and from members of Sánchez’s own Socialist party, as well as disapproval from the supreme court. Opponents maintain that his main aim is to bolster his fragile coalition government, which is supported by the separatist party that governs the Catalan region. Some 60 per cent of Spaniards oppose the pardons, according to surveys. Pablo Casado, the leader of the conservative main opposition People’s Party, said that the pardons represented a “contempt for the law” and “embezzlement of sovereignty”.

Sánchez said that the pardons were “a message especially for thousands of people who supported and feel solidarity with [those jailed]. And for the thousands of people who disapproved of his conduct, but already consider the punishment enough.” He added: “We don’t expect that those seeking independence will change their ideals, but we expect [they] understand there is no path outside the law.”

Separatists in Catalonia, where 60 to 70% of people polled support the release of the jailed leaders, said the move was insufficient and backed calls for a complete amnesty for all those implicated — an estimated 3,000 people — in the referendum and declaration of independence. Elisenda Paluzie, the head of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), a pro-independence activist group, said that 30 or more senior government officials would face trial, accused of misusing public funds and disobedience, with some risking imprisonment, fines and bans from holding public office. “The pardons are personal solutions that will alleviate the pain of the prisoners but do not recognise that there was no crime and that they shouldn’t have spent a single day in jail,” she said. “We aim for a nullification of the trial [at the European Court of Human Rights] in Strasbourg.”

Separatists also demand an amnesty for other members of Catalonia’s regional government, such as Carles Puigdemont, who was the head of the regional authority in 2017 and fled into exile in Belgium. Others are in exile in Scotland and Switzerland. However, Jordi Sànchez, head of the ANC at time of referendum, who was also jailed for nine years for sedition, said: “The pardons will definitely serve to reduce tensions that exist in a large part of Catalan society that viewed our imprisonment or exile as arbitrary and authoritarian.” Oriol Junqueras, head of the party that runs the Catalan regional government, last week struck a more conciliatory note, conceding that some mistakes had been made by the separatists.

Cuixart is not packing up his few possessions just yet. He did not know exactly when he would be freed or whether a court would block the pardon. “We are the victims of a political judgment so nobody knows if they will again adapt the penal code to their needs,” he said.  

2. The Spanish PM’s bid for calm could inflame tensions in Catalonia: Isambard Wilkinson, The Times

José Ortega y Gasset, an early 20th-century Spanish philosopher, believed that “the Catalan problem is a problem that cannot be solved, it can only be borne”. In the light of such wisdom the granting of pardons to separatist leaders by Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, is seen as the latest attempt to calm tensions in the 300-year-old dispute.

It is a gamble that most Spaniards oppose — including 60 per cent of Sánchez’s Socialist voters — and one that runs the risk of destabilising his fragile coalition government and refilling the sails of the independence movement.

Although in regional elections in February parties supporting Catalonia’s independence won for the first time more than half the popular vote, the Socialist party, led in the region by Salvador Illa, won the largest share. The ultranationalist Vox party made unprecedented gains.

Government insiders say that their calculation is that although surveys suggest a large proportion of people oppose clemency, their reservations will not be translated into votes. The political agenda will move on quickly, they hope, focusing on hoped-for economic improvements and a successful vaccination campaign.

In Catalonia the pardons have received the blessing of the clergy and prominent business groups.

“The rhetoric of the independentists will not change much. But the Spanish government will be in a position to say that they tried to break the ice,” Lluís Foix, a prominent Catalan commentator, said.

“There will be grounds for normality, lower tensions and dialogue”. Sánchez’s government is reeling from a hefty victory by the conservative main opposition Popular Party in the Madrid region. A poll published yesterday by Sigma Dos suggests that the PP would win more votes in a general election than the Socialists and could govern with Vox. The win by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP’s Madrid leader, significantly boosted support for the conservatives. Her punchy leadership style has threatened to overshadow Pablo Casado, the PP national leader.

She has been at the fore of her party’s reaction to the pardons, dragging King Felipe VI into the melee, saying that Sánchez was making the monarch an “accomplice”, since by law he must sign them.

The pardons “are an act of faith”, said Nacho Torreblanca, of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Madrid.

“It’s a gamble. In the past separatist leaders have used concessions from the central government to push further for independence. This could be the same since so far their reaction has been to say that they are not stopping their push.”

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here.   

Covid 

Sweden: I don't know - does anyone? - what the final verdict will be on the Swedish strategy but it's noteworthy that the number of new cases is extremely low and the deaths total is down to zero. It's well known that - as elsewhere - mistakes were made initially in respect of care homes but, apart from that, there never seems to have been a consensus on the overall merits and demerits of the Swedish approach. Though, I guess it can be agreed that it impacted the country's economy less than in most others. And that it had only 2 waves, as opposed to at least 3 elsewhere.

The UK:   As Europe and America dance again, The UK is stuck in the slow lane. Widely-spaced jabs, a refusal to use vaccine passports and the Delta variant are holding Britain back. . . .  Although freedoms have increased over recent months, Brits still face tougher restrictions compared to others. More on this theme below.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Spain is not entirely free of the stain stain of racism, avers María, correctly. The far-right Vox party, she says, is the expression of the hatred of the other based on skin and origin that too many still harbor. The party does seem to have some rather odious spokespeople. I'm reminded of Hard-Hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah. Who was accused of pouring water on drowning men. 

Here's Mark Stücklin with comments on the risk posed by squatters. 

It's reported that animals - mainly wild boars, I suspect - cause more than half of Galicia's road accidents. As if we didn't have enough to contend with, what with bendy roads, quite a lot of surface water and boozed and/or drugged-up youths.

Aspirant teachers here have to take exams - Oposiciones - in the subject they want to teach. If successful, the state - not them - decides where they can start their careers. I guess it's not surprising that English was the most subscribed exam in Galicia this year but I was rather taken aback to see French ranked last, alongside Latin and Greek. Which must be painful for native speakers to read, given its status here only 30 years ago

The UK

It's frustrating to see Europe - with much higher numbers - relaxing while I can't contemplate going to the UK until the quarantine obligation is ended. These are quotes from the article below on this theme:-

- There's something so deeply British about what we’re doing to ourselves: snatching an endless purgatory of anxiety, fear and lives weighed down by the bureaucracy of hygiene theatre from the jaws of what could have been victory. We had an advantage, a huge one, and instead of running with it gleefully, we’ve driven ourselves – or have been driven – into the mud.   

- There’s a sense that when Europe opens up, it really opens up. The same goes for America. We’re the only ones being kept back in the twilight life of hygiene-bureaucracy and restrictions.    

- Britain’s love affair with self-excoriation is part of what makes it great: it makes us one of the least corrupt countries in the world. It yields great comedy. It breeds a political culture of robust, bracing critique. But when you get even the likes of Theresa May and Tony Blair calling our current jamboree of life-sapping rules bizarre and illogical, then surely it’s all gone too far.

- We began Covid with defeat, and now we have the chance to enjoy the fruits of a win. It’s just a shame that our Government, still stuck in the mindset of the first phase of the the pandemic, is set on squandering it.

Quote of the Day

After he'd seen this El Pais: "Many seniors who died from Covid-19 in 2020 are not going to die in the next few years’, my friend Eamon sent me this response: Well, that will save having to have a double funeral. 

Spanish 

Correction of the correction. Four Spanish friends have now told me that everyone really does say, A Pé Pé, not ap.

English

Do you write instal or install? Interestingly, some dictionaries say the former is British and the latter American. Whereas other dictionaries say the opposite. I've always used install. I think.

Finally  . . .

Yesterday's post late because of various distractions. The most expensive of which was fining that my iron had been left on for 4 days, just as the cost of electricity was soaring. I will now compensate by not ironing sheets, tea-towels or handkerchiefs for the rest of my life.

THE ARTICLE    

Trust Britain to trade our vaccine advantage for this bureaucratic travel shambles. While Germans are sipping sangria in Mallorca, we’re being kept back in the twilight life of hygiene theatre and restrictions: Zoe Strimpel The Telegraph

I got back from amber-list Europe last weekend. It was lovely to have made it to a beautiful foreign landscape, but the obstacle course of stressful, expensive admin required for returning to the UK stuck a dour tail on the trip. 

With its rictus of illogical hurdles keeping vaccinated and properly tested people from travelling with relative ease, Britain seems to want to trumpet from every possible rooftop that it is closed for business, closed for fun and closed for any kind of rational enjoyment of what has been an astonishing vaccine drive.

There is something so deeply British about what we’re doing to ourselves: snatching an endless purgatory of anxiety, fear and lives weighed down by the bureaucracy of hygiene theatre from the jaws of what could have been victory. We had an advantage, a huge one, and instead of running with it gleefully, we’ve driven ourselves – or have been driven – into the mud. The latest figures show we’ve partially vaccinated 42 million adults, or 80% of the adult population, and 30 million have been fully vaccinated. 

The Delta variant is cause for concern, of course, and a single jab is much less effective against it than two jabs. But Britain has an over-abundance of our very own AstraZeneca vaccine, and so – if we really wanted to embrace our vaccine ingenuity – we could be shortening the gap between jabs not by a month, as we are now, but by two months. We could even let people pay to have their second jab sooner. Sacrilege, but it shouldn’t be.

However, we prefer the unpleasant route. And so while America romps on with normal life, having unleashed hundreds of millions of vaccines in its own impressive inoculation effort, back in Blighty just going to the pub is still a slalom of pointless admin. And instead of looking at ways to get rid of them, arbitrary rules only seem to be multiplying. To view a book in the British or Wellcome Libraries, you have to wait three days because the material must ‘quarantine for 72 hours’ – this despite the fact that as far back as the summer, numerous, reliable studies have shown that the risk of transmission through surfaces is almost nil.

No, you’re not going to catch Covid from a manuscript that’s been in an archive for years, but you might on a packed Tube where most people are no longer bothering with masks – that being a simple area in which the British have been rubbish compared with Europe and much of the US. This is something the Government might usefully focus on, but I suspect the PM and Matty H don’t tend to take public transport, apparently preferring to force theatres, pubs, libraries and museums to tinker with pointless measures.

Meanwhile, Europe has had an abomination of a jab programme, which is only now picking up. It has a much bigger problem with anti-vaxxers than we do, and has vaccinated a far smaller percentage of its population than us. The Delta variant is on the march there too. And yet even they have realised: as the rate of vaccination picks up, it’s time to let people live again. Variants are here to stay, and as the UK has shown, can erupt anywhere, even in Kent. Red list or not, they’ll get in anyway, as the Delta variant has made all too clear.

So while Brits are stuck at home, paralysed by the punitive barrage of medical bureaucracy required to re-enter the country, and then 10 days quarantine, across Europe borders are reopening, beaches and bars are open for business, Germans are sipping sangria in Majorca, and people who have had both vaccinations aren’t forced to undergo endless rigmarole by authorities – as well they shouldn’t.

In Italy last week, it was such a pleasure to sit wherever I wanted for coffee, for beer, for spritz. I went for ice cream, I went for dinner, I went to museums and churches without booking in advance. People are respectful with masks, zealous with hand sanitiser, but they were enjoying themselves. Pointless one-way systems have been ditched, and the Italians realise that making people register for a faulty contact tracing programme with their phones before they can enter a venue is pointless. There’s a sense that when Europe opens up, it really opens up. The same goes for America. We’re the only ones being kept back in the twilight life of hygiene-bureaucracy and restrictions.

Britain’s love affair with self-excoriation is part of what makes it great: it makes us one of the least corrupt countries in the world. It yields great comedy. It breeds a political culture of robust, bracing critique. But when you get even the likes of Theresa May and Tony Blair calling our current jamboree of life-sapping rules bizarre and illogical, then surely it’s all gone too far.

We began Covid with defeat, and now we have the chance to enjoy the fruits of a win. It’s just a shame that our Government, still stuck in the mindset of the first phase of the the pandemic, is set on squandering 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' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid

As (easily) predicted . . . The Delta variant is beginning to spread, threatening the EU’s progress against the virus.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Another year, another couple of 'authentic' caminos. One from A Orixe and another Of the River Muros. And those are just the latest ones here in Galicia. I'm pretty sure there'll be more in the rest of Spain. All looking forward to seeing the pilgrims of last year's Holy Year. Which is now this year, of course.

Was El Cid given that epithet during his lifetime or was he just called plain old El Campeador or Expert in Pitched Battles? Research suggesting that the 11th-century warlord was only dubbed El Cid 50 years after his death has excited fierce academic debate in Spain. Click here and keep your fingers crossed the link works for you.

Which reminds me. . . Do we yet have the results of the DNA analysis which will establish beyond doubt(?) whether Crístóbal Colón was Spanish, Galician, Portuguese or Italian? And possibly Jewish?

María's Final Stretch: Days 15 & 16

The EU

The EU has introduced a new ‘digital’ ID. Here’s what it means for us residents. Well, the official ones anyway.

Europe - West and East

If it works, this link will take you to an interesting article on the 'fractious' nature of the current Euro football tournament. In that old phrase - War minus the shooting. But, so far at least, the writer's got it wrong on 'the thrill of watching Harry Kane'. Or, indeed, the entire England team . . .

The Way of the World

This week a petition was launched to prevent Amazon's Jeff Bezos from returning to Earth after his maiden flight. So far, 6,000 people have signed it, because he's "an evil overlord, hellbent on global domination” and is actually Lex Luther in disguise”.

The Way of the World

Camilla Long: What happens at the end of this, when we've finally cleansed all of culture? When we've removed all the artists, silenced all the musicians, sentenced all the light entertainers to death? How will books look after we've made novelists remove every slightly irreverent mention of, say, Anne Frank? I’ll tell you how it will look: an endless stream of beige non-books by people like the “wife, mother” and global activator of “compassion” Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The cultural equivalent of tofu.

Quotes of the Day

If we start cancelling artists for causing offence, the walls of galleries will soon be bare.

What is needed is a dating app for people who don't want to meet people who use apps. 

Finally  . . .

It seems I'm not the only one to notice how excitable/exaggerated British football commentators have become: It was not that long ago that we used to happily laugh at the commentators from Latin America for their complete lack of objectivity. 

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid 

The WHO has warned that the Indian/Delta variant is becoming globally dominant because of its increased transmissibility.

Russia: Moscow has seen record new infections, mostly Delta.

Germany. The top public health official has predicted the Delta variant will rapidly become dominant there, despite rising vaccination rates. 

Spain: So, we won’t have to wear masks from 21 June? Some medical experts are alarmed at the move, warning it is too soon and could lead to a spike in contagion.

Italy: Has reimposed a 5 day quarantine on British travellers because of the surge in Delta cases there. Stable-door-closing?

The UK: People who have been double vaccinated and come into contact with a Covid-19 carrier would be spared 10 days in quarantine under plans to use daily tests to return to normality. Given the profiteering price of tests in the UK, this could be expensive. Does the single J&J/Janssen jab qualify? I can't find an answer to this question.

The obvious question: Is the European tourism industry really going to be saved this summer, or will there be some backtracking relatively soon?

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Experts have warned that Spain is facing the biggest demographic crisis since the Spanish Civil War. Too many deaths last year and not enough births.

An astonishing Spanish success.

Ten Spanish reds worth checking out. Nice to see Galicia’s red grape - Mencia - represented, albeit by a bodega from next door León.

This roundabout challenge is a new one to me.

Lenox takes the piss. Or at least a leak.

The EU

As I predicted (it didn’t take genius). . . . Judges in Brussels have rejected European Commission demands for Astra Zeneca to deliver hundreds of millions of Covid jabs immediately.  

This is a scathing appraisal of the EU President, Ursula von der Leyen. Taster: The significant question about here is not whether she will survive, but what she signifies about leadership in today’s EU. In particular, why did Macron promote her, while the leader who knew her best—Merkel—temporised before only reluctantly acquiescing in the final stages of the 2019 horse-trading? Thank god that, in contrast the UK has a great leader . . .

The Way of the World/Social media/Quote of the Day

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. - Aldous Huxley

Spanish 

I don't know why I said yesterday that the Pilates instructor had said Ey Pi Pi - as if she were English - when she'd actually said A Pé Pé. I corrected it in the evening. More importantly, a Spanish friends says she's never heard anyone Spanish say anything other than ap.

English

If you want to know how Shakespeare spoke and why his Sonnets used to rhyme far more than they do nowadays, this is for you.

Finally  . . .

There's a TV ad for an energy drink in the UK which uses - in cartoon form - a joke which is at least 50 years old. It originally centred on an enterprising Jewish tailor but, of course, the said ad features not a Jewish tailor but a male hairdresser. Who is presumably not gay.

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here.   

My thanks to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for a 1 or 2 of today's items. 

Covid 

France: Face masks are no longer mandatory in outdoor settings, and as of Sunday the night-time curfew will end, 10 days earlier than expected. Because, says the Prime Minister: The health situation improving faster than we'd hoped.

Spain: The Prime Minister here has said mask-wearing outside will cease to be compulsory 'soon'. This is a pretty meaningless word but it does contrast with that of UK government medical advisers who are warning of restrictions lasting for many months yet. 

Can this all be down to the impact of the Delta(ex-Indian) variant which so far seems to have been kept at bay on the European continent? Or has it more to do with the money that traditionally comes from tourism? Far more in France, Spain and Greece than in the UK

Cosas de España/Galiza 

The extremes of Spain  . . During the mad phoney boom which ended in 2007, Spain had the highest number of bank branches and staff per branch in Europe. Whereas it now has the lowest. And lots of charges and commissions. I imagine profits are a lot higher these days.

So, perhaps after living below the horizon, you got your official residence here to ensure you retained your pre-Brexit rights. You'll now need to know the tax implications, one of which - Modelo 720 - is pretty serious. Click here for advice.

María's Final Stretch: Days 13-14

The UK

The CBI predicts the UK economy this year - thanks to the vaccine boost - will grow twice as fast as the eurozone's - 8.2% v. 4.2%. Maybe AEP got this right.

Every day for the past 14 years, the SNP has been using the tools of government to tell a story of Scotland anxious to break free from a decaying, corrupt and socially regressive UK. That’s her attack, and there hasn’t been much of a defence. Not surprising, then, that she's been very successful at obscuring the downsides of independence for Scotland. Which is not rich, (potentially/easily) self-reliant Cataluña.

Good to see the Guardian printing completely fucking hopeless. Why on earth every other journal prints f***ing, when all readers know what is is - and say it in their heads - beats me.

The UK and the EU post Brexit

What does Brexit mean for expats and second-home owners? Hopefully this link works . . If not, I'll post the text tomorrow. Assuming someone tells me . . .

The EU

Not good news . . . An EU-backed German vaccine has delivered disappointing clinical trial results in a setback for the bloc’s immunisation efforts. The CureVac jab, which had been one of Europe’s brightest hopes in the vaccine race, was found to prevent only 47% of infections, just below the threshold set out by the WHO for vaccines. Its efficacy against more aggressive forms of the coronavirus such as the Delta variant may be even lower than this.

The USA

As modest as ever, Trump says the book he's writing about himself will be the book of all books. Probably true, but not in the way he means.

The Way of the World  

Below is a list - a brief comment on each - of The 10 great comedies they wouldn’t make today - in the age of trumped-up outrage and cancel culture. I confess to having watched and enjoyed 9 of them. For which I guess, I should now be cancelled.

This week a petition was launched to prevent Amazon’s Jeff Bezos from returning to Earth after his maiden flight. So far, 6,000 people have signed the “Petition To Not Allow Jeff Bezos Re-Entry To Earth”, reasoning that he is “an evil overlord hellbent on global domination” and is actually “Lex Luther in disguise”.

Quote of the Day

Caitlin Moran: Why on earth was the G7 summit held in Cornwall? The 2 things every Brit knows about Cornwall is that: a) it’s an absolute bugger to get to and b) the locals really don’t want you to be there.

Spanish 

My Pilates instructor spoke of an A Pe Pe Which turned out to be an app available from the sports centre. Why can't they just say ap? Other than because it has thrice the syllables of app.

English

A new(wish) initialism, not an acronym . . . WFH: Working from home.

Finally  . . .

A never-ending frustration . . .Trying to make an appointment with my doctor on the phone last night, I was asked, as usual, for my 'first surname'. As usual, I explained I had only one and, as usual, I spelt it out. To be told, as usual, that they couldn't find me in the computer. Having then solved the problem by giving my ID number - which I really should've done in the first place - I asked what they had as my surname in their computer, to be given 'Davies'. So . . . As this is correct, there's a huge prize for anyone who can explain why this happens every single time I try to make an appointment, anywhere and everywhere. Including when I get to see the doctor and he tries to find my records in his computer. It used to be a bit of a joke . . .

 THOSE UN-MAKEABLE COMEDIES

It’s simply not in the interests of a TV executive to green-light a risqué comedy that could be misconstrued, deliberately or otherwise, and then lose them their job. The fear of causing offence has stymied the creation of magic. Which is why these 10 comedies, all of them classics in their own right, would not get made today.

Dad’s Army: Earlier this year, a showing of the sitcom’s 1971 movie on the BBC was preceded by a warning about “discriminatory language”. That one of the most beautifully crafted, most loved sitcoms ever made should require a reminder that attitudes were different 50 years ago seems itself laughable, but it underlines the fact that in 2021 it’s unlikely that Captain Mainwaring and his all-white Home Guard would ever make it to the screen.

Ab Fab: Women drinking too much, neglecting their children and making fun of fat people – that could have been the synopsis for Ab Fab, but read now it would land the script straight in the slush pile.  

The Office: The problem is that cancel culture has obliterated people’s irony sensors, says Ricky Gervais.

Peep Show: There’s little chance Channel 4 would take a sitcom revolving around the daily life of two young, white men today.

Fawlty Towers: The greatest British comedy of all ticks just about every single non-compliance box you can think of. Yet to watch it is to understand the difference between parody and mockery.  but it’s unlikely they would have got as far as making it had it surfaced in 2021

Friends: The most popular sitcom the world has ever seen is sexist, homophobic, fattist (Monica) and features no non-white actors in any of the lead roles. 

Little Britain: It was at least equitable in its offensiveness: it was misogynistic, it mocked transvestites, and characters included “the only gay in the village,” a working-class “chav” with an Asbo (Vicky Pollard) and Andy Pipkin, who pretended to be disabled. 

Will and Grace: The first prime-time television series on US terrestrial television to star openly gay lead characters 

The Inbetweeners:An unexpurgated smut trawl following 4 sex-obsessed teenagers at school was always intended to cause some offence – but what’s deemed offensive has changed over recent years. Primarily, The Inbetweeners wouldn’t get off the ground because, like Peep Show but more so, it’s a male-led comedy in which women are either targets or trophies. Of course, the butt of the joke was the men and (in the case of Jay) their pitiful misogyny, but in the current climate context matters little.  

Father Ted: Read one way, this cult classic is an affectionate homage to Irish culture – but would it be read that way now? More likely this barmy, anarchic tale of three churchmen living together would be seen as something close to mockery.

So, the world might be better but, even if so, it’s sadder.

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid 

The UK: Following criticism in this blog, this is the latest (probable) development/U-turn:- Vaccinated folk might soon be able to go out of and into the UK to/from Amber countries without having to quarantine. Good news for at least me. Though, I suspect the need for several expensive PCR tests will remain

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Electricity prices in Spain are said to be the highest in Europe, just ahead of the UK's but way above Germany's. But I suspect the situation is worse than that because that's just for actual KwHs, and utility bills here always have high fixed charges. Which is certainly not the case in the UK, where low users like me don't subsidise large families in this way. To add injury to injury in Spain, the latter get a discount dating from Franco's Catholic era. 

But, anyway, it's good to know that a percentage of one's bill is going to illegally finance political parties and to subsidise the lifestyle of all the ex-Ministers on the utility company boards. And on those of the telecoms companies, whose services are - surprise, surprise - also among the highest in Europe.

Church bells are being stolen across Spain, so far mainly up here in the North. Police suspect a specialist gang, which seems rather obvious to me, given what they'd need to do to get the bells down and away. Which they didn't quite manage in one isolated village last week

As in the UK - and maybe everywhere in the world - the Tax Office here in Spain - La Hacienda - is not only detective but also the police, the trial judge and the appeal court in its own cases. And it operates on the basis that no one is honest and everyone is lying to them. And without integrity. On top of this, they can not only be very efficient but also very inefficient, as with the saga of poor María's fine. As I've said, both of the 19th and of the 21st centuries.

Pontevedra's mayor has made the city a global model of urban design. Last year, his council closed off a major route into town, claiming this was because of the Covid risk to students at a high school there and, so, temporary. No one believed them, of course, and now it's been admitted that it's permanent. In addition - having found that the traffic would - astonishingly - use a parallel street to circumvent the closure, the council has changed the one-way direction of that street to make this impossible. But, the mayor has told us rather loftily, There are other ways to get to the city centre. Not for long, I fear. He certainly doesn’t like cars.

I'm not sure I've got this right but it seems a professional rally driver fatally crashed his car up in our hills last week, while driving the future rally route when it was still open to the public. Hard to credit the degree of recklessness. But at least he only killed himself.

Talking of sports . . . TV ratings for Spain’s match against Sweden at the European Championship were the lowest for the team at the start of a major tournament since 2008. Folk must have known something I didn't before the match, which ended 0-0 . . .

Yesterday, I wrote that you could avoid security at Pontevedra station by getting an early train. This wasn't entirely correct, of course. You can also do this by going in the evening, after the guy who mans the machine has knocked off.

What I forgot to write was that the first voice I heard in Arcade was someone accusing me of cheating(Tramposo!). It turned out to be a neighbour, who'd assumed I'd driven to somewhere along the camino so I could walk back to Pontevedra.

The UK

I heard this comment in a podcast during my walk yesterday: In 16th century England, to get on in life it wasn't what you knew but who you knew. I could swear I've heard that more than once during my years here in 21st century Spain.

Seven years ago the Leeds city council made a (valiant?) attempt to set up a zone where street prostitutes wouldn't be arrested. But the Managed Area was a failure, as it pushed into residential areas, leading to complaints from residents of harassment and sexual assaults of even schoolgirls. This is hardly surprising, I guess, in that even Amsterdam is having to re-think its red light district policy. Too many drunk Brits, for one thing. Customers/gawpers, I mean. Not the local ladies.

The Way of the World  

I won't be able to buy kaffir leaves for my curries any more. At least not in Waitrose in  the UK. They are now makrut lime leaves there. And soon everywhere else, I guess. After some individual -  ignorant of the origin of the name - complained that the word kaffir upset her.

English

I wrote above: After the guy who mans the machine has knocked off. What should I say if the guard is (or says he is) a woman? ‘Operates’, I guess.

Finally  . . .

Superlatives are in overdrive in the TV commentaries on the Euro matches. Everything good is termed 'absolutely brilliant'. And this is on British TV. I dread to think how excessive the Spanish commentators are. Or perhaps they're actually harder to impress.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid 

The UK

There are 2 reasons, I think, for the UK - ridiculously? - now having greater restrictions than Spain, despite being way ahead with vaccinations. And despite a very low death rate. Firstly, the mistakes made in the past year - see yesterday's overview - have been so egregious that the government is now afraid to make the smallest of mistakes. And so is erring on the side of extreme caution as regards the Delta variant. Secondly, none of the humungous public expenditure of the last 15 months seems to have gone on expanding NHS facilities, ahead of either another wave or the normal winter crisis. Possibly because, as with the Nightingale hospitals, it would prove impossible to find the staff for them. For one reason and another.

Below is a coruscating article on this theme.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

This morning I walked c.12km on the camino from Arcade to Pontevedra. Some 'pilgrims' but not a lot. So, I wasn't passed by many, even on the steepest slopes of the first hour. Being rock-strewn, these become virtual river beds when the rains either are or have been heavy. But happily, not today.

As I walked down the station steps in Arcade, a young woman rushed past me in a failed attempt to catch the departing train. Fortunately for her, though, her mother had waited in the car park, against this eventuality and took her off in the direction of Vigo.

This stretch of the camino is a lot more `provisioned' than it was when I first walked it 11 years ago, though no one was yet manning the food and drink stalls that never used to exist. And this very bosky stretch is now cut by the new Pontevedra by-pass road - the A57. Or it will be when construction in finished in the year 20xx.

There wasn’t the usual security at Pontevedra station at 8am. So, if you’re planning to blow up the Vigo-La Coruña train, just buy a ticket early in the day.

María's Final Stretch: Days 9-12

The UK

Anti-Toryism - says the author of this article - is the foundation of Scottish nationalism. It is this, above all - she avers - that allows the SNP to keep winning. Being virulently anti-Tory(Conservative) has become a sort of code for hating Britain and the English who give us Tory governments. It is the difference between now and 1979 when 31% of Scots voted Conservative.

The EU

Tens of thousands of British nationals living in France and 3 other countries risk losing local healthcare, employment and other rights if they do not apply to remain resident in the next 14 days. France, Latvia, Luxembourg and Malta have been called on to extend their 30 June deadline as the Netherlands has done, to 30 October.

France 

The highest number of Brits vulnerable to loss of rights is here, where 135,000 Brits have applied for residency out of a population estimated at 148,300, leaving at least 13,300 at risk.  

English

Back to Laurence Sterne's 18th century novel Tristram Shandy. . . .Sterne severs times writes You was instead of You were. Maybe this was when the plural form You was beginning to be used as the singular form instead of Thou.

Finally  . . .

Since last Saturday, I've been hearing the voice of, I thought, a mother and child. After ruling out both neighbouring houses and gardens as the source, I began to wonder if I didn't have a poltergeist. But, this morning, I went down to my basement and realised it was coming from a toy dinosaur saying repeatedly: Yellow. Red. Blue. Choose another colour. Presumably a bloody Duracell battery . . .

If you don't find that amusing, blame my younger daughter, who thought it was hilarious and worth a mention.

THE ARTICLE  

This isn’t a delay, but a disastrous trap for the PM and the country. Boris Johnson’s lockdown concession leaves the door open to semi-permanent restrictions on liberties: Sherelle Jacobs, the Telegraph

Small events can have world-altering effects. This is well understood in physics; chaos theory dictates that, in our complex and interconnected world, a butterfly can flap its wings in Brazil and trigger a tornado in Texas. But, in politics, the sentiment behind the so-called “butterfly effect” is strangely underappreciated.

We have already seen its power at the very start of the pandemic. The world has probably changed forever due to the West’s decision to follow China’s lead in adopting lockdown to control Covid-19. This draconian policy that was never part of liberal democracies’ pandemic planning but came to be seen as an inevitability after Beijing pursued it. China, in the words of Prof Neil Ferguson, “changed people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control”.

Once again, we may be about to witness the power of seemingly innocuous events. For many, Boris Johnson’s decision to postpone freedom day to mid-July will seem like a commonsensical measure if the time is used to accelerate vaccinations. But I fear what he has agreed is much more significant than that. Will this really turn out to be a minor delay on the long road to freedom? Or will it instead prove to be the first step down a dangerous path that ends with lockdown restrictions continuing in some fashion indefinitely?

Consider the basic principle that the Prime Minister has conceded: vaccination of the vulnerable is not a sufficient condition for reopening society. In effect, the Government seems to be saying, lockdown can only end once the link between cases and hospitalisations has not just been weakened but severed. We need herd immunity to go back to normal.

But vaccines may never fully break the link between cases and hospitalisations. Fast forward a couple of months, when the jab has been offered to every adult, and we may still be seeing significant localised surges in hospital numbers. Experts think that the evolution of more contagious variants also means that the percentage of the population who need some form of antibody protection to secure herd immunity may have risen – from achievable (60 per cent) to borderline unrealistic (80-95 per cent).

Mr Johnson might only want a brief pause until we can all learn to live with the virus. But the logic of his failure to take the leap now is that restrictions could continue until we reach what may prove to be an entirely unrealistic goal. This flirts perilously with an acceptance that restrictions may have to go on forever.

I don’t envy the Prime Minister. I am sure that he wants to return our freedoms. But he is under tremendous pressure to bow to experts, whom the broadcast media treat as objective oracles of truth rather than purveyors of narrow judgment. Much of the public has been conditioned into a permanent state of Covid fear, a fact for which the Government must take partial responsibility. It has failed to communicate lucidly that the way out of lockdown is to roll out the vaccine and then accept the virus as another manageable risk among many.

Mr Johnson’s allies argue that the PM wants to avoid at all costs forging ahead now only to reverse the lifting of measures. Yet, in his dithering and pathological avoidance of confrontation, he resembles nobody so much as Theresa May. On Brexit, Mrs May was undone by the catastrophic concession to “sequence” EU talks, which trapped her in a doom-loop of endless capitulations. Mr Johnson may struggle to recover from surrendering on the idea that lockdown cannot end until Covid is effectively defeated.

There is still time for Mr Johnson to regain control. Lifting lockdown in July, while levelling with people that many people will still die in the coming years, could save him and the country. But if he cannot, the great danger is that Britain will stumble into a Zero Covid strategy in desperate pursuit of herd immunity. A nasty ethical row on child vaccination is already looming, with experts warning that Britain must inoculate young people to gain a true grip on the virus. So, too, an ugly public debate about whether imposing restrictions on the unvaccinated could drive down hesitancy rates.

Just suppose we endure these controversies and do restrict people’s liberties further. Having taken things so far, society will want to protect its gains. It won’t seem such a great leap to keep restrictions in place in a bid to drive down cases even further. Social distancing will carry on as hospitality businesses adapt or die. The young will no longer look forward to nightclubs, but look back on them as a bygone hedonism, like ballroom dances before the Second World War. With the developed world unlikely to ever reach herd immunity, foreign tourism beyond Europe and America will be effectively abolished.

Such a picture may seem extreme. In Britain, we tend to believe that moderation will always prevail. Yet, in crises, it tends to be ideologues rather than pragmatists who gain momentum. Mr Johnson has for months been locked in a vicious cycle of seeking a middle ground, before relenting to those who favour extreme caution.

The Prime Minister still does not seem to fully appreciate that he is increasingly fighting not just a pandemic, but an ideology. This is not simply a case of a few overzealous modellers. The interests of the two most powerful movements of the moment, environmentalism and global health, are converging. Eco-warriors have attracted attention for unapologetically eyeing the collapse in aviation as an opportunity. Less appreciated is the fact that infectious disease specialists have been warning against the dangers of globalist capitalism and mass travel even longer than the green lobby. The window of opportunity to challenge their drastic, deglobalising remedies is closing. Even if the Prime Minister wanted to, with so many citizens terrified, and a middle class zoomocracy facing few risks to its material comfort, he will struggle to mount a challenge later down the line.

This week, Britain badly needed the Prime Minister to show conviction. It needed No 10 to shift from the “precautionary principle”, to the “slippery slope principle” which recognises that small decisions can unleash an unstoppable spiral of events. This has not happened. We can now only wait to see the consequences – and whether the most important moment of Mr Johnson’s prime ministership has just come and gone.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid

See below for the latest UK-oriented Overview from MD of Private Eye - The Preventable Disaster.

The UK: I guess I don't need to tell you what was announced yesterday. Here's Richard North today, probably echoing the majority view. Some pundits are suggesting it may be spring before restrictions are finally lifted. This might be more tolerable if there was any sense that we were being given the full picture, and that the people in the driving seat knew what they were doing. But it's been a long time since – if ever – those conditions were fulfilled. 

The government - which fears the consequences of getting anything else even slightly wrong - has gained control over people and is not going to give this up easily. But a revolting mood is being built up. Especially because, as RN puts it: It might seem to some that the lifting of  nationwide restrictions is being held back, not because of the general prevalence of illness, but because of localised outbreaks, which are not being fully addressed with the powers government has at its disposal. Because, it seems, these are in areas of high density of people from India and this would be 'racist'. And affect negotiations for a trade deal with India . . . 

Sweden: Down to zero deaths per day.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

It must be summer . . . Ana Obregón has started to feature in the media. La O is one of those Spanish female celebrities who seems to get younger by the year. She must be well into her 60s by now but, in yesterday’s foto, appears to be around 20. Healthy living, I guess.

Well, it certainly is summer. Our traditional forest fires are springing up, along with the usual 5-10 theories on who or what is behind them. And the planes and choppers collecting water from the river below my house.

I pass this sign 2-4 times a day. It suggests you get on the AP9 autopista to drive to the nearby Marineda City. Which is actually 135km away, in La Coruña - a 90 minute trip . . .

The UK

In Orwellian Britain, lockdown is perpetual and sickness is health. See the Times article below

Even Johnson's biggest media fan, the Telegraph, has pronounced that: Johnson risks being remembered not only as the prime minister who took away our freedoms but who was unwilling to give them back again. To return to RN:  Johnson's vaccine bounce is beginning to fade and he’s now treading on extremely thin political ice.

As you might expect, the left-of-centre Guardian is pretty sniffy about the right-of-centre new kid on the media block, GB News. Its reviewer predicts its demise within a year.

The EU

The Telegraph view: The EU has shown embarrassing and dangerous ignorance. Macron's failure to recognise the true status of Northern Ireland reflects a cynical, manipulative organisation. Could well be right . . .

The USA

Former White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, has claimed she never lied while working for the government, because she’s a Christian. In fact, she told lie after lie. Including:-

- The Mueller report was a “complete and total exoneration” of Trump 

- Trump had a “long history of condemning white supremacy and racism” 

- The kids’ cartoon Paw Patrol had been canceled, when it hadn't been.

- Covid would never come to the USA, even after cases were already here.

Quote of the Day

Dating apps are machines devised by Silicon Valley to annihilate human love (because you won’t need their apps for that) and replace it with sex.

English

In his 18th century novel Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne uses the past participle 'knit', not the modern (British) 'knitted'. This reminded me that the American past participles for spit and fit are, I believe, spit and fit, compared with the British spat and fitted. Presumably usage changed in the UK after the 18th century but not in the USA.

Finally  . . .

I've said it a few times  over the years . . . Shopping successes can't be guaranteed in Spain. But I've had a big one in the last week. Firstly, my IT shop confirmed my suspicion it was the charger at fault, not my old Mac itself. Secondly, they said they could get me a much cheaper Chinese version of the Apple charger. Then, it was actually in the shop when I went to check on the promised delivery last night. Finally, it worked! I rather felt I should get drunk to celebrate this rare event.

COVID OVERVIEW

The Preventable Disaster.

It's official: the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was "a preventable global disaster", according to the final report of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR). 

Over one year, it has conducted in-depth literature reviews and original research, hearing evidence from hundreds of experts and frontline workers around the world and with an "open door" to inquiry submissions. Its report, Make This the Last Pandemic, found that there were, and still are, "weak links at every point in the chain of preparedness and response. Preparation was inconsistent and underfunded. The alert system was too slow - and too meek. The World Health Organisation was under-powered. The response has exacerbated inequalities. Global political leadership was absent." 

Delays cost lives 

The IPPPR acknowledged how hard people at all levels in all countries worked to tackle the virus, and the speed at which tests, vaccines and drug trials were delivered thanks to open scientific collaboration. But governments did not openly collaborate, nor react with sufficient urgency to the WHO declaration of a public health emergency on 30 January 2020. The "golden months" of February and March, when swift action could have saved many lives, were lost. 

Those countries that succeeded in suppression took early, pre-emptive action. Those that lost control (often repeatedly) adopted a wait-and-see approach. Wealth was no guarantee of competence (indeed, the wealthiest countries were often the most complacent). However, within and across nations, the poorest and most vulnerable people have suffered more, both from Covid and its socio-economic fallout. The report urgently calls for the fair distribution of vaccines. 

Here to stay 

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is here to stay. There is nothing surprising about a new variant (B.1.617.2, first observed in India) spreading more quickly than the current dominant UK variant (B 117, first observed in Kent). That's what evolution does to viruses: they get fitter and fitter. There is currently a variant of B117 that may be vaccine-resistant in time. Booster jabs may be needed. 

B.1.617.2 has been with us since February, but we imported it in larger numbers in April, allowing it to seed widely around the UK. The good news is that it (currently) appears susceptible to vaccines, so as infections rise they should not translate into hospitalisations, deaths and long Covid for those protected. However, only a third of people in the UK have had both doses of vaccines. Surge vaccinations in the most affected areas will reduce risks, but protection isn't instant. The government decided not to delay allowing indoor gatherings in homes, pubs and restaurants from 17 May. Time will tell if that was sensible. 

Act on surges 

lf you wait to identify a variant of concern in a pandemic, you're too late. This was the clear lesson of the winter, when SAGE (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) urged the government to lock down amid rising infections, but the government delayed acting until the B 117 variant was officially identified as the cause. 

This led to an exodus from the south-east before Christmas, which spread the variant all over the UK and brought more than double the deaths of the first wave. 

[As I’ve claimed] The government has just repeated the error by waiting until B.1.617.2 was identified as a variant of concern in India before putting it on the travel red list. Infection rates are underreported in poorer nations, but even based on reported rates it was clear in early April that India was at the centre of a rapid outbreak, with higher levels than bordering Pakistan and Bangladesh. This was highly likely to be due to (then unidentified) variants. 

From a pandemic control perspective, it made no sense putting Pakistan and Bangladesh on the red list on 2 April but not India. Up to 20,000 people arrived in the UK from India between then and 23 April, when India was added. They were left to their own devices as to quarantine (which we know isn't very effective). A further computer glitch in test and trace meant many contacts of people carrying the variant were not traced. A lot is riding on how much protection our partial vaccination offers.

Border confusion 

Pandemics are best managed by swift global cooperation. In January 2020, neither the WHO nor SAGE were recommending border controls or closures on the grounds that they cause economic harm and merely delay spread, unless you keep your borders tightly controlled from all destinations until the whole world is vaccinated. 

The International Health Regulations 2005, which govern emergency pandemic responses, declare the need for a balance between the conflicting aims to "prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease", and avoidance of "unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade". Countries that imposed early, unilateral border controls gained better pandemic control with less economic damage. However, had the outbreak proved less serious, they might now be facing legal action for loss of trade and restriction of free movement. 

Give the Brexit context, Boris Johnson was unlikely to advocate for border controls before the virus had arrived. "Wait and see" became the UK's mindset. 

Now, 15 months on from the start of the pandemic, Europe still has no coherent border control policy. The EU has delayed its announcement for a fortnight, Spain is welcoming anyone from the UK without the need for a PCR test, Germany is blocking UK traffic because of the B.1.617.2 variant, and the UK is permitting travel to both countries but advising you should only go if it's urgent. 

How SARS started in the UK 

The UK's "wait and see" policy proved our undoing. Research by the Covid-19 Genomics UK consortium (Cog-UK) published last June showed that at least 1,356 people had brought the virus into the UK in February and March, leading to a massive first wave. Less than 0.1% of those cases came from China. Rather, the UK epidemic was largely initiated by travel from Italy in late February 2020, Spain in early to mid-March, and then France in mid-to late March. Eighty per cent of initial cases arrived in the country between 28 February and 29 March. 

Had we embraced strict border controls early on, or had an effective test, trace isolate system - or preferably both - we might have controlled the outbreak without lockdowns. But the scientific advice to the government at the time was that border controls, test, trace and isolate, face masks and lockdowns either lacked evidence or delayed the inevitable, so herd immunity became the government's default policy, until it realised how many deaths would result and dithered into a late lockdown. 

Public opinion 

In hindsight, with a vaccine less than a year away, the UK might have opted for a "Fortress Australia" approach at the outset, only opening up when all adults had been offered both vaccines. It may not have kept variants out - essential goods have to be traded - but it might have kept the numbers down while allowing more freedom to work, study, spectate and party within our borders. But would people have supported stricter border controls? 

In a recent lpsos-Mori poll of 2,007 adults aged 18-75, 79% supported stopping people entering the country from countries with higher levels of infection; 70% supported quarantining in hotels for those returning from all foreign holidays; 67% supported stopping people entering from any other country; and 58% supported stopping foreign holidays in 2021. 

In contrast, the government advocates a weak and inconsistent traffic light system. After a country is put on the red list, a grace period of 4 to 7 days enables people to rush back to the UK, much like jumping the lights on amber-red. Or they can travel via a lower-risk country and a void restrictions. 

Those on the amber list are expected to quarantine at home for 10 days, but notwithstanding government threats of a knock on the door from the "holiday police", it's still a much more permissive border policy than, say, Australia and New Zealand. No surprise that it permits viral spread. 

Where did all the money go? 

A report by the National Audit Office on the government's pandemic response estimates its lifetime cost at £372bn: £62bn on the job retention scheme, £38bn on NHS Test and Trace, £27bn on self-employment income support, £26bn to devolved administrations, £23bn on bounce-back loans, £21bn on business rate measures, £18bn on PPE, £18bn on rail and bus measures, £18bn on business grant funding, £14bn on further health services spend, £10bn on universal credit, £10bn on vaccines, £10bn on VAT measures . . . How much of the colossal spend and death toll could have been avoided if we'd got a grip on the pandemic earlier? Only a public inquiry can say . . . 

Public inquiry delay 

The public inquiry, starting in spring 2022, is unlikely to report before the next election. Any claims made by Boris Johnson's former brain, Dominic Cummings, can be conveniently referred on[?]. Modelling expert Professor Neil Ferguson told the science and technology committee on I0 June last year that the 40,000 deaths in the first wave would have been 50% lower if lockdown had been introduced a week earlier. Why wasn't it? We'll find out in 2027. 

Putting a figure on it 

Nothing the public inquiry eventually unearths is likely to be surprising. Many countries fell into the "wait and see" trap. Germany and France had similar second wave excess deaths to the UK. The challenge will be for the inquiry statisticians to enumerate how many lives were saved by our pandemic management, and at what cost. And how many more lives might have been saved - and harms avoided - with more competent management. 

It should commemorate those lost and celebrate what we did well, particularly scientific collaboration and investment leading to rapid drug trials, vaccine development and roll-out, and the considerable compassion, support and gratitude shown during the pandemic, particularly to key workers (now sadly waning, not least for overworked GPs). 

Global reform 

The IPPPR report, meanwhile, argues that the WHO should be strengthened immediately with an increased budget and remit and "a new global system for surveillance, based on full transparency by all parties, using state-of-the-art digital tools". Will China, Russia, the US, the EU, and the UK not to mention assorted dictators around the world buy into such a spirit of global cooperation? 

Covid consequences 

- 148m people infected and more than 3m Covid deaths in 223 countries and dependencies (to late April) 

- During the first wave, 228,000 children and 11,000 mothers across South Asia died due to disruptions in health services 

- 17,000 health workers died from Covid in the first year 

- Lost global output of $22tn in 2020-25 

- 90% of children missed school 

- Substantial rise in domestic violence and early marriage 

- 115-l25m people pushed into extreme poverty 

- Levels of mental illness rising sharply 

- Health and care staff with high levels of distress and bum-out 

- In the poorest countries, fewer than 1% of people have had a single dose of vaccine.

THE ARTICLE 

In Orwellian Britain, lockdown is perpetual and sickness is health. Embracing the statist doctrine of a permanent war on Covid will end badly for the Conservatives: Tim Stanley, The Telegraph.

There is a spectre haunting  Britain: permanent lockdown. Assuming that the June 21 date for lifting restrictions is pushed back today, on the grounds that cases and hospitalisations are rising, this narrows the window for reopening in the summer. Why? Because reopening almost inevitably triggers a spike in cases, and the later we delay that moment, the closer we will be to winter – when the NHS is under pressure anyway – and the more dangerous allowing Covid to spread becomes. It is not inconceivable that restrictions could remain in place until spring next year, a decision that will be shaped by two political developments.

One is the parliamentary inquiry into events last year. Matt Hancock will keep his job, but Dominic Cummings has succeeded in embedding the narrative that Britain locked down too gently, too late, which helps explain why we are now being so cautious. The second reason is a debate within Government and the public health establishment over the best way forward: do we control Covid but learn to live with it, like we do flu, or do we try to eradicate it entirely? We got a hint of what the zero-Covid argument means when Professor Susan Michie, a member of Sage and a member of the Communist Party (yes, really) said that wearing masks and other measures might stay in place “forever” because “this isn’t going to be the last pandemic”.

Technically, she is correct, and I predict that many people will be voluntarily wearing masks for years to come out of a mix of fear and altruism: it’s not a bad thing to do when you have a cold. But if a state apparatus follows this logic to its natural conclusion – if you think that controlling pandemic deaths is more important than the economy, personal freedom or (this is where it starts to get mad) addressing non-Covid illnesses, including mental health – then one can easily argue not just for pushing back June 21, not just for leaving lockdown in place over summer, but even reversing some of the liberalisation of the past few months. Why not? If Britain cannot unlock with the vulnerable vaccinated, and when an estimated 8 in 10 of us have antibodies, then when will it do so? 

One answer is “never”. Not in the sense of perpetually locking us up indoors, but by remaining eternally vigilant, tracking and tracing us, ready to shut up shop at a moment’s notice.

George Orwell’s doctrine of perpetual war, in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, was justified by the need to keep us poor and divided. War is peace because it guarantees elite control. Our situation is obviously very different but, as in the totalitarian state of Oceania, it is the product of a bureaucracy running on autopilot. We locked down because we could. Given that we can, it is hard to argue that we should not. The alternative is the political class saying “some of you will die but we all have to live with risk otherwise we are not really free” – but you would have to be a very brave politician to do that, and in the absence of a true disruptor, a Trump-like maverick, the merciful logic of the welfare state triumphs. If previous generations had had the technology and money to control their populations like this, they would have done it too. We have both at our disposal, so the machine switches on and runs itself. Sickness is health, because it automates perpetual care.

Opposition to the new order is as tricky as opposing a war, and almost inconceivable. It is practically absent from the broadcast media (on ITV news, a journalist described delay as a “no brainer”). I guess the comeback question is: “Do you want to let people die?” Obviously not, which is why opposition to any lockdown has been tiny. But as with a war – even the most moral and necessary venture – it falls upon some lonely reporter or MP to point out the cost. This social experiment will change us: war always does. Britain was still living with rationing after the Second World War till 1954, conscription till 1960. I remember as a child being told by those who lived through it that the country was never the same again.

I now wonder if I lived in a brief golden age of wealth and freedom, roughly 1989 to 2020, when I could get a good job at a newspaper without any contacts by blogging and turning up day after day looking for work. (Or fly to America, camp out on a mattress on a stranger’s floor and reinvent myself as a foreign correspondent.) Kids trying to make it now have no such physical mobility and diminishing social mobility, too, because rent is high and ownership is impossible, while the culture wars are squeezing the parameters of what one can do or say. The initial, liberating boom of the internet is over; whatever you said then can now be used against you.

The lockdown is the predictable next step, the tangible manifestation of a societythat is terrified and of individuals who have given up or given in. Yes, I will wear the mask; yes, I will obey these rules. Not just to save the NHS, which I am keen to do, but because I also have no say in the matter and can see no point pretending otherwise. Like Winston Smith, I shall drink my Victory Gin and submit.

Is this what life under the Conservatives looks like? Some Tories are starting to ask if Labour would have handled this crisis differently. If one assumes they would have been even more stringent and happy to spend, and if one accepts this philosophy that the state must do all that is possible to prevent Covid deaths, then why not vote for a Left that will do the job with greater enthusiasm? This is the risk that Tory governments run when they embrace the state, be it on health, the environment or “tackling inequality”: they validate Left-wing methods to achieve laudable goals. In the short run, warn Conservative critics, you can win votes by triangulating around a hapless opposition. In the long run, voters might come to the view that there is no difference between Labour and the Conservatives so they may as well vote Labour and maybe get a council house. 

The Tory edge over Labour has hitherto been the liberty card. One wonders when they will finally play it. I am sure the PM is itching to, that if he were writing this column from the hilltops of the back benches he would conclude, with a flourish, that the individual should ultimately be free – not of their social obligations, which take priority always, but free to be their own master, free to chart their own course. Free of Big Brother.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid

The UK: As Freedom day of 21.6 is delayed for 'up to 4 weeks', there are now real fears that - unless the next month proves 'successful' against the Delta variant - mask wearing and distancing will remain through the autumn and winter months, until next spring. The government, it seems, has made exactly the same mistake with Delta as it did with the original variant early last year; it acted too slowly against a known threat, allowing many thousands of people to arrive from India. But this time round, the vaccine success might well not offer the protection it has done to date.

Spain: Here, the question is: What will be the national effect of Delta taking hold in Madrid? The recent - Vox arranged - demonstration there against lockdowns surely won't have helped.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

The latest chapter in the Pardons saga. This time, the leaders of the other right-of-centre parties were not so dumb as to be snapped standing next to the leader of the the far-right Vox party.

Advice on travelling to Spain. This week's anyway.

Culture and customs differ. Spaniards are amused by the British 'obsession' with Please and Thank-you. I was reminded of this when leaving my first Pilates class, when I was the only one of 12 students to say Thanks to the instructor. Everyone else just said See you. But, then, the British say Thank-you to the driver of their bus as they get off. Which even I find excessive. But still sometimes do it. . . 

Life is virtually back to normal here in Pontevedra city. Hence the denuncias against excessive noise and raucous binge-drinking down in the old quarter over the weekend. The young are making hay during our lighter-than-they-really-should-be evenings. Not that the light really is a factor in this.

Which reminds me . . . Even before Covid, there was talk of the government doing something about Spain’s mad horario, which has some folk arriving home from work after 10pm and watching TV until 1am. Covid and its early closures then raised the question of whether any of the enforced changes would be retained - with diners eating at, say, 8 rather than 9 or 10. But I see nil evidence of this and wonder if anyone has.

The UK

There were some teething problems with the new GB News both last night and this morning. I took a look at 7am but won't be watching again, as some some reporters spoke with regional accents and one of them said 'An increasing amount of cases', instead of 'an increasing number'.  .

The right-of-centre Times, though, said  GBN's approach to the news will have been music to the ears of those viewers who believe TV news is 50 shades of Left. Which is surely correct. 

France

I mentioned Macron's need for a geography lesson. Here's one.

In revenge, I cite the 1513 Battle of the Spurs, so called because these were the only things used by the French cavalry as they fled from the English troops. Thereafter, said French cavalry (the gendarmerie) was known throughout Europe - for a while at least - as The Armoured Hares. 

Religious Nutters Corner

Thank god not all Catholic priests are as insane as the Spanish one who's said the culpability for the  murder of 2 young girls by their father lies with his unfaithful ex-wife.

Quote of the Day

It would seem we're no longer allowed to die of anything. Perhaps, as a consequence, we'll all live for ever, but without even a scintilla of enjoyment. 

Spanish 

Encajar is one of those Spanish verbs which can mean a lot of things. I’m currently trying to work out what Encajar los hombros means. ‘Push them together’, I think . . 

English

It's football time again. With ex-footballers as commentators who say things like: He's took up a great position and He done well there. Who was it said there's a standard English imposed on everyone by class considerations?

Finally  . . .

Lenox Napier has kindly sent me this on the topic of modern music, a subject I rather danced around yesterday. As I’m aware older folk always tend to disparage the music of previous generations:- 

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid

A good question:  Is there a limit to how much worse variants can get? An answer here.

The UK: 

1. A significant 3rd wave is under way but will it prove to be a harmless ripple or a brutal wave which threatens to overwhelm the NHS once more? That, the modellers confess, is not yet clear. 

2. Says it all . . 

3. Good News. British scientists have developed a ceiling-mounted “Covid alarm” that can detect whether someone in a room is infected with the coronavirus in as little as 15 minutes. The highly accurate gadget, little larger than a smoke alarm, could revolutionise screening in aircraft cabins, classrooms, care homes and offices.

Cosas de España/Galiza  

So, which is the happiest town in Spain?

I need to check this out . . . A Galician doctor has been prosecuted to charging for a death certificate. I think - but could be wrong - this is common practice in the UK. Charging, I mean. Not prosecuting doctors.

Radon is a (carcinogenic) gas which emerges naturally from granite, of which there's an awful lot here in Galicia, where the incidence of lung cancer is at least double the national number. In my street, all our basements are surrounded by the gas - meaning that, if you convert yours into a bedroom or office, you'd be wise to install an exhaust system and a gas detector.

I need a strong elastic band to keep my Kindle from falling from its decrepit leather cover. Fortunately, our considerate postpersons regularly drop perfect ones they've finished with onto the pavement/sidewalk.

The UK

Right-of-centre GB News debuts this evening.

France

President Macron - who thinks Corsica is part of mainland France - is reported to have said that Northern Ireland isn’t really a part of the UK/Britain. He appears to need lessons in both history and geography. Not to mention diplomacy. Sometimes, even super intelligent people can be very stupid.

The EU

Is the EU a commercial/business success? See the article below.

Quote of the Day

If you're not embarrassing your children, you're obviously not enjoying yourself.

The response to it of my  younger daughter: Well, you had a great time then.

English

The forerunner of both Old English and Old German/Dutch is Old Norse, I believe. I wondered if this was the reason Norwegian is said to be the easiest language to learn. But now I know that: Norwegian verbs have one of the easiest conjugations in Europe (closer to English than to German) – one verb form per tense. Plus, word order in Norwegian is similar to English.

Finally  . . .

Listening to wonderful 60s music yesterday, the question arose: Where is all that creative talent nowadays? It clearly doesn't go into today's monotonous 'pop' music. So, is is it latent or is it elsewhere?  

THE ARTICLE 

How Brussels’ complacency turned Europe into a corporate wasteland. The Continent once boasted dozens of global leaders but the tech upstarts from America and China have left it in the dust: Tim Wallace 

Jacques Delors was confident. The Cold War was over, communism had fallen and Europe was taking the lead.  “The European model is an inspiration for others,” the then-President of the European Commission told the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London in September 1992. Its single market “has revived national economies which were in relative decline”. “Keener competition” from globalisation combined with “cooperation” and “solidarity… sets us on a growth path which will be beneficial to all.” Other economies were following its example. “Our trading partners are gradually being won over to the idea that regional integration has a dynamic impact on all,” he said. “Witness the recent agreements concluded by the United States, Canada and Mexico.”

Fast forward almost 30 years, and the big winners are not on this side of the Atlantic. 

Arguments at the G7 centre on European governments seeking a bigger slice of tax revenues from US technology giants. That this is a vital problem on the global stage speaks to Europe’s failure to create that dynamic, world-leading economic environment of which Delors spoke so fondly.

The Continent is not full of Luddites: its citizens enthusiastically use digital tech, hence politicians’ desire to levy taxes based on the location of customers, not businesses. The problem is a failure to build those businesses driving the digital revolution.

America ascendant 

Apple is the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalisation of more than $2.1 trillion (£1.5 trillion), followed by Microsoft at $1.9 trillion. Oil giant Saudi Aramco is next, followed by Amazon, then Google’s owner, Alphabet, which rounds out the global top five at $1.6 trillion. Amazon and Google were founded in 1994 and 1998, after Delors’ speech. Microsoft and Apple are children of the 1970s – years when Europe was wracked by industrial strife – and have successfully reinvented themselves to create powerful global brands.

Europe’s most valuable company, meanwhile, is LVMH at a mere $406bn. Its history goes back to Louis Vuitton setting up shop in 1854. The fashion titan shows there is no reason old-world businesses cannot have success on a global scale. But its lonely position points to a wider lack of dynamism in European economies: the authorities are much better at protecting incumbent big businesses than they are at promoting new growth.

Sam Bowman, director of competition policy at the International Centre for Law & Economics, says attitudes to successful businesses in Europe are much more critical than those in the US. Those attitudes spread into regulations and policy to stymie innovation. “In the US they see massive profits as a reward for success, when in Europe the culture is that you have a lot of social obligations when you have become big. You see that in the approach to taxation and general regulation of large firms,” he says. “If you are an entrepreneur who can go to one place or another, it is pretty obvious why you would prefer the US approach, which is more conducive to setting up firms and good at importing foreign entrepreneurs.” Europe has compounded its problems with extensive new regulations such as GDPR, hamstringing young businesses with little capacity to cope with red tape. That entrenches the positions of giants who can shrug off the legal costs.

Europe’s legacy industries

The old Continent still has plenty of large and important companies. The top 10 companies held by MSCI’s Europe Index have long and illustrious histories. Nestle was founded in 1866, and HSBC a year earlier. Unilever is a relative sapling, dating back to 1929. Apparent newcomers Novartis and Astrazeneca were set up in the 1990s from mergers of far older businesses. Dutch-based semiconductor group ASML, formed in 1984, and SAP, the German software group founded in 1972, are the only ones which are less than 50 years old.

They remain powerful and can be innovative, as shown by Astrazeneca’s vital global contribution through its Covid vaccine in the past year. But compared to the top 10 in MSCI’s US index, they look distinctly staid.

It has not always been obvious that Europe’s companies should miss out on global domination, however. MSCI’s stock indices show Europe and the US tied in the late 1990s, with the dot com bust appearing to show the hubris of overconfident Americans. European markets recovered faster, booming through the early 2000s. By the eve of the financial crisis RBS was the biggest bank in the world by assets and Dutch-based ING had broken into the top 10 businesses by revenue. The credit crunch was much more severe than the tech bust, and ever since US and global markets have raced ahead of those in Europe, including the UK.

Small fish in a big pond

As well as missing out on tech, Europe’s companies have struggled to match the scale of global rivals. The top end of Fortune’s Global 500 index shows how the makeup of the business elite has changed in the past 25 years. In 1995, the biggest 10 companies had revenues of around $100bn. By 2020, annual revenues of $275bn were needed to break into the top tier. And it is the top end which is dominated by the US. Of the top 50 businesses by revenues, 22 are American, up from 14 in 1995.

China has grown from none to 12. Europe’s share of the top 50 has slipped from 17 companies to eight. At the other end of the scale, American investors are much more willing to back young businesses. The OECD found a far higher availability of venture capital in the US for startups and, particularly, scale ups.

The Entrepreneurs’ Network (TEN) found pension funds contribute 65pc of all venture capital funding in the US, compared to 18pc in Europe and 12pc in the UK, pointing to a radically different attitude to risk-taking.

Starved of growth capital on this side of the Atlantic, it is difficult for companies to grow and compete on the global stage. Instead of steps being taken to make the UK more like America, TEN’s Aria Babu points to new proposed rules governing tech takeovers which risk blocking deals which have even a slim chance of harming competition. “If Brexit was for anything, it really is to make sure the UK is the best place in the world to do this. A big part of the point is to detach ourselves from European attitudes around regulation and industry, and have a more innovative approach,” she says. Bowman notes that the US could go in the same direction as it looks at tougher regulations. “The fashionable view in the US is that basically the European approach is correct, and Big Tech is out of control, and we need to adopt a much more precautionary approach to regulation,” he says. 

“It is a funny dynamic, given that people in Europe are beginning to ask ‘why the hell have we not got a European Google?’”

The Continent’s failure stands as a rebuke to Delors’ misguided optimism.

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

The G7 Summit/Circus

A nice political sketch below

Covid

The UK: Despite being way ahead in vaccines, the UK is now on the verge of the 3rd wave experienced elsewhere - or 4 here in Spain. This is because of the Indian variant(Delta), which is 65% more transmissible than whatever the last strain was - British/Kent? - and which is causing 100% of new cases. Hardly anyone now expects June 21 to see the end of restrictions, with a delay of 4 weeks now predicted. But will Brits comply, given that it's being widely asked. How many more weeks can we take? Or, as Richard North puts it this morning: With the prevailing uncertainties and the history of the management of this epidemic, gone are the days when automatic compliance can be assured. A number of anti-lockdown demonstrations have already taken place and more reaction can be expected. 

The EU: Members have agreed to ease rules over the summer to allow fully vaccinated tourists to travel restriction-free across borders. Restrictions imposed on non-EU travellers will depend on the level of Covid-19 cases in each nation. Unsurprisingly, the UK is currently excluded from all restriction-free plans, due to concerns over the Delta variant.

Spain: Where does this EU development leave Spain? Assuming you'd want to keep Delta from your shores, is it really wise to let even vaccinated British holidaymakers into the country? Will we see a rise in infections in the vacation hotspots pretty soon, meaning a 5th wave?  Hot off the press. . . . Madrid brings forward a second AstraZeneca jab for the 60-69 group, as more cases of the Delta variant are detected. According to the deputy health chief, there is already community transmission of this strain in Madrid. Not much of a surprise, given the laxity there over recent months. There goes my end June trip to see my daughter and grandson.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Another command from Brussels. More games?

I thought I'd seen them all - T-shirts sporting strange bits of English. But yesterday a guy walked past my table with just FUCK OFF on his chest. Albeit with the 2 words in different colours, presumably to make it artistic.

María's Final Stretch: Days 7-8

The UK

Surprise, surprise! . . .  Our closest allies no longer trust Boris Johnson. Loose words and jokey insults trip off the tongue of the PM but foreign leaders will be less forgiving than British voters. As all Anglophiles know, the best of Brits combine humour with deep knowledge and an intense work ethic. Boris Johnson is not among these, as History will surely note. Possibly even the electorate before then. As John Crace of the Guardian noted the other day: At some point he will come unstuck – like every narcissist he germinates the seeds of his own destruction. But  . . . Right now he’s riding the crest of the vaccine wave and looks pretty much untouchable. Why does that say, I wonder, about Brits at large?

The USA

A British view of the new president: Biden doesn’t understand Northern Ireland. He's a classic of the type: a man of tenuous Irish descent who loudly declaims his Irishness yet clearly has little experience or understanding of the country, its history or inhabitants.   Including - and especially - those of Northern Ireland.

Quote of the Day

I’ve met Britain’s most pretentious coffee vending machine. At a Liverpool railway station, it bids you to wait while your coffee is “being crafted”. Crafted! There’s a soundtrack of coffee shop ambience, perhaps to distract from a robot spitting hot water, powder and UHT milk into a paper cup: Carol Midgley

English

I confess I didn't know that thou and you were the equivalents of these formal/informal forms:-

German: Sie and du, 

French. vous and tu, 

Spanish: usted and tú, 

It's said that thou declined rapidly in the 17th century, as folk became wary of offending others by using the singular thou form reserved for not just children but also social inferiors. 

It's also said that Shakespeare uses the forms inconsistently, sometimes using you with a lesser being, and sometimes thou.

Finally on this . . .Forms of the pronouns thou and thee are still used in regional dialects of English.

Finally  . . .

I thought I'd seen them all - T-shirts sporting strange bits of English. But yesterday a guy walked past my table with just FUCK OFF on his chest. Albeit with the 2 words in different colours, presumably to make it artistic.

THE ARTICLE

Not much love and peace for these ageing hippies: Quentin Letts. The Times

The whole thing felt like a delayed wedding reception for Boris and Carrie. Newly spliced Mr and Mrs Johnson stood on a Cornish beach and greeted their friends before posing for photographs. Carrie was in a dress of such brilliant pink you could see why the US presidential security detail were wearing dark glasses. Boris was in a new suit. It didn’t fit him. Do they ever?

Joe Biden tottered around the place looking a bit zoned-out. Justin Trudeau loped and strutted and put his Covid mask on when he thought the cameras might be watching. He could do with a haircut, that lad. Angela Merkel, on her last international summit, actually laughed. Demob happy. When she and her husband arrived on the beach, it was a surprise to find they had not brought their towels.

Carbis Bay in early June. Some boosterist in Downing Street had decided on several events being held outdoors, including the welcome elbow-bumps, the “family photo” and sundown sea shanties round a fire pit this evening. Did Angela remember to bring her swimming costume? Miraculously, this opening day of the summit was dry and fine. G7 leaders were thus denied the character-forming Cornish experience of wind-lashed cagoules, slanting rain and a pastie in the car park with the windscreen wipers working.

Airport arrivals were overseen by Colonel Edward Bolitho, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, a ramrod-spined, sword-wielding Etonian accompanied by soldiers in bearskins and — welcome to modern Britain — some Herbert with a bottle of hand sanitiser. Whooping motorcades whisked the guests down narrow lanes. Much of the Royal Navy was bobbing at anchor in St Ives bay.

“This is meant to be a fireside chat,” complained the prime minister, “but it has turned into a gigantic media circus in which we have to greet each other several times.” With that he expelled journalists from the low-ceilinged, bay-view executive meeting suite where the leaders were sitting at a round table.

Emmanuel Macron was described on Sky News as “the bad fairy” of the summit. Bad fairy? Can you still say that? The French president was certainly in itchy mood. He twitched his shoulders, fiddled with his comb-over (there was quite a breeze) and slipped a hand around colleagues’ backs. He wouldn’t leave Biden alone, stroking his arm and waving his fingers in front of old Joe’s eyes like a conjuror.

In the morning Macron was at the centre of a little stunt to assert European unity. At a terrace table bang in front of the official snappers, he went into a huddle with Merkel, Italy’s Mario Draghi and the two European Union delegates, Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel. Draghi and von der Leyen were laughing heartily. Probably discussing “sausage wars” with Boris. Really, how ridiculous to persecute British bangers under chilled-meat rules. Everyone knows there is almost no meat in your average snorker.

The PM had a one-to-one with the US president, the two men sitting in arm chairs with a dead tree stump between them. No doubt bugged by the Russians. Dominic Raab, foreign secretary, said that there had been an “incredibly warm chemistry” at the meeting. It was, though, that sort of day. Close. A bit sweaty. Raab himself was glistening. More talcum powder for Dominic, please.

Much of the “media circus” was stuck 30 miles away in Falmouth. Protesters round the headland in St Ives were divided into “authorised” and “non-authorised” demonstrations. How shaming for any anarchist to be authorised. At least the heroes of TV rolling news had been allowed into the compound. Sky’s Beth Rigby was there, to tell us about “co-ordination meetins”.

Tonight the leaders will have that party on the beach. Marshmallows will be roasted. Mellow, folksy vibes. But White House bodyguards have been told to “shoot without questions” if young Trudeau pulls out a guitar and starts singing Joan Baez peace songs.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid

The UK: I'm on record warning this would happen . . . Social distancing and face masks should continue forever, says Sage scientist, to help suppress other viruses.

Portugal: After a big raise in daily cases, the brakes have been put on relaxation in certain towns and it's been announced that masks will remain compulsory in all public places throughout the summer

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Predictably, Spain is discovering - belatedly? - that the EU is not just a one-way street of subsidies but has screws to turn when it's not happy with a member state. But do the screws have teeth or can Spain continue to game the system, as it's done in the past, eg with Modelo 720?

I might already have noted this confusion . . .   

Here's a nice article on Alcalá de Henares, birthplace of Cervantes. And The first true univeristy city. Or possibly university city. 

Odd to read - and hard to believe - that the octopus stalls (pulpeiras) that spring up on Fridays here in Galicia are unregulated.

I spent a fruitless 20 minutes early this morning trying to park in Pontevedra city but, as expected, ended up in a council-owned gold mine below the Alameda. It doesn't help that at least 200 street-side parking places in this zone have disappeared over the last 10 years, or are now limited to 15 minutes only.

Coming home, I wanted to enter a street that used to be 2-way but was blocked by a driver who pointed to a sign. This one:-

An official change of heart or just vandalism?

The UK

The names Ann and Mary were very common in the Middle Ages but I was surprised to hear in a podcast yesterday that it's rare for a baby to be given one of them these days. Especially males, I guess.

France

M Macron continues in his role as hard man of Europe. Well, the Western bit, anyway. As regards the NI Protocol of the Brexit deal, he insists that Nothing is negotiable. But I'm sure he's wise enough to know that, in life, everything is negotiable at any point in time. It all depends on the cards in your hands. I guess he's playing to the gallery of the presidential elections of 2022. Of course, Macron might be right in this case, in that the UK has a very weak negotiating position.

The EU

At least one Irish person thins that the case for an Irish Brexit is growing stronger. This is Ray Bassett, a former senior Irish diplomat. Who says The Republic of Ireland has been used and abused by Brussels. And that Its patience may just be running out. See his article below.

Will Poland break from the EU? Poles love Europe but a deepening conflict over the supremacy of EU law versus the independence of Poland’s constitution is pushing them towards the exit. Here’s a Times article on a looming crisis that could break the EU. But probably won’t.

Quote of the Day

Desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. But at least one of these is a good thing.

Finally  . . .

Oh, frabjous joy . . . I read reports yesterday confirming a friend's comment that the Portuguese police are fining Galicians 300 euros for taking roundabouts a la Española. Just to recap, this is using the outside lane regardless of whatever exit you're taking. In Portugal, as in every other country of the many I've driven in, this lane is only for the first exit. To clarify. In Spain:-

1. You are advised by Tráfico not to drive Spanish Style, but

2. It's not illegal to do so, and

3. If you do it, you have the right of way, so

4. If someone who is exiting hits you, they are at fault, and

5. Their insurance company might not pay out.

Crazy, I know but that's the long and the short of it. And every day I witness several learners still being taught to drive a la Española. I do hope many of them go down to Portugal and get fined. Both for being in the wrong lane and for either not signalling at all or for signalling wrongly, Meanwhile, here's a relevant (Spanish) article, with helpful(?) diagrams . .

THE ARTICLE

The case for an Irish Brexit is growing stronger. The Republic of Ireland has been used and abused by Brussels. Its patience may just be running out: Ray Bassett 

Throughout the Brexit process, Ireland has placed all its bets on the European Union.

It did everything in its power, in alliance with Brussels and Remainers in London, to thwart the democratic outcome of the referendum, confident that Brussels would overpower those seeking to take the UK out of the EU’s orbit. After all, discarding democratic outcomes of national votes had become a hallmark of the Brussels operation and the tactic had proved to be very successful in the past in Greece, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Ireland itself.

Then, when the Brexit talks began, and Leo Varadkar became Ireland’s prime minister, Dublin was content for the border between the Republic and the North to be cynically used as a weapon against the UK. The intransigence displayed by Brussels and Dublin on the issue helped destroy the political careers of two Conservative Prime Ministers, contributed to the comprehensive rout of pro-EU sentiment inside the Tory party and poisoned relations between Britain and Ireland.

With Brexit now a reality, Ireland faces a very different external landscape. Any kudos it gained for its pro-EU stance during the Brexit process was quickly forgotten and the bloc has become a much colder house. Dublin was made to confront this early when the EU, without consultation or any regard to Irish interests, invoked Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol to establish a hard border on the island of Ireland for Covid vaccines.

After howls of protest from Dublin, Belfast and London, the invocation was dropped – but the episode brought home just how peripheral Ireland and its interests really are to Brussels.

Now, the EU is issuing new threats of punitive action against the UK over the Northern Ireland Protocol, including the suggestion of a trade war should the UK extend grace periods for certain goods. The protocol, in its present format, is clearly not sustainable as it has alienated a whole community in Northern Ireland, which represents the antithesis of the purpose of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement.

Many in the Republic understand this and it is clear that the situation calls for direct talks between Dublin and London to sort out this local  issue, with flexibility on all sides. Co-operation on an overhaul of the protocol could be the catalyst for a reset of Irish/British relations. That, however, is something that the EU will never countenance.

Perhaps this would matter less if the EU was taking Dublin’s other interests more seriously, yet Brussels has time and again proved a poor partner. Ireland, just like the UK, has extensive and rich fishing grounds. Under the Common Fisheries Policy, the local fishing fleet is only allocated 15.5 per cent of the stocks in Irish waters. This was partially compensated for by quotas inside UK waters. After Brexit, however, the Commission imposed very large cuts on the Irish allocation in the British maritime area, the largest cuts of any EU nation. The interests of France, Spain and the Netherlands clearly trumped those of the Irish.

The spectre of imminent changes to corporation taxation poses the biggest threat. Ireland has grown rich by attracting a disproportionate amount of Foreign Direct Investment, mainly American. The country’s corporate tax rate of 12.5 per cent, plus very generous write-downs and offsets, has encouraged multinationals to base their headquarters in Ireland.

The decision of the finance ministers of the G7 in London, with the enthusiastic support of Brussels, to establish a minimum 15 per cent tax rate and move to tax multinationals where they make their sales, heralds the onset of global reforms in this area. The new 15 per cent rate is estimated by the Irish Department of Finance to reduce Ireland’s corporation tax take by between €2.2 billion and €2.4 billion per annum or one fifth of the total. The Irish business representative body, IBEC, put the likely losses at well over €3 billion. The EU is determined to rein in Ireland’s competitive advantage.

If the EU continues to attack Ireland’s ability to attract FDI, a fundamental question will have to be asked as to how long it will continue to be in Ireland’s interest to remain inside the bloc. Ireland’s two main trading partners are the UK and the USA, with total non-EU trade accounting for well over 60 per cent, by far the highest percentage of any EU country. The US and the UK are the largest overseas investors in Ireland and between them they receive the bulk of Ireland’s growing external investment. Ireland is part of the Anglosphere of English-speaking countries.

There are other developments inside the EU which are not to the Irish public’s taste. The growing demand, especially by Germany, for a common foreign policy based on majority voting in the European Council, a push for greater militarisation of the EU, and Ireland’s growing net contribution to the EU budget will all place a strain on the traditional Irish pro-EU sentiment.

These changes could yet cause an eventual rupture with Brussels. Irexit may be emerging as a credible prospect in the future.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid

The UK: While the daily death toll remains low at c.8, the number of cases is rising rather worryingly, particularly in parts of northern England where the Indian (‘Delta') variant is well- established. A regional lockdown???

Cosas de España/Galiza 

As doubts remain over whether Spain will ever be UK Green this summer, the government has launched an €8m campaign to lure visitors from Germany. Details here.

There are now more 'tourist accommodation' beds in Pontevedra province than hotel beds. And there are certainly far more 'pilgrim' inns(albergues) than the current camino flow merits -  including 3 new ones in the first Pontevedra city street they walk down. And several more being built in the centre. All pretty empty, of course, this expected-to-be-bonaza year. That said, numbers are slowly increasing, albeit mostly of Spaniards and Portuguese, it seems. Very few foreign tongues on the streets so far.

But the good news is that the Pope has declared ex cathedra that 2022 will be the Año Jacobeo 2021 here in Galicia. Amazing powers, inherited from JC, I guess.

Leaving a train at Vigo's Urzaiz station, you can take either 33 steps or an escalator to the (currently closed) normal entrance/exit level. At the moment, to get to the temporary entrance/exit, you have the choice of a lift, several more escalators or another 108 steps to the street level. Guess who arrived there first yesterday, albeit possibly a tad more tired than everyone else.

María's Final Stretch: Days 4-6  Etiquette at a place I rarely go to.

The UK

The EU

According to a Continent-wide survey: The slow and chaotic start to the vaccine rollout at the beginning of 2021 raised big questions about the EU’s capacity to steer its member states through the crisis. Disappointment with EU institutions has now come out of the periphery and gone mainstream.  . . . In Spain, traditionally one of the nations most enthusiastic about the EU, a majority of 52% saw it as dysfunctional. But I guess it will recover when subsidies start to roll southwards. You might be able to access this link on this.

Quote of the Day

From a one-star review of that book: The Duchess of Sussex’s semi-literate vanity project leaves Harry holding the baby. It's all bland parenting 'wisdom' and no story – and it's hard to imagine any child enjoying it.

Finally  . . .

I go on and on about bizarre driving at roundabouts in Spain* but I'm glad I wasn't at the one at the bottom of my hill at 8.15 last night, when a 'drunk and high' driver from Vigo crashed into 2 other cars there.

* Latest example: A driver in front of me approaching a roundabout this week signalled left, went into the right-hand lane, then went straight on and - once past the roundabout - signalled right but went straight on. The truth is that not signalling at all is better than this. 

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid

Here's a thing . . . It's now said that the variant which swept Continental Europe last autumn originated in Spain. But, unlike the one identified in Britain, escaped being labelled the Spanish variant. Seems a tad unfair.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Details here on Spain's involvement in the EU digital certificate scheme

The Spanish Health Ministry has admitted that its traffic light system for coronavirus restrictions is not obligatory for the regions. Although regional and central authorities initially insisted the measures included in the scheme were ‘mandatory,’ the text states that they can be modified according to each territory’s epidemiological situation

Portugal

Seems to have been given something of a free pass on slavery, which it got very heavily into in the 15th century. First in Africa and later in China, Japan and Korea. So many slaves were brought to the markets of Lisbon that they represented at one time 10% of the population. Details of this sordid era here.

Far more serious . . . I just checked on the availability of IKEA's hammock in both Galicia and North Portugal, to find it costs €45 here but €65 down in Braga. Maybe the latter comes assembled, whereas ours will cost you €19 to have a company assemble it for you.

The UK

Oh, dear. A lawyer has been suspended by her own firm over a tweet suggesting the Sussexes’ new daughter be called Doprah. And the termagant columnist Julie Burchill has been sacked by the Telegraph for suggesting her name should have been Georgina Floydina.

Click here for a long but worthwhile portrait - essentially for (North) Americans - of Boris Johnson - A man who has spent a lifetime turning ambition, opportunism, and ruthless self-promotion into extraordinary personal success. And who understands the art of politics better than his critics and rivals.

The EU

Thanks to resistance from national governments, Brussels is said to have lost it fight -post Brexit - to block UK scientists from involvement in technology projects. Dear me.

Germany 

Brexit Britain may soon have a new best friend there, claims AEP in optimistic mode in the article below.

The Way of the World  

That G7 tax deal . . . Not exactly what it purports to be, it says here.

Spanish

I’ve heard a large beer glass called a bok, a bol and, last night, a bos. Possibly in the last case by a South American lady. Any more?

Quotes of the Day

1.The inevitable consequence of what we call progress (at all levels, economic, political, scientific, technological) is self-destruction.

2. Nudists have no fashion sense

Finally  . . . 

Stretching the limits of credibility beyond breaking point  . . .The TV ad for a British insurance company: It's our heart which sets us apart. A bloody insurance company!

THE ARTICLE

Brexit Britain may soon have a new best friend in Germany. Read this exclusive extract from our Economic Intelligence newsletter and sign up at the bottom of the article to get it every Tuesday: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard The Telegraph

Berlin’s political leaders are mostly too young to know much about the extraordinary role of British military officers in the post-War reconstruction of Germany.

That episode of visionary statecraft and creativity has faded from collective consciousness. It never had much hold over Angela Merkel, who grew up in Communist East Germany with a binary sense of Cold War politics. But Armin Laschet has not forgotten, and he is now the odds-on favourite to be the next Chancellor.

The British military administration created Laschet’s industrial state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1946 under “Operation Marriage”, partly from chunks of Prussian territory. It then nurtured the region back to economic health in difficult times. “The founding history of North Rhine-Westphalia is intimately bound up with the United Kingdom and the remarkable dedication of our British friends,” he said.

This occurred at a time when the initial impulse of the occupying powers was a Carthaginian settlement intended to hold the Germans down, and make them pay. The prevailing view in some quarters was that the Allies had not been tough enough after the First World War and that this time there should be systematic de-industrialisation and crippling retribution.

The punitive policy did not survive first contact with reality in the British zone. “The officers were shocked by the extent of destruction. There was a feeling that you can’t just let people starve,” said Christopher Knowles, an historian at King’s College London and author of Winning the Peace: The British in Occupied Germany, 1945-1948.

General Bernard Montgomery swung quickly to a reconstruction policy. He let mid-ranking officers in their twenties run with the baton. Ivan Hirst, a 28-year-old major in the Engineers, found himself in charge of the smashed Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg with initial instructions to dismantle the production line and ship the machinery to the Midlands as war reparations.

He did the opposite, producing an olive green Beetle from bartered materials and scrap parts to meet the needs of the British army. It was the start of a stunning revival. Hirst oversaw the first freely elected Works Council of VW employees, part of the push by Clement Atlee for a pluralistic trade union movement as a cornerstone of post-War German democracy.

Volkswagen was handed over as a trust to the West German government and Lower Saxony in 1949. Hirst became a revered figure in Wolfsburg.

John Seymour Chaloner, a 21-year-old major in the Westminster Dragoons, commandeered offices and recruited an ex-Wehrmacht radio operator called Rudolf Augstein to create an unfettered weekly news review. Chaloner put up with the unvarnished reporting even when an early edition accused the British authorities of providing starvation rations to workers in the Ruhr. The story caused a storm in London but tolerance of criticism ultimately prevailed. What became Der Spiegel magazine was launched under German control in 1947.

The Americans also moved crabwise toward reconciliation but with a lag, while the French resisted for longer. It was the British who pushed for the revival of German industry at key talks in January 1946. “They were the most liberal and led the way,” said Knowles.

It would be a stretch to describe Armin Laschet as a committed Anglophile. The Christian Democrat candidate is a deal-maker at heart who likes to keep the lines open to everybody, including Vladimir Putin. “He hails from Achen (Charlemagne's lair) and will always put the Franco-German relationship first when push comes to shove,” said Holger Schmieding from Berenberg Bank. Yet Mr Laschet gave a striking answer when asked in the first presidential TV debate which country should be the primordial partner for the European Union. “We must do everything we can to keep the British very, very close alongside us,” he said.

You could say this is an implicit recognition that the EU mishandled Brexit negotiations, more or less forcing the UK into a hard Brexit by insisting on dynamic legal alignment and sweeping oversight for the European Court as a sine qua non for basic free trade. His chief wrath is instead directed at states that remain in the EU, eagerly spend hand-outs from Brussels (ie, from German taxpayers), while ignoring the rules of the EU game when it suits them. The British may have been prickly but they did not abuse the system in such a way.

When Green candidate Annalena Baerbock was asked the same question on foreign policy, her Pavlovian non-sequitur response was to agitate for more “Europe”, which captures a fundamental difference in ideology. She is a reflexive supranationalist. There is little place for the democratic nation state in her philosophy. Labels can be confusing. The German Greens are not particularly “green” any longer by OECD standards. Their 2030 coal ban and CO2 emissions targets are both less ambitious than laws already passed by a British Tory government. They have instead evolved into a hardline Europeanist movement, advocates of EU fiscal union, a joint foreign policy, and a European defence force. They want to whittle down the national veto.  In short, they have become the “Brussels party”, although they have not gone as far as many British Greens in actively trying to break up their own country.

As a matter of hard Realpolitik it is surely a relief for Downing Street that the Baerbock bubble of the last month has definitively burst. The Christian Democrats (CDU) won a resounding victory in the regional elections of Sachsen-Anhalt over the weekend, the last beauty contest before the national vote in September. The Green surge fizzled out. They won just 5.9pc of the vote, albeit in a small quirky state. The Left Party fared even worse.

The back-slapping Armin Laschet does not set passions alight. He is the post-Merkel “continuity candidate” picked by the CDU’s old guard against the clear wishes of the party base. But he is nevertheless running five points ahead in the latest nationwide Insa poll.

The German vaccination campaign has kicked into gear and is now rolling along with the Teutonic precision that we expected earlier. A V-shaped economic recovery is in full swing and the Christian Democrats will enjoy a reopening dividend. It is looking ever more likely that Mr Laschet will lead the next German government, probably in coalition with the Greens as junior partners. If so, this effectively kills off “Hamiltonian” plans by EU integrationists hoping to turn the Recovery Fund into a permanent economic government, eviscerating national parliaments in the process.

It is not clear what Mr Laschet means by keeping the British “very, very close” but it implies a willingness to bury the hatchet after the bitter Brexit divorce, a switch from a punishment policy to something closer to a win-win for both sides. This is in contrast to public statements by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, who both stated that the UK must emerge from the Brexit process in worse shape than the status quo ante, otherwise the example would pose a threat to the EU project. They brushed aside proposals by a group of European academics, economists, and elder statesmen for a Continental Partnership with the UK, one that could become a model for the ring of countries around the EU that want friendly ties and open trade but without the full package of the superstate. This chance was missed. The EU still has no formula for its near abroad, or for its own nationalist members in Eastern Europe. It is quarrelling with everybody.

The British military administration of Northwest Germany after the Second World War was far-sighted by comparison, given the blood-letting and horrors that preceded it. Needless to say, it was more muddled and less benign than we like to imagine. But in the round it was remarkable.

In my view the EU will ultimately come to the conclusion that the “pastoralisation” of Brexit Britain – to borrow the analogy of the Morgenthau Plan for post-War Germany – will give way over time to an amicable modus vivendi. It is already under pressure from the Biden administration and will have to sort out the Northern Irish Protocol, which is currently being pushed by the EU with a pig-headedness that violates the dual consent principle of the Good Friday Agreement.

The message of the early trade data is that EU exporters are rapidly losing share to global rivals in the UK market, with much of this damage concentrated in North Rhine-Westphalia. This will get worse when Britain ends its (unreciprocated) grace period of light-touch rules for goods imports from Europe. It is a hard deadline of sorts.

What is needed is a fresh cast of EU leaders willing to question the canonical orthodoxies of the EU’s Brexit Task Force and turn the page. A Chancellor Laschet would be a good start. The souverainiste surge building up in France, Italy, and Spain may broaden the base.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid 

The UK: The odds are reducing on June 21 being Freedom Day, in the face of a looming 3rd wave.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Covid 'passports' (i.e. certificates) are now available in Galicia and several other regions, in English as well as Spanish.

Today sees the Selectividad university entrance exams throughout the country. Students undertake these having already been assessed by their secondary schools. In an indication that grade creep is now not just an Anglo phenomenon, I see that 25% of Galician kids are now Sobresaliente, or Outstanding. Which - as with First Class degrees in the UK - rather questions the accolade, both in logic and in common sense.

Talking of young folk - 3 more deaths here over the weekend when a car driven by an unlicensed and uninsured driver jumped a stop sign and was hit by a truck. Despite technological advances, our local police don't seem to have cracked a problem which inevitably increases insurance premiums in this province/region. And causes untold grief, of course.

I've said many times that Spanish society is the best of the 6 I've lived in but, of course, there are niggles. This week, I've already been reminded of 2 of these, neither of which, I suspect, would bother many Spaniards:-

1. If a shop doesn't stock what you want, the shopkeeper never says anything like 'Sorry, we don't have that'. Usually it's a bald No. Sometimes in a tone that suggests he or she resents being bothered by the question.

2. Given that none of the several Panama hats I've left in bars has ever been handed in, there seems to be something a Finders Keepers attitude in Spanish society. I've noted a couple of times that the receptionist in the Prado years ago actually laughed when I asked if there was a Lost Property office there. And I've given up, as a complete waste of time, writing my phone number inside my hats. 

Judging by the regular sight of men walking dogs smaller than cats, I'd guess that the Spanish male has changed a lot since I first came here in 1971. I can't imagine this happening back then but I might be very wrong, of course. They also push baby carriages now. Something else they might not have been seen doing 40 years ago.

Yesterday I signed up for Pilates classes at our refurbished sports centre in Pontevedra city. This now goes by the name of Be-One. Which strikes me as ridiculous. If anyone can figure out the rationale, please let me know in the Comments.

Portugal

Portugal warns it will reciprocate if Spain imposes a vaccine certificate requirement for overland travellers. I'd better remember to keep my certificate in the car . . .

The UK

Flashbacks yesterday when I read that the first Brit to be convicted for murder via DNA analysis - in 1986 - is about to be released. My company had licensed this technology from the inventor (and later Nobel prize winner) but then had to fight off an attempt by the UK government to steal it from us. See here on this.

France 

Is it really on the brink of civil war?

Finally  . . . 

The ferry from the UK to northern Spain re-commenced this week. I hope to be getting it later this year, as soon as I won't need to quarantine on my arrival.. .  

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid 

Some 7 day moving averages. Different population numbers, so not per million of the population. By rising number of deaths

Gibraltar New cases 1 Deaths 0

Sweden New cases 1,400 Deaths 1

Israel New cases 15 Deaths 2

Portugal New cases 569 Deaths 2

Netherlands New cases 2,230 Deaths 8

UK New cases 4,800 Deaths 8

Spain New cases 3,300 Deaths 37

Italy: New cases 2,350 Deaths 69

France: New cases 7,200 Deaths 85

Germany 3,000 Deaths 115

USA  New cases 3,200 Deaths 375

Cosas de España/Galiza 

From today, you can come to Spain from outside the EU so long as you have a PCR certificate. Except if you're coming from the UK, when you don't need this. I think.

Public service stuff from The Olive Press:-

1. How to cut your electricity bills under the  new regime.

2. The tougher ITV tests for cars over certain ages.

News - here and here - of bad treatment of Brits down south, where there's an awful lot of Spanish illegality. Including many thousands of unlicensed properties. Which do seem to be treated differently depending on your nationality.

I need to put my smoking comments in context . . . There are actually very few folk smoking on/near the terraces these days. BUT: More than 90% of those doing so are female. Usually young. Like the 3 at the next table to mine last night who’d just got back from the beach. Not that that’s relevant . . .

In pursuit of more fibre in my diet, I bought 3 loaves. Apart from fibre, the nutritional elements are much the same. But not so the weight and above all, the price:-

1. Mercadona Harina Integral: 6gm of fibre. Weight 460gm. €0.69. Fibre €0.12/gm

2. Pan Rico Integral: 7gm of fibre. Weight 385gm: €2.45.  Fibre €0.35/gm 

3. Groweat Organic Bio: 11gm of fibre. Weight 400gm €3.99. Fibre €0.36/gm

So, is 'Bio' an even bigger rip-off here than elsewhere? Or is it worth it? Or should I just eat more Mercadona bread?

María's Final Stretch: Days 1-3

Portugal

How might poor Portugal’s removal from the Green List affect you?

France 

Lofty EU ambitions.

China

Thanks to Covid and regardless of where it really sprang from, China’s days of free riding on the West are well and truly over. And A new, and more dangerous, era dawns. Says the writer of the article below. Historicl times, then. 

Finally  . . .  

A little bit of Spanish history I wasn't aware of. . . In 1505 Isabela of Castilla's daughter, Juana (not yet La Loca), was sailing to Spain via the English Channel with her husband, Philip of Burgundy, when they were shipwrecked on the Dorset coast. The couple were afforded great hospitality  by England's Henry VII but were, in fact, hostages for the duration of their stay. To get away, Philip was forced to sign a very one-sided treaty with England. After 6 weeks, the couple were allowed to leave and sailed to La Coruña, in North Galicia. Where ere they pobably got an even better welcome and were free to move on.

THE ARTICLE  

True or not, the Wuhan lab leak story looks set to change the world.Whatever the origins of Covid, relations between China and the West are coming apart at the seams: Jeremy Warner, The Telegraph

First it was lockdown, then test and trace, and finally vaccines. Now, seemingly, the UK Government hopes for Covid salvation by effectively banning foreign holidays, a strategy filled with so many loopholes, waivers and inconsistencies as to be scarcely worth the paper it is written on. If it is the Delta variant the restrictions are meant to protect us from, it’s too late. The horse has already bolted.

The pandemic’s longer term geopolitical ramifications are, meanwhile, looking ever more ominous, including potentially a complete breakdown in relations with China. Covid is fast becoming a lightning rod for one of those decisive moments in history, a great shifting of the tectonic plates which sees nearly 50 years of deepening economic integration between East and West go powerfully into reverse.

Release of a mammoth cache of emails to and from Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House, has brought China’s culpability in the origins of the disease firmly back into the public eye. It turns out that Fauci was alerted to the possibility that the virus could have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory as early as January 2020, or well before the disease began to take hold in the West.

Fauci said subsequently that he was “not convinced” by the official Chinese and World Health Organisation explanation that the disease originated naturally via a local wet market. Confusingly, he also continues to state that the most likely origin is a jumping of species. Indeed, in one email exchange he is thanked by an organisation which provided funding for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for stating publicly that the evidence supported a natural origin, not a lab release.

Be that as it may, the reason all this has assumed such importance is not because of the veracity of the allegations or otherwise. Personally, I have always found the idea of an accidental lab leak to be easily the most plausible explanation. The circumstantial evidence is just too hard to ignore. The wider scientific community has questions to answer on why it was so determined to dismiss the idea as a conspiracy theory. Vocal support from Donald Trump for the idea of a lab leak didn’t exactly help its case, admittedly, but that’s no reason to dismiss the possibility out of hand. Good science is about being open to and testing rival hypotheses. Many virologists have been far too happy to accept a self-serving official explanation for which there is as little evidence as the alternative lab leak theory.

In any case, it is very unlikely we’ll ever get to the bottom of it. As Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, told The Telegraph last week, if there is any hard evidence of a lab leak, it will in all probability already have been destroyed.

The Chinese authorities are never going to admit to such a catastrophic accident. To the contrary, they do nothing to discourage rival conspiracy theories, widely circulating in Chinese social media, that the virus in fact came from a US lab, and was then transmitted to China via a visiting US army sports team. As I say, people – and governments – will believe what they want, and it will never be proved one way or the other. This is not like Chernobyl, which shattered the credibility of the Soviet regime; unlike a nuclear meltdown, covering up a lab leak would be relatively easy.

What the hardening of positions does do, however, is act as a conduit for a wider process of bifurcation between West and East. Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, after 25 years of Chinese isolation, promised a more hopeful and less confrontational world in which rival economies and political systems would converge into a harmonious whole.

China’s accession at the turn of the century to the World Trade Organisation seemed finally to bring Nixon’s vision to fruition.

But now it’s all coming apart at the seams. Far from growing to be more like us, China’s centralising instincts have returned with a vengeance under President Xi Jinping, and with them a much more assertive, even triumphalist, approach to the West and the rest of the world.

China’s sense of inevitable Western decline and Chinese ascendancy began with the global financial crisis, which seemed both to confirm Western economic incompetence and turbocharged China’s relative economic catch-up. “You were my teacher,” Wang Qishan, the vice-president, told Hank Paulson, then US treasury secretary, in 2008. “But now I am in my teacher’s domain, and look at your system, Hank. We aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore.”

That sense of superiority has been compounded by the pandemic, where the Chinese authorities have contrasted their own apparent success in brutally containing the virus, allowing the economy to stage a rapid recovery, with the seeming failings of the West, where deaths have been far, far higher – in part because of our love of individual freedom – and the economic damage much deeper.

This could change. Western vaccines are proving much more effective than Chinese alternatives, lending weight to the idea of continued Western superiority via technological prowess, while the US economy is now staging a remarkable recovery which should see it regain all the growth lost to Covid by the end of the year.

What is also true is that China’s days of free riding on the West are well and truly over. Last week’s decision by the Biden administration to ban Americans from investing in dozens of Chinese defence and technology companies marks a further escalation in hostilities which sees both countries attempting to decouple one from the other. But it is all going rather too quickly for China’s liking. Growth in internal demand is unlikely to happen fast enough to compensate for the speed of Western disengagement, and the consequent loss of export markets. Xi’s dream of a “dual circulation”, self-reliant and contained economy, is not yet there.

The Wuhan lab leak theory, whether legitimate or not, provides cover for and greatly enhances this defining shift in the global geopolitical and economic landscape. On both sides of the divide, it will entrench a “them and us” mentality. A baited dragon, moreover, becomes a very much more dangerous one, unpredictably lashing out wherever it senses weakness. China’s repressive one child policy is meanwhile coming home to haunt in a demographic time bomb of ageing and population decline which has left millions of young men with no one to marry. In recognition of the problem, China last week lifted the restrictions to three children per household, but too late. The die is already cast.

We are unlikely ever to know the truth about the origins of Covid, but since when did truth determine the course of history? The Wuhan lab leak narrative is one of those defining stories which encapsulates a whole raft of seething resentments and rivalries. A new, and more dangerous, era dawns.

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid 

This is a must-read - long - article on the question of the origin of the virus. And this is a second one. If the link isn’t accessible, please tell me and I’ll C&P the article later today or tomorrow.

These are said to the the latest Covid rules in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Turkey and Croatia?

Talking of Greece . . . 

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Here's the latest development in the war between Madrid and some regions over Covid restrictions. I confess to having given up trying to understand it, in favour of just relying on the Voz de Galicia to tell me what we're allowed to do in our street. Or possibly the entire barrio.

When I first came here 20 years ago, it was commonplace to hear “The weekend begins on Friday". Meaning midday for many folk. More recently, I've heard 'Thursday' (night?) substituted for 'Friday'. But not for the electricity companies, of course. Their weekend rates begin midnight Friday, I think. Or maybe 23.00.

Talking about when I arrived here . . . Back then, the Great Flax Case of 1999 was still fresh in the memory. An article I read yesterday caused me to ponder whether the infamous level of corruption among Spanish politicos was any less these days, 20 years on. I do wonder. The article was about the prosecution of the ex President of the Valencia region, who'd saved at least €6m euros from his salary/income and sent it too Andorra.

Repopulating bits of Spain. Fancy a whole village to yourself?

Portugal

The UK

Is Johnson not a jelllyfish but Britain’s first Catholic PM? See the article below. 

China

See the above Covid articles.

The Way of the World 

Good questions: Do the commissars who police the language of everyone not have even the remotest capacity for forgiveness? Are they not capable of overlooking the indiscretions and the witterings of youth? 

Good reply: It would seem not. Right now we are in the grip of an absolutism which would do credit to the old Soviet Union, or indeed Torquemada. Not only must you agree with everything we say, but you must always have agreed with it before we even said it. Wrongthink can stretch all the way back. Everything you have ever said will destroy you.

Inside the crazy world of NFTs, where $69m has been paid for a piece of digital artwork? 

Finally . . . Quote of the Day

A bore is a person who, when asked how he is, tells you. Must strive to remember that.

THE ARTICLE 

Is Johnson Britain’s first Catholic PM? What would have been unthinkable only a generation ago appears to have been confirmed by last weekend’s wedding  Ben Macintyre

When the Pope arrives for the UN climate summit in Glasgow in November, he will be greeted by a British Catholic prime minister and his Catholic wife. A generation ago that would have provoked an outcry. A century before that, riots. Anti-Catholicism has been deeply embedded in this country for more than 400 years but almost overnight it has evaporated from a cause to die for into a shrug, as exemplified by a prime minister who has now apparently decided to think of himself as a Catholic, but who technically may not be one, and who doesn’t worry much either way.

Last weekend Boris Johnson married Carrie Symonds, amid great secrecy, in a Catholic ceremony at Westminster Cathedral, seat of the Roman Catholic Church in England. He was baptised a Catholic, his mother’s faith, and is officially a parishioner of the cathedral. Their son Wilfred was baptised there last year by the same priest who officiated at the wedding. That appears to make Johnson Britain’s first ever Roman Catholic prime minister. But as always with this prime minister, there are complications. At Eton, he was confirmed as an Anglican. He has often voiced equivocal feelings about monotheism, pointing to a mixed ancestry that is Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian. Johnson says he thinks about religion “a lot”, but that it would be “pretentious” to suggest that he is a “serious practising Christian”. Of his own indistinct faith, he has observed. “It’s a bit like trying to get Virgin Radio when you’re driving through the Chilterns. It sort of comes and goes.” That remark either originated with, or was appropriated by, David Cameron. It is the subtler Tory version of Alastair Campbell’s injunction: “We don’t do God”.

Some Catholics argue that while he might have undergone Anglican confirmation at school, Johnson remains Catholic in the eyes of that church. Others claim he needs to be formally readmitted. “He’s an Anglican unless and until he is received into the Catholic Church, which would in his case require the sacrament of confirmation,” tweeted the Catholic journalist Austen Ivereigh. Then there is the ticklish issue of bishops. Under the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, it is technically unlawful for a Catholic prime minister to advise the Queen on appointments to the Church of England, including bishops. (If Johnson were Muslim or Hindu, this would not be a problem.) Finally, there is the prime minister’s complex past. Twice divorced, with at least one child born out of wedlock, he was nonetheless permitted to marry under Catholic rites. According to canon law, Johnson’s two earlier marriages took place outside the Catholic Church and are therefore invalid: as far as the Catholic authorities are concerned, this is not Johnson’s third marriage but his first. That has come as a surprise to countless other divorcees who have been refused marriage in a Catholic church without a formal annulment.

However, the most remarkable aspect of all about the nuptials is that nobody has raised a single objection to the fact that Johnson either professes to be, or is, or may be, a practising Catholic. For a country steeped in centuries of anti-Catholic prejudice, that is an astonishing historical watershed. Ever since the Act of Supremacy of 1534, anti-Catholic feeling has been fed by the fear that the Pope could seek to reimpose religious and political authority through his Catholic allies, France and Spain. Virulent anti-Catholicism gradually abated over the centuries, but like British antisemitism it persisted, unacknowledged, coded and tenacious.  In 1978, amid rumours that Prince Charles might marry a Catholic, Enoch Powell thundered: “It would signal the beginning of the end of the British monarchy. It would portend the eventual surrender of everything that has made us, and keeps us still, a nation.”

While the burning of Guy Fawkes’s effigy on November 5 has been all but shorn of its religious symbolism, the idea that Britain might be led by a Catholic remained anathema to many in the latter part of the 20th century. Writing in this newspaper in 2007, William Rees-Mogg recalled that in the recent past “in politics, a Roman Catholic prime minister was unthinkable, and a Roman Catholic lord chancellor was actually illegal”. Tony Blair attended Mass as prime minister but did not formally convert to Catholicism until he left office. Even that led to some ecclesiastical raised eyebrows. There were good political reasons for keeping his personal faith under wraps as prime minister, including the delicacy of Northern Ireland negotiations and his party’s position on abortion, but it provoked suspicion that Blair did not “do God”, as his spin doctor prescribed, except secretly, and with a Catholic deity.

Some see Johnson’s church wedding as signalling a new spirituality, perhaps prompted by his own brush with mortality during the pandemic. Others see a deft political gambit to divert attention from the Dominic Cummings farrago. But most people are simply uninterested in which God, if any, Johnson worships. That very indifference raises an intriguing constitutional question. A member of the royal family is no longer required to renounce the succession if he or she marries a Catholic, but under the Act of Settlement, ours is a Protestant monarchy and no Catholic may ascend to the throne. If we do not mind that a Catholic now runs the country, why should we care if a Catholic monarch rules it?

Johnson’s white wedding in Westminster is proof that faith is no longer an issue of concern in politics, least of all to the prime minister himself, for whom religion is another opportunity for a joke: Catholic Schmatholic.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid

Spain: Seems a tad belated . . . The first cases of the Indian variant of COVID-19 ('Delta') have been detected in a Malaga testing centre. 

Cosas de España/Galiza

Every Spaniard wastes 77 kilos of food a year, it says here. Seems a lot but I've no idea how this compares with other countries.

Good news for those thinking of doing a bit of domestic tourism.

Two or three more regions have said they won't comply with the government's latest (pseudo?)dictates on nocturnal restrictions. This commentator goes to town on Madrid's performance in the health area over the last 17 months, alleging that it's been - contrary to the PM's assertions - 'among the least successful' globally and that Health Ministry's credibility is 'at rock bottom', amidst 'confusion and inequality'.

To my astonishment, one of  my favourite tapas bars is finding it impossible to hire a sous-chef. 'No one wants to work', alleged the head waiter. Too comfortable on furlough? I'm reminded of some friends who had a restaurant at the mouth of the Miño river and had to resort to Portuguese employees, as local Spaniards were unwilling to work the hours.

All you need to know about the remarkable Canfranc Station, which I plan to visit later this year.

Like me, Lenox feeds the birds . . . As I've said, my (many) sparrows have rather lost out to the numerous greedy greenfinches and the collared doves. Not to mention the occasional (hated) magpie.

You have to hand it to them . . . Spanish police seized 300kg of cocaine smuggled into Europe by a drug trafficking gang who disguised it as charcoal. 

Even cuter than next door's kittens . . . And an admirable success story.

The UK & The EU

Post Brexit, it's claimed that both Spain and Portugal have invented rules beyond those of the EU for UK foodstuffs, especially organic products. Not cricket but neither is it very surprising. Rules are there to be either ignored when inconvenient or expanded when convenient. As Richard North puts it: It may be years before we see the full impact of Brexit. But, if the food industries are any guide, the only way is down.

On the other hand . . . Spain has been told off by the European Commission for allowing non-EU visitors into the country without a negative Covid test. But the EU body has no apparent legal standing to enforce a non-compulsory accord between its member countries over ‘allowing in’ people from non-EU territories. So, being inconvenient, the rule is being ignored.

Finally  . . .  

Well, my email to my friend didn't come back to me despite the attached post including 'fag' again. So bang goes that theory.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Correction: I'm sure most readers will have realised it should have been NIMBY yesterday, not MIMBY.

Covid

We now have the Nepal variant of the Indian variant, now called Delta. In the UK at least. This could go on forever, if common sense is ignored and a sense of perspective never gained. 

Spain details a new [traffic light] system of coronavirus restrictions to be applied until 70% of population is vaccinated. Despite opposition from some regions, the measures – including early closing hours and capacity limits for bars and restaurants – will be obligatory across the country. Details here. Will the Madrid Presidenta, as is her wont, take this to the Constitutional Court?  P. S. As I write, I see that Galicia, the Basque Country and, of course, Madrid are going to defy the government.

Cosas de España/Galiza

A friend has told me that our local health centre is 'chaotic', so

of Spain’s primary healthcare centres 'buckling under pressure' didn't come as much of a surprise.

Good to know that: Queen Letizia’s latest dress shows the potential power of royal style. Though I'm not sure what it means and can't be bothered to read below the headline . . 

The Spanish-American war of 1898 was a veritable disaster for Spain. It was 'sparked' by an explosion on a US ship in Havana harbour in which more than 200 men died. The US accused Spain of a torpedo attack and off it went, to take over Cuba and other Spanish possessions. As of today, the truth is: No one has ever established exactly what caused the explosion or who was responsible. It is known that the ship's magazine exploded but it's not known why. One consequence on this hammering of the final nail into the coffin of Spain's empire was a high degree of anti-Americanism here which - fuelled by US neutrality in the 1936-9 Civil War - is said to persist today. Though I'm sure individual American are treated as nicely as every other guiri.

Back in modern times . . . The government is planning to revise the obsolete(medieval?) law of sedition, which was used against the Catalan rebels now in jail.

A propos . .  . María's Level Ground: Days 59-60 Those pardons.

Portugal

Fair comment, I suspect: President Rebelo de Sousa reacted angrily to the move from Green to Amber, saying the British government was obsessed with infection rates, even though hospital admissions and deaths were at low levels. He described the UK’s stance as “health fundamentalism” and claimed it “does not recognise that we live in a different situation than we lived before vaccination”.

I might go and spend a week down in nearby Portugal, to display solidarity. And to enjoy leitão assado more than once.

The USA

Err . . . Arizona plans to execute prisoners with the cyanide gas used in Auschwitz. Work to revive the state's 20-year-old gas chamber is taking place amid a shortage in lethal injection supplies. . . .

China

Covid reorders the world's strategic landscape – but not as China expected, says AEP in the article below. Which might just settle a few fears about the danger of an imminent `yellow peril'.

A Guardian article on the consequences of the leak theory proving to be true.

The Way of the World 

The decision to give the next football World Cup to Qatar was always, shall we say, highly questionable. But now we read: The Qatari state has been accused of playing a central role in a secret money laundering operation to send hundreds of millions of dollars to jihadists in Syria. I guess this might fall into the category of 'unintended consequences'. Doubtless, though, the corrupt officials who financed slaughter can live with themselves. In their luxury homes.

Not a bad idea?: Emmanuel Macron sets up a unit to fight fake news, over fears that next year’s presidential election could be hit by a “pandemic” of disinformation. It's catchily entitled The National Agency for the Fight Against Manipulations of Information. But surely there'll be an acronym.

Finally  . . . 

The Humanist article I cited yesterday mentioned the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. I heard today that publishing was banned in the Muslim world until the 19th century. But an article I've found says the printing press was introduced in the Islamic world in 1727. So only a mere 300, not 400, years after the West. Which must say something.

THE ARTICLE 

Covid reorders the world's strategic landscape – but not as China expected. Repression, vaccination problems and now the Wuhan lab revelations are pushing the pendulum away from China and back to the West: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Telegraph 

The democratic West did not lose the pandemic after all. The US will probably emerge in better fundamental shape from the events of the last eighteen months than Xi Jinping’s China. This is an enormous geopolitical upset.

It was universally assumed after Wave One and Two that the chaotic, ill-prepared states of North America and Europe had suffered an irreparable blow to their collective prestige, and a concomitant loss of global economic caste. We can see in hindsight that they suffered neither.

Jiang Jinquan, Xi’s propaganda chief, declared that Beijing’s success in stamping out Covid-19 with seemingly minimal economic damage had shown “the superiority of China’s political system”.  The Communist Party believed that China’s sorpasso had been pulled forward by a decade and was henceforth unstoppable.

Kishore Mahbubani, the prophet of Eastern ascendancy, said Covid marked the definitive start of the Asian Century. The pandemic would accelerate the shift to a ”China-centric” global system where the enfeebled white man would have to learn his new place . Deference to Western societies and values would be “replaced by a growing respect and admiration for Eastern ones”. It made sense at the time.

A year later it is far from evident. American and European vaccines are the miracle cure sought by everybody. Japan’s vaccination drive has been strangely inept and nine prefectures covering 50pc of GDP are still under a state of emergency. A fourth wave has filled hospitals, and the Indian Delta variant has again thrown the Olympics into doubt.

Japan’s economy remains stuck in recession.

Those who relied heavily on Chinese vaccines have grown wary of large claims and opaque science. Chile vaccinated fast and early with Sinovac, and Hungary with Sinopharm. Both were overwhelmed by fresh waves of hospitalisation and death. Nobody believes trial data any more. 

China is belatedly vaccinating its own population as highly-infectious variants keep popping up. Parts of Guangdong again under draconian curbs. George Gao, head of China’s Centre for Disease Control, says his country’s inactivated vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” and may have to be mixed with Western mRNA technology to contain further waves of contagion. Which raises the question: will China have to rely on repressive surveillance measures long after the West has fully reopened? “The perception of China as the great winner has turned around. The momentum is now on the side of the western liberal democracies,” said professor Ho-Fung Hung, a political economist at John Hopkins University.  “The US and the UK have the pandemic under control and their vaccines are very effective. It is China that is now struggling. Its vaccine diplomacy is no longer working,” he said.

The red-hot US economy has already regained its pre-pandemic levels of GDP but has done so with eight million fewer workers, evidence of rocketing productivity. Lockdowns seem to have condensed seven years of digital take-up into a single year. Who would have imagined that stopping people going to work would be such a Schumpeterian* catalyst?

The OECD’s global outlook this week made an astonishing forecast. It suggested that the US economy would surpass even its pre-virus growth trajectory as soon as the third quarter. By the early 2020s it will have shifted into a higher gear altogether, thanks to Joe Biden’s investment blitz and technological rearmament (against China).

Capital Economics says slumping productivity and the ageing crunch will probably stop China catching up with the US for decades to come. “On our forecasts, China reaches 87pc the size of the US in 2030, up from 71pc now,” said Mark Williams, the group’s chief Asia economist. The workforce peaked in 2017 and is already shrinking. The decline will accelerate to 0.5pc a year after 2030. “If China doesn’t overtake the US by the mid-2030s it probably never will. And if it does overtake, it may struggle to hold on to first place,” he said. The recent census revealed that the population is contracting at a faster rate than either the United Nations of Chinese demographers previously thought. The three-child family rule introduced this week comes too late to reverse a pattern now deeply lodged in Chinese society.

China is adept at stimulating short-term demand in a crisis. The state-run banking system enables it to let rip fast with credit. But the extra output created by each yuan of loans has slumped since the halcyon days of 2008-2009. While the debt ratio has risen to almost 340pc of GDP, the economic growth needed to service these liabilities has dropped from 10pc to nearer 5pc in a decade, with 2pc on the cards by the late 2020s.  “People are naive to think that China has found the elixir of perpetual growth and will always come roaring back. It is just as imbalanced as it was before the pandemic,” said George Magnus from Oxford University’s China Centre.

Its catch-up model of state-led investment is patently no longer fit for purpose. The World Bank says the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP) - the relevant gauge of the economy - has fallen to 0.7pc from around 3pc before the global financial crisis. It has converged with Western levels of TFP performance at a stage of its economic development where it should be much higher. 

Premier Li Keqiang argued a decade ago that China would end up in the "middle income trap" unless it ditched the top-down model and embraced something much closer to liberal pluralism. He was overruled. Xi Jinping has instead doubled down on police surveillance and the state-owned behemoths, the Party’s machine of patronage and control. He is opting for a "dual circulation" strategy. “It’s just autarky. China is going to become a huge version of North Korea. There is no way it can sustain momentum if it cuts itself off from the West since it relies on the outside world for hi-tech and semiconductors,” said Ho-Fung Hung. Deng Xiaoping’s son, Deng Pufang, warned three years ago that XI was embarked on an “utterly mistaken” course, failing to understand the critical role of the market in the post-Mao growth miracle. Just as important, Xi has violated the cardinal Deng rule: “hide your strength, bide your time”.

He let hubris take hold. Pandemic triumphalism combined with Xi’s wolf warrior diplomacy, Uighur oppression, and the flagrant violation of the Hong Kong treaties, in a revealing foretaste of what Chinese hegemony might feel like.  “The damage has been irreparable. It has been a devastating reminder of the difference between our hierarchy of values and what it means to be a totalitarian regime,” said Roger Garside, a former British diplomat in Beijing and author of a forthcoming book called China Coup: the Great Leap to Freedom. Mr Garside said Beijing has made the same error as the fascist regimes of the 1930s. It has misjudged the ability of the democracies to pick themselves up and mobilise their hidden strengths. 

One result of Xi’s overreach was a Pew Survey of 14 countries last October showing that negative views of China had surged to record levels, even in Korea. Another result is the strengthening of the Quad alliance of India, Japan, Australia, and the US, with Europe crabbing sideways into the same camp. 

President Xi has told his diplomats to mind their language and strive to make China “loveable” but there is no going back once the mask has slipped. The risk for China is that the investigation of the Wuhan lab theory by the US intelligence agencies validates what has until now been deemed a conspiracy theory. If the Chinese state created this virus, covered up the leak, and then allowed airline passengers to seed it around the world, the consequences will be catastrophic. The year that China claimed ascendancy may prove to be its annus horribilis.

*Schumpeter believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its successes, that it would spawn a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class's existence.  'Creative destruction'.

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Cosas de España/Galiza

This article explains the new multi-level pricing of electricity here. Now, leaving my iron switched on all day will cost me even more than before. In truth, as there was a cheap nocturnal rate in the UK over 30 years ago, I'd always rather assumed that was the case here too. And so have always put my washing machine on at midnight. But it seems not. 

Blogger María - see below - surely encapsulates the universal view here when she writes: The electric companies have become a racket here. Every single change benefits the companies, not the small consumers. This is a result of the Spanish revolving doors between government and industry. Many Spanish ex-politicians find a comfy chair on some corporate committee of some industry, notably the electric industry, after their political careers come to an end. Of course the regulations are going to favor the companies; that way their comfy chairs and plushy paychecks are assured. As for Spain's Consumer Association, FACUA, this is said to have 'slammed' the new billing system. Much good that will do.

The electricity industry is not the only one accused of ripping off consumers here. We still have internet prices which are among the highest in Europe, I believe.

A propos . . . Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas reports that: Thirty ex-politicians are working as Directors in state-run (or partially owned) companies, making €8.5m a year. The companies include Indra, Enagás, Red Eléctrica Española, Hispasat, Navantia and Correos.

This is a drug-smuggler's speedboat recently sequestered down south by the National Police, but made here in Galicia. It's 15m long and 'valued' at €200,000. Chicken feed to our local narcos, of course.

María's Level Ground: Days 57-8 Those electricity price hikes.

Portugal

The 7 day moving average has fallen to just 1 but the incidence rate has risen significantly in the last week. Meaning that Portugal is at risk of losing its Green status today, affecting many actual and imminent holidaymakers in the UK. 

The UK 

NIMBY: An acronym from 'Not in my back yard', defined here. So now everyone can understand this comment: Britain's first Nimbys objected to public executions near their homes. Rather than being motivated by a sense of justice, 18th century Londoners petitioned for the hangings and the display of corpses to be moved from their doorstep because of the stench.  

The USA

The website - From the Desk of Donald J Trump - allowing him to communicate directly with his followers has shut down a month after it launched. Trump had used it to rile up his supporters, attack his opponents, including the Republican senator Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney and repeat his baseless assertions that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Maybe he does have a modicum of sense and sensibility.

The Way of the World 

Like viruses, conspiracy theories travel around the globe. But are they always unhealthy? One answer here.

English

The things you learn listening to podcasts. . . . William Penn gave us not only Pennsylvania but also Philadelphia. Which is Greek for 'brotherly love'. Is there a lot of it around there? 

Finally  . . . 

The first person in the UK to get a Covid jab was called William Shakespeare. In Argentina a newsreader commented: "This has stunned all of us, given the greatness of this man. We're talking about William Shakespeare and his death. As we all know, he is one of the most important writers in the English language. He's died in England at the age of eighty one." The internet had a field day.

A friend's email provider rejected a message from me, twice. His theory is that its computer didn't like a work in the text - possibly 'fag'. For Brits, this means a cigarette. For Americans, it's a homosexual. If he's right, the (American) machine will reject my email today, with 'fag' in this post. Unless it's asleep on the job. 

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid 

The UK: Now on the optimism upswing again . . .  The UK reported no new coronavirus deaths yesterday for the first time since the pandemic began, raising hope that the remaining restrictions in England may still be lifted this month. En passant, I read last night that the typical daily death toll from cancer in the UK is 450. Thanks to the neglect of patients over the last 15 months, this has now surely risen.

Peru: After a review, it has more than doubled its death toll, meaning it now has the worst Covid-related death rate per capita in the world.

Gibraltar: Reported to have vaccinated 100% of its population. Would this have happened if it'd been part of Spain? Just askin'. As no doubt its inhabitants are.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Internal politics: An article here on the complicated and complicating issue of pardons (full or partial) for Catalan politicians involved in the illegal referendum of a few years ago.

External politics: The price  of being an ex-colonial nation . . .  Spain has refused to take part in a US-led military exercise in Africa from fear that it would legitimise Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara. A Lot of interest in a lot of sand.

As it says at the top of every post, Spain is compellingly loveable. But this doesn't mean there's a total absence of things which grate. As every long-time reader will know, the continued prevalence of smoking is one of these for me. I've said more than once how saddened I am by the sight of groups of young women all smoking - a scene which plays out more than ever now that Covid regulations oblige them to stand apart from terrace tables. Yesterday, 4 things sort of jumped out at me on this theme:-

1. A report on an organisation called AECC posting members outside Pontevedra's colleges to try to persuade pupils not to smoke.

2. Another report that the average age at which Spanish kids take up the habit is 14

3. A finding that 90% of smokers do it in front of minors (including mothers pushing prams and the like), and

4. These signs on the windows of houses between the bars in the city's main tapas street, imploring folk exiled from the tables not to smoke and drop butts in front of the properties:-

It's one of the complaints I have against smokers - or some of them, at least - that they’re inconsiderate of others. Maybe the not-serious theory I postulated when I was a young man - that nicotine affects certain parts of the brain - is not so daft after all. Do they also throw, say, the wrapping paper from an ice lolly on the ground? Or just their butts. Or 'fag-ends' as we Brits say, to the amusement of our US cousins.

Enough said. Rant over.

To be positive . . . The computer bit I need arrived yesterday. As it came from Amazon UK, I was rather expecting it to be sent to the Post Office so I'd have to go there to pay post-Brexit charges and taxes on it. But it was delivered by the courier. Even better news, after initially failing to solve the problem, it then began to work and allow me to connect my laptop to both my printer and the all-important back-up hard disk.

Having recently read Giles Trmelett's book on the International Brigades, I felt more than normally saddened by news of the death of the last surviving member of these, aged 101. Him, not me.   

The UK 

Best news of the year so far . . . Salad Cream is coming back to Britain as part of Kraft Heinz's plans to invest £140m in its Wigan factory.

The EU

Here's a warning for those Brits who haven't - like many of their compatriots - been living below the wire and have dutifully gained official residence: Britons face a one-month deadline to retain their rights in 4 EU countries. France, Malta, Luxembourg and Latvia.

For those Brits who have been living below the wire here in Spain - lots and lots of them  - they might get lucky, in that the government might well continue to turn a blind eye to their (non-taxed) existence. Bit of a risk, though, for those - many - who haven't fled back to Blighty or sought to regularise their situation. And pay taxes. Time will tell.

Finally  . . . 

I couldn't find a document I wrote in 2001 and decided to use a voice-to-text app to reproduce it, rather than re-type it. It's debatable whether this saved me time and effort. Anyway. . . Some of the more amusing errors:-

Lump: Lamb

Urine: Your Rhine

Vomit: My meat

Must  be my (faint) Scouse accent  . . . 

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain' 

Detailed info on Galicia and Pontevedra city here. 

Covid  

The UK: The Indian variant (now called Delta) is making for a very complicated situation. Richard North: Such are the variables that even a competent, trusted prime minister would be hard-put to choose the right path and make his decisions stick. Johnson could thus find that, whatever he does, he will be condemned – with plenty of people willing to join in. To that extent, the next 2 weeks could prove to be make or break, for Johnson's political fortunes and for the nation as a whole. We are indeed at a pivotal moment.

Spain: Will it escape Delta?

Cosas de España/Galiza

Spain in figures: Birth rate, retired and foreign populations, and life expectancies.

It might surprise you to know that the famous French and Portuguese caminos are not the only ones you can walk in Spain. In fact, there are over 40 of them - really - and it seems at least one new ('genuinely authentic') route is added every year. This week I've read of one by sail - La Navega el Camino - which officially starts in the Basque port of Hondarribia and sails across/down the north and north-west coasts of Spain, to end near Padrón. This year's version - like most of my life, as it happens - is dedicated to women. Click here for info, in English. Obviously, if coming from the UK you have to get your boat to Hondarribia, via La Rochelle it seems.

As you all know, Ferdinand and Isabella vanquished the last Moorish stronghold of Granada in 1492 and agreed a deal with the outgoing Emir Boabdil under which freedom of religion would continue. Four things of note:-

1. Their victory united Spain for the first time since the Visigoths had left it, many centuries previously.

2. The deal with the Moors was stamped on by the Pope and then resiled on by F&I.

3. This led first to the immediate expulsion of the Jews, followed by the Moors 10 years later in 1502.

4. The first institution set up by the new unified state was the Inquisition, charged with rooting out Jews and Moors who were faking their Catholicism so as to avoid exile.

Life in Spain: I called my doctor's office for an appointment yesterday and had 2 problems, the traditional one and a new one:-

1. Having explained, yet again, that I only had one surname, the secretary told me she couldn't find it in the computer. Doubtless because they had one of my 2 forenames down as the first of 2 theoretical surnames. But she did finally find me via my ID number.

2. The doctor's name is Lopez, which I pronounced twice as Lopeth, before having to spell it out for her. After which I heard her say it, South American style, as Lopess. Happily, a friendly waiter later confirmed my pronunciation was perfect to him . . .

Well, our president has said he hopes we can soon dispense with the bloody masks but it seems Castilla la Mancha might beat us to this. Its president says his government plans to end compulsory use outdoors 'by July'. So, there's still time for us to sprint to the front. 

The first 20kph signs have appeared in Pontevedra. And, if you were cynical, exactly where you'd expect them - on the edge of the city as you come down from the AP9 autopista at 80kph. Onto a road which was previously 50.

The Way of the World

Some interesting data on wealth distribution here. No surprises about the USA. Especially if you're reading - as I am - The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

Spanish  . . . .

Courtesy of María . . . Un carter: A crankcase. Derived from the name of the English engineer who invented this in the late 19th century. 

Finally . . .

A UK TV ad. The next generation toilet cleaner . . . How did we survive without it?