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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, as of next Monday 2 Aug., I will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Why in Spain there are two surnames and why it does not happen in most countries? See below.

Those electricity price hikes and how reduce their impact

This will be of interest to those looking to buy property in certain parts of Spain. Including along the Galician coast.

And this will be of interest to those in Spain who patronise Deliveroo.

And this - from the estimable Marinero - will interest those who believe in the preposterous myth of the Holy Grail. And perhaps to some who don't.

Lenox Napier goes to jail without passing Go . . .

Caesura - Gaseosa. Lemonade. Fizzy water with a hint of a lemon-tasing chemical . . .

The UK  

The "amber plus" regime for those returning from France is on one level a trivial detail, hardly newsworthy when set against the magnificent fiasco of the British pingdemic.  Yet nothing quite so illustrates the bureaucratic incoherence of Britain’s post-vaccination policy as this lunatic quarantine rule for travellers. 

Sweden

Has the Swedish strategy been vindicated? Or is it still too soon to say? Currently it has a low rate of cases and no deaths, despite there being no compulsory mask-wearing. 

Finally  . . . 

Something very Spanish last night . . . Someone I didn't know was kind enough to ring my doorbell to ask if it was my car with a window open outside my house. At midnight. Which is equivalent - according to my rule-of-thumb - to 10pm in the UK. Where this might well not have happened.

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

THE ARTICLE  

Why in Spain there are two surnames and why it does not happen in most countries?

The double surname system was consolidated in our country in the 19th century and spread throughout Latin America, but it is uncommon in much of the world.

In Spain, as well as in other Spanish-speaking countries, it is very common for newborns to have two surnames: the father's and the mother's. However, this system is not very common in most of the world. However, this system is not very common in the rest of the world. In fact, neither was it in our country until the 19th century, since Spaniards used to adopt a surname that they could even choose during adulthood, as explained in laSexta by Antonio Alfaro, president of the Hispanic Genealogy Association (HISPAGEN). "For centuries the choice of surnames prevailed, as long as it was not malicious, although it was most common for the firstborn to adopt the father's name and the rest of the brothers or sisters other family surnames." In this way, it was normal for siblings not to share a surname, since boys usually acquired their father's and girls that of their mother, grandmother or other women in the family.

Origin and consolidation

In the 16th century, the double surname system began to spread among the upper classes of Castile, but "it was not consolidated in the rest of Spain" until the 19th century, says Alfaro. At the beginning, it was a tool to differentiate the population: "The Administration realized that it is much easier to control us with the double surname system". Thus, it was established and in 1833 it was already very common, although it was not regulated.

It was not until 1889, with the creation of the first Spanish Civil Code, when the official use of the maternal and paternal surname was established. Specifically, Article 114 stated that "legitimate children have the right to bear the surnames of their father and mother". Therefore, from this moment on, the double surname was extended to all areas, until it became an obligatory rule that, according to Alfaro, served to identify "in an effective and reliable way the Spaniards". Likewise, from the point of view of the president of HISPAGEN, he also recognized the importance of the maternal surname. Currently, in Spain, the order of the surnames can be chosen, so that the first one can be that of the father or the mother.

After Spain, the custom of the double surname was incorporated into other civil registries in Latin America, where the tradition has also been maintained to the present day. But outside the Hispanic sphere, citizens usually have only one surname. For example, in Portugal, the Civil Code establishes that children may use the surnames of both parents or only one, which is the parents' decision. If no agreement is reached, a judge will determine which will be chosen. It is customary in this country for surnames to be registered in reverse order: first the mother's and then the father's, which is the one usually used.

In Italy, only the father's surname used to be used, but since 2016 the law allows both to be used. Something similar happens in France, where since 2005 the parents can choose to put both surnames, in the order they want, or one of them. Even so, in the Gallic country, more than 80% of the time it turns out to be the paternal one, with which a movement has emerged, driven by the collective Porte Mon Nom (Take my surname) and the deputy Patrick Vignal to put an end to what they call "patronymic patriarchy".

In Germany, as in the United Kingdom and Turkey, this matter is not regulated, but married couples usually adopt the man's surname for both partners and, therefore, also for their children. This position has been followed in many other countries such as Japan or China, although women do not lose their maiden name, or the United States, where some choose to make it their middle name.

 In Russia, and other countries such as Bulgaria, the surname is formed by adding a suffix to the father's name, varying according to the gender of the son or daughter. On the other hand, Sweden is a rare case within Europe, because it usually adopts both surnames, in the order chosen by the parents, but, if the couple does not reach an agreement, only the maternal surname will appear in the registry.

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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, as of next week, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership. 

Cosas de España/Galiza 

In the blow to the tourist industry here, Americans have been advised not to travel to Spain and neighbouring Portugal, despite the fact that vaccination rates in both these countries are higher than in the majority of other countries.

On the issue of vaccination . . . Given the importance of the tourism industry, it's hardly surprising that Spain has put immense effort into this. Facing this challenge, it's benefitted from having fewer anti-vaxers than in, say, next-door France, and from a round-the-clock campaign. These 2 charts show Spain's excellent performance relative to other countries, and the PM yesterday claimed that Spain - with 400,000 shots a day - has moved up the rankings, giving it 'the gold medal in vaccinations', with 66.6%  of the population having had one jab and 56.3% having had 2. But Chile(63%) and Canada(57.4%) would surely dispute this, at least for a few days. But no one Spanish believes what our politicians say anyway . . .

From a point of view of both economics and art, Spain's 16th century was truly 'golden'. More recent centuries have been of baser metals. I cited reviews of Paul Preston's book 'A People Betrayed' in March 2020 and in January 2021 but I'd missed Isambard Wilkinson's of October 2020, included below. Taster: Preston’s thesis is that corruption and  political incompetence have created the social division that has blighted Spain from the 19th century to the present, impeding the country’s progression towards liberal democracy. I'm not sure many would argue with that. Though both corruption and political incompetence might well be at a rather lower level nowadays, if not exactly negligible.

At a local level, infections continue to rise and restrictions have been re-imposed in several councils, against the backcloth of 80% of cases being among those below 40.

The UK  

Latest Office for National Statistics figures suggest that nearly 92% of adults now carry antibodies to coronavirus, representing about 73% of the population as a whole. Some say herd immunity has been reached but others say it hasn't for important variants. Who knows?  University College London, for one, estimates total population immunity is now at 87%, although they believe the delta variant has shifted the herd immunity threshold to 93%. 

In Britain, we have at least achieved success with vaccine roll out, but little good does it seem to have done us, with policy on international travel stuck in the muddled, neither fish nor fowl, halfway house of the current traffic light system. What’s really behind the se absurd and restrictive foreign travel rules? See the article below for a cynical(?) answer to this.

Possibly good news, though not for Norfolk trees . . . A baby beaver has been born there for the first time in more than 600 years.

The UK and the EU post Brexit

Northern Ireland. For those (very?) few interested, here's Richard North today: One can hardly avoid noticing that talks are at an impasse, with no common ground and not the slightest sign of agreement. The EU is saying that the protocol is the solution to the problem of Northern Ireland, while the UK government argues that Northern Ireland's problem is the protocol. You can't get much further apart than that. Possibly a good example of British understatement.

The Way of the World

Caitlin Moran. The South Korean TV coverage of the Games has given viewers a bit of a surprise. There, MBC decided to “jazz up” the section in the opening ceremony and illustrated the Ukrainians’ entry with pictures of a devastated Chernobyl; Romania got a picture of Count Dracula; while Haiti got shots of the street protests following the assassination of their president. In this respect, Italy got off lightly: no pictures of Mussolini hanging from a lamppost, but a nice pizza instead.

Finally  . . . 

My niece and I sat down to Spag Bol and pasta last night, without the 2nd carbohydrate of bread. It struck me that very few Spaniards would do this. Though they might not actually eat the stuff. I often thrown to the birds virtually all of what I've put on the table for Spanish guests. Who'd display withdrawal symptoms if I didn't supply their meal-time comfort blanket to break up and leave on a side-plate.

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

THE ARTICLES  

1. 'A People Betrayed' by Paul Preston. The pain in Spain continues to reign:  The country’s history is a tale of corruption and violent division: Isambard Wilkinson, TheTimes

Paul Preston has written a Spanish history about a period so steeped in assassination, mob violence, civilian bloodshed, corruption and failed governments that about halfway through reading it I wondered if I had the grit to carry on

I hadn’t even reached the civil war of 1936-39, but General Francisco Franco had just put down a largely unarmed rebellion of Asturian miners with artillery and bombs. Women were raped, prisoners tortured and executed. “This war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and any force that attacks civilisation in order to replace it with barbarism,” Franco commented of the bloody suppression of the miners in October 1934.

March, dubbed the “Sultan of Spain”, embodies the corruption, that, according to Preston’s thesis, along with political incompetence, has created the social division that has blighted Spain from the 19th century to the present, impeding the country’s progression towards liberal democracy.

He pops up like a bad penny in the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the Second Republic and Franco’s rule, bribing his way out of jail, avoiding arrest dressed as a priest, bankrolling rebels and governments, buying a parliamentary seat or paying off debts run up by Queen Victoria Eugenie with Parisian jewellers. March is also representative of a gallery of rare breeds, including light-fingered prime ministers, fornicating aristocrats and a somnolent dictator, that give life to the narrative of this hefty tome.

The story begins with a portrait of an impoverished country riven by social inequality, civil strife and coups d’état. Preston, professor of contemporary Spanish history at the LSE, notes that between 1814 and 1981 Spain witnessed more than 25 military coups. The first of four civil wars began in 1833 and the last ended in 1939.

The unrest did not only lead to the rise of a militant left. By the 1830s Spain had lost the bulk of its empire and in the Carlist Wars of that decade and the next the “forces of reaction” — the army, the church and establishment — were on the march. In the 1860s there were fewer than 50,000 priests; at the end of the century, more than 88,000; by 1930 there were 135,000.

Preston, the author of an acclaimed biography of Franco, has a reputation for being pro-left, pro-republican. The clue to the tenor of the work is the title, which belies the fact that many Spaniards did not feel betrayed by a lack of social progress. Still, the book’s depth of research cannot be faulted, and the examples of grand malfeasance and political corruption are extraordinary. For example, after years of turmoil, in 1876 a new constitution was drawn up by the conservative Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, a cultured man who learnt by heart the speeches of Gladstone and Disraeli. It instigated an idiosyncratic form of British democracy, known as the turno pacifico, whereby the two main monarchist parties took turns in power, marginalising republican parties.

This sham strengthened the cacique, the local strongman, usually a landowner, who had the tax collector, the mayor and the judge in his pocket; such was the vote fixing that there were examples of the cacique’s favoured deputies being returned to parliament with majorities bigger than the electorate. Flying squads of voters were deployed in Madrid, with one man voting more than 42 times. To deter undesirable voters, voting urns were put in fever hospitals, pigsties or on a high roof.

The turno, however, could not stop the spread of anarchist ideas and protests. In 1897 Cánovas, then prime minister, was assassinated by a young anarchist journalist. A wave of bombings and shootings led to mass arrests of anarchists, republicans and freethinkers. Alejandro Lerroux, the editor of El País, then a scandal-mongering and left-wing newspaper, came to prominence by exposing the abominable treatment of prisoners in the bleak fortress of Montjuic, “the Spanish Bastille”, in Barcelona. A civil guard officer accused of being a torturer challenged Lerroux to a duel; he refused, but they ended up fighting with walking sticks when they met on the streets of Madrid.

Lerroux entered politics, becoming prime minister in the 1930s; he was outrageously corrupt and was on March’s payroll. As Preston puts it: “A lifetime of shameless corruption reached its peak when, as prime minister in 1935, Lerroux brazenly sponsored a system of fixed roulette wheels.”

Before that the fallout from the loss of Spain’s last colonies in 1898 had led to economic crisis, a collapse of morale and repression. Fears over the political influence of the army, which was heavy-handed in dealing with rising Basque and Catalan nationalism and unpopular because of the use of conscription to fight its north African misadventures, intensified opposition to the ancien regime.

Symptomatic of the desperation of the time, the conservative elder statesman Antonio Maura, whose reforming efforts seem quixotic in the context of Spain’s apparent ungovernability, at first welcomed the coup in 1923 of Miguel Primo de Rivera, who saw himself as the “iron surgeon” needed to cure Spain’s body politic.

The scion of a large landowning family, Primo, prime minister from 1923 until 1930, was viewed by the middle and upper classes as a bulwark against disorder. He was also “a gargantuan eater, an inveterate gambler, a heavy drinker who loved binges”. His semi-official biography stated that “among his loves there have been women of high and low origins”.

His sexual appetites caused a scandal when he formed a relationship with La Caoba (the Mahogany), an Andalusian cabaret artist alleged to be a prostitute and drug addict. After a relatively popular start, his dictatorship ended, amid strikes, coup threats and the collapse of the peseta, with his resignation, which led to the Second Republic.

Preston charts the republic’s doom and the rise of Franco out of the ashes of the north African campaigns, recording that, besides Nazi German and Fascist Italian support, his flight from semi-exile in the Canary Islands to Morocco and his Africa Army’s onward passage to Spain to join the coup that led to civil war, were financed by March.

Preston offers potted histories of the civil war and Franco’s 38-year rule until 1975, from its pernicious and economically harebrained origins to its corrupt end, when the ageing siesta-prone caudillo could just about lift an eyelid to sign off on garrotting political opponents.

Buried in the narrative lies ample treasure: Franco’s brother, Ramón, a famous aviator and republican, in 1930 set off to bomb the royal palace, but aborted after seeing children playing in the gardens; Pablo Picasso’s uncle was a general who compiled a key report on a military disaster in north Africa; one of the tutors of the future King Juan Carlos was a member of the extreme right who once plotted a suicide attack on the Spanish parliament with poison gas.

Preston’s account takes us through the close-run, coup-endangered transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He concludes that the long history of corruption scandals and political incompetence — left, right and monarchical — is the cause for Spain’s polarisation and fragmentation today. Perhaps he oversimplifies the reasons for the country’s present woes, not giving due weight to wider influences such as the global rise of populism and international economic pressures. Nonetheless, after I had finished reading A People Betrayed, I applauded Preston’s — and my own — heroic feat.

2. What’s really behind these absurd and restrictive foreign travel rules? Following the money seems as good an explanation as any for the traffic light system. Jeremy Warner, The Telegraph

“Leave thine home, oh youth”, urged the Roman courtier Petronius Arbiter in a poem made famous by the celebrated British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, “and seek out alien shores; a wider range of life is ordained for thee”.

In the homogenised sameness of today’s world it is regrettably ever harder to find any genuinely alien shores yet to be explored, but just the chance to travel in the last year and a bit of on/off lockdown would have been a fine thing.

For some of this time, there has been an absolute ban on non-essential travel overseas; though the restrictions have now been partially lifted, the Government continues – to the dismay of a once thriving travel industry – to discourage it, and indeed seemingly to make it as difficult as possible.

At every stage, moreover, there has been the threat of bringing back the more hardline constraints. This in itself has been a major deterrent to booking an overseas holiday. Rumours of another crackdown this winter are already rife among beleaguered tour operators and airlines, many of whom won’t survive another year like the last one.

The fault is not entirely with the UK Government. There is plainly not a great deal ministers can do about policy in the US, New Zealand and Australia, all of whom have in effect banned non-residents, including UK citizens. Attempts to persuade the Biden administration to reciprocate on freedom of travel for the fully vaccinated have run into the sand.

As an aside, it is worth noting that when President Trump began the process of closing American borders by imposing a ban on travel from China in the initial stages of the pandemic, he was almost universally condemned. The World Health Organisation claimed that there was no evidence that border controls would halt the spread of the disease.

Seemingly taking his instruction directly from Beijing, the WTO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that because of the actions already taken by China, it was wholly unnecessary to interfere with international travel and trade. And yet when the saintly Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, similarly closed her borders, with the aim of going beyond suppression to complete eradication of the disease, she was hailed as setting a shining example to all.

What we now see is that failing to combine zero tolerance strategies with an effective vaccination programme – only 14 per cent of Australians and New Zealanders have been fully vaccinated – condemns a country to never-ending isolation, and as in the case of Australia (where there is now a growing public backlash against the eradication strategy), lingering and repeated economic lockdown. Once buoyant tourist industries have been all but annihilated.

In Britain, we have at least achieved success with vaccine roll out, but little good does it seem to have done us, with policy on international travel stuck in the muddled, neither fish nor fowl, halfway house of the current traffic light system.

Britain’s most popular tourist destinations have all been left stranded at the amber to red end of the spectrum of continued restrictions. Even when those destinations are relatively open to UK holiday makers, the conditions attached to returning home are costly, bureaucratic and off putting, seemingly deliberately so. The threat of a sudden change in status adds to the deterrent effect.

All this might be just about tolerable if properly justified on public health grounds; as it is, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the various categorisations. Infection rates in many amber designated countries are considerably lower than here; we are much more likely to give it to them than them to us.

Though it pretends otherwise, the Government would, it seems, much rather you stayed at home. No, no, no, say ministers. We fully understand that these restrictions are bad for the economy, and we wouldn’t be imposing them if there were not good public health reasons for it. We cannot risk another wave.

Well perhaps, but I can’t help but think that the Treasury would be rather more active in pushing the case for a further lifting of constraints were it not for one rather important fact.

Time was when international travel was largely the preserve of the rich and particularly intrepid, but that all changed from the 1960s onwards when the age of mass tourism arrived and an overseas holiday started to become accessible to all. Today, Brits are more likely to holiday overseas than almost any other nation, if they could, that is. As a country we take almost as many trips abroad as the whole of the US, which has five times as many people.

The upshot is that we run a huge trade deficit in tourism. In 2019, British nationals made 93.1 million trips abroad, spending an astonishing £62.3 billion. There were on the other hand only 40.9 million trips to the UK, with spending of £28.5 billion. If the money we spend abroad were instead disgorged in the UK, it would theoretically be a huge net boost to the economy, even if we lost all those tourist pounds from overseas.

That in essence has been the effect of the pandemic and the travel restrictions policymakers have deemed necessary to counter it. Small wonder that Spain, Portugal and Greece are so keen to welcome us back. By the month, they bleed billions of British euros. Small wonder too that the Treasury would much rather we spent its furlough largesse here in the UK than a Benidorm or Mykonos nightclub.

From an overall economic perspective, it would of course be better if things returned to the way they were; hundreds of thousands of UK jobs depend on overseas tourism, both outward and inward bound. But the magically shrunken tourist deficit does at least provide some consolation as a positive both for the balance of payments and for tax revenues. It also provides support for the levelling up agenda; relatively rich southerners who would otherwise be splashing the cash abroad will be spending their money in the UK regions instead.

I’m not suggesting this is the underlying reason for keeping us all locked up. Yet it is ever harder to see any other justification. If there is one, please tell.

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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, as of next week, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

There are c.4.8m foreigners in the Spanish population of 47m. The top 3:- 1. Moroccans, 2. Romanians, and 3. Brits. But these are the official figures and there are - or have been - many more retired Brits living here below the (registration/tax) horizon. So, Brits might (even now) outnumber at least the Romanians, who need to go public in order to work.

So, from next week, we double-jabbed Brits will allowed to go to the UK without going into very expensive quarantine. But: Ministers are "getting jumpy" about the number of Beta cases in parts of Spain and are considering placing Spain on a new “amber watchlist”, putting tourists on notice that the country risks being relegated to the red list if cases rise further. Who'd rule out yet another farcical twist in this saga?

Reading about the Challenger and Chernobyl disasters, I was struck by the accounts of how engineers’ concerns were ignored and decisions made on cost-savings grounds. Just as in the case of the safety system on the train which crashed near Santiago 8 years ago, leaving c. 70 people dead. And with fingers pointed mainly at the driver, not at the management which took the fatal decisions.

Possibly more than we need to know about Spain's disgraced ex-king: His estranged mistress has accused him and the Spanish secret service of spying on her in the UK. She claims that he put her under illegal surveillance as part of a long-running row over an alleged gift of €65 million[sic]. I don't suppose he's much concerned about this. His reputation couldn't get much lower and he'll financially survive any verdict.

Lenox with a bit of fun on ciggies. [Which my spellcheck turned into ‘piggies’]

Germany

Germany plans to tighten the rules for returning holidaymakers amid growing concerns in northern Europe over a sharp rise in infections being brought back by tourists. 

‘Countdown to Surrender – The Last 100 Days’: A WW2 series told from the German perspective. This PBS America documentary series was an excellent, dispassionate programme that left sensationalism at the door. The unusual thing is that the story is told from the German perspective.  

Quote of the Day

The UK: Nothing about the post-Freedom Day situation makes sense. The cost of our newfound “freedom” is overwhelming guilt.

The Way of the World/Social Media

In the UK at least, Facebook turns out to be the least trusted of social media platforms for news, with just 27% of people saying it's trustworthy, and only 28% saying it's accurate. But it’s stilll favoured by the young for their information.

Finally  . . . 

I have a niece visiting me. Passing through the process at Stansted airport, she offered her father's vaccination QR on her phone by mistake, but was waved through . . . Things were rather more rigorous at Santiago airport, with document examiners all in full PPE.

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

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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, as of next week, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

The word 'Annual' might not mean much to most readers. But it does to at least some Spaniards, being a battle in North Africa in which the Spanish army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the - very heavily outnumbered - Moroccan Berbers. This was back in 1921, a hundred years ago. An anniversary which the Spanish government is  - understandably - said to have pasado por alto. i.e. overlooked/ignored.

Yesterday I noted that Spain is said to have the highest percentage of double-jabbed in the world. But its ranking is much lower when it comes to the percentage of the population with one jab. I can't pretend to know which - if you have the choice - is the better option.

Yet another case this week of a Galician 'kamikaze', a driver heading the wrong way on the A6, at 6pm. This time not a confused geriatric but a drunken 33 year old. We seem to have quite a few of these kamikazes every year. Don’t know about other regions.

The Galician police were as officious as ever over the weekend, fining folk for all sorts of Covid infringements, including an excess number of no-conviventes together out in the street.

María's Not So Fast: Days 22-23  A [Health] Service We Pay For

The UK  

OTOH: Daily Covid infection numbers are on the decline. With hospital admissions hovering around a quarter of what they once were during infection peaks, evidence is building that the vaccines are working: preventing not just serious illness, but reducing transmission as well.

OTOH: We can’t get too comfortable: Covid is constantly surprising us and numbers may well rise again

OTOH: The economy appears to be racing ahead. EY’s latest estimate shows it growing at its fastest rate in 80 years, forecasting 7.6% growth in 2021.Its analysis fits a trend: other economic heavyweights are also predicting a faster bounce back than initially anticipated.

OTOH: Don’t be fooled: the situation remains fragile and a rapid recovery is still not guaranteed.

The UK and the EU post Brexit

Query. Did the British not read the fine print when they signed their Brexit deals? Not only do they regret agreeing to a lay a customs border down the Irish Sea to avoid the need for passport checks and inspections of goods on the Ireland-Northern Ireland border; they also have second thoughts about their agreement with Spain for Gibraltar.

'Perfidious Albion' yet again?

The Way of the World 

The Scottish Government - which likes (like Spain) to be 'different' - is backing proposals to encourage 8,000 civil servants to pledge they’ll specify their preferred pronouns at the end of each email. Effie Deans mocks this development here.

I'd like all to know that, henceforth, my personal pronoun - for I, me and you - will be Zak.

English

Zak've often wondered and, yes, there used to be an adjective 'miscontented', back in the 16th century. Now displaced by 'discounted', of course.

Zak've finally looked it up . . . 'To cosplay': To dress up as a character from a film, book, or video game.

Spanish/Spanglish

To cosplay: Hacer cosplay.

Finally  . . . 

A conner conned. Nice one. But gullibility and immoral profiteering continue, of course.

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

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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, as of next week, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Covid 

The UK: the case rate has fallen for several days now but no one really seems to know why. As one headline put it: The fall in Covid cases is great news (but a bit baffling). And fears remain that last week's Freedom Day will soon reverse the trend.

Spain: An impressive achievement.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

All our (many) local newspapers carry large announcements - 'tombstones' - about very recent deaths. I've often wondered why people incur the expense of these but, in a country where the law obliges burial or incineration within 24-48 hours, it's one way to publicise funeral details. I assume that, as one ages, one increasingly goes through the morbid process of checking if any of your contemporaries has just passed away and you need to clear your diary for an evening engagement.

There is, by the way, a huge Death Insurance business here - allied with the funeral director business - to deal with the complicated implications of the rapid-burial obligation. You can initiate the process at any time of the day or night. Impressive, if not cheap.

The wheels of Spanish justice 2: Up in Cataluña: The corruption case against ex president Pujol is still without a trial date 7 years after his admitting he had a fortune in a bank account in Andorra. I wonder if they're waiting for all the other folk he can implicate to die. Or at least Pujol himself, as he's already his 90s. Or maybe the objective is to let the statute of limitations work its magic. Either way, it's doubtful that the truth will out. Or that any of the implicated family will end up in clink.

I'm not clear why but - under our new pricing system - we're now paying more for electricity than in both Germany and France, both of which are rather richer. The cost of a MW/h rose from €28.49 in February to €91.31 in July, or by more than 200%. If that's the consolidated price, the new peak time rate will be even higher. 

The UK and the EU post Brexit

Richard North: As regards resolution of the Northern Ireland Protocol dispute, it’s evident that nothing rational is going to come from the present cast of actors. . . It’s hardly surprising that this issue is heading towards a collision.

Quote of the Day

We’re in this weird sort of cuddly capitalist thing where companies pretend they’re our friend. I’m perfectly happy to pay my money without entering a co-dependent relationship with them or being told to “give us a call on the banana phone". 

Finally  . . . 

In Pontevedra's Tapas Alley on Sunday, this chap's choice of clothing caused a bit of a stir, especially when - the first time he walked past - he was wearing a jacket in the same style. Which you could characterise in one of two ways. One of which would be pyjamas but the other would be more provocative.

A shaggy cat story?

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

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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, as of next week, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Covid:  

The UK:  Good news . . . As of August 1, double-vaccinated expats - me for example - will be able to travel to the UK, as the Government plans to recognise foreign jabs from then. Unless, of course, there's yet another U-turn by Johnson's hapless government. If it does happen, it'll mean I can avoid both quarantine and the cost of 2 PCR tests at around 90 quid each. But does the single J&J/Janssen jab count as a double vaccination? And here's a potential wrinkle . . . “UK nationals who've been vaccinated overseas will be able to talk to their GP, about what vaccine they've had and have it registered with the NHS - to ensure it is approved in the UK." What bloody GP? After 20 years, mine is here in Spain. My ex UK GP wouldn't know me from a hole in the ground.

Second query . . . Will this change remain valid if Spain moves to Amber+?

Cosas de España/Galiza 

The wheels of Spanish justice . . . Right-wingers are fed up with waiting for the verdict of the Constitutional Court on the law of a previous (socialist) government permitting abortion. I guess you can understand their frustration, as it's been 11 years already. 

If you're a student thinking of moving to Spain, this guide is for you.

María's Not So Fast: Days 20 & 21 Santiago's Holy Day

Need I say that I don't subscribe to the ludicrous - but immensely profitable - myth of St James's headless body coming to Galicia in a stone boat manned by angels. Below is what the famous Protestant George Borrow had to say about Santiago and its cathedral. As you can see, he was wrong about its glory passing. Richard Ford was even more scathing about the myth, as you can see from his long, but learned, diatribe, also below.

The UK  

Weeds are defined as 'Flowers growing in the wrong place'. In other words, wild flowers that no one wants in their garden. Well, almost no one. It's reported this morning that, at a  Royal Horticultural Society show in Cheshire last week, 'a garden full of weeds - labelled Weed Thriller - was awarded a gold medal, despite its creator expecting to receive “nul points”.

A topical headline: Roses out, olives in: the new English garden in a time of climate crisis.

The EU

Richard North this morning avers that this is far more of a 'regulatory union' than a trade or political union. A system, he stresses, which devotes a 409-page regulation to specifying the forms to be used by exporters of animals and food products into the EU has to be considered all bad. It's a system, he adds, in its terminal stage of bureaucratic decay. 

The Way of the World 

Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. One of the reasons he was 'turbulent' for the king was that he refused to allow even murderous priests to be tried in civil courts. I was reminded of this when reading that this week, for the first time ever, the Vatican will allow a Cardinal to be tried by professional judges, not other Cardinals. A mere 851 years later. And some say Spanish justice is slow . . .

Finally  . . . 

So, is this Catalan politician unfortunate in having a mop which looks like a rug? .

This article suggests not . .

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

GEORGE BORROW'S VIEW OF SANTIAGO IN THE EARLY 1830s

Santiago stands on a pleasant level amidst mountains:  the most extraordinary of these is a conical hill, called the Pico Sacro, or Sacred Peak, connected with which are many wonderful legends.  A beautiful old town is Santiago, containing about twenty thousand inhabitants.  Time has been when, with the single exception of Rome, it was the most celebrated resort of pilgrims in the world; its cathedral being said to contain the bones of Saint James the elder, the child of the thunder, who, according to the legend of the Romish church, first preached the Gospel in Spain.  Its glory, however, as a place of pilgrimage is rapidly passing away.

The cathedral, though a work of various periods, and exhibiting various styles of architecture, is a majestic venerable pile, in every respect calculated to excite awe and admiration; indeed, it is almost impossible to walk its long dusky aisles, and hear the solemn music and the noble chanting, and inhale the incense of the mighty censers, which are at times swung so high by machinery as to smite the vaulted roof, whilst gigantic tapers glitter here and there amongst the gloom, from the shrine of many a saint, before which the worshippers are kneeling, breathing forth their prayers and petitions for help, love, and mercy, and entertain a doubt that we are treading the floor of a house where God delighteth to dwell. Yet the Lord is distant from that house; he hears not, he sees not, or if he do, it is with anger.  What availeth that solemn music, that noble chanting, that incense of sweet savour? What availeth kneeling before that grand altar of silver, surmounted by that figure with its silver hat and breast-plate, the emblem of one who, though an apostle and confessor, was at best an unprofitable servant?  What availeth hoping for remission of sin by trusting in the merits of one who possessed none, or by paying homage to others who were born and nurtured in sin, and who alone, by the exercise of a lively faith granted from above, could hope to preserve themselves from the wrath of the Almighty?

Rise from your knees, ye children of Compostela, or if ye bend, let it be to the Almighty alone, and no longer on the eve of your patron's day address him in the following strain, however sublime it may sound:

"Thou shield of that faith which in Spain we revere,

Thou scourge of each foeman who dares to draw near;

Whom the Son of that God who the elements tames,

Called child of the thunder, immortal Saint James!

"From the blessed asylum of glory intense,

Upon us thy sovereign influence dispense;

And list to the praises our gratitude aims

To offer up worthily, mighty Saint James.

"To thee fervent thanks Spain shall ever outpour;

In thy name though she glory, she glories yet more

In thy thrice-hallowed corse, which the sanctuary claims

Of high Compostella, O, blessed Saint James.

"When heathen impiety, loathsome and dread,

With a chaos of darkness our Spain overspread,

Thou wast the first light which dispell'd with its flames

The hell-born obscurity, glorious Saint James!

"And when terrible wars had nigh wasted our force,

All bright 'midst the battle we saw thee on horse,

Fierce scattering the hosts, whom their fury proclaims

To be warriors of Islam, victorious Saint James.

"Beneath thy direction, stretch'd prone at thy feet,

With hearts low and humble, this day we intreat

Thou wilt strengthen the hope which enlivens our frames,

The hope of thy favour and presence, Saint James.

"Then praise to the Son and the Father above,

And to that Holy Spirit which springs from their love;

To that bright emanation whose vividness shames

The sun's burst of splendour, and praise to Saint James."

RICHARD FORD ON SANTIAGO

The town of Santiago is so named after St. James the Elder; it is also called Compostela, Campus Stellæ, because a star pointed out where his body was concealed. It is impossible to understand many important portions of Spanish fine art and religious character, without an acquaintance with the history of this St. George of the Peninsula, which has never been fully detailed to English readers.

The Spanish legend of St. James the Elder, when not purely pagan, is Muslim. The Gotho-Spanish clergy adapted these matters from the ancients and the Muslim, just as Mohammed formed his creed from the Old and New Testaments, making such alterations as best suited the peculiar character and climate of their people and country; hence the success, and their still existing hold over their followers.

The custom of choosing a guardian over kingdoms and cities prevailed all over the ancient world, and when by the advice of Gregory the Great the pagan stock in trade was taken by its successor into the Roman Catholic firm, the names being merely changed, the system of patron-saints was too inveterate to be abandoned. The Spaniards contend, without a shadow of real evidence, that St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. James, came all 3 to the Peninsula immediately after the crucifixion. Rome, however having monopolized the 2 former for her guardians, Spain was obliged to take the latter. The making his burial-place a place of pilgrimage was next borrowed from the East, and was one of the results of Santa. Helena's invention (and a rare one it was) of the cross at Jerusalem in 298. The principle of visiting a sacred spot was too inspiring to be overlooked by Mohammed, when he adapted Christianity to Arabian habits, and pilgrimage became one of the 4 precepts of his new creed, Mecca being selected in order to favour his native town by this rich influx. The ill-usage of the Christian pilgrims led to the crusades, in which Spaniards took little part; nay, they were forbidden to do so by the Pope, because they had the infidel actually on their own soil. Yet Spaniard and Moor felt the spirit-stirring effect of a particular holy spot, and determined on having a counterpart Jerusalem and Mecca in the Peninsula itself. The Spanish Moors were accordingly absolved by their clergy from the necessity of going to Mecca, which being in possession of the Khalif of the East, was inaccessible to the subjects of his rival in the West; and Córdoba being the capital of his new state was chosen by Abdu-r-rahman, who, like Mohammed, wished to enrich his new city; and a visit to the Ceca, where some of the bones of Mohammed were pretended to be preserved, was declared to be in every respect equivalent to a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Thereupon the imitating Spaniards, who could not go to Jerusalem, set up their local substitute; they chose their mountain capital, where they, too, said their prophet was buried: thus the sepulchre at Compostela represented alike those of Jerusalem and Mecca. The Aragonese, whose kingdom was then independent, chose for their Ceca their capital Zaragoza, where they said the Virgin descended from heaven on a visit to Santiago; and the religious duty and saving merits of pilgrimage became as much a parcel of the orthodox Spaniard's creed as it was of the infidels, whom they always fought against with a weapon borrowed from their own armoury. As the Moors had established soldier-monks or Rábitos to guard their frontiers and protect their pilgrims, so the next imitation of the Spaniards was the institution of similar military religious orders, of which that of Santiago became the chief. Founded in 1158 by Fernando II. of Leon, it soon, like that of the Templars, from being poor and humble, became rich, proud, and powerful, insomuch that El Maestre de Santiago, in the early Spanish annals, figures almost as a rival to the monarch. When Granada was conquered their assistance was no longer needed, and Isabella, by bestowing the grand-mastership on Ferdinand, absorbed the dreaded wealth and power of the order into the crown, without having recourse to the perfidy and murders by which Philippe le Bel suppressed the Templars in France.

This was now accomplished without difficulty, for these corporate bodies lacked the security of private properties, which every one is interested in upholding. They were hated by the clergy, because rivals and independent brotherhoods - half priest, half soldier - without being either one or the other, although assuming the most offensive privileges of both. The people also stood aloof, for they saw in the members only proud knights, who scorned to interchange with them the kindly offices of the poor monks; while the statesman, from knowing that the substance was no longer wanted, held the order to be both obsolete and dangerous. All parties, therefore, aided Ferdinand, who was greedy of gold, and Isabella, who was determined to be really a queen, and the order virtually ceased to exist, save as conferring a badge on nobles and courtiers.

But in the medieval period it was a reality, as then a genuine lively faith existed in both Moor and Spaniard; each grasped the legend of their champion prophet as firmly as they did the sword by which it was to be defended and propagated. Proud towards men, these warriors bowed to the priest, in whom they saw the ministers of their guardian, and their faith sanctified and ennobled such obedience: both equally fanatical, fought believing that they were backed by their guardians: this confidence went far to realise victory and especially with the Spaniard, who has always been disposed to depend on others; in the critical moment of need, he folds his arms and clamours for supernatural assistance; thus the Iberians invoked their Netos, and afterwards prayed to the Phœnician Hercules. All this is classical and Oriental: Castor and Pollux fought visibly for the Romans at Regillum; Mohammed appeared on the Orontes to overthrow Count Roger, as Santiago, mounted on his war-horse, interfered at Clavijo in 846 to crush the Moslem. There was no mention of Santiago, or his visit to Spain, or his patronage, in the time of the Goth, and simply because there being no Moors then to be expelled, he was not wanted.

For this Hagiography consult 'El Teatro de Santiago,' Gil. Gonzalez. Florez has collected all the authentic facts which different infallible Popes from Leo III. have ratified. The best book is 'Historia del Apostol de Jesus Christo, Sanctiago Zebedeo, Patron y Capitan General de las Españas;' Mauro Castellá Ferrer, 1610, for this is the correct title of the apostle in Spain. The conferring military rank spoke the spirit of the age and people when bishops rode in armour and knights in cowls, and a nation of caballeros never would have respected a footman guardian. Accordingly Santiago, San Martin, and San Isidoro are always mounted, and represent the Fortuna Equestris of the Romans.

Froissart felt the full rank of this chief of a religious chivalry, and of a church-militant, and, therefore, like Dante, he calls St. James a Baron—Varon, Vir, a gentleman, a man emphatically, in contradiction to Homo, Hombre, or a mere mortal clod of earth. So Don Quixote speaks of him as "Don Diego," the Moor-killer, and one of the most valiant of saints. The Cids and Alonzos of Spain's dark ages at least had the common sense to choose a male guardian to lead their armies to victory; it was left to the enlightened Cortes of Cadiz in 1810 to nominate St Teresa, the crazy nun of Ávila, to be the fit commandress of the Cuestas, Blakes, and suchlike spoilt children of defeat.

According to church-authorised legends, St. James was beheaded at Jerusalem in 42, but his body was taken to Joppa, where a boat appeared, into which the corpse embarked itself, and sailed to Padron, which lies 4 leagues below Santiago; it performed the voyage in 7 days, which proves the miracle, since the modern Alexandria Steam Company can do nothing like it. It first made for Barcelona, then coasted Spain, and avoiding the delicious South. (probably because polluted by the infidel), selected this damp diocese, where the wise prelate Theodomirus, who planned the self-evident trick, resided. The body rested on a stone at Padrón, which hollowed itself out - wax to receive, and marble to retain - although some contend that this stone was the vessel in which it sailed. The corpse was then removed to a cave sacred to Bacchus, and the whole affair was forgotten for nearly 800 years, when, says Florez, "Spain breathed again by the discovery of the body, which occurred after this wise:—Pelagius, a hermit, informed Theodomirus bishop of Iria Flavia, Padrón, that he saw heavenly lights always hovering over a certain site. It was examined, and a tomb found which contained a body, but how it was ascertained to be that of the apostle is not stated: that unimportant fact was assumed. Thereupon Alonzo el Casto built a church on the spot, and granted all the rich land round for 3 miles to the good bishop. In 829 the body was removed for greater security to the stronger town of Santiago, wild bulls coming by "divine inspiration" to draw the carriage, as a delicate compliment to the guardian of the land of Tauromachia. Riches now poured in, especially the corn-rent, said to be granted in 846 by Ramiro, to repay Santiago's services at Clavijo, where he killed single-handed 60,000 Moors.. This grant was a bushel of corn from every acre in Spain, and was called el Voto and el Morion, the votive offering of the quantity which the Capt.-General's capacious helmet contained. The deed, dated Calahorra 834, convicts itself of forgery. This roguery in grain recalls that in oil of Hinckmar, who, 360 years after the right date, forged the story of the Sainte Ampoule being brought down by a dove from Heaven for St. Remy in 496 to baptize Clovis at Rheims.

This corn-rent, estimated at 200,000l. a-year, used to be collected by agents, although not much eventually reached Galicia, for grains of gold and wheat stick like oil to Spanish fingers, and Quien aceite mesura le unta las manos. The jokes in Spain on these and other corn-collectors were many: Quien pide por Dios, pide por dos; anda con alforjas de fraile, predicando por el saco. This tax was abolished in 1835. When corn-rents were given to discoverers of bones, revelations never were wanting if the land was good; hence every district had its high place and palladium, which however tended indirectly to advance civilization, for the convents became asylums in a rude age, since in them the lamp of learning, of the arts and religion, flickered. The duty of visiting Compostela, which, like that of a pilgrimage to Mecca, was absolutely necessary in many cases to take up an inheritance, led to the construction of roads, bridges, and hospitals,—to armed associations, which put down robbers and maintained order: thus the violence of brute force was tempered.

The scholar will see in the whole legend a poverty of invention. "Lucida Sidera," strange constellations, eclipses, and comets, are the common signs of pagan mythology, palmed on an age ignorant of astronomy. These star-indicated spots were always consecrated. Compare this Compostela with the Roman Campus Stellatus. The Galicians, however, of old, were noted for seeing supernatural illuminations, and what was more, for interpreting their importance. Thus, when the gods struck with lightning the sacred hill, gold (not bones) was sought for. But ancient avarice was straightforward and unblushing: the results nevertheless were the same, and the invention of the modern priests gave them the philosopher's stone, the magnet wherewith to attract bullion.

As to marvellous transportations by sea in miraculously sent ships, Lucian tells us, that the head of Osiris was carried to Byblus by water, and also in 7 days; again Herodotus  records that Corobius was transported by sea, and also to Spain and also through the Straits. Pausanias particularly names Tyre as the port whence an image of Hercules was carried by a ship conscious of its sacred cargo to Priene, and there became the object of pilgrimage; so, according to the Greeks, Cecrops sailed from Egypt in a boat of papyrus. But it would be mere pedantry to multiply instances extracted from pagan mythology, and for every one a parallel might be found in papal practice in Spain.  

That rocks soften on these occasions, all geologists know well. Thus the stone at Delphi, on which the Sibyl Herophile sat down, received the full impression, second only in basso-relievo to that grand stone on which Silenus reposed, and which Pausanias was shown at Trœzene: so among the Moslem, when Mohammed ascended to Heaven, his camel's hoofs were imprinted on the rock (just as those of Castor were at Regillum); and his own footmark is shown near Cairo, at Attar é Nebbee, and in the Sahara or sanctum of the Haram at Jerusalem. Such a metamorphosis was an old story even in sceptical Ovid's times.

Some antiquarians, with sad want of faith, have pronounced this stone to be only a Roman sarcophagus; if, however, people can once believe that Santiago ever came to Spain at all, all the rest is plain sailing; yet this legend, the emphatic one of Spain, is not yet disbelieved, for see Mellado's Guide (1843) on Santiago and his cockleshells; but the Phœnix of the ancients is no bad symbol of the vitality of superstitious frauds, which, however exploded for a time, rise up again from their ashes. As the inventive powers of man are limited, an old story comes round and round like the same tune in a barrel organ. There is nothing new under the sun, said the wisest of kings. The Pontifex maximus of old and modern Rome have alike fathomed the depths of human credulity, which loves to be deceived, and will have it so, "and the priests bear rule by their means:"

The first cathedral built over the body was finished in 874, and consecrated in 899; the city rose around it, and waxing strong, the Córdobans felt the recoil of the antagonist shrine and guardian, even at their Ceca; whereupon Al-mansúr, dreading the crusading influence, determined on its total destruction, and in July, 997, he left Córdoba on his 48th jihad, or holy crusade, having also sent a fleet round to co-operate on the Duero and Miño. He advanced by Coria, and was met at Zamora by many Spanish counts, or local petty sheikhs, who with true Iberian selfishness and disunion sided with the invader, in order to secure their own safety and share in the spoils. Al-mansúr entered Santiago Aug. 10, 997; he found it deserted, the inhabitants having fled from the merciless infidel, whose warfare was extermination; then he razed the city, sparing only the tomb of the Spaniards' Prophet, before which he trembled: so close was the analogy of these cognate superstitions.

Mariana, however, asserts that he was "dazzled by a divine splendour," and that his retiring army was visited by sickness inflicted by La divina venganza. Had this taken place before Al-mansúr sacked the town, it would have been more creditable to the miraculous powers of Spain's great guardian. The learned Jesuit, however, dismisses this humiliating conquest in a few lines, and these contain every possible mistake in names, dates, and localities. Thus he fixes the period A.D. 993, and kills Al-mansúr, whom he calls Mohamad Alhagib, at Begalcorax in 998, whereas he died in 1002 at Medinaceli.

Shant Yakoh, the "Holy City of Jalikijah (Galicia), is thus described by the more accurate contemporaneous Moorish annalists; and it affords a curious proof of the early and widespread effect and influence of the antagonistic guardian and tomb on the Moors. The shrine was frequented even by those Christians who lived among the Moors, and the pilgrims brought back minute reports. "Their Kaaba is a colossal idol, which they have in the centre of the church; they swear by it, and repair to it in pilgrimage from the most distant parts, from Rome as well as from other countries, pretending that the tomb which is to be seen within the church is that of Yákob (James), one of the 12 apostles, and the most beloved of Isa (Jesus): may the blessing of God and salutation be on him and on our prophet!" "They say that the Moslems found no living soul at Santiago except an old monk who was sitting on the tomb of St. James, who being interrogated by Al-mansúr as to himself, and what he was doing in that spot, he answered, I am a familiar of St. James, upon which Al-mansúr ordered that no harm should be done unto him." The Moslem respected the Faquir monk, in whom he saw a devotee borrowed from his own Kaaba of Mecca. His great object was to destroy the idols of the polytheist Spaniards, as the uncompromising Deism of the Hebrew, and his abhorrence for graven images, formed the essence of Islamism. Al-mansúr purified the temples according to the Jewish law, and exactly as the early Christians in the 4th century had treated the symbols of paganism. Thus, by a strange fate, the followers of the false prophet trod in the steps of both Testaments, while Christianity, corrupted by Rome, was remodelling and renewing those very pagan abominations which the old and new law equally forbade.

Al-mansúr returned to Córdoba laden with spoil. The bells of the cathedral of Santiago were conveyed to Córdoba on the shoulders of Christian captives, and hung up reversed as lamps in the Great Mosque, where they remained until 1236, when St. Ferdinand restored them, sending them back on the shoulders of Moorish prisoners. Al-mansúr is said to have fed his horse out of the still existing porphyry font in the cathedral, but the horse, reply the Spaniards, burst and died. Possibly, coming from Córdoba, the change of diet had affected his condition, and certainly we ourselves nearly lost our superb haca Cordobesa from the "hay and oats" of Galicia.

Al-Mansúr could not find the body of Santiago, at which some will not be surprised; however the soundest local divines contend that the Captain-General surrounded himself when in danger with an obfuscation of his own making, like the cuttlefish, or the Lord Admiral of the Invincible Armada; and to this day no one knows exactly where the bones are deposited. It is said that Gelmirez built them into the foundations of his new cathedral, in order that they never might be pried into by the impertinente curioso, or removed by the enemy. In the same way, it was forbidden among the Romans to reveal even the name of Rome's guardian, lest the foe, by greater bribes, or by violence, might induce the patron to prove false. The remains of Hercules were also said to be buried in his temple at Cádiz, but no one knew where. However, Santiago lies somewhere, for he was heard clashing his arms when Buonaparte invaded Spain; as Hercules did before the battle of Leuctra, so the old war-horse neighs at the trumpet's sound. The Captain-General, valiant at Clavijo, had already given up active service in 997, and it could not be expected that such an invalided veteran should put on, like old Priam, his old armour and turn out of his comfortable resting-place to oppose Soult 812 years afterwards. After all it is just possible that the veritable Santiago is not buried at Compostela, for as the Coruñese claimed a duplicate body of Geryon, to the indignation of the Gaditanos, so the priests of St Sernin at Toulouse, among 7 bodies of the 12 apostles, said that Santiago's was one; and when we remember the triumph of Soult at Santiago and his trouncing at Toulouse, it is difficult not to think that the real Simon Pure is buried at St Seernin, and helped our Duke.

Be this as it may, all Spanish divines lose theur temper whenever this legend is questioned; volumes of controversy have been written, and the evidence thus summed up:—Primo, The scallop shells found at Clavijo, prove that they were dropped there by Santiago, when busy in killing 60,000 Moors. Secundo, If the Virgin descended from Heaven at Zaragoza to visit Santiago, of which there can be no doubt, it follows that Santiago must have been at Zaragoza. However the honest Jesuit Mariana thinks no proof at all necessary, because so great an event never could have been believed at first without sufficient evidence; while Morales concludes that "None but a heretic could doubt a fact which no man can dare to deny;" be that as it may, the Pope soon became jealous of this assumed elevation and Baronius resented pretensions which rivalled those of St. Peter, and were pretty much as unfounded. Accordingly Clement VIII. altered the Calendar of Pius V., and threw a doubt on the whole visit, whereat the whole Peninsula took alarm. The Pontiff was assailed with such irresistible arguments, that his virtue gave way, and the affair was thus compromised in the Papal record: This would not do; and Urban VIII. in 1625, being "refreshed" with golden opinions, restored Santiago to all his Spanish honours.

The see, now an archbishopric, was formerly suffragan to the metropolitan Merida. It was elevated in 1120 by the management of Diego Gelmirez, a partisan of Queen Urraca, who prevailed on her husband Ramón to intercede with his brother Pope Calixtus II. Diego, the first primate, presided 39 years, and was the true founder of the cathedral; and although the people rose against him and Urraca, he was the real king during that troubled period when Urraca was false to him and to every one else. There is a curious Latin contemporary history, called 'La Compostelana,' which was written by two of his canons; and none can understand this period without reading it. The city and chapter of Toledo opposed the elevation of a rival Santiago, for as in the systems of Mohammed and the imitating Spaniard, religion went hand in hand with commerce and profit, as it had since the days of the Phoenicians. A relic or shrine attracted rich strangers, while its sanctity awed robbers, and shed security over wealthy merchants; hence an eternal bickering between places of established holiness and commerce, and any upstart competitors: as Medina hated Mecca, so Toledo hated Santiago.

But Gelmirez was a cunning prelate, and well knew how to carry his point; he put Santiago's images and plate into the crucible, and sent the ingots to the Pope. He remitted the cash to Rome (where no heresy ever was more abominable than the non-payment of Peter's pence, for, no penny no paternoster), by means of pilgrims, who received from his Holiness a number of indulgences proportioned to the sums which they smuggled through Aragon and Catalonia, then independent and hostile kingdoms, and the "dens," say these historians, "not of thieves, but of devils," for Spain in those unhappy times resembled the Oriental insecurity of Deborah's age, "when the highways were unoccupied, and travellers walked through the byways."

Following the example of the pagan priests of the temple of Hercules at Cádiz, Gelmirez now extolled the virtues of making a visit and an offering to the new guardian at Santiago. The patron saint became el santo, the saint par excellence, as Antonio at Padua is il santo. He never turned a deaf ear to those pilgrims who came with money in their sacks: and great was the stream of wealthy guilt which poured in; kings gave gold, and even paupers their mites. Thus all the capital expended by Gelmirez at Rome in establishing the machinery was reimbursed, and a clear income obtained; the roads of Christendom were so thronged, that Dante exclaims: Mira mira ecco il Barone Per cui laggiu si visita Galizia!

At the marriage of our Edward I, in 1254, with Leonora, sister of Alonzo el Sabio, a protection to English pilgrims was stipulated for; but they came in such numbers as to alarm the French, insomuch that when Enrique II was enabled by them to dethrone Don Pedro, he was compelled by his allies to prevent any English whatever entering Spain without the French king's permission. The capture of Santiago by John of Gaunt increased the difficulties, by rousing the suspicions of Spain also. The numbers in the 15th century were also great.  916 licences were granted to English in 1428, and 2,460 in 1434.

But the pilgrimage to Compostela began to fall off after the Reformation; then, according to Molina, "the damned doctrines of the accursed Luther diminished the numbers of Germans and wealthy English." The injurious effect of the pilgrimage on public morals in Galicia was exactly as at Mecca; it fostered a vagrant, idle, mendicant life; nothing could be more disorderly than the scenes at the tomb itself; the habit of pilgrims, once the garb of piety, became that of rogues. It was at last prohibited in Spain, except under regulations. But smaller pilgrimages in Spain, as among the Moslems, are still universally prevalent; every district has its miracle-shrine and high place. These combine, in an uncommercial and unsocial country, a little amusement with devotion and business. The pilgrims, like beggars in an Irish cabin, were once welcome to a "bite and sup," as they were itinerant gossips, who brought news in an age when there were no post-offices and broad sheets; now they are unpopular even at Santiago, since they bring no grist to the mill, but take everything, and contribute nothing; they are particularly hated in ventas, those unchristian places, from whence even the rich are sent away empty; hence the proverb, Los peregrinos, muchas posadas y pocos amigos.

A residence in holy places has a tendency to materialize the spiritual, and to render the ceremonial professional and mechanical. Thus at Santiago, as at Mecca, the citizens are less solicitous about their "lord of the apostles," than those are who come from afar; as at Rome, those who live on the spot have been let behind the scenes, and familiarity breeds contempt. They are, as at all places of periodical visit ancient or modern, chiefly thinking how they can make the best of the "season," how they can profit most from the fresh enthusiasm of the stranger; and as he never will come back again, they covet his cash more than his favourable recollections. Accordingly the callous natives turn a deaf ear to the beggar who requests a copper for Santiago's sake, he gets nothing from them natives but a dry Perdone usted por Dios, Hermano! Therefore the shrewd mendicant tribe avoid them, and smell a strange pilgrim, for whom even the blind are on a look-out, even before he descends the hill of St. Marcos. He enters the holy city, attended by an attendant group hoarse with damp and importunity. 

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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, in the near future, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Covid:  

Interesting that cases are again rising everywhere except in Sweden. Wonder what it means.

Spain's rise among the young is horrendous and we wait to see what the hospitalisation and death rate consequences are of our 5th wave. As of now, the daily rate of 17,716 is close to the all-time peak of 18,504 of 21 January. As we wait, curbs on nightclubs and partying are being restored. Inevitably, Spain is accused of being too quick to lift these, as it rushed to save the summer and attract foreign tourists. Not surprisingly, Germany has downgraded Spain to 'High Incidence', which is a major blow to the tourism industry, especially in the Balearics. See the link to María's post below.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

A Times columnist today on recent developments here: Banning support for Franco is anti-democratic. Spain’s socialist government has a problem dealing with Franco's legacy. It has decided to airbrush him from history by criminalising the “glorification” of his regime, effectively censoring public debate about Spain under his rule. This is an assault on free expression and fundamentally anti-democratic. Free and open societies should come to terms with their history rather than try to erase it. . . . This legislation criminalising unwelcome or unpalatable ideas ignores the fundamental importance in any democracy of the free flow of thought and liberty to speak one’s mind. Spain’s leaders are playing with fire in a country that is still a relatively young democracy. They should reverse course. 

María's Not So Fast: Days 15-19 Our Reality 

The UK  

An ex-Tory MP: I have no idea how Freedom Day will end and nor do you, but I do know this: if it ends badly, with deaths soaring and an NHS again staring at disaster, that will finish Boris Johnson. . . . As a classicist, there's bound to be the nagging understanding that nemesis waits in watchful attendance upon hubris. In defiance of all appearances, I’m sure Johnson lives in a state of constant anxiety that he has tempted fate too far, and everything is about to go horribly wrong. 

Well, I don't much care about him but what happens will determine when I can make my long-planned trip to the UK to see my latest grandchild, now several months old.

France 

What is it about the Frogs?: Riot police hit the streets as antivaxers gear up for yellow vest-style protests.

The Way of the World

Emojis showing a pregnant man and gender-neutral royalty are expected to be included among a fresh crop of symbols to be released in autumn.

Spanish

Guess how I've learned that un chubasquero is a raincoat.

Finally  . . .

You surely will believe this . . . 

1. Yesterday on the Renfe site I tried to get times of trains from Santiago to Pontevedra next Tuesday, to be told there were none. 

2. Today I tried to get the times of trains next Saturday from Pontevedra to Madrid, to be told I hadn't entered a valid station of origin. This is by no means the first time this has happened.

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

COVID REVIEW

Losing the plot 

It doesn't much matter what Boris Johnson says on 19 July, many people have given up listening. Many vaccinated adults have already ditched masks, apps and social distancing, and never bothered with free lateral flow tests. 

Disgraced former health secretary Matt Hancock's hypocrisy and the waiving of rules for Uefa dignitaries attending Euro 2020 matches have also helped fuel the abandonment of all caution by many fans. Sanctions will probably be lifted on 19 July because many people will not take them seriously now. Hancock's resignation makes no difference. He conned us all, and possibly for a long time. 

Hancock snared 

How British that the end of Hancock's tenure as health secretary was not the UK's high rates of Covid death and long Covid, nor the failure to protect care home residents and healthcare staff from Covid. Nor was it the expensive failings of Test and Trace, the secretive award of lucrative jobs and contracts using personal contacts, nor a failure to declare clear conflicts of interest. 

The appointment of Gina Coladangelo as a non-executive director of the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) - her job being to independently scrutinise its work at taxpayers' expense- elicited no sanction, despite the fact she is a very old friend of Hancock's and her brother is director of a healthcare firm with several NHS contracts. When Hancock and Coladangelo became a couple, they kept it quiet. It was only when the pair breached social distancing rules under a spy camera that Hancock's game was up. Having been so sanctimonious about other rule breakers and repeatedly declared that "if one person breaks the rules, we will all suffer", Hancock - and Johnson's support for him - destroyed all remaining credibility. Those following the rules feel angry and betrayed; those breaking them feel vindicated; and those lucky enough not to have a spy camera in their office have roared with ridicule. 

How dysfunctional can a government department be when the health secretary is secretly filmed in his own office? And when he himself is secretly using a private but hackable gmail address and WhatsApp groups to conduct government business? It's as if the Nolan principles on ethics in public life never happened. 

The Good Law Project is gamely trying to get to the bottom of Hancock's Covid contracts, and he has already been in breach of the law once by failing to hand over details. Michael Gove also broke the law by awarding a £560,000 contract to associates of his and Dominic Cummings at Public First. Gaining access to private email and WhatsApp accounts to find the full extent of governmental wheeling and dealing will be an equally lengthy legal affair, and by the time the public inquiry kicks in, the accounts may have long vanished. 

Blame magnet 

Johnson may have been hoping to keep Hancock in place long enough for him to take all the blame at a public inquiry, but now he has gone he will be blamed for everything on the understanding that if he takes it on the chin and doesn't squeal, he'll be back in the fold before too long. Like Cummings, Hancock will have uncomfortable evidence showing Johnson was, say, slow to lock down. If the blame gets too unfair, he might just let it slip. If your boss has called you "totally fucking hopeless" and you no longer work for him, the least you can do is return the compliment. 

Just a little prick [British pun/joke]

When Hancock was asked how he would be remembered after the pandemic, he replied: "For the vaccine programme." That seems a little less likely now; but any role he did play in the acceleration and roll out of vaccines deserves to be acknowledged. Cummings is less gracious in his appraisal of Hancock, declaring that responsibility for vaccination was taken away from the DHSC because it was "a smouldering ruin" for PPE procurement and would be likely to screw up vaccines too. Thanks to former Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley's reforms, Hancock had relatively little control over NHS England or the NHS frontline. The leaders who deserve most credit for the vaccine programme arc Kate Bingham of the Vaccine Task force (for procurement) and NHS England's Emily Lawson (for the planning and rollout). 

Power grab 

Hancock gave the impression the pandemic was a career opportunity rather than a public health emergency. Had he survived, he would shortly have grabbed more power than any health secretary in modem times under the proposed "Lansley-reversal" health bill.

But the baton now passes to Sajid Javid, the 17th health secretary MD has served under in my 34 years in the NIIS. Most have stuck it for two years. Johnson must seriously distrust Jeremy Hunt, the longest ever serving health secretary, who would have been an obvious choice to replace Hancock, having been fully up to speed on the pandemic as chair of the health select committee, and knowing where all the bodies are buried from his previous lengthy tenure. Perhaps Hunt was the one who left the spy camera in the office. 

Rarely does a former chancellor accept the poisoned chalice of health, but the new powers coming Javid's way may have been hard to resist. With no experience or previous professed interest in health, and just a day to look at the data, Javid declared that all sanctions would be likely to end on 19 July and all changes would be irreversible. He is right to be mindful of the many harms of lockdown and the destruction of town centres, livelihoods, children's mental health and education, but who knows what the winter will bring? 

Even if all Covid measures are rescinded, many people will continue to wear masks and socially distance. Some people may even retain the habit of washing their hands. Others will continue to break the rules as they have throughout. Traffic in many UK sexual health clinics has not reduced during the pandemic, because some people view sexual contact as an essential bodily function that trumps the need for social distancing. Doctors now call it the Hancock effect. 

Hospital pass 

Pandemic aside, Javid has accepted a mammoth hospital pass from Hancock. The anger of NHS staff exposed to unnecessary risk during the pandemic, record NHS staff shortages and patient waiting lists, and the crumbling NHS estate are all well documented. But Johnson made some glorious promises on health and social care to get elected in December 2019, and it is Javid who will now have to deliver them or explain why he can't. 

They include: 40 new hospitals; 50,000 new nurses; 6,000 more GPs; 20,000 more primary care professionals such as physiotherapists and pharmacists; 7,500 extra nurse associates; and 50m more GP appointments. 

Johnson also promised £1.6bn for research over the next decade to find a cure for dementia; a new £500m fund to give patients quicker access to the most cutting-edge medicines for cancer and other diseases; 12 trailblazer schemes for adult mental health; and 1,000 extra staff in NHS community mental health services. This is part of a £975m increase in community mental health funding every year. All schools and colleges in England will be offered mental health training, and 73 mental health support teams and additional training for teachers "will ensure pupils will be able to gel the mental health support they need, when they need it". 

Then there's a promise to level up and reduce the UK's endemic health inequalities, which Covid has made even worse. As for social care, Johnson declared on his election as Tory leader: 

"My job is to protect you or your parents or grandparents from the fear of having to sell your home to pay for the costs of care and so I am announcing now - on the steps of Downing Street - that we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared. And we will give every older person the dignity and security they deserve." No wonder Javid wants to focus on the pandemic. The challenge he faces is immense. 

What next? 

Vaccination of adults is continuing apace, including many walk-in centres, and this remains the best chance of keeping 

hospitalisations and deaths low, and is the most widely supported control measure. Other measures have far greater side effects. Currently, anyone pinged as a potential contact by the NHS app is required to isolate for 10 days even if they have been double jabbed, have no symptoms and test negative. Many employees, including health and care staff, are off work as a result, as coronavirus infections rose 72 % in a week. If they continue to rise, and this policy continues, 1m fully-vaccinated people with no symptoms could be in quarantine. But they will soon be able to visit Germany. 

Child abuse? 

Nearly 400,000 school children are already in isolation, most with no symptoms, because someone in their bubble has tested positive. The JCVI (joint committee on vaccination and immunisation) is still appraising the risks and benefits of vaccinating the under 18s. Some experts, such as Prof Calum Semple, a member of SAGE, believes there is "rock-solid data" to show that the risk of severe harm to children from Covid is "incredibly low". Others believe we should remain very cautious about exposing children to a novel pathogen with unknown long-term consequences, and vaccination would be a far safer- but not risk-free - option. If and when it is offered, it should remain voluntary. 

We do know that children desperately need other children to play with for their physical, social and emotional development. We also know that for some children the haven and support of school - and a school dinner - is essential to their health and safety. 

Children should clearly stay away from school if they are sick, but if they are well and deemed to have been even a fleeting Covid contact, they currently have to sit at home and watch crowds of adults enjoying Wimbledon, the Euros and wild, drunken celebrations. Unsurprisingly, rates of suicide, self-harm and eating disorder in children have risen during the pandemic. And educational losses may never be regained. Sajid Javid should start by making the welfare of children his paramount concern. Our futures depend on 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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, in the near future, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

In both depth and breadth, there are just too many politicians in Spain. Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas gives us this translation from a Spanish article in the NY Times, headed ´l‘Too Many Politicians and Not Enough Managers: "Spain's Unsustainable Bureaucratic Machine’. Perhaps there is an explanation why Spain needs 22ministries when France has 16 and Germany, with almost twice the population, manages with 14. But the Spanish government does not offer an answer to this conundrum and citizens have good reason to believe that this mammoth administration, with its army of advisers, is part of what we Spaniards know as the 'chiringuito nacional'" - the bureaucratic and institutional paradise created by a political class determined that taxpayers pay the bill for their excesses. Says Lenox.

While Black Lives Matter and other movements have focused on which statues to pull down, Spain - says the BBC - is immersed in a battle over which figures to erect and what parts of its past to commemorate - or to consign to history's dustbin.

Personally, I find the legionnaires a tad camp and vainglorious and am no admirer of their  dirge, The Bridegroom of Death. The hair-raising lyrics of this can be found below and you see it sung here and, with lyrics, here. The legion was the idea the brutally insane - Long live Death! - general José Millán Astray and I venture to say its time has passed.

Staying in critical mode . . . The wheels of the train went too fast at Angrois, near Santiago 8 years ago but the wheels of justice are rather slower . . . On the 8th anniversary of the accident - 70 dead - the judge has convened an oral trial against the only 2 people in the dock - the driver of train and the ADIF director responsible for safety. The Public Prosecutor is asking for 4 years in prison for each of them for 80 crimes of reckless homicide. Superficially, if the company was guilty of negligence  - because it ignored warnings and didn't install an appropriate safety system - can the driver really be guilty too? 

There's an article on the Spanish judiciary here.

HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for these 3 times:-

1. It’s no secret that the RENFE online booking system is beyond hopeless. The company now suggests that buyers from abroad use a VPN to get past the first level of online negatory bureaucracy. 

2. The traffic police now have 39 drones flying around to catch us while speeding.  Click here for a map of locations, plus a list of the 50 radars with the highest revenues.

3. There's a stethoscope in my soup.

The UK 

The government says it'll be slashing by 50% the funding for “high-cost” degrees such as those for footwear production, media studies, floristry, design studies, clothing production, gardening, cinematics[?] and drama and art. One wonders why some of these were financed in the first place. Other than to achieve Tony Blair's objective of having 505 of kids go on to university.

Finally  . . . 

As I look out on The Atlantic Blanket normally associated with winter, I'm delighted to read that the UK's heatwave will continue throughout August. Albeit only by the Daily Express, famous for its claims about the death/'murder' of Princess Diana.

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

The Bridegroom of Death

No one in the tercio knew

who that legionary was

so bold and reckless

who joined the legion

No one knew his story

but the legion supposed

that a great pain was biting him

Like a wolf in his heart

But if anyone asked him who he was

With pain and rudeness he would reply

I am a man whom fate

has wounded with the paw of a wild beast

I am a bridegroom of death

who will be united in a strong bond

with such a loyal companion

The harder the fire was

and the fiercer the fight

defending his Flag

the legionary advanced

And fearless of the thrust

of the exalted enemy

he knew how to die like a brave man

and rescued the ensign

And by watering the burning earth with his blood

murmured the legionary in a mournful voice

I am a man whom fate

has wounded with the paw of a fierce beast

I am a bridegroom of death

who is going to unite in a strong bond

With so loyal a companion

When at last they picked him up

between his breast they found

a letter and a portrait

of a divine woman

And that letter said

"... if one day God should call you

a place for me

that I will soon come to look for you!

And in the last kiss he sent her

his last farewell he consecrated to her

To go to your side to see you

my most loyal companion

I became death's bridegroom

I embraced her with a strong bond

and her love was my banner

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' 

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, in the near future, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now. Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Covid

It's said to be good thing that the Delta variant can outmuscle the ('worse') Beta variant. Which is claimed to be what has happened in the UK but isn't happening in France. This, it seems, is the song sung by those trying to explain the bizarre decision of the UK government to put France in an Amber+ box all of its own.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

According to the Spanish Statistical Office, 50,000 Brits have disappeared from official registers since Brexit - though this might also reflect the fear of the dreadful Modelo 720 law of 2012. This total is 17% of the official number of 300,000 Brits in Spain. Applying this to the unofficial total of 1,000,000 would mean 170,000 Brits have gone back to Blighty. Or maybe somewhere else. 

Another development in the wake of the Civil War . . . Apologising for Francoism and glorifying the Spanish Civil War are to be banned under a new law intended to stamp out the last vestiges of the fascist dictator’s grip on the nation. More on this here and here.

In the UK, A young girl has been seriously injured by an e-scooterist. I'll think of her every time I see someone here (illegally) weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic at speeds of 20kph or more. Ignored by the same police who are officious when it comes to car drivers where there are no pedestrians.

For history buffs . . . This is a nice podcast on The Spanish Century.

Here in Galicia, nightbirds must now present a negative test result or a vaccination certificate at the door of a nightlife venue. So, an enterprising local firm is now offering an antigen test on site - plus a glass of wine - for €20.

After a few hours of sun yesterday afternoon/evening, the bloody advection fog has returned this morning. And, to add injury to insult, as we luxuriate in temperatures of 19-20 degrees, we learn that the skyrocketing price of electricity - now the highest in Europe - is in large part due to folk further south having their ACs on 24/7 . . .

The UK

Simon Jenkins: Boris Johnson's leadership was never suited to collective government. It is egomaniacal, based on charm, fumbling, humour and an addiction to publicity – all handicapped by his relationship with truth which is as dysfunctional as his relationships with women. Sounds about right.

Quote of the Day

Tom Stoppard: Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?

English

According to the writer and critic Jonathan Meades: Although Received Pronunciation[RP]  has been derided as the accent of southern elites, social climbers and stuffy Radio 4 announcers, it doesn't deserve its snobby reputation and should be celebrated as a tool of social mobility. The decline of RP, also known as the Queen’s English, will make it harder for Brits from diverse backgrounds to suppress “accentual tics” and build careers in which they were assessed on skills rather than upbringing. In other words, speak proper and you'll be judged proper.

Finally  . . . 

Oh, dear . . . Liverpool has been stripped of its coveted world heritage status after Unesco blamed years of development for an “irreversible loss” to the historic value of its Victorian docks. But, as someone has correctly opined: Who cares? The city was popular for visitors long before Unesco arrived and it will remain so after it has gone. This won't take the gleam off a fine city. 

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

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'   

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, in the near future, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Our coastal weather was forecast to change today, with the sun breaking through the low cloud - or ‘advection fog' - we've had for 5 days now. But it hasn't so far. As one local paper put it yesterday:  Galicians living on the coast are talking about nothing other than our extraordinary weather - the fog that has thwarted their beach plans. But up in our hills there's 'no trace of maritime air'. And the temperature is as high as 37 degrees, against barely 20 on the coast. See the Weather Special below.

An apt cartoon . . 

So,  not just problem here in Galicia . . The rising number of invasive wild pigs is having a greater impact on the climate than a million cars because the animals unearth carbon trapped in soil. Populations of feral pigs, such as wild boar, are growing in many countries where they are not native but have spread after animals escaped from farms or were illegally released.

So much for the AVE high speed line between Galicia and Madrid being fully operative by end last year or even end this year. As if we ever believed it would be . . . ADIF is finishing the last stretch of the AVE to Galicia, which will take 3 years to complete. The train will reach Ourense this year, along the current route, while construction of the bypass line is being put out to tender. If you believe it really will be 3 years, you haven't been watching and listening for the last 30 years

Here's a nice example of how granite 'scrubs up' well. This building - about to be a new pilgrim's albergue - was very weather worn - i.e. pretty black - only a few months ago:-

I've been sent a legalistic email by a woman who ran a charity cited here a month ago as being accused of fraud. It's all untrue, she says, and I must redact the citation. I may yet get my day in a Spanish court.

The UK

Thanks to the government's overactive Test & Tracing app, the UK is now to be called the United Pingdom . . .

I've never been clear as to whether I and my daughter are entitled to free treatment on the NHS. That said, neither of us have ever been charged for this. Now comes an announcement that British expats could face large NHS bills when returning to visit their home country as they will lose their rights to healthcare coverage when they visit the UK. That said: These rules do not apply to those already living in the EU prior to Dec 31. So, maybe we both were and still are entitled to free NHS services.

The Way of the World

New research reveals how the design of digital products exposes children to harm. Features designed to maximise engagement, activity and followers — the 3 drivers of revenue — create a world in which children are offered an unfettered diet of pornography, distorted body images and suicide and self-harm content, all within 24 hours of creating an account. These services are not deliberately designed to put children at risk, but engineers and designers told researchers they design for engagement not safety.

English

An amusing report, for Brits at least: For decades Americanisms have rampaged through Britain laying waste to swathes of the Queen’s English. Now Peppa Pig is leading the fightback. The animated anthropomorphic pig is being credited with infusing American children with a vocabulary and accent honed in Britain. The “Peppa effect” has taken hold during lockdown, according to parents in North America, who claim their children are talking about strange objects with funny accents. Biscuits, petrol stations and telly are among the Anglicisms some claim have taken hold as a result of the increased popularity of the 17-year-old cartoon series.  But at least one parent sees positives in this development:  My daughter now sounds like a little lady”. “She says ‘lovely’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all the time.”  

Finally  . . ,  

Can it be true that a Norwegian women's beach handball team has been fined for wearing shorts instead of bikini bottoms? Apparently it is: The European Handball Federation has penalised the team over its decision to wear 'improper clothing', as the rules forbid the covering of more than 10cm of their bums. 

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

A WEATHER SPECIAL

The advection fog* covering the extreme west of the region is directly related to san Atlantic anticyclone and one of the effects it generates: the upwelling of cold, deep water. In this sense, the low cloud that appears suddenly and catches bathers unawares is by no means a phenomenon exclusive to the Galician coast. For a start, these days the maritime air also covers almost the entire Portuguese coast, where icy waters are emerging. Moreover, this type of humidity is common in California.

The truth is that the US state and the Galician community share a lot in terms of weather. A coincidence that is determined by their geographical location. Both are located in the west of their respective continents and are the gateway to the influences of their oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic.

In addition, the meteorology is strongly conditioned by the oceanic anticyclones, which have exactly the same origin. Both the Azores and the Pacific high pressure system are of a semi-permanent type. They are part of the general circulation of the atmosphere and are always located in the same position. They only move north and south depending on the time of year.

Anticyclones are fed by warm air, so they rise in latitude in spring and summer, when solar radiation increases in the northern hemisphere. And because anticyclones at these latitudes rotate clockwise, they generate northerly winds that set cold water upwelling in motion. In the absence of wind, in California, as is currently the case in Galicia, the moisture that moves over the very cold sea cools and condenses easily. To try to find more reasonable similarities, it is worth noting that the tongue of sea air often engulfs the bay and the San Francisco bridge, making it very difficult for vehicles to circulate. In Galicia, the same often happens with the Vigo estuary and the Rande bridge.

* Advection fog is fog produced when air that is warmer and more moist than the ground surface moves over the ground surface. The term advection means a horizontal movement of air. Unlike radiation fog, advection fog can occur even when it is windy. ... As air cools the temperature drops closer to the dew-point.

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'

Note: I’ve been posting my blog in 3 places in the last year, including here. I’ve now reduced this to 2 and, in the near future, will be confining posts to one site on Wordpress. This is the link, if you want to start using it now.  Maybe sign up for email receipt, as this helps me understand my readership.

Cosas de España/Galiza  

How to get your Covid passport here in Spain

A few extracts from the article on the siesta I cited yesterday, pertinent to the crazy Spanish horario:-.

- A light lunch and a heavy evening meal: To a certain extent, this is catching on in Spain, mainly in big cities where it takes too long to get home and back and where opening hours for offices and shops tend to be longer, frequently all day, meaning midday breaks are taken in shifts and cannot afford to be more than an hour or two for this reason.

- In bigger towns and cities, and in tourist-heavy areas, the midday shutdown might only be from 14.00 to 16.00, if at all, but in smaller towns, it can be from 13.00 to 17.30, whether or not there is any practical need to do so, whether or not there is any practical need to do so.

- For some time now, various economists, health experts, sociologists and politicians have been calling for a more northern European-style work schedule, since not returning home until night-time makes the work-life balance extremely difficult, especially for families, and even with an extended break in the middle of the day, it is tiring for employees to be starting work at around 09.00 and not finishing until 20.30.

- Whilst it is often argued that the long lunch break and siesta are a 'Spanish tradition', they are more a habit than part of a custom or culture, and it is just as likely that future generations will adapt to a light lunch and early finish in the same way other nations have done, since practical considerations, like having to travel a longer distance to get to work, forced them to alter their routine. The pandemic and opening restrictions thrust similar changes on Spain.

An interesting map from a local paper, in an article informing us of the growing importance of the Pontevedra port of Marín to the world's drug barons:-

[Go here to see the foto I'm not allowed to post here]

I set off for the kilometre walk to my pilates class at 8.30 yesterday but had to return to my car to get my reserve mask there. But no mask. No problem, I thought, as I knew I'd pass 3 farmacias en route to the sports centre. As I did, plus another 2 within sight. All closed. As was a 6th I detoured to. All in vain, since - even when one of them opened at 9 - I had to wait behind one of those customers who regards a chat with the pharmacist as essential to their good health. By the time I got a mask, it was too late to finish the walk to the venue and join the class. So, I had a coffee, read the local and national papers before walking back to my car, parked at the bottom of my hill across the river.

En route, I passed a young woman remonstrating with her 3 year old for dropping her little umbrella. ¿Que pasa, coño? she shouted at the child. Which is roughly equivalent to What happened, arsehole? Only worse It might be hard to believe but, to motherland speakers of Spanish, c**t is a term of endearment. South Americans are generally much less vulgar, eschewing the palabrotas so common here in Spain.

As I sat outside the café, I twice enjoyed one of my little pleasures - seeing cars arrive at the top of a side road where the single direction of traffic was changed at least a year ago. Resulting in a 6-point U-turn back to whence they came. I suspect that the culpability lies with their satnavs(GPSs).

[Go here to see the foto I'm not allowed to post here]

In the UK, temperatures this week are in the high 30s, leading the Met Office to issue its first ever Extreme Heat warning. Here in Pontevedra it was 37/38 on Friday and Saturday but only 21 for the first 2 days of my daughter's visit from Madrid. But it might rise to 25 today, when the sun finally clears the persistent low cloud/mist by early afternoon. I feel a bit sorry for the vacationers from the capital and the South. They surely didn't expect the sought-after coolness to be this cool, even if they were aware of the capriciousness of our Atlantic seaboard climate.

The UK

A couple of heavy-ish articles:-

1. As we see a spike in non-Covid related deaths - a result of reduced general healthcare services offered by the NHS - we will eventually reach a situation where dealing with Covid indirectly becomes a more important cause of death that the disease itself – if we are not already there. More here.

2. From a British doctor who is an NHS respiratory consultant and works across a number of hospitals: I work in an NHS Covid ward – and I feel so angry. But it's hard to summarise exactly why I feel so angry. See the article below.

The Way of the World

For those seriously interested in the dialogue around transgenderism - The Sex Deracination gambit.

Spanish

Una siesta sentimental - A euphemism, I believe.

Finally  . . .

The recent British Open golf championship was won by a young American called Collin Morikawa. So, an extra L compared with my forename. But not here in Spain, where it's rendered Colin in the press. Which is a tad ironic, as when I give my name to receptionists and bureaucrats here, they usually write it as Collin. As my first surname, by the way. Since David is my first forename.

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

THE ARTICLE  

I work in an NHS Covid ward – and I feel so angry. 

It is hard to summarise exactly why I feel so angry. While the third wave is clearly under way, things are definitely different this time around. For the equivalent case numbers, hospitalisations are far lower, and people overall are less unwell. Vaccines have made the difference.

Many of our admissions have not been vaccinated, however. Some want to achieve “natural immunity”; it is unclear whether they realise that the only way to do this is to get the disease instead. Another wants “to see some real data”, as if all the information assessed by the regulatory authorities before approval, and the clear real-world data about the reduction in cases, is somehow fabricated. Someone’s friend got some side-effects from the vaccine so she didn’t have it; guess which one of them ended up in hospital. Most of these people have the decency to look sheepish, or to describe themselves as “one of those idiots”.

Not all, mind: some remain defiant as they are wheeled off to intensive care, and their families deny that Covid itself exists even as their relative is placed on a ventilator.

How can you even begin to have a conversation with that as a starting point?

Conversely, well over half of our Covid admissions have been vaccinated. These patients are a mix of ages, and are less unwell than they used to be, for the most part; very few need admission to intensive care after vaccination. The vaccination clearly works, but is not 100% effective in all people. This much we knew.

There are other problems brewing now. Our paediatricians are seeing a rapid increase in cases of RSV, a seasonal virus that in severe cases causes respiratory distress in children. Children have been mingling much less recently and immunity has dropped, so cases are rocketing. Conversations have already begun about how we are going to share vital equipment – ventilators, Cpap machines – between adults needing it for Covid and children for RSV.

On top of this, other respiratory viruses are starting to rise again in adults. We are starting to see cases of flu, parainfluenza and others that have been almost entirely absent for months. This creates a huge headache as we try to isolate different cohorts from one another. Two cohorts were hard enough – Covid and non-Covid – but now that we have different Covid variants and patients with other respiratory viruses to isolate from one another, we are rapidly running out of side rooms and space in the hospital to do so.

It is hard not to watch the steeply rising curve of daily cases with horror. It is obvious that we are not even near the peak. Current predictions seem to be that this will not occur until later in August, or September. The number of cases we have in hospital is doubling every 14 days or so. At the current rates, that suggests we will need to open new wards and restart our Cpap unit in a couple of weeks. Just the thought makes me feel tired.

We are all still exhausted. Levels of unhappiness among staff are high; I know several consultants who have gone off work with stress and many others who are receiving treatment for mental illness. Planning childcare is a nightmare on the shifting sands of unexpected isolations in children and their caregivers, and this increases the strain. Interestingly, I have sensed an increasing openness and willingness to discuss mental health that has long been lacking for doctors and perhaps this is one small silver lining.

Meanwhile, however, our junior doctors are so close to the edge that minor events regularly bring them to tears. Their training has been hugely disrupted through this, and they have high anxiety levels about the future. The most junior were fast-tracked through to qualification last year and have never worked in a hospital without Covid. They have missed out on so much of the camaraderie, shared experiences, nights out and human contact that formed my coping mechanisms during my first few nervous months as a doctor. No wonder they are struggling. I want to tell them that this is not normal, that it won’t always be like this, but reality bites: it may well be.

We are undoubtedly in for a horrendous winter that is likely to surpass any previous years in terms of the complexity and intensity of work over a prolonged period. The burden of long Covid and patients left broken and damaged after severe Covid infections is not decreasing and will need to be provided for alongside everything else. Vaccines have clearly weakened the link between cases and hospitalisations, with people not getting as ill as they were before, but if cases hit 200,000 a day even a small proportion of these could bring hospitals to their knees. Meanwhile, we are also about to allow all the other respiratory viruses to again flourish in a population whose immunity will be relatively depressed by 18 months’ reduced exposure to them.

In this context, it is hard not to feel undermined by the relaxing of all restrictions. Any pretence of “data not dates” or “following the science” is nonsense; why not hold on a bit longer? I appreciate that we will all have to “learn to live with Covid”, but surely we must continue to mitigate risk, and opening up in the face of exponentially rising case numbers is idiotic. We have to learn to live with the risk of getting run over; that doesn’t mean that we cross the road in front of an articulated lorry. Surely we can at least wait until the curve of new cases is flattish, not steepening, and hospitalisations are not rising? And give a few hundred thousand more vaccinations while we’re waiting?

For the most part, I think that the patients I see have been following the rules. But if people are allowed to do something, they will. And this is what makes me most angry. When rules are relaxed, people will quite reasonably relax their behaviour. Urging caution thereafter is as nonsensical as asking people to “stay alert”. This is a pernicious, contagious, invisible virus that a person can spread for days before they even know they have it. I have met tens, if not hundreds, of careful, cautious, law-abiding people who have been infected despite following the rules. All that the current verbal gymnastics can do is to shift the blame away from those in power – who have access to a wealth of data, the whole picture – on to ordinary people who don’t have the information to make an informed decision. We need to be given simple, clear, safe rules to follow, however unpalatable that may be. It is craven and disingenuous to do otherwise.

Meanwhile, the mood in the hospital is one of weary resignation. We watch the unfolding case numbers with horror and try to carry on as usual. It is hard to escape the feeling that, once again, we will be bearing the brunt of our leaders’ mistakes. 

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  

Law courses: As I was late in adding it, 1 or 2 early readers might not have seen this yesterday, nor my comment that, at 98%, some Selectividad marks demanded are far higher than the 5.5(49%) of others. Here are a few local ones:-

La Coruña: Law  alone 60%  Law + Business Admin 81%

Santiago de Compostela: Law alone 67%  Law + Labour Relations 70%

Vigo - Pontevedra Campus: Law alone 56%  Law + Business Admin 76%

Siestas: Why do (some) Spaniards (and I) have them?

You think you've seen it all - or most of it - but then, in the supermarket, you come up against a woman doing her shopping on an e-scooter

Ever since I came here, the mayor of Pontevedra city has been trying to get rid of a factory on the city's outskirts. As this is by far the largest private employer, you might think this is an odd thing for a left-of-centre politician to do but there we are. Its licence was scheduled to expire in 2018 but in 2016 the top Galician court extended it for 60 years. Last week, though, a national court reversed this decision, leading the company to say it'll appeal to the Supreme Court. So, there's several more years of this saga to run yet. It looks rather more like a personal vendetta to me. Perhaps the mayor hates the factory even more than he does cars on his city's streets.

María's Not So Fast: Days  13 & 14. Lessons of Yesterday. 

The UK

A valid comment? In recent yers, the government has legitimised all sorts of nannying measures, including greater taxation of foods high in sugar or salt. Plans for rebuilding after the pandemic, particularly those associated with the green economy, almost always involve the spending of vast amounts of taxpayer money or greater government intervention. It is a dangerous moment for government by fudge. Unless the statist trend is arrested, the great risk is that, despite having voted for Brexit to free itself from the EU’s stultifying rule-making, the country becomes like France, with a French economic model and a French attitude to the state. There are already worrying signs of a drift towards dirigisme, grands projects of questionable value, and a prevalent cultural attitude that government is an empowering force whose diktats are to be followed without question. The old common law idea that you can do what you like, so long as it is not explicitly prohibited, threatens to be turned on its head. The country can no longer avoid the choice that governments have faced ever since the Brexit vote. Is the UK’s future really that of a European-style social democracy, with high levels of tax and regulation, and an expansive and interfering state? Or are we to follow the logic of Brexit to a more coherent conclusion, and embrace American-style freedom and enterprise, and all that entails?

The Way of the World

Dietary science:  Scientists have lurched one way and another over the past 50 years. Carbs were good and then bad. Eggs bad and then good. We’ve had dozens of government guidelines, policies and fad diets, from the F-Plan to Paleo, Atkins and the Mediterranean. No wonder people are confused. The reason for this surreal history? They framed the problem the wrong way: they analysed groups rather than individuals. But this is flawed. We all have different microbiomes, genes and metabolisms and so react to the same food in different ways. When it comes to diet, the focus has to be the individual. And it’s now possible, with a couple of measurements, for doctors to provide personalised nutrition. After 50 years of chaos and growing public distrust of nutritional guidance, this could go a long way to solving the obesity crisis. Let’s hope so.

Finally  . . ,  

I have my daughter and grandson from Madrid with me this week. It's amazing how quickly they can convert my house to a replica of her flat, viz. a toy shop hit by a minor earthquake.

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

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 

Are masks really effective? I’ve long suspected not. So wasn't surprised to read the article below. But then came this long thread, containing the claim that: Evidence from observational studies is pretty consistent, though causality is hotly contested . . . Broadly speaking, in countries and regions where mask mandates were introduced, the rate of spread of the virus subsequently fell substantially. 

Cosas de España/Galiza  

It seems that the ex-king established his personal pension fund not just via commissions on one thing and another but also by actually being an arms-dealer. Which might just explain why some folk - possibly quite a few - don't want much to do with him these days. Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas advises that Nine (fringe) parties are asking Congress to investigate his alleged illegal sale of weapons. Not the major parties, of course. That would be far too radical and destabilising. That way lies the 3rd Republic..

A Spanish friend has responded thus to my query about lawyer salaries:- There are indeed differences between the graduates of Spanish universities, as some are more prestigious than others, e.g. La Complutense in Madrid and Comillas in Cantabria. In addition, the big law firms take the best qualified and, during their professional careers, they train them and, as they move up the career ladder, they gain enormous experience and then specialise a lot, generally working longer hours than usual, as their clients are multinationals who, although they pay good fees, demand quality and speed. The employees who can keep up with this pace are promoted until they become partners. Even within this position, there are 2 classes: "salary partners" and "equity partners", and the remuneration of the latter reaches the very high levels cite, as this remuneration is the sum of 2 components: salary and profit sharing.

Andd here's an article showing that the Selectividad mark required can be as high as 13.685 out of 14, or 98%, way above the 5.5 required by some lesser places of study,

Portugal

Here's the estimable Marinero on the dreadful Lisbon earthquake of 1577, which killed between 30,000 and 50,000 residents - 20% of the population of the city.

The UK

The highest number of EU citizens granted 'settled' status so far in the UK are Romanians. They total almost a million, despite being only 282,000 in the month of the 2016 referendum and 404,000 in June 2020. Officially at least.

Germany

Astonishingly, the devastating floods in the West of the country may well be the result of  a "monumental failure of the system". There exists a highly sophisticated international flood prediction resource, part-funded by the EU. The first signs of catastrophe were detected 9 days ago by the Copernicus satellite. Over the next few days, a team of scientists sent the German authorities a series of forecasts so accurate that they now read like a prophecy. I guess it's possible that the delegation of reaction responsibility to the regions which worked so well in the early stage of Covid militated against effective measures in the case of the very heavy rains and the apparently inevitable floods. But a German friend has endorsed the claim that the country’s alarm systems are in a 'parlous state'.

Not what you'd expect of Germany.

Finally  . . ,  

Once worth $100m, the antivirus pioneerJohn McAfee, was broke when he died in a Spanish prison. Takes some doing. Had a fondness for 'bizarre mansions', it's said.

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

THE ARTICLE  

Cloth face masks are 'comfort blankets' that do little to curb Covid spread, Sage adviser warns. Dr Colin Axon warned some cloth masks have gaps that are invisible to the naked eye, but are 500,000 times the size of viral Covid particles: Justin Stoneman, Telegraph

Standard face coverings are just "comfort blankets" that do little to reduce the spread of Covid particles, a scientist advising Sage on ventilation has said. Dr Colin Axon, who has advised the government on minimising the risk of cross-infection in supermarkets, accused medics of presenting a "cartoonish" view of how how tiny particles travel through the air. He warned some cloth masks have gaps which are invisible to the naked eye, but are 500,000 times the size of viral Covid particles. "The small sizes are not easily understood but an imperfect analogy would be to imagine marbles fired at builders' scaffolding, some might hit a pole and rebound, but obviously most will fly through," he told The Telegraph.

The mask debate has been reignited this week after the Government published 'Freedom Day' guidance recommending their continued use. It led to Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, enforcing their continued use on the London Underground. 

Dr Axon said the public need to be offered a wider view of the science behind face masks, rather than the "partial view" of information being pushed by medics over their effectiveness. 'Medics have a cartoonish view of how the world is' "Medics have this cartoonised view of how particles move through the air - it's not their fault, it's not their domain - they've got a cartoonish view of how the world is," he said. "Once a particle is not on a biological surface it is no longer a biomedical issue, it is simply about physics. The public has only a partial view of the story if information only comes from one type of source. Medics have some of the answers but not a whole view."

Dr Axon, Brunel University's senior lecturer in engineering, said that the true mechanisms involved are best evaluated through science. "When the particle enters another body it returns to a biomedical issue but the mask debate is about the particle journey," he said. "Masks can catch droplets and sputum from a cough but what is important is that SARS CoV-2 is predominantly distributed by tiny aerosols." Dr Axon said that medics were "unable to comprehend" the miniscule elements at play, adding: "A Covid viral particle is around 100 nanometres, material gaps in blue surgical masks are up to 1,000 times that size, cloth mask gaps can be 500,000 times the size." Dr Axon, whose report on ventilation in supermarkets was used by both Nervtag and Sage to aid decisions, says that medics "cannot have it both ways" over asymptomatic spread. He added: "Not everyone carrying Covid is coughing, but they are still breathing, those aerosols escape masks and will render the mask ineffective." Droplets from coughs are much larger, and more likely to be stopped by a properly used mask, Dr Axon says. An Oxford study last summer concluded that masks were "effective" in reducing the spread of the virus. 

However, other studies have cast doubt on their effectiveness. A subsequent Danish study involving 6,000 people concluded that there was no statistical difference in infection spread in non-wearers, while data on US states with non-mandated usage failed to show a correlated uptick in cases.

"The public were demanding something must be done, they got masks, it is just a comfort blanket," Dr Axon noted. "But now it is entrenched, and we are entrenching bad behaviour. All around the world you can look at mask mandates and superimpose on infection rates, you cannot see that mask mandates made any effect whatsoever. The best thing you can say about any mask is that any positive effect they do have is too small to be measured."

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  

Covid: Today's rules across Spain. Keep checking.

Much less notice is taken in Spain these days of developments in the Catholic Church but this one is surely of more-than-average interest.

I wonder if any reader can explain a conundrum . . . Whenever I see the Selectividad marks required for university courses in local universities, those for law degrees are amongst the lowest. This is in line with the relatively low status of lawyers in Spain. Against this, a recent article spoke of salaries of around €200,000pa for lawyers working in a good law firm(bufete) - a claim endorsed by this 2020 article. This is said to be twice that of senior personnel in an accountancy firm. And I believe that more than 50% of MP and government ministers have a law degree. So, do some universities demand far higher marks? And/or can the best lawyers make a hell of a lot more money than the vast majority of their colleagues? Who really aren't anywhere near as well paid as in the Anglo world?

María's Not So Fast: Days 10-12 Propitiating the sea.

The UK

Although many have returned home post-Brexit, the government has discovered that there were (and still are) a lot more EU citizens in the UK than it thought. Around 6m have applied for settled status, well above the 3.5-4.1m expected. This is only bad news to the extent that, especially in some parts of the country, this means public services risk being run based on unrealistic expectations of demand. For GPs for example. But the restaurants will be better.

Quote of the Day

Another couple of Simon Jenkins' views on football, which I've long held myself. Well, the first one, anyway. If more goals are wanted, then widen the goalposts. Otherwise honour the result: a sport that cannot accept a draw is not a sport, it is show business.

Finally  . . ,  

HT to Lenox of Business Over Tapas for the information that, when products get smaller, it's called reduflación, against ‘shrinkflation’ in English.

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

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  

Covid: The overall incidence rate has risen to 470 per 100,000 inhabitants for the past 14 days - way over the ‘extreme risk’ level of 250. It’s highest in Cataluña, Castilla y León, and Navarra. It's sad - and worrying - to relate that, with 279 Covid cases, Galicia has entered the ‘extreme risk’ box. Fortunately - as elsewhere - hospitalisations and deaths aren't growing at the same rate as cases. Which, again as elsewhere, are very largely among the unvaccinated young. Some restrictions are expected to return. Unlike a lot of tourists.

So, 6 of the 11 judges on the Constitutional Court have opined that the lockdown of March 2020 - under a State of Emergency  - was illegal, as it should have had parliamentary endorsement under a State of Exception. Theoretically, then all fines should be repaid, but I would advise victims of this illegality not to hold their breath. Unless a US-style 'class action' has a chance of success.

Listening to a podcast on 16th century England yesterday, I was struck by something that's still true in Spain - too many bloody women named 'Mary'. That said, not just one but three of Henry VIII's six wives were call Catherine. . .

 told my visitor about my decision not to signal both before roundabouts or when I was on them. He asked me if I was also going to adopt the uniquely Spanish custom of only using the outside lane. I said this would take a few more years. Meanwhile, I'd rely on my mirror and 6th sense to avoid being side-swiped from the right.

Quote of the Day

There can be no doubt that penalty shoot-outs are dramatic. But equally true is Simon Jenkins'  comment that they involve the ritual evisceration of young players’ emotions on the altar of entertainment. And that: A penalty shootout is staged cruelty that should be beneath the dignity of team sport. It degrades a noble game to the toss of a dice.

The UK/The Way of the World

A ludicrous English lout who, before the final Euro game on Sunday, stuck a lighted flare up his arse, was wearing a (stupid) bucket hat that sells at £545/€640. Presumably to people who have a lot of money but not much below their headwear.

English

I guess most readers will know that 'vaccination' comes from vacca, Latin for 'cow', as the substance injected originally came from cowpox, not human smallpox. 

Spanish

'Cow' is vaca in both Spanish and Portuguese. But is pronounced baca in Spanish, of course. 

And a ‘Basque cow’ is a vaca vasca/baca basca . . .

Finally  . . ,  

My daughter talking to her husband:-

Daughter: I think you have ADD

Husband: What's that?

Daughter: Attention Deficit Disorder. When you lack attention.

Husband: Well, I definitely don't have that. I could sit in a room all day with a coffee and wouldn't be at all bothered if no one gave me any attention.

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

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  

Covid: Spain’s overall incidence rate has jumped 470 per 100,000 inhabitants for the past 14 days – still well over the ‘extreme risk’ level of 250. The incidence rate is at its highest in Catalonia (1,068), Castilla y León (779) and Navarra (700). As of next week, we’ll be able to buy antigen tests in pharmacies without a prescription from our GP.

Some busting of traffic fine myths here.

Talking of travelling . . . Returning from a short Camino walk yesterday, I paid for our tickets on the train, as there was no office at the station. I offered my discount card and helpfully pointed out that I was the old one. The ticket-collector (el revisor) took our phone numbers, printed out a receipt and then insisted - with a laugh - that I look at it. He'd put me down as a child, which might have been even cheaper than the one I was entitled to. So we all had a good laugh.

The EU

AEP is once again unimpressed with an EU initiative: Europe picks a fight with the whole world by going for green protectionism. The EU's carbon border tax plan is an attempt by the bloc to impose its political agenda on everybody by unilateral means. See below.

The USA

A surprise . . . More Americans Watched the Euro 2020 Soccer Final on TV Than the NBA Finals. The stat is a testament to soccer’s growing popularity in the United States, more than it is a knock on the NBA.

Quote of the Day

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. If I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'. Very true, both generally and specifically. There are other groups. 

English

For those Americans who wonder why Brits say 'queue' instead of ’line’ . . . Since being borrowed into English in the 1470s, ‘queue’ has had a lot of meanings: it could refer to a band of parchment, a line of dancers, a plait of hair, the long end of a string instrument, a cask, the bottom part of a lance, or the tail of a beast in heraldry. All of these definitions have something to do with length, and that last one is closest to their origin in Old French ‘coe’ or ‘cue’, meaning ‘tail’ (or, colloquially, ‘penis’).That's from Latin ‘cauda’, meaning ‘tail’, and we can trace it back to Proto-Italic ‘kauda’ and Proto-Indo-European ‘khu’, meaning ‘cleaved’. Or ‘cloven’, I guess. 

Finally  . . , 

The sacred tortilla: The Guardian claims here that the with-onions-faction has finally won the age-old war against the without-onions faction. As if.

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

THE ARTICLE 

Europe picks a fight with the whole world by going for green protectionism: The EU's carbon border tax plan is an attempt by the bloc to impose its political agenda on everybody by unilateral means: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph

The European Union has jumped the gun. It has charged ahead with plans for a carbon border tax before it has secured the necessary cooperation of key allies. 

It is attempting to impose the EU’s political agenda on everybody, by unilateral means, in the face of implacable opposition across the globe. 

The putative carbon fee on imports is the centre-piece of the European Commission’s climate plan, unveiled today with the tantalising moniker “Fit for 55” - meaning a 55pc cut in CO2 emissions from 1990 levels by the end of the decade. 

China deems it disguised economic warfare, a first step towards circumventing the World Trade Organization and excluding China, without having to admit the ulterior purpose. Tackling climate change should not become an excuse for geopolitics, or for attacking other countries with trade barriers,” said President Xi Jinping.

The BRICS quintet agree with him, even if some agree with him on nothing else. The EU is inadvertently burnishing Xi’s claim to leadership of the emerging world when Western interests would be better served by courting India, Brazil, and South Africa, (if not Russia).  

“The whole developing world sees this as self-serving protectionism. It throws gasoline on international trade tensions,” said Michael Liebriech, the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance and a key negotiator in global climate policy. “Think of the optics: the wealthy EU, levying a charge on manufacturers in the world’s poorest nations and using it to defray the costs of running the Berlaymont building,” he said. Mr Liebreich said the EU is up against a powerful coalition of countries that views this overreach as a form of latter day colonialism, dressed in green garb. “The risk is that these countries will say ‘if that is how you are going to treat us, count us out, we’ll trade with each other’. That way we will end up with a two-speed world and a meltdown in Glasgow.” 

US climate chief John Kerry pleaded with the EU not to press ahead with the border tax before the COP26 climate summit this autumn, fearing that it would undermine months of careful diplomacy, which has already led to net-zero commitments by countries making up 78pc of total emissions. The tax should be “a last resort, when you’ve exhausted the possibilities”, he said.

The decision to ignore Mr Kerry marks the definitive end of the post-Trump honeymoon, and probably the start of a fractious and chronic trade conflict that could have been avoided. It is certainly careless statecraft. 

Nobel economist William Nordhaus is the guiding mind behind the border tax, hoping it will evolve into a “carbon club” of like-minded green pioneers, although it takes more than one to form a club. The idea is that once Europe, America, and G7 allies have together established a broadly compatible carbon price, others will have to follow suit or face exclusion from the world’s biggest combined market. 

Prof Nordhaus starts from the premise that the United Nations’ COPs regime has reached a “dead end”. He is wrong about that. The 2015 Paris Agreement has proved to be an irreversible turning-point, coinciding with a sudden leap forward in green technology that renders fossil fuels obsolete on the forward curve. 

Big Money has switched sides, chastened by the prospect of a regulatory sledge hammer, but mostly seduced by the allure of fortunes to be made in more competitive sources of energy. Nobody wants to be stuck with stranded assets.  

There is a theoretical elegance to the Nordhaus carbon model. It uses the price mechanism to set signals, letting markets sort out the best technologies. A variant of his plan has reached the US Congress in the form of HR 763, with the backing of all former chairmen of the US Federal Reserve. “We’re heading down the road of using very ineffective, costly tools. We could reduce emissions much more efficiently with much less intervention and a much lighter hand on the economy,” he said. However, elegant theory is useless if decoupled from the realities of global geopolitics.  

You can see why the EU has ended up in this position. The price of emissions under its carbon trading scheme (ETS) has rocketed tenfold over the last three years to €52 a tonne as a result of rationing permits. This is generating lots of tax revenue. 

But the higher the EU carbon price, the greater the imperative for a border adjustment tax to level the playing field, and to avert ‘carbon leakage’ to free riders. This will become ever more necessary as the ETS scheme is extended over time from the power sector to a wide range of tradable industries. Most companies are currently shielded by free carbon credits.

The German chambers of industry and commerce (DIHK) said “politically-induced rises in CO2 prices are only sustainable if at the same time compensation is provided for hard-hit companies that are particularly affected.” It cited steel, aluminium, and cement producers, along with 900 mid-sized German contractors.

The EU logic is impeccable but how can the border tax be reconciled with countries such as the US that do not have a carbon price - though California and New England have permit schemes - and instead rely on other instruments to curb emissions?

The Biden administration is not hostile to the principle of a carbon border tax. The Democrat party platform last year called for a US version, leaving it no doubt that the target was Xi Jinping’s China. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has long favoured such an idea. But the White House has concluded that anything like a federal carbon tax is doomed in Congress. The administration is snookered.

Brussels has charged ahead anyway and risks turning what could be a cooperative Atlantic venture - a sort of trade Nato - into a fractious and chronic trade conflict. Could Liz Truss possibly proceed with her post-Brexit trade deals the UK went along with the EU plan as currently designed? Clearly she could not. So Brussels is inviting interminable friction with London as well. 

“This is going to cause a furore and bog us down in all sorts of problems for little purpose,” said Tom Burke from the green energy think tank E3G. He blamed France’s Emmanuel Macron for pushing the border tax to the top of the EU agenda.

How does one measure the relative national carbon content of an imported Washington machine in any case? It is nigh impossible, as one can see in “Counting Carbon”, a brave effort by the UK’s Overseas Development Institute. “The literature quickly disappears into a thicket of diagonalized vectors, final demand matrices and Leontief inverses,” said Mr Liebreich.

What is the CO2 footprint of a car made from parts in thirty countries and shipped criss-cross in Brownian motion, or the footprint of an Apple iPhone made with components from the US, China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the UK, France, Germany and Denmark? Even the great Wassily Leontief would struggle with this. 

“China can simply redirect its low carbon production to the EU and ship dirty production elsewhere,” said Michael Jacobs, Gordon Brown’s former climate adviser and now at Sheffield University. “The biggest impact is going to be on places like Turkey, Ukraine, or North Africa just outside the EU that produce cement and steel,” he said.

Does the energy and climate wing of Ursula von der Leyen’s commission talk to colleagues in the foreign policy and defence wing?

This opening salvo from the commission is the start of a long winding road. The European Parliament will want to make it tougher. East European states in the EU Council will want to make it weaker. Corporate lobbyists will fight tooth and claw to secure exemptions. 

You could say the EU’s negotiating tactic is already working: one reason why China is introducing its own carbon trading scheme is precisely because it fears border taxes by the Western axis.

But the risk of screwing up COP26 in Glasgow surely outweighs any advantage at this juncture if the objective is to fight climate change, while the refusal to heed the warnings of the Biden White House reduces Western leverage.

The EU has been admirably ambitious but it is also trying to impose its internal regulatory policy and methods on the world through trade policy as if it were the global hegemon. It is not the hegemon.

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  

Not good news: Spain now has the highest rate of Covid infections in Europe - 436 per 100,000 inhabitants over 14 days. Both France and Germany have advised their citizens against taking holidays here this summer.

In Pontevedra's main square last night, we were treated to a Beatles tribute band. Not only was the singer female but so were all other members except the drummer. Although  they performed all their songs in English, they made an exception with ‘I Feel Fine’, which was rendered in Gallego, as Síntome ben. I think. As the volume was - as ever - excessive, I had trouble making out anything.

The nearby town of Moraña will this year have its annual lamb spit-roasting fiesta. This is one of my favourites and I've attended it several times but usually eating in a bar or restaurant, a little away form the main marquee/tent. This is because you need 15 people to enter the lottery for a table there. And getting 15 Spanish people to really commit to the event would be like herding sheep. Sure, I could get 14 friends to say they'll come but, in Spain, that amounts to sweet FA. Each of their positive responses would have the unstated rider, unless I have something better to do on the day. Which might well end up with me paying for several no-shows. Or becoming a ticket tout in the town an hour before the event. A confession . . . Years ago, I ordered roast lamb in a restaurant and enjoyed it so much I had it again. . . .

Talking of no shows - there are reports of only 30% of people turning up at one vaccination spot earlier this week. Who knows why. Too young to care? Anti-vaxxer mentality? Still in bed? Or something else? But, whatever, it's not helping to stop the current massive surge in cases.

María's (new) Not So Fast:  Day 9: Fairness

The UK

A play on the WW2 government exhortation to Stay Calm and Carry On:-

The EU

There are increasing concerns and differing tactics being adopted across Europe to address the on-going impact of Covid, as it continues to wreak havoc, with the Delta variant taking a dominant role in escalating case numbers. The lifting of restrictions and increasing the rate of vaccinations, particularly among the younger age demographic, are challenges that all countries are facing. There is no easy answer, but the repercussions of getting it drastically wrong could be catastrophic.   More here.

France 

Wow . . . The discovery of a hoard of 9th-century Frankish silver in a Polish field has prompted speculation that it may be part of a vast ransom -  2 tonnes of gold and silver - paid to save Paris from the Norse Vikings who'd besieged the city in 845AD. Not everyone accepts this theory, of course.

The Way of the World

SUVs:  Why is urban Britain, a country once home to ingenious small-car engineering (think of the original Mini), turning to elephantine lumps of gas-guzzling steel and glass at precisely the point in our planet’s history when we realise that weight and size are bad things?

Spanish

Having heard David Rose's ‘The Stripper yesterday’, I checked on the Spanish translation. There are 2 words, in fact - La Desnudista and, inevitably, La Estríper. 

Finally  . . .

One of my neighbours has had to go into quarantine because 2 kids in her son's playgroup class had tested positive. This has disrupted both her personal and business plans and, in frustration, she wrote last night. Jesús! Estoy harta de este fuck*** virus/año. After I'd stopped laughing, I advised her of the correct use of the asterisks . . 

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'

Cosas de España/Galiza  

The government is said to be considering making the Covid-driven ban on smoking on café and restaurant terraces permanent. While naturally happy to support this initiative in principle, I fear this will lead to even greater gatherings of smokers standing not far from the tables. Leading to even larger clouds of smoke blowing down the narrow streets of our tapas quarter. Why not ban smoking altogether? Or just allow the shooting of all smokers on sight? Or smell.

Mark Stücklin reports on burglary trends here, possibly with a personal interest in seeing the sale of certain alarm systems.

This is an article on the 'top-rated attractions in every Spanish province'. Actually, I think they mean region, as only 1 of Galicia's 4 provinces rates a (justifiable) mention.

Here's Lenox of Spanish Shilling on his early driving experiences. And here's my comment to his amusing post:- The 'permanent' UK driving licence I got c. 1966 didn't have a foto. When I came to Spain in 2000, I lacked an ID card and didn't want to carry my passport around with me, to present to supermarket cashiers when using a bank card. So, I pasted a foto into my flimsy pink-paper UK licence, before swapping it a few months for a Spanish one. At which time,  Tráfico minions mis-read my old UK licence and gave me permission to drive a huge truck and trailer. Albeit for only 5 years.

María's (new) Not So Fast: Days 6, 7 & 8  Where's the beef?

María has confirmed my belief that, while the UK is talking about a 3rd Covid wave, Spain is well into its 5th. Actually, it's arguable it's a 6th wave:-

 The EU: The Euros Final

The consensus is that the Italian team which (justifiably) beat England on Sunday wasn't the Italy team of old but a newer, more positive and creative one, not dependent on stellar defence and rapid breakouts. These stats suggest it really was 'old Italy' in one respect:-                    

Possession: Italy 65% England 35%

Fouls committed: Italy 21  England 13

Yellow cards: Italy 5   England 1

Red cards: Italy: None but should have had 1  England: None

So, despite have the vast majority of possession, Italy was, shall we say, more robust than England when they didn't have the ball and wanted to get it back. 

France

The government has long had a problem - in part created by itself - of large scale vaccine resistance among the (bolshy) French. As a first step in a campaign against this, the president has said vaccination will be compulsory for health workers, and that folk will be banned from trains, shopping centres and restaurants if they don't have a Covid passport. Stand by for fireworks. Especially as M Macron has warned that the country might have to move towards mandatory vaccinations for all, if resistance to inoculations continues.

Spanish

Topical words from the root barro, ‘mud’:-

Embarrar: To make dirty

Embarrado: A dirty player

Embarraron el partido. They played dirty

English

It seems I maligned the folk who did the translations at the Museum of the History of Madrid, when early this month I questioned their translation of Jornadas Reales as 'Royal Progresses'. I've since come across references to Royal Progresses such as this one and have seen them defined as ‘Tours of their kingdom by a monarch and his or her retinue and entourage.'

Finally  . . .

Maria has advised that what I termed 'baseball boots' are not called this in the USA, where they're 'Converse hi-tops', or just 'hi-tops.' I'm sure, of course, that this is true but, if you put 'baseball boots' in Google Images, you aren't denied pictures such as this one. For completion, these are the Converse boots I saw on the street, which looked very much like the ones I saw/had as a kid, quite a few years ago.

This woman is quite a catch

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' 

Cosas de España/Galiza

Faced with a rapidly increasing number of Covid cases - though not deaths - the president of the Galician Xunta is reported to be preparing the re-imposition of some restrictions. Very probably selectively, to specific cities/towns/villages or barrios.

Pontevedra’s dog pound has seen a large rise in the number of guest there. Maybe because folk have discovered the benefit of having a dog to walk with during lockdowns.

Pontevedra’s university - a branch of Vigo’s, I think - doesn’t offer the full range of courses but, for those it does, these are the required mark in the entrance exam. These are always given as out of 14 - to 3 decimal places! - but I’ve changed them to percentages. As ever, the top ones are a bit of a surprise:-

Nursing: 82%

Physiotherapy:82%

The Sciences of Physical Activity and Sport:[?]76%

AV Communication: 74%

Primary teaching: 71%

Publicity/Advertising and PR:

68% Infant education: 66%

Fine Arts: 60%

Forestry: 37%

Public sector Direction and Management: 36%

Some Eurostat figures here, showing where Spain comes as regards the cost of living . . . Just below the EU average overall, but one of the most expensive for telecoms. I guess this data doesn’t reflect the recent increase in electricity

A Covid cartoon with a few Spanglish slang terms for you:-

The UK

I wonder how many Brits still consider Gareth Southgate a strategic genius. A Spanish friend, knowledgable in these things, has just told me that GS is a cagón. I’ll have to look that up, though I have an inkling as to its meaning,

The USA

As the Delta variant spreads rapidly - especially in areas of low vaccination - daily Covid cases have been above the 20,000 level for 3 days in a row - a level not seen since May. The 7-day average of daily new cases is up by 47% from 2 weeks ago and hospital cases have risen by 11%.

At 1,870, the USA’s deaths per million number is about to overtake the UK’s total of 1,882

Spanish

1. 'Swag': Una palabra del inglés que hace referencia a un estilo o moda particular del ámbito del rap y del hip-hop. En este sentido, alude a una manera de vestir y de comportarse, con un énfasis especial en el modo de caminar.

2. 'Flow': Tener flow se empezó a usar para decir que alguien tenía estilo; que tenía rollo, en la jerga de los 80. Ese algo indescriptible que hace a alguien distinguido, único, original. A ese tener flow pronto le salió una expresión hermana. Una locución con más flow, con más garra: tener swag.

3. 'Una Kelly': A person - usually female - who cleans hotel rooms or your house

4. Cagón: A wimp; pussy; chicken; nappy/diaper fouler. From the verb cagar.

Quote of the Day

Camilla Long: It turns out that when women get in power, we’re just as lusty and aggressive as men. The question is: Is that, really, a bad thing? Perhaps we should just stop claiming moral superiority.

Finally  . . . It would be very nice to have this said about one’s book . . . 'The Four Continents' [Osbert Sitwell, 1955] . . . Subtitled 'Discursions on Travel, Art, and Life', this is much more than an account of journeys undertaken or places seen, for these are merely the starting points for reflections, digressions, and discussions which encompass not only the present but also the past and the future, and penetrate, too, into the timeless realms of value and beauty.

The word ‘discursion’ isn’t recognised by my spellcheck. But it means: 'A running or rambling about: Rambling or desultory talk; expatiation. The act of discoursing or reasoning'. And Google’s Ngram shows that, although its use peaked in 1840, it’s been on the rise in the last few decades.

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  

Here's the latest advice on travelling to and from Spain. How long this will remain accurate is anyone's guess.

Only in Galicia? Three headlines in yesterday's Diario de Pontevedra:-

- An alleged drug dealer had more than a million euros in his house.

- Meis reinvents its traditional fiesta to make tripe more tasty.

- Octopus supplies are now higher than before the pandemic 

When I brought my border collie to Pontevedra in late 2000, he was the only example of that wonderful breed in the city. Now, they're almost 2 a penny. Though long-haired dogs that need a great deal of exercise aren't the ideal dog in a city centre flat, I wouldn't have thought. Much more sensible to have an ugly creature no bigger than the average cat. Of which there are, sadly, many in the city. And even more of the even uglier French bulldogs and pugs. Thanks to the dictates of canine fashion among citizens who like to show off.

After a near crash involving a driver who mis-read my signal, I've decided - after years of resistance - to conform to Spanish norms and make no signal on entering, navigating or exiting a roundabout. In this way, oncoming drivers will be forced to stop, as they'll have no idea what I'm going to do next. But, of course, I won't ever assume they they will actually stop. It’s a percentages game and I’m just trying to decrease the probability of being killed on my bête noire.

And now a heart-warming tale, to set agains my gripe that lost items are never returned to me or handed in . . . Yesterday, as I was about to enter my car, I got a phone call and put my kindle on top of my car while I answered it. And then drove off with it still there. Halfway home, I heard a horn blown behind me and saw in my mirror a guy on a scooter 50 meters down the hill, whom I ignored. Once home, I realised what I'd done with the kindle and headed back down the hill to where I'd seen the chap on the scooter, hoping I'd find the kindle on the road there. But what I actually found was the kind soul waiting for me with kindle in hand. Since he must have been there 5-10 minutes against the possibility I'd return, I naturally thanked him profusely but later wondered if I should have offered a reward. Next time I certainly will. Though I might die before then.

P. S. I also put a magazine on the roof of the car but later found this at the side of the road near my the parking lot.

María's (new) Not So Fast: Day 5  

The UK

I hear that the government’s 'world beating' app for advising people they've been near someone infected with Covid is so troublesome folk are deleting it in droves. The Law of Unintended Consequences at work again.

Quote of the Day

Keeping one’s dignity on dating apps is all one has left in this modern age of courtship.

The Way of the World

The classic economic definition of money is 3-fold: It's:-

- a “unit of account” in which to quote everyday prices, 

- a “medium of exchange” that everyone accepts for payment, and 

- a “store of value” you can preserve your wealth in. 

Bitcoin doesn’t perform the first 2 functions. True - thanks to explosive price gains - it’s been a wonderful store of value, if you bought some 2 years ago. Yet the same was true of tulips when a mania for them gripped 17th-century Holland - until suddenly it wasn’t.

Finally  . . .

Aren't sudden flashbacks wonderful? I saw a young woman wearing baseball boots last night - a current fashion item, I'm told - and was transported back many years, to when I found some among my father's WW2 paraphernalia. An RAF pilot, he'd been based for a while in Alabama. Or maybe it was when my aunt brought me some from Canada. Flashbacks can be rather vague on details . . .

I hear there’s a big football match tonight . . .

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'

 Cosas de España/Galiza  

Spain's judges might be right-wing but the current government certainly isn't. Its latest achievement - not before time - is to radically change Spain's 19th century laws on sexual aggression.

Spain's overall Covid incidence rate is now well above the ‘extreme risk’ level. The highest and lowest rates are now: 

12-19 – 891 per 100,000

20-29 – 1,047

70-79 – 38
Yesterday, I wondered how great the risk is of Spain moving to Red under the UK's traffic-light system. Right on cue, the relevant UK minister has warned that increasing contagion rates in Green or Amber nations can lead to their being bumped up a colour. And Germany is tightening its restrictions on folk coming from Spain

Characterising yourself as 'different' is said to be a common/overused trope in UK ads. The latest exponent is the British government, with: See Things Differently. Other examples are the Guardian's 1986 Points of View spot, and Foot Locker's 2019 ad We See Things Differently. Plus . . . Apple has also made it a cornerstone of its brand, from the famous 1997 "Think Different" spot to a 2014 film called Perspective that played on reordering the words "Seen Things Differently". OK, but possibly the earliest and most famous example is Spain is Different, said to be the brainwave of Galicia's ex PP 'baron' Manuel Fraga, when he was Franco's Minister of Tourism way back in 60s .

Modelo 720 is a frightful law on overseas assets, originally intended to reduce tax evasion by Spaniards but with a real impact on foreigners resident here. The EU has declared certain elements of it illegal but Spain has yet to formally challenge this ruling, I believe. So we are now in the 7th year of what someone forecast 6 years ago would be a 10 year process of resolution. But since then we've had Covid. So 10 years now looks optimistic. Anyway, I mention Modelo 720 today because of this inevitable development.

A Day in the Life of Lenox Lenoxovitch

The UK

If you watch UK TV ads, you'll be aware that: It is a rare commercial for breakfast cereal, building societies or furniture that doesn'tt feature a beaming family of colour or gay couple. That this is inaccurate doesn't stop major companies indulging in the  distortion. This is a problem for the new right-of-centre GB News, which is critical of 'wokeish nonsense' but wants the advertising revenue from right-on companies such as IKEA, Vodafone, Specsavers and Bosch. (Putting that another way . .  Companies which are at the vanguard of the new cultural inclusivity).

Spanish

I've been down the rabbit hole of alunizaje, which is given in one dictionary as ‘smash and grab’ but which in the article I was reading seemed to mean breaking into cars by smashing a window. The RAE's dictionary has as its main definition as ‘a moon landing’. But the 2nd, slang meaning is: Acción de dirigir un vehículo contra la luna de un escaparate con la finalidad de romperla y perpetrar un robo. Called ram-raiding in British English. Luna here effectively means a (shop)window. But the luna of your car is the windscreen, also called el parabrisas (Lit. breeze-stopper). I think.

Spanglish

Another non-existent English gerund - El tumbing: Lying down, especially on a sunbed on the beach, apparently. From the words tumbar: to overthrow/knockdown/tumble, and tumbarse: to lie down. Not to mention una tumba: tomb, grave, tombstone. In the latter case, el tumbing is not a recreational choice, of course. Like el spinning, el tumbing hasn't made it to the RAE's dictionary yet. Unlike el puenting, el lifting and the ridiculous el footing.

Finally  . . .

Did you know that straws, cotton buds and plates made of plastic are now banned in Spain?

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'

Cosas de España/Galiza  

There's a painting in the Prado which used to be by Goya, then wasn’t, but now possibly is again. It’s this one - The Colossus:- 

Officially: There's no consensus and disagreement continues. But there is growing support for it to be returned to Goya.

Sunday's football match: Everyone here in Spain will be supporting Italy on Sunday, says a Spanish football journalist. Because England - being fracasados - always choke in the big games. As England have played most of their matches at Wembley, this wouldn't be Spain if there weren't quite a few conspiracy theories doing the rounds here. And Raheem Sterling’s dubious penalty didn't help things on that front. Said journalist claims most people here will be supporting the Italians, even if though it was they who knocked out Spain in the semi-finals. Most but not all, of course. Not sure what this says about Anglo-Spanish relationships.

Given there are said to be more than 100 (150?) different genders on offer, is there a risk they'll eventually run out of letters? Or window space? 

María's (new) Not So Fast: Days 2,3 & 4. Shocking judicial bias.

The UK

The devil in the details . . . Just as I’d concluded I could travel to the UK in August without being quarantined, I see that: The UK government has said it won't accept any proof of vaccination apart from the NHS app or certificate. Terrific. Bloody Brexit!

With the incidence of Delta cases rapidly rising in Spain - as elsewhere - the question might be: Having gone from Amber to Green, is there a risk of the country going backwards to Red in the relatively near future?

Quote of the Day

Even in the 17th century, the nascent popular press could sow confusion in people’s mind. The advent of the internet has greatly magnified the potential for misinformation and disinformation to spread, to the extent that we may speak of twin plagues in 2020: one caused by a biological virus, the other by even more contagious viral misconceptions and falsehoods.

Spanish

HT to Lenox of  Business Over Tapas for these examples of Spanish-influenced English terms:-

The cowboy term for prison, hoosgow, from juzgado

canyon, from cañon

vamoose, from vamos

mustang, from mesteño

alligator, from el lagarto, and 

stampede, from estampida

Plus these

Finally  . . .

Another HT to Lenox for this article displaying coloured versions of famous fotos from the Civil War.

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 

If I were asked I’d say the great majority of Spanish drivers are fine at the wheel. But I'm regularly surprised by the actions of a few. I don't mean the ones who cut across my bows from an outside lane - 4 inside 10 minutes yesterday - as I’m inured to this and have developed a 6th sense. Rather, I mean - for example - the person who pulled out in front of me at a junction near my house last evening when I was 2-3m from him/her. And the guy who almost mowed me down 5 minutes later in the car park of BricoKing, when he drove across 2 empty bays to get to the one closest to the door. But at least I got the standard cursory wave of apology from him.

I've drafted a book about my first 15 months in Spain. That winter - 2000-2001 - was, my new friends insisted, the worst in 25 years. I remember it - and my 5 broken umbrellas - very well indeed. But I'd quite forgotten that July 2001 was 'the wettest since records began'. The sun is shining brightly today but here's a foto from yesterday's local paper that speaks for itself about the rain of the previous few days:-

The UK

The latest MD review of Covid is below, following close on the heels of the previous one, thanks to the vagaries of the postal service. It was written before Mr Hancock departed.

Astonishing to read that a BBC newsreader is paid £429,000 a year, vastly more than the Prime Minister. Hard to argue with the comment that No newsreader could possibly be worth this.

The UK and the EU post Brexit

It's said that the EU - having been given the opportunity on a plate - has failed in its (vengeful?) attempt to destroy the City of London and to transfer most of its business to the Continent. Says one observer: Brussels has failed in lots of ways over the last couple of decades, from mis-managing the single currency, to stifling industry in red tape. But this will go down as one of its most glaring failures.

Spanish

María explained yesterday that Punto in my electricity bill meant Peak time. Ironically the RAE dictionary doesn't give 'peakp among its 43 meanings of punto. Preferred words are cumbre, cima and pico.

A sketch in English becomes un sketch in Spanish -  Escena breve, normalmente cómica, que con otras de las mismas características se integra en un conjunto teatral, cinematográfico o televisivo. Of course, it might be written sketch but is almost certainly pronounced esketch.

Finally  . . .

This is a reprise of yesterday's Kiki Dee and Elton John duet, in 2000 when - astonishingly - she was 54. This was during a sell-out concert in 2000 in New York's Madison Square Garden. Hard to believe but the previous year - desperate for money - Elton John had performed in Pontevedra's bullring!

And here's Ms Dee in 1974 showing why many of us think she never got the fame she deserved.

COVID REVIEW
 

Open and shut case 
The grand reopening of everything has been delayed, sensibly in MD's view. Even before the avoidable calamity caused by the arrival and spread of the Delta variant from India,, the UK stood out for two things in the international league table of pandemic harm: high rates of excess death in the under 65s, and high rates of long Covid. 
This is largely because many of us are overweight and carry chronic diseases at a young age that make us more susceptible to early Covid death and long-term harm than, say, Scandinavian populations. Many people on UK intensive therapy units with Covid have been obese and in their 50s, some younger. So opening up before all those aged 5O and over had been offered both jabs, plus a fortnight to kick in, was always the least harmful option. The Delta variant has made it even more so - if we want to avoid even more avoidable Covid harm. However, it will cause other harms that have to be mitigated and compensated. 
How much physical and economic harm could have been avoided with better border controls will be a matter for the public inquiry in 10 years' time. Hopefully by then a huge public health drive will have made us happier, healthier, lighter, fitter and more virus resistant. 
 

No one knows 
As to what happens next, no one knows. Hospitalisations are up by 50% in a week, and deaths by 8%. The numbers are small compared to January. But exponential growth has left us for dead three times before. Do we err on the side of caution or optimism? 
As ever, different scientific advisers have different predictions: from a third wave that is "considerably smaller" than January, to one that is "considerably larger". Would lifting the remaining restrictions now overwhelm (some) hospitals? SAGE cannot say with confidence either way. But it does think even a short delay in full-fat freedom would lead to a significant drop in hospital admissions for Covid (and allow more people to get vaccinated). Eventually, individuals will be left alone to decide the risks they pose to themselves and others (as football supporters are already vividly demonstrating). 
 

Compulsory or not? 
Should vaccination of care-home workers be mandatory? Would any gains from reducing the risk of a Covid outbreak be lost by the dangers of a worsening staff crisis? There are 112,000 staff vacancies in social care, and if mandatory vaccination were accompanied by improvements in pay, training and working conditions, it might help fill the gap. 
In London, vacancies are high but only 23% of homes have at least 80%of their staff vaccinated, and only 40% in the South-east. Multicultural education programmes are inching up the vaccine uptake but not as fast as the Delta variant is spreading. Health and care staff have risked their lives during the pandemic, and 1,500 have died alongside more than 42,000 residents. Health secretary Matt Hancock is being eviscerated for the holes in his supposed "protective ring" around care homes. You can understand why he wants to act. 
There are alternatives. Those who decline a vaccine could have daily lateral flow tests - and we've spent more than £1bn on those - but they are prone to false negatives (ie you think you're not infected when you are) and the US regulator has branded them useless. Care homes could be left to decide their own policies, so people could choose a home where the policy was compulsory or voluntary, but choice is in short supply in a sector with so many going bankrupt and having to close. Care homes could also make vaccination of residents mandatory. Staff moving around are more likely to be super-spreaders; but residents with chronic, poor immunity are more likely to harbour a virus for longer and create variant strains. 
The unions are against mandatory vaccinations but MD personally would not object to being told to have vaccinations as a condition of being a doctor (as with Hepatitis B). The UK, as ever, is divided, so we will have comparators: England will experiment first, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland currently keeping it voluntary and seeing if gentle persuasion, peer pressure and, for some, a £500 gratitude bonus does the trick. 
Ultimately, this may end up in the courts. 
Care workers may sue for an infringement of human rights; relatives may sue for Covid needlessly contracted in a care home. It could go on for years. Meanwhile, the Delta variant keeps spreading, but those who are double-vaccinated are much less likely to die from Covid (though they may still die from dementia). 
 

Care home deaths 
Have more people died from Covid or dementia in care homes during the pandemic? It depends on your sex. The Office for National Statistics has published its analysis of care home deaths in England and Wales registered between the week ending 20 March 2020 and week ending 2 April 2021 - so covering both waves of the pandemic. 
• 173,974 care home residents have died since the pandemic began, an increase of 19.5% compared with the five-year average (145,560 deaths); of these, 42,341 involved Covid-19, accounting for 24.3%of all deaths of care home residents. 
• Deaths of care home residents involving Covid-19 increased sharply in wave one; but a higher proportion of deaths involved Covid-19 in wave two (25.7 percent) than in wave one (23.1%). 
• The higher proportion in wave two could be due to undiagnosed Covid-19 cases in the first wave. 
• There were more total deaths of care home residents above the five-year average in wave one (27,079 excess deaths) than in wave two (1,335 excess deaths). 
• During the first and second wave, Covid-19 was the leading cause of death in male care home residents, while dementia and Alzheimer's disease was the leading cause for female residents. 
• Dementia and Alzheimer's disease was the most common pre-existing condition found among deaths due to Covid-19 in both male and female care home residents in wave one and wave two. 
So, more women died from dementia and Alzheimer's disease in care homes than from Covid, and more men died from Covid, but many will also have had Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia as well. Many of the deaths have been quick and gentle, but sadly also in isolation. It's impossible to know how you will feel at the time, but thinking ahead, if I was in my 80s or 90s with dementia in a care home, I would not mind a Covid death, and might even prefer it to watching Cash in the Attic. Not all Covid deaths are tragedies. However, al 59 I have done everything reasonable to avoid Covid because it can be a horrible way to die young, and I witness in my work the long-term damage that viruses can do. I have the influenza vaccine every year, even though it is less effective than the Covid jabs. I want to reduce my risk of any unpleasant virus, and of passing it on.
 

Hancock in the dock 
The hunting of Hancock is now a national sport, but no one in the NHS expected competence from a newish health secretary with no experience in health, a penchant for untested tech interventions and an ability to bend in whatever way was likely to keep him in Boris Johnson's cabinet. 
It hasn't helped that his boss in this complex health emergency is a classics scholar. Scientists tend not to be attracted to politics because they hate the bluff, bluster, lies and deceit. Science is about sensible guessing with uncertain data, making errors, owning errors and learning from them in real time. It is the antithesis of politics. 
Politics is also obsessed with blame, and Hancock will likely be kept in place until he can soak up every last drop of it ahead of the public inquiry. Former chief aide Dominic Cummings' mission to destroy Hancock with immediate effect is unlikely to succeed, even with screenshots of Boris Johnson referring to him as "totally fucking hopeless". Cummings provided no hard evidence that Hancock had lied, rather that he was guilty of the same over-promises as Johnson. 
Just as the prime minister kept assuring anyone who would listen that it would all be over in 12 weeks/by Christmas, 
Hancock mimicked his boss's supreme over-confidence. PPE and ventilator supplies were "all sorted", there was the infamous ring around care homes, no one who needed NHS care would be denied it, everyone who needed a test would get one. All he was doing was telling his boss what he wanted to hear. 
Even now Hancock can't stop himself spinning. He claims only 1.6% of care home outbreaks were seeded from hospitals where residents were discharged without testing, citing Public Health England (PHE) research. But he knows the research is biased by the fact that to detect an outbreak you need testing, and tests were rarely done during the first wave. As MD wrote at the time, you can't beat a virus if you don't know where it is. Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. 
It's likely that even more people in care homes had Covid than was recognised because they simply weren't tested. The PHE research Hancock quoted states that "the majority of these potentially hospital-seeded care home outbreaks were identified in March to mid-April 2020, with none identified from the end of July until September where a few recent cases have emerged". So, once testing was finally mandated for discharge from hospitals to care homes in mid-April, it appears to have helped prevent outbreaks. 
If Johnson thought Hancock was hopeless, he had a very experienced former health secretary (Jeremy Hunt) waiting in the wings and desperate to be selected. There was enough work for two health secretaries - one to tackle Covid, the other to ensure non-Covid patients weren't thrown under the bus. Hunt was responsible for our pre-pandemic preparation and should be interviewing himself on the current joint select committee inquiry into "what went wrong". He was one of the first politicians to point out how badly prepared we were for mass testing at the outset. If he'd been recalled, we might know if it could have been done better with a different health secretary. 
Instead, Johnson stuck with lap-dog Hancock despite spotting serious failings and can hardly sack him now. Promoting Baroness (Dido) Harding to lead NHS England (she has applied for the job) after the mixed performance of Test and Trace might divert some heat from Hancock, but he remains the most useful long-term fall guy. However, Hancock has nothing to do with border controls, our repeated weak link. It may tum out that we undermined our good work on vaccines to help Johnson secure a trade deal with India by delaying the decision to put India on the UK's travel red list. If so, Hancock's failings may yet be overtaken by events. You can't level up if you keep shutting down. 
 

Children last? 
The welfare of children is supposed to be our paramount political, legal and health concern, but it clearly isn't. The shocking inequalities present before the pandemic have widened, and although there has been no increase in adult suicides, the same cannot be said of children. 
Bristol hospitals are now on their highest alert for childhood eating disorders and self-harm, a pattern repeated across the UK. Before the pandemic, agencies to safeguard children and improve their mental health had been stripped bare by austerity cuts, and so help is often now only available at crisis point, and sometimes too late. 
A report in July 2014 conservatively estimated the UK cost of child sexual abuse at £3.2bn, with the majority coming from lost productivity as victims of abuse are less likely to work and more likely to work in lower paid jobs and have serious health issues over a lifetime. If Johnson really wants to level up, he has to invest in children's health and protecting them from harm, self-harm and exploitation. lf we keep fouling our nests, we will never fully recover. 
Levelling up vaccines
Vaccine nationalism was always likely to be an issue for poorer countries but even democracies like Taiwan are struggling. It did brilliantly to manage the pandemic initially, but relaxed too soon and cases are on the rise. Now China is blocking Taiwan's attempts to buy Covid vaccines from anywhere other than China. The US has donated 750,000 vaccine doses but as cases increase, less than 5% of the population has been vaccinated. For its part, Taiwan donated 51m masks to other countries at the start of the pandemic. The world needs to return the favour. 

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

An unusual headline: Two Men in India Were Arrested for Saying Cow Dung and Urine Aren’t COVID Cures. Click here if you want to know more . . .

Cosas de España/Galiza 

Lenox on masks

And María on  . . . coffins.

I have my first electricity bill under the new charging system and, as with all utility bills in Spain, it 'flatters to deceive'. Initially, I was surprised - nay astonished - at how low it was, before I realised it was for only 9 day in early June. Which, strangely, didn't actually start until a week after the date of the last bill. Was the interim period free of costs?

In the Spanish way of things, the bill contains even more words and numbers than previous bills but doesn't offer an explanation for this unusual aspect. 

Looking at energy bills here in Spain can give you 'analysis paralysis' - very possibly a deliberate tactic on the part of the companies - but I eventually worked out that the large increase in an already high amount of (obfuscatory?) data was the breakdown of costs between the 3 new charging periods of - punta, lano and valle. I'll leave María to give a good translation of these, as a literal one doesn't make much sense to me. Anyway, here's what the back page of the bill now looks like:-

And here's the new - multicoloured - bar chart.

Finally, for reasons I can't begin to imagine, this chart shows May's consumption at 50% more than April's, whereas last month's had this as only around 10%. Again, no explanation given. 

Así son las cosas. We consumers might be confused - and poorer - but the directors and shareholders of the electricity companies won't be much exercised about that. And neither will the government, though it has reduced VAT to partially compensate for the evident profiteering brought about by smart meters and higher costs for peak periods.

Overall, one again gets the impression of a Spanish company using cheap new technology to bedazzle the consumer and to only play at customer service - as with the companies issuing endless - nil cost - emails to demonstrate how much they care. Assisted by all those ex government ministers on their Boards.

Oh, and another thing not explained - or apologised for - is the regular blackouts. Need I add that I don't bother to adjust the clocks on the various items which show the time.

Rant over. 

The UK

The ‘realist' view? Covid cases are rising significantly but hospitalisations and deaths are not, which suggests the emergency is under control. We need to shift from disaster containment to threat management. Think of it as living in an earthquake zone: you’re conscious of the risk and prepare for the worst, but you don’t walk around acting like an earthquake is happening right now, with your knees bent, holding onto the furniture. Nor should we act as if Covid will kill us all, because it won’t.

Anyway, as of this morning, it looks like I'll be able to travel from Amber Spain to the UK in August without going into quarantine. Assuming the single Janssen jab is seen as equivalent to the 2 jabs of the other vaccine options.

The EU

AEP - another unhappy camper - takes his traditional jaundiced view of current developments in the article below. Sample phrases/sentiments:-

- incontrovertible 4th wave by the end of this month

- doctrinal madness

- dysfunctional pathologies.  

- treacherous circumstances facing European leaders 

-  a textbook case of how bureaucratic centralisation in Brussels can subtract rather than add value.

- The imperative of saving this year’s tourist season has paralysed political leaders.

- The 4th wave is freighted with consequences. 

English

British: They couldn’t care less

American: They could care less.

I fancy the British version is the more accurate description of insouciance at its max.

Finally  . . .

This is just one of the many hundreds - thousands? - of sketches which TV companies wouldn't dare to show nowadays. Being terrified of social media reaction from those made uncomfortable by the dictates of their own truth.

And here's something from a musically simpler - and funnier - era . . . If it doesn't make you smile, you are dead.

THE ARTICLE

Europe’s fourth Covid wave is freighted with political consequences: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 

Europe has again misjudged the contours, time-lags and politics of the pandemic. Large swathes of the Continent will be in an incontrovertible fourth wave by the end of this month, before they are sufficiently vaccinated to ignore the medical consequences. This will be hard to explain.

Covid cases in Catalonia are running above UK levels on a per capita basis, and the R reproduction rate is over 2.0. Portugal is tracking the UK’s trajectory with only a slight delay, while France’s health minister Olivier Veran says his country may be overwhelmed by late July. As if it were an omen, Luxembourg’s prime minister has been hospitalised with Covid days after attending a summit of EU leaders in Brussels. Yet Europe’s internal borders remain wide open. The imperative of saving this year’s tourist season has paralysed political leaders. 

In a surreal twist, the European Commission is actively threatening measures against Germany for imposing a quarantine requirement on its own residents returning from Portugal – that is to say, for trying to prevent more deaths in Germany as a result of largely unnecessary travel. Justice commissioner Didier Reynders says the rules must be exactly the same for everybody. It is doctrinal madness.

We are witnessing a fresh display of the EU’s dysfunctional pathologies. Europe has had the laboratory of the ultra-contagious delta variant before its eyes in England for weeks but the EU’s collective system has failed to heed the lesson. The mistake repeats what happened earlier this year when politicians played down the self-evident dangers of the Kentish Alpha variant, when the EU vaccine roll-out had barely begun.

To my surprise, Emmanuel Macron got away with his decision in January to overrule calls from the French conseil scientifique for a precautionary lockdown. The criticism has been muted even though the death toll proved to be an Airbus a day for two months until he was forced into a lockdown anyway. Had Boris Johnson defied Sage and Nervtag so openly in this way, he would have been crucified by Westminster lobby journalists. Mr Macron may get away with it a second time, but he has pushed his luck by telling the nation that “happy days” are here again, and then going on an insouciant tour of France’s tourist villages (where he was slapped in the face). He sent his cabinet onto café terraces to trumpet the reopening, in contrast to Downing Street’s low-key message. Mr Macron’s poll ratings jumped, but on what French epidemiologists knew to be a false prospectus. There is a curious narrative in the French media – presumably coming from Elysée briefings – that France is less vulnerable to the Delta variant than the UK because a) the British have relied heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine: a dubious conclusion since it has proved equal to Pfizer-BioNtech in real life data. And b) because the British chose to lengthen the time between vaccinations, while France has stuck closer to the three week rule. Yet the UK has nevertheless vaccinated 51pc of the total population twice. This compares to 31pc in France, 37pc in Portugal, and 39pc in Spain and Germany.

A staggering 86%of adults in the UK have had a first dose, just about a world record and a precursor of full-dose ratios. It is a testament to social solidarity but also a political and institutional success. This brings herd immunity into view, allowing the country to open on July 19 and damn the torpedoes. Boris Johnson’s Freedom Day is viewed as an act of reckless adventurism across Europe. They assume that it will go badly wrong. But the intersecting variables of vaccines, antibodies, age and time, may equally vindicate the decision. If so, the demonstration effect of post-pandemic life in Britain will become increasingly awkward for those EU leaders still grappling with a fourth wave into the early autumn and forced back into coercive measures.

Mr Macron has reopened before reaching a plausible threshold of safety. The pace of vaccination has slowed to under 170,000 a day. There is pervasive abstention, to some degree because of his own utterings during the AstraZeneca wars. Just 57% of staff in care homes have been jabbed. His solution is to prepare for mandatory vaccination, for frontline staff at first, but not necessarily stopping there. This is political nitroglycerin, likely to provoke resistance beyond anti-vax circles. The risk is a long messy fourth wave that drags into September, contaminating the French rentrée. Mr Macron is already on thin political ice. His vanishing En Marche party was reduced to 7pc of the vote in the recent regional elections. The latest Ifop-Fiducial poll suggests that he would lose a run-off match against ex-Gaulliste Xavier Bertrand.

The treacherous circumstances now facing a string of European leaders dates back to the EU’s vaccine strategy last year, a textbook case of how bureaucratic centralisation in Brussels can subtract rather than add value. The EU drew the conclusion – as ever – that the answer is more Europe, not less. The ideological push for an EU vaccine certificate in a rush to head off national border controls is in much the same vein.

My guess is that the pandemic has fundamentally changed German public attitudes towards the EU. It has done so at a delicate moment when Germany has also been badgered into large fiscal transfers through the €800bn Recovery Fund, initially presented as a Covid relief plan but in reality a patronage fund for a European Commission with insatiable ambitions. It is striking that the Christian Democrat (CDU) manifesto released under Armin Laschet lays down in no uncertain terms that this fund is a one-off instrument, and not the start of a Hamiltonian fiscal union with shared debts. Indeed, the CDU text is an ice-cold douche for advocates of an EU superstate.

What is clear is that the “Grand Reopening” of the European economy flagged by Standard & Poor’s a week ago has already been spoiled. The Club Med summer is in trouble. Jacob Nell from Morgan Stanley says the hit to GDP could be 1.5C for Italy, 1.7%for Portugal, 2.3%for Greece, and 2.5& for Spain in a “severe scenario”. That is not the end of the world in itself, but amounts to another asymmetric shock along existing lines of cleavage. It further widens the North-South chasm, rendering the European Central Bank’s one-size-fits-all monetary policy ever less tenable. Italy and Spain will not regain their pre-pandemic levels of output until well into 2022 at best. Germany will have closed the gap by the fourth quarter of this year. It is already in a full-fledged boom, at risk of overheating as services catch up with manufacturing. The IHS Markit index for German services hit a 10-year high in June, with input costs rising at the fastest pace since the series began a quarter century ago.

Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann says German inflation is heading for 4% later this year, a level unseen since the Reunification boom in the early 1990s when interest rates were near double digits – not minus 0.5%. He has called for early tapering of pandemic bond purchases well before the current scheme expires next March, and a total halt to quantitative easing as soon as the pandemic is over. In a remarkable speech to the Ludwig-Erhard-Stiftung (note the venue), Mr Weidmann explicitly warned the ECB not to slide into the trap of fiscal dominance or to “put the sustainability of public finances above the goal of price stability”. He invoked the Trojan war: the wrath of Achilles and the near-fatal rupture of the Greek alliance (following a plague). Interpret that how you wish, but it sounds like a shot across the bows. Does he mean that Europe should not take the German cash cow for granted?

The ECB has been funding the entire budget deficits of the Latin bloc throughout the pandemic, drawing a veil over the underlying deterioration of sovereign debt profiles. The Banco de España says Spain’s debt has jumped 30 percentage points to 125%of GDP since Covid arrived. Portugal has hit 137%. Italy is flirting with 160% of GDP this year. It is an open question whether these countries can finance themselves on the global capital markets without the QE debt shield. A taper tantrum in Europe is an order of magnitude more dangerous than a US taper tantrum.

It would be inaccurate to say that the ECB is politically captured by the debtor states, though there is an element of this. It is captured by New Keynesians, who have abandoned the original “twin pillar” regime (remember M3?) inherited from the monetarist Bundesbank. The effect is much the same. Their policy is incompatible over time with German economic needs or cultural traditions, and must ultimately end in a struggle for monetary control. Nobody should underestimate last year’s incendiary decision by the German constitutional court when it ruled that the ECB has been acting ultra vires, using bond purchases to carry out disguised fiscal rescues in violation of EU treaty law.

Covid-19 has led to a short-term truce and muffled the tensions. But it has deepened the underlying problem and may ultimately bring forward the reckoning between Europe’s creditor and debtor blocs. The fourth wave is freighted with consequences. 

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

Good news: Despite the increase in virus cases, Galicia’s tourism sector has succeeded in gaining bookings and occupation rates of 70 and 80% are expected for July and August, respectively.  Those who’ve come in the last week will have learned of the vagaries of our weather. But I’m sure they’ll all have brought rainwear, given our reputation for 24hour rain, 365 days a year.

Bad news: Despite the price-reduction measures announced by the government, increases won’t stop and are expected to total €139 over the rest of the year. For the average family, I guess 

Just news: The more successful of our (many) narcotraficantes have decided to muscle in on the rich pickings of the hash trade down South. Should lead to a few battles.

The UK

Covid: Below is the latest - shocking - review of the governments's failures, from the medical correspondent of Private Eye. Will Boris Johnson ever pay the price for his poor leadership? Very probably, as "All political lives end in failure". The only question is When.

A propos . . . Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus.

Quote of the Day

As restrictions ease. . . The great mask debate isn't really about clinical efficacy or the coherence of the rules. It's about signalling the sort of person you are. Are you freedom-loving and rational, or socially responsible and selfless?  

The Way of the World

More than a third of Brits aged 30 to 49 have stopped talking to someone over a political stance but less than 20% of people aged 50 to 64 have done so. The study found that “wokeness” and “cancel culture” were becoming a dividing line in the UK. 

Finally  . . .

In the crazy world of fashion, an ounce of ostrich feathers was once - in the 19th century - worth more than an ounce of gold.

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

COVID IN THE UK

Cock and bull 

Dominic Cummings' 7-hour confession to the joint inquiry of the health and social care committee and science and technology committee upped the ante on prime minister Boris Johnson and health secretary Matt Hancock by alleging one to be "totally unfit to govern" and the other "a serial liar". 

Whether he has the data to back up his claims remains to be seen. But another Covid wave would play into his fantasy of pinning the blame on two people (one of whom he helped install in power). We already know tens of thousands of people might still be alive if the government had made different decisions, but that applies to many governments. Indeed, according to an international independent inquiry, the whole pandemic was a huge failure of global governance and an avoidable tragedy to boot. 

We're doomed . . . 

The UK advisers' view at the pandemic outset was that we were doomed, nothing would work and we could only hope to spread out the inevitable high death toll. Boris Johnson's view at the outset was that it was no worse than 

swine flu and it was OK to shake hands with people in hospitals when advised not to. MD's view at the outset was that a pandemic would be prevented by swift global action, as it was with SARS-CoV-1 in 2003. We were all wrong. 

Persistent bollocks 

Many ministers and advisers have persisted with a party line they know is bollocks. Anyone who says any of the following is either lying or woefully misinformed . . ,. 

I. We were well prepared for the pandemic 

2. Herd immunity was never the plan 

3. We put a protective ring around care homes 

4. There were no PPE shortages 

5. We protected the NHS 

The best chance of stopping the pandemic was at source. In the unlikely event of China having a public inquiry, we might finally discover whether the virus came from a bat cave or a laboratory, and what early opportunities to contain it were squandered. Once it reached our borders, via Europe, we had a defeatist pandemic plan based on influenza to guide us until more evidence emerged. Countries that had experienced the horrors of SARS-CoV-1 in 2002 were guided by the urgent need to keep it out at any cost. 

That expert advice in full . . .

2011 UK flu plan: In January 2020, the UK used its pandemic flu planning as the default for Covid, and waved the white flag. The 2011 advice stated: "It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so." 

2014 UK flu plan: "International travel restrictions are highly unlikely to interrupt the spread of an epidemic significantly." 

2016 Exercise Cygnus: In 2016, Exercise Cygnus, aka Exercise Sittng Duck, modelled for a "swan flu pandemic" and concluded: "The UK's preparedness and response, in terms of its plans, policies and capability, is currently not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic that will have a nationwide impact across all sectors." 

We had 4 years to put it right, but the government opted for more austerity before the Treasury miraculously found £372bn to bail us out of the pandemic. We didn't improve our preparation. Our stockpile of essential PPE was inadequate and in some cases out of date. We didn't have a plan for mass testing. And with our overloaded health services and shocking levels of obesity and chronic disease, we truly were sitting ducks. 

2017 risk register: The 2017 UK national risk register estimated that 20,000-750,000 people could die in the event of a pandemic flu-like illness. It prompted no action. 

Following the science . . .

21 January 2020: The UK's NERVTAG (New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group} estimates that closing the border to 50%of passengers - its toughest sanction - should not be recommended as this would "only delay an epidemic in the UK, not prevent one". So we kept borders open and imported the virus on at least 1,536 occasions from Spain, Italy and France in February and March 2020. 

22 Jan: SAGE agrees with NERVTAG that border screening would be ineffective, and says we should hand out leaflets and posters asking any sick passengers to come forward instead. 

30 Jan: The World Health Organization raises the risk of the coronavirus outbreak to its highest level, a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC}. It warns that "all countries should be prepared for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread". However, it does not recommend face masks or border controls. 

3 February: The government's Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group (SPI-M-O) is less optimistic: "It is unclear whether outbreaks can be contained by isolation and contract tracing. If a high proportion of asymptomatic cases are infectious, then containment is unlikely via these policies." 

11 Feb: SPI-M-O recommends the government should not close down mass gatherings. 

18 Feb: SAGE advises that "when there is sustained transmission in the UK, contact tracing will no longer be useful". Which is just as well, as it only has contract tracing capacity for 5 cases per week (requiring 800 contacts). At a push it could manage 50 cases a week. 

25 Feb: Public Health England (PHE) issues guidance for care homes that says it is "very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected". Staff are told they need not wear masks, because they "do 

not provide protection from respiratory viruses". 

The same day, "herd immunity" appears in SAGE minutes based on an Imperial College paper, which declares that measures that are "too effective" merely delay transmission. It postulates allowing the disease to spread and "fine-tuning" infections until the UK population has reached herd immunity. 

26 Feb: SAGE suggests that suppressing Covid like in Hong Kong and China "would result in a large second epidemic once measures were lifted". The "preferred outcome for the NHS" might be to allow some disease to spread while reducing the peak. 

3 March: SAGE writes: "There was agreement that Government should advise against greetings such as shaking hands and hugging, given existing evidence about the importance of hand hygiene." Boris Johnson tells a televised press conference: "I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands." 

The government launches the "contain" phase of its corona virus action plan, described as "detect early cases, follow up close contacts, and prevent the disease taking hold in this country for as long as is reasonably possible". 

4 March: Adverts promoting face masks as protection from Covid are banned in the UK. PHE says masks are ineffective and instead urges more hand-washing to delay the spread of the virus. SAGE advises that introducing social distancing measures could potentially decrease the total number of deaths by around 20-25%, and substantially reduce the peak of the infection. It still believes that cancelling large-scale public events wouldn't contain the outbreak. 

Herd it all before . . . 

5 March: SAGE again refers to a herd immunity strategy, allowing healthier people to gradually catch the virus and develop immunity while "cocooning" those more likely to die if infected. The UK "optimal policy" is to avoid strong measures to suppress the virus early on, allowing infections to develop over the summer months while suppressing the peak to 4,500 deaths per day, and reaching herd immunity by September. Modelling assumes that suppression measures can be sustained for a maximum of 3-4 months, so introducing early lockdown-style measures to stop the disease is judged likely to lead only to a more deadly resurgence later on when they are lifted. 

6 March: Care home workers are still operating under February guidance that "face masks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses such as Covid-19 and do not need to be worn by staff", NERVTAG reports that much of the UK's limited stockpile of high grade respirators is being used up and "there are concerns that there may not be enough FFP3 stock for use later on when it may be needed". NERVTAG explains why masks are discouraged for the public but recommended for healthcare staff. Unlike the public, trained healthcare staff "know when to change the masks when they become soggy". 

l2 March: The government announces that it will stop all community testing for SARSCoV-2 infections and focus instead on testing people in hospitals as it moves from the "contain" phase to the "delay" phase (aka Operation Sitting Duck). 

16 March: The UK strategy of "herd immunity" (aka "mitigation" or "single peak") aims to reach population immunity in one surge before September, with 40m lower-risk citizens taking it on the chin while the higher-risk citizens hide. Alas, a new SAGE model predicts 259,000 deaths would result, with NHS intensive care capacity overwhelmed eightfold. 

17 March: First use of the word "lockdown" in SAGE minutes. We lock down six days later. 

2 April: The government publishes advice to care homes. It states that some patients "may have Covid-19, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic. All of these patients can be safely cared for in care homes if the guidance is followed." It also states that "negative tests are not required prior to transfers/admissions into the care home". 

5 April: Boris Johnson is admitted to hospital with Covid. 

I5 April: Prior testing before discharge to a care home becomes mandatory* (*er, where available). 

Testing truths 

Government advice on testing and tracing has flip-flopped from "no point" to "can't be done" to "essential for those with symptoms" to "test the whole country, symptoms or not". We could have done as the WHO advised on 

30 January 2020 and massively ramped up our test and trace capacity early. Taiwan and Germany did. We didn't. 

Protecting the NHS 

Ww did not protect the NHS or patients. We didn't have sufficient PPE or tests. Tens of thousands caught the virus inside hospitals and many died. ITU just about coped by dangerously understaffing its units and pushing staff to the point of exhaustion. Many now have crippling long Covid. Many patients have suffered and died because they couldn't access non-Covid care. Waiting times will take years to come down. General practice is in meltdown. In hindsight, and now, stopping the virus at our borders is a much better plan. 

Freedom postponed? 

No one  knows what will happen after 21 June. The government needs to treat us as adults and share all the data and modelling that informs whatever decision it makes. As with any treatment, there is no guarantee. But we need to know the benefits, risks, alternatives and unknowns of any decision, and what the safety net is if shit happens again. 

The government should also revisit its pandemic management, admit to errors and apologise for them. Many scientists at the time raised concerns that delayed lockdowns would cause thousands of needless deaths. For the millions of people harmed by Covid, Dominic Cummings' recent allegations merely add to the pain, and 5 years is- a long time to wait for the public inquiry's verdict. The government needs to grow up and 'fess up now. With evolving variants, herd immunity may never be fully achieved, even with global vaccination. But it remains our best shot at freedom . . . 

 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 latest rules for Brits hoping to come to Spain.

The Paradors are government-owned hotels in ex palaces, mansions and monasteries throughout Spain, Mostly, they're architecturally magnificent, though the modern ones don't find favour with me. But I've always been a bit ambivalent about the staff, some of whom offer only desultory service. Or, as I once out it, they seem to invest themselves with the importance of their celebrity guests and look down on the rest of us. I mention this because of my Sunday morning experience in Pontevedra's Parador in the last year. Especially when it's sunny, I go there to have a coffee before my midday tiffin. If any of the ladies are on duty, they answer immediately the (compulsory) bell in the lobby and then guide me to the terrace. But the one chap who works there always retreats out of sight and doesn't emerge to answer the repeated summonses of the bell. Leaving me to stand waiting - ignored also by the receptionist - until, after 7-10 minutes, I get fed up and leave for a place where they still offer newspapers. My assumption is that this happens because the waiter knows I'm  not a guest, just a would-be coffee client. Anyway, more annoyed than ever yesterday, I took out my plastic Amigos de los Paradores card and - with some difficulty - ripped it in half,  then threw it in disgust on the floor below the little table with the notice and the bell on  it. I'm sure this will have no effect whatsoever but - as I departed in high dudgeon - I felt a bit better. 

A propos  . . . One of the best Paradores is up in the Galician hills, featured in this post.

María's Final Stretch. Days 29 & 30. It has to be asked what's been done with all that freedom . . . .    

The Way of the World

See the article below to see how Oxfam has lost its way over anti-racism. It takes some believing.

Quote of the Day

Samuel Johnson is said by some to have got most things right. Like Eric Blair, I guess. He certainly in this case IMHO: A cucumber should be well-sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out. But I don't know if EB liked them. 

Spanish/English

Here's an example of something in English which isn't quite right, to me, as a translation of the Spanish. Not, I guess, the original German:-

Is 'has pain' really the best option? Why not 'feels the pain of failure'? And I'd prefer 'trying' to 'attempting'.

Finally  . . .

Nice work, if you can get it . . .

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

THE ARTICLE 

How Oxfam lost its way over anti-racism. By attacking its own staff's integrity, the charity seems to care more about race theory than the wellbeing of actual women.

Zoe Strimpel, The Times

There have been promising signs recently of a growing backlash in Britain to some of the institutionalised excesses of wokeness. The Government has given the kibosh to unconscious race bias training in Whitehall, and cracked down on universities’ ability to no-platform speakers deemed racist (and transphobic, and all the other ics and ists). Last week I wrote about the Office for Students’ decision to investigate higher educational establishments, including the universities of Hull and Worcester, who claim it is racist and Euro-centric to mark down essays for bad English.

But alongside the prickings of hope there is still a current of deranged woke thinking bubbling up in certain environments with chilling regularity. Last week Oxfam offered a sharp reminder of just how far the extremes of anti-racism ideology have seeped through. It is hardly surprising that a charity working with people in developing countries has an interest in race that, given contemporary fixations, invites theorising about white privilege and white supremacy. What is more surprising, what takes one’s breath away, is the sheer insulting viciousness of this interest; more of a fixation, really. 

The charity circulated a “whiteness” survey to its 1,800 UK staff, 88 per cent of whom are white. The survey stated that whiteness is “a power construct created by white nations for the benefit of white people”, bulldozing, as contemporary race zealots are wont to do, all notion of class or gender. It’s hard to imagine that the Irish labourers and Lancaster loom workers of the Victorian period, working in infernal conditions, or men slaving in mine shafts, or working class women facing their 11th baby, would have felt in receipt of a “power construct” to their benefit. But hey ho.

With the stone-cold hostility of tone that has become the hallmark of social justice warriors, the survey intoned that those who quibble with blanket condemnation of whiteness as a form of racism itself should think again: Oxfam “does not recognise reverse racism”.

The ideas and tone of the survey raise the question of how leadership – or whoever has the power to determine organisations’ internal literature and their “training” programmes – can be so badly out of sync with what ordinary people deserve or think.

Oxfam staff rightly felt insulted. “Why are they presuming their workers, who are working for a humanitarian charity, are racists and bigots?” asked one employee.

It is a sign of the times that Oxfam is investing its energy in lunatic, insulting documents that appear to favour a kind of armchair race war while failing to make any material difference at all to the cause. The proportion of ethnic minority employees at Oxfam GB actually fell from 16 per cent in 2019 to 11.8 per cent in 2020.

There is an added unpleasant irony to Oxfam’s vicious line on whiteness: its apparent neglect of interest in gender and the wellbeing of women. The charity is still reeling from the Haiti sex scandal in 2018, in which it was revealed that top staff paid earthquake survivors, some allegedly underage, for sex, along with further charges of a culture of harassment, bullying and intimidation. In April, a female aid worker quit, alleging a “toxic” culture in which her sexual harassment complaint had been ignored. Earlier this month, meanwhile, Oxfam sacked three aid workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo after allegations of sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, intimidation, nepotism and fraud. As one employee subjected to the whiteness survey last week pointedly asked: “Surely the time and money should be better spent on the real findings that some of the men they employ are sexual predators?

It’s not just that Oxfam seems to prefer going on about critical race theory to thinking about actual women’s welfare: its fixation with race and particularly whiteness has led it to open hostility towards women. A training pamphlet put together by the charity’s LGBT network in 2020 and seen earlier this month by The Telegraph included gems like: “Mainstream feminism centres on privileged white women and demands that “bad men” be fired or imprisoned”. In reporting rapists and other criminals, white women “[legitimise] criminal punishment, harming black and other marginalised people”. Then there was the charming assertion that the women who report men of colour for rape are “contemptible”. The document advises staff to read Sussex gender studies professor Alison Phipps’s book Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism, which concludes that “Mainstream feminism is supporting, not undoing, the root causes of sexual violence”. The four-week “learning journey” links to Phipps’s Twitter account, which, in its own summary of the book, declares: “White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetuate through white supremacy.” Come again?

The pamphlet was optional, but the existence of documents like it, and its race survey, indicate the infiltration of an ideology that is redefining what Oxfam is – a theory-twiddling charity more obsessed with race than with the wellbeing and dignity of its female staff. Most Britons – and especially most people working at Oxfam – are deeply sympathetic to the fight against racism. Attacks on their integrity, such as that of the whiteness survey, are not only entirely uncalled for, they serve to sow racial tension where there was none.

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'

Please note. This blog appears on both Google's Blogger and on Wordpress. I'm not happy with the former and some readers say the latter is easier to read. So, I'll be leaving Blogger in the near future. If you want to switch, this is the link. Click on Blog and maybe sign up for receipt by email. Which helps me know my readership.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Our local police have decided to get tough with kids doing what kids do, threatening fines of €300 per infraction. As ever with the young in Spain, the response seems to have been slow. Reminding me of what a teacher friend said years ago: Thanks to Franco, there's a fear of being labelling authoritarian in Spain. We don't know how to say No to our children. Maybe she was right.

Latifundios are (very) large estates, associated for centuries with rich, absentee owners. Mostly in the South. Here in the North West, we have the opposite situation - minifundios - small or even tiny plots resulting from regular divisions on inheritance. The source of many land disputes. The Diario de Pontevedra recently reported that there are actually 2.5 minifundios for every person living in Pontevedra province. 

The UK

The EU/Germany

AEP takes another critical view - below - at Mrs Merkel's legacy, both for Germany and the EU.

The USA

Q. Is James Corden the UK’s most annoying export?

A. Yes. And has been for quite some time. Many in Britain heaved a deep sigh of relief when he took his cheeky-chappy routine across the pond. Now some Americans have cottoned on to Corden’s guilty secret: he isn’t very funny.

The Way of the World

The pandemic has presented yet another intoxicating way for one group of people to assert its beliefs over another group of people. It is grating to watch. For nearly a year now, it’s been happening: the casual demonising of the vast majority who aren’t being sufficiently “vigilant” or “honest”. It doesn’t matter if you have in fact spent months hiding in the dark, wiping down vegetables, or if you are double-vaxed, or if your own mother nearly died of Covid. You must fully demonstrate you are morally pure by showing how dedicated you are to doing exactly what this tiny minority wants at all times, even if that means wearing your mask outside and not going on holiday, or testing your child repeatedly. 

Spanish/English

I contend it's easy to see when something in English has been translated - even if totally correctly - from the Spanish original. Not so much, say, the word order as style. Or 'floweriness'. In the Madrid museum last week, I was rather fascinated by word-perfect English versions of the information plaques which, nonetheless, seemed to me not to have been done - or approved by - a native speaker. Possibly the striving for perfection. Or, more usually, the use of words or phrases that a native speaker would confine to specific occasions. For example 'the wee hours of the morning'. And then there are the phrases which might just sound better or actually mean something in Spanish - such as Over the last years or The Plurality of Contrasts. Finally, there's the words such as quintrelle and which almost no native speaker would recognise. And such translations as Royal Progresses for Jornadas Reales. Though, with its 15 meanings in the Royal Academy's dictionary, jornada certainly does present a challenge. Including: Viaje que los reyes hacían a los sitios reales, and Tiempo que los reyes residían en un sitio real. I rest my case.

The museum, by the way, stressed that there was no  planning involved in the expansion of Madrid during the 18th and 19th centuries. Which didn't come as a huge surprise, given the residual Spanish aversion to anything as un-spontaneous as planning or making genuine commitments . . .

Finally  . . .

On Wordpress, this blog seems to be followed by a disproportionate number of folk in India. They aren’t exactly spammers but in some way must be trying to promote their own sites. Possibly in the vainglorious belief I will go to them . . 

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

THE ARTICLE 

We all love Mutti Merkel but she leaves a trail of wreckage across Europe. Angela Merkel is a reassuring figure on the international stage but her policy errors have harmed Europe and the German economy    Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The Telegraph

The long unadventurous reign of Angela Merkel will go down in history as Germany’s Brezhnev era, a time of deceptive stability that masks the onset of slow structural decline. The country has clung to comfortable immobilism and a pre-digital business model. Beguiled by relative ascendency within Europe and the mercantilist advantages of an undervalued exchange rate, it seems only dimly aware of the dangers. “People don’t realize it now but we are witnessing the end of Germany as an economic superpower,” says Ashoka Mody, former deputy-director at the International Monetary Fund in Europe. The verdict is even blunter from Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin and author of Die Deutschland Illusion. “We’re living in cloud-cuckoo land,” he once told me.

German outperformance compared to the rest of Europe - but not the world, which it lags badly - is mostly the fruit of an ‘internal devaluation’ within the closed eurozone system. This was made possible by the Hartz IV wage compression policies enacted before Chancellor Merkel took power. It became easier to fire workers. Unit labour costs in German manufacturing fell 4.6%in the single year of 2005.

Angela Merkel inherited a regime in which German industry had acquired a competitive edge of 20-30& against the Club Med bloc, which was nigh impossible for the South to reverse without going into debt deflation and making matters even worse. Ultimately this was untenable for a currency union, as became all too clear. The other reason for German outperformance over the Merkel years has been the role of Deutschland Inc as chief supplier of engineering equipment and industrial goods to China, a phase of development that is waning as China moves up the ladder and pursues an autarky policy of import substitution under Xi Jinping.

Chancellor Merkel is an immensely reassuring figure on the European stage and deserves a cordial welcome on her valedictory visit to Britain. But she also bears much of the responsibility for Europe’s Lost Decade, a calamitous episode of monetary mismanagement and austerity overkill that set the stage for Brexit. She allowed the eurozone debt crisis to fester for 3 years until it engulfed the Spanish and Italian debt markets in mid-2012 and threatened to set off a cataclysmic chain of sovereign defaults. Only then did she agree (after US intervention) to let the European Central Bank assume its critical role as a lender of last resort.

Her government used its control over the EU’s institutional machinery to impose austerity overkill on southern Europe, driving the whole region into a contractionary vortex that pushed debt-to-GDP ratios even higher and was largely self-defeating even on its own crude terms.

Although she agreed to joint debt issuance under the EU Recovery Fund last year, the sums are modest when stretched over six years and the structure reverts to the status quo ante over time. It is not a permanent fiscal entity or Europe's 'Hamilton Moment'.It does not correct the original sin of the euro, the creation of a federal currency without a federal EU treasury or economic government to make it workable. Indeed, Mrs Merkel has spent 16 years digging in her heels at every juncture to prevent it happening. The dysfunctional halfway house remains in place to cause the next crisis.  

The Merkel austerity formula for Europe caused several hundred thousand economic refugees from Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and even France at one point, to migrate to Britain in search of work. It also diverted large numbers of Eastern Europeans who would have worked in other EU states to come to Britain too. These migrants have, thankfully, prevented the National Health Service and British care homes from keeling over. We should cherish them. But the sudden influx of so many people led to social tissue rejection at a critical moment in 2015 and 2016. Chancellor Merkel’s decision to throw open the doors to the vast refugee caravan from the Mid-East (mostly economic migrants, and not from Syria, as it turned out) fed the mood that Europe was out of control. If that had been the only problem, Brexit would never have happened. But Angela Merkel rammed through a series of EU initiatives that successively undermined British consent for the EU project.

She revived the European Constitution after it had been rejected by the French and Dutch people, repackaging it as the Lisbon Treaty and expediting it by executive fiat without fresh referenda. Tony Blair acquiesced under the pretence that it was a cleaning-up exercise. The effect was to transform the EU from a confederacy of treaty states into a quasi-federation with Germany constitutionally established as primus inter pares. It greatly extended the writ of the European Court and made the Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding, subverting the Common Law system and allowing euro-judges to rule on almost any matter, such as UK intelligence sharing with the US, or Swedish tax policy. It created a de facto supreme court for Europe. This was revolutionary.

Mrs Merkel circumvented David Cameron’s veto of the EU Fiscal Compact when he requested safeguards for the City, pushing through a separate treaty that isolated Britain and created a very nasty atmosphere. Mr Cameron was right as it happens: the Compact was economic vandalism, and has proved unenforceable.

She ignored him when he tried to stop the appointment of arch-federalist Jean-Claude Juncker as Commission president, breaching an EU tradition that no large state should ever be overruled on this choice. The broad British public may not have followed these episodes but political, media, and financial opinion did take note, and that was to tip the fine balance.

Mrs Merkel acted with a single-minded determination in what she saw as the German national interest (while always calling it the European interest), but lacked Fingerspitzengefühl for what it might mean to anybody else.

In the case of Britain, it meant Brexit, which has deprived the EU of its second biggest net contributor, its financial hub, and a leading defence and security power. It has deprived Germany of a blocking minority against the French-led protectionist states in the EU Council, and jeopardised its captive export market in the UK. In short, it brought about a diplomatic reverse of the first order for Germany itself.

At home, Mrs Merkel never seriously challenged the balanced-budget ideology of the German establishment, more or less letting the maniacal Wolfgang Schauble do his worst. Public investment has been negative for most years since the early 2000s, even though borrowing costs were zero and the economic multiplier on infrastructure spending is known to be high. The result of this flat-earth policy has been predictable.

Most Britons would be surprised to learn that Germany has had one of the slowest growing economies in the advanced bloc over the last 20 years. The OECD says productivity growth has averaged 1.2% annually since 1995, compared to 1.7% in the US, or 3.9% in Korea, which has spent its money pulling far ahead in G5 coverage and artificial intelligence.

Germany has sought to future-proof itself against its coming ageing crisis by controlling debt rather than modernising the economy. The Bundesbank says the old-age dependency ratio will rise to  39.35 by 2025, reaching 505 by mid-century. Greens deem this utter folly. They will launch an investment blitz if they sweep into power in September, but Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats are more likely to win and they still worship at the altar of fiscal rectitude.

The country has by now woken up to the slippage in digital technology, disturbed to discover that fibre-optic cable coverage lags Turkey and is too limited to support basic IT operations in extensive regions. The Tesla shock is too great to ignore. Almost everybody understands at this point that the German speciality of superb diesel and petrol engines is obsolete in a net-zero world. Volkswagen’s Herbert Diess says German carmakers risk going the way of Coventry within a decade unless they can quickly master the production of computers on wheels, where Silicon Valley has a large but not unassailable lead.  At stake is an industry of 800,000 workers that supports a wider ecosystem amounting to 10%  of German GDP.

There is of course much ruin in a great nation, to borrow from Adam Smith. Nothing is foreordained and it would be a mistake to underestimate the resourceful German people. But it is hard to see how anything of substance is going to change as long as the Merkel mentality holds its suffocating grip on Germany. We all love Mutti and wish her well. But long survival in office is not the same as statesmanship.  

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'

Please note. This blog appears on both Google's Blogger and on Wordpress. I'm not happy with the former and some readers say the latter is easier to read. So, I'll be leaving Blogger in the near future. If you want to switch to Wordpress, this is the link. You can sign up there for receipt by email. Which helps me know my readership.

Covid  

Europe: 

1. As expected, Mrs Merkel has abandoned her efforts to co-ordinate a Europe-wide hard-line stance on British arrivals in the EU, compelling quarantine. 

2. Despite central pronouncements, 10 states have said they won’t penalise Brits who've received a jab from an AZ batch made in India. Spain is one of these.

3. Mystifyingly, despite evidence to the contrary, the UK ministry of Health say that no one in the has been done from Indian-made batches . . .

The UK: Talks are in progress about co-ordinating the NHS app with the EU Certificate system to ensure that it is seamlessly integrated, by the end of July.  

Spain:

The overall incidence rate has jumped again, to 153 per 100,000 for the past 14 days, taking the country back over the ‘high risk’ level.  And the rate has also increased to 405-450 in the 12-29 age cohort. Nil chance of Amber becoming Green, then.  

Cosas de España/Galiza

The Diario de Pontevedra reports our car-hating mayor as saying the city is winning the battle against the trárfico. I wonder if that's the vehicle trárfico or the narco trárfico . . . Almost certainly not the latter.

Lenox on Spanish maids. Las chicas.

More bloody subsidies for 'numerous families' here in Galicia; they’re to be given discounts on the toll roads, meaning higher prices for the rest of us.

María's Final Stretch. Days 27-28. A nice find. 

The EU

Something on getting longterm residency in every state.

The USA

Academics say Trump wasn't the worst ever president. Well, that's academics for you . . . On the details . .  Out of 10 characteristics of good leadership, Trump got his best marks for public persuasion (32nd out of 44) and economic management (34th). He came last, however, for moral authority and administrative skills.  

Quote of the Day

Eighteen months on . . . I now hate every moment in a mask. Like many I began cheerily, bought colourful and amusing designs, tried to match them with outfits. I was fascinated by how easily we adapted. But now I have cheap blue paper ones shoved in every pocket. I hate my glasses steaming up; that waterboarding, can’t-breathe sensation when the paper gets damp; the faffing about before you enter a shop. Above all I detest the limits they put on communication, preventing the small talk or joke with a stranger that can lift your day. Perhaps others can read precise feelings just from someone’s eyes, but I can’t. I’d happily trade my mask for a badge saying “I’m fully vaxxed”. There is nothing more creepily dystopian than a tide of silent faceless figures wandering a shopping mall. We will never feel our happy, connected, normal selves until we let the mask slip.

As I've admitted, the worst thing for me is that they make every Spanish woman beautiful because of those big brown eyes . . . And I know this ain't really true.

Spanish

Desmadre: Mess, Blast, Riot: What the kids are having in the Balearics and everywhere else now.

Spanglish

Dale hard al ingles con just 15 minutitos de Gymglish every day.

Finally  . . .

In the UK, folk hang black plastic bags on dog poo in trees. I asked the internet why they do this bizarre thing and got this reply: The general consensus is that it's down to laziness - similar to the reason why it's suspected so many people litter. Some believe people think they are being "helpful" by hanging bags of dog poo up on trees or fences. Here in Pontevedra, along the river, they don't bother to hang them up but chuck them under the nearest bush. So, I guess this other response is relevant here: They bag it in case anyone is watching because that is what dog owners are expected to do. They leave it on the trail or toss it into the bush still in the bag when no one is looking because they are inconsiderate, lazy, stupid, and have no respect for the environment.

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 

I had hoped to have ended this section by now but . . . 

Some good news: The Covid crisis has vastly accelerated innovation and not just for vaccines. From liquid biopsies to nanotech therapies, these [below] are the other discoveries that will change society for ever.  

Europe: Bad news from the WHO.

The EU: Germany might well have abandoned its efforts to have a common (negative) approach - a la Germany’s - towards Brits wanting to enter the EU.  

The UK: Despite that, confusion persists about whether fully-vaccinated Brits can avoid quarantine on arrival in, say Spain - especially if one or both of their jabs was manufactured in India.

Spain:

1. The overall incidence rate has jumped another 17 points to 134 per 100,000 inhabitants for the past 14 days and a 3rd region now has an incidence rate above 150 - Andalucia (162), Cantabria (194) and Cataluña (182).

2. For those aged between 12 and 29, the rate now ranges between 345 and 367. Not good.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Mark Stücklin gives us 3 helpful articles today:-

1. Barcelona and Madrid as WFH options

2. How to evict non-paying tenants

3. How to protect your home. 

Spain has long been blighted by language ‘wars’, at least in those regions which have a separate official language from Castellano. When I first came to Galicia, every letter you got was in both Castellano and Gallego. Now, there’s rarely any Castellano. And while most web sites will be in both languages, those of the Xunta might well not be. Down in Madrid the pretty-far-right PP president there has just set up an Office of Spanish in the Department of Culture. One wonders why.

In her page cited yesterday, María cites the lack of consideration for others among ‘egocentric’ kids and their parents. I’d go so far as to say this is a major deficiency among the Spanish. True, they can be personable. admirable and even ‘noble’ and they make good Samaritans, if you’re in trouble, but - on a day to day basis - they can show a remarkable lack of consideration for strangers. And they get very upset if told that, by the standards of other cultures, they can be impolite. To put it politely. 

Portugal 

Good to know . .  As of today, the toll on the A3 from Galicia to Oporto is now half of what it was. 

The Way of the World/Quote of the Day

Not long ago, in fact around the time of the 2012 Olympics, multicultural Britain was being held up as a beacon of “live and let live” common sense in a turbulent world. Now it's splintering into militant sectarianism. There are people on all sides — anarchic agitators, sinister anti-woke stirrers, outright racists and the merely gullible — who are intent on using culture not to unify but divide. The arts world should rise above this, yet it is being dragged into the mire. . . .  Each faction goads the others into more and more ludicrous stances. There’s no meeting of minds any more. Taken from this: It’s time we stopped our cultural life being dictated by mob rule. Click here for more on this.

English

Theses are said to be the 16 words/phrases that will instantly make Brits' teeth itch:-

- Emails at work from complete strangers that start with hoping you are “enjoying the sun” or that you have had a “relaxing weekend”. 

-Fascist. Now generally used [o describe a person who has the power to deny you something. In Spain, anyone who disagrees with you]

- Literally. 'There was literally nowhere to park.'  

- For sure. An Americanism now used as a faintly patronising alternative to “right” or “exactly”. It implies just a hint of “That’s implicit but it’s not what I’m getting at”.

- Inappropriate. This expresses recognition of wrongdoing without committing yourself to condemning it.

- Three day wedding. What was wrong with a drink and a canapé, speeches, cake, more drink, tears, minicab home?  

- Blessed. There are a few words tha make us think of Meghan and 'blessed' is one of them.

- I’m good. As in “I will not be requiring any of your delicious pavlova, thank you so much”. Another Americanism. Fine, but to our ears it always sounds rude.

- TBH. The abbreviation of To Be Honest. A bit like OMG used to be. Slightly ridiculous.

- Cute. This has got more unbearable over time since it can now be applied equally to: a dog; a small child; an elderly man, namely Captain Tom; a bath toy; an owl; a footballer; a table decoration; a sexy text message, a cupcake, a tight T-shirt, and an octopus. It can't be right to use the same word to describe a newborn as an oiled up Love Island contestant in a thong. Cute is now a word meaning awwww and phowar, and maybe the worst.

- Babes. In the same family as cute.

- Barrista. Is it a special skill requiring months of training like, say, a pastry chef, or sommelier? Don’t think so.

- Going forwards. As in “We think this would be a better arrangement, going forwards”. One of those unnecessary add-on creepies. See also, “reaching out”.

- We’re detoxing. It’s possible people don’t say detoxing any more because they’ve switched to “fasting” or “We’re on a no carbs no sugar thing” and that’s a relief because “detoxing” is both irritating and impossible.

- Authentic. As in your goddaughter describing her new boyfriend as authentic, because he refuses to get his haircut in order to secure a job in the hospitality industry.

- Spiritual. Roughly the same.

Yesterday, I thought of a 17th but I  can’t now recall what it was. Maybe tomorrow.

Finally  . . .

I do, of course, support 2 national footballs teams and the odds are they will meet in the final. In my Pilates class yesterday - admittedly to a degree of scepticism - I insisted its wouldn’t matter to me me which one one. Unless, England outplays Spain but still loses. Worst of all, on penalties.

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

THE ARTICLE  

Five unexpected pandemic breakthroughs. The Covid crisis has vastly accelerated innovation and not just for vaccines. From liquid biopsies to nanotech therapies, these are the other discoveries that will change society for ever

Liquid biopsies

Last spring, as Covid-19 swept across Britain and hospital wards filled with gasping patients, the cancer specialist Dr Angela George came up against a serious problem. “We had patients with what looked like cancers on imaging, but we couldn’t get biopsies,” she says. “There was no capacity.” In normal times cancer treatment can begin only once a biopsy — a small tissue sample from a tumour — confirms the disease is malignant. But with staff diverted to the Covid response and many more sick or isolating, the colonoscopies, bronchoscopies and other procedures needed to take such samples were unavailable. So George, a consultant oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital, turned to a technique that has long been held as the future of diagnostics: the liquid biopsy. For years cancer specialists have explored the concept of using these highly sensitive blood tests to detect the DNA shed by tumours to diagnose and monitor cancer precisely without the pain and inconvenience of a biopsy. But despite excitement about the prospects, progress had been slow. Then the pandemic struck and necessity became the mother of invention: experimental techniques were dragged from the future into the present. George’s team started using liquid biopsies to diagnose and treat patients with suspected cancers of the lungs, pancreas, ureter and bile duct. They are now carrying out a clinical trial to try to make the practice routine. While these are early days, eventually doctors hope to be able to do away with surgical biopsies altogether.

Nanotech heroics

If genetic engineering has been the flashy star of the Covid vaccine miracle, lipid nanotechnology has been its unsung hero. Nanotechnology is the vehicle at the heart of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, used to transport tiny strands of genetic material called messenger RNA (mRNA) into the body. This prompts cells to start making Sars-CoV-2 proteins, which, in turn, prime the immune system to detect future infection. Scientists have been working on mRNA therapies for decades, but until recently were unable to keep these fragile strands of code intact in the body for long enough for them to transmit their message. Lipids — tiny balls of fat — provided the answer. They encapsulate the RNA, below left, protecting it for long enough to reach the cells.

The potential of the field is enormous. These tiny fat balls — often known as microbubbles — act as a highly effective drug-delivery system. At the University of Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Professor Eleanor Stride is developing a technique where microbubbles, each 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair, are used to deliver chemotherapy directly to cancerous tumours. A beam of ultrasound is targeted at the relevant part of the body. When the bubbles pass through the ultrasound wave, they burst, releasing the medication at the precise point it is needed.

“We can massively reduce the amount of chemotherapy that we need,” Stride says. Rather than flooding the whole blood system with chemotherapy, as is done traditionally, tiny but very concentrated volumes of the drug are used. That means much higher doses can be deployed without the usual side effects

Her team is trialling this approach for brain, pancreatic and bladder cancer, and hopes also to do so for stroke patients by delivering clot-busting drugs directly to the brain.

Bespoke medicine

When we first went into lockdown, the UK had capacity to perform no more than 5,000 Covid tests a day. Since then a vast diagnostics network has been created and up to 1.9 million tests are now carried out daily. Doctors believe this new testing capacity could lead to an era of personalised healthcare. Much of medicine is currently based on educated guesswork. For example, the elderly are given a flu jab because they tend to have weaker immune systems. But instead of assuming there is a drop-off in immunity for all over-50s, why not test for antibodies on an individual basis?

Experts are already investigating the idea of carrying out regular antibody tests to see whether individuals are still protected against coronavirus. If their levels are too low, they would simply have a booster jab.

Straightforward antibody tests could be sent by post to every house in the country. Professor Paul Moss of Birmingham University, who leads the UK Coronavirus Immunology Consortium, says: “I see a way that we will be screened at home, possibly every six months or every year, with a fingerprick test.” The Birmingham team is already using such tests to screen leukaemia patients after they are vaccinated, to measure how their immune systems have reacted to the jab. It could also be used to streamline other immunisation programmes.

Professor Sharon Peacock of Cambridge University, who helped spearhead the Covid genomics effort, believes mass monitoring could be used to track antibiotic resistance — considered to be one of the greatest risks to human health. By routinely decoding the genomes of bacteria, the spread of evolving superbugs could be tracked in the same way that new Covid variants have been mapped.

With schools closed for months on end, the young have had a hard time of it. But one unexpected benefit has been the discovery that age-based school bubbles work wonders for younger children. Segregating pupils into year groups when children returned to school saw year 7 pupils (those aged 11 and 12) flourish, as they were shielded from older pupils and the associated intimidation, bad behaviour and stress, according to research by the Institute for Education in London. The researchers stopped short of recommending complete age-based segregation, but said schools should consider having part of the school dedicated to each year group.

It is an example of the mass human experiment that took place as millions of people were forced into new patterns of behaviour and lifestyle. Lockdown itself, of course, was the biggest experiment of all. When the Chinese city of Wuhan ordered its citizens to stay indoors last January, it seemed inconceivable that the UK could ever follow suit. Yet on March 23, when Boris Johnson told the nation to stay at home to save lives, in our millions we obeyed.

“People are prepared to make very big changes in their behaviour, very quickly, if they see there is a threat and if they see what they can do can make a difference,” says Professor Susan Michie of University College London, who sits on the government’s Sage and behavioural science advisory committees.

Compliance dipped over the summer when government instructions stopped making sense, Michie says. “The mixed messaging, the Eat Out to Help Out policy, the Dominic Cummings fiasco — these dented trust and adherence,” she says. But once infection rates rose again over Christmas we fell back into line. People had understood the risk of the Kent variant and the need to give the new vaccines time to work, Michie says. The lesson? People will change their behaviour to a remarkable extent if they understand the rationale behind it.

Faster clinical trials

In the early days of the pandemic, panicking doctors around the world were trying any drug that had even the slightest chance of tackling Covid. They leapt on antimalarials, antivirals, antibiotics and HIV treatments, despite having no evidence they would work.

So why had doctors abandoned evidence-based medicine? Because in normal times clinical trials take up to a decade. Early on, two Oxford professors, Martin Landray and Peter Horby, designed the Recovery trial, a programme that would dramatically accelerate that process. By inviting every NHS hospital to participate, they could reach a huge trial population. And instead of trialling each drug one by one, they simultaneously tested five treatments. Some 40,000 patients took part.

Last June Recovery showed that dexamethasone, an anti-inflammatory drug that costs just 50p per patient per day, slashed the risk of death among the sickest patients by a third. It has since saved well over a million lives, including 22,000 in the UK. In February an anti-inflammatory called tocilizumab was shown to reduce the risk by another 14 per cent, halving the risk of death to a Covid patient in intensive care.

Earlier this month the trial also showed that a drug developed by the US firm Regeneron cut deaths by 20 per cent among the one in three patients who don’t produce their own antibody response when they contract the virus.

The study also showed that several drugs initially used for Covid — including hydroxychloroquine, which was trumpeted by Donald Trump — gave patients no survival benefit. Recovery has also shown that clinical studies don’t have to take years.

“Trials have become too complex,” Landray says. “It shoots up the costs to something truly ridiculous and the consequence is that people try to avoid doing trials, or they try to make them small and ultra-precise. The problem with a small trial is you might miss the benefit, and the problem with precise trials is you then try to generalise to the real world.”

The concept of bigger, wider, multi-arm trials is already taking hold. A group at UCL has adopted this approach for multiple sclerosis, naming it the Octopus Trial because of its various arms. Landray and Horby were knighted this month in recognition of their work on Recovery.

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

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.  

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'

Covid  

The EU: Details of the EU Certificate/Passport system, now operational

Spain:  

1. Details of what's required of folk coming from the UK

2. Spain's overall incidence rate has jumped from 106 to 117 per 100,000

3. Two thirds of the kids arriving in Vigo from their mega-party in the Balearics tested positive, adding 117 cases in the Pontevedra health area.  

Cosas de España/Galiza

As in the UK re Scotland, the Spanish Prime Minister has said there won't be a referendum on Catalan independence. But, unlike Johnson, Sanchez has added 'never'.

Spain is in the societal van again . . . The Spanish Cabinet on Tuesday approved a  bill that would  allow transgender people over 16 to freely change their gender and name without doctors or witnesses being involved in the process. The proposal could still change during parliamentary debate of the legal draft. But, if its essence prevails, Spain will join a handful of countries enshrining gender self-determination without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or requiring that a person’s physical appearance conforms with traditional male or female expressions. See also the article below.

Another move away from the rigeurs of Catholicism.

María's Final Stretch. Day 26: Those malditas crías . . .    

Ireland

The union of Ireland and Northern Ireland: What is very surprising is the relative lack of debate on the economic challenges of pursuing this. Put bluntly, it would ruin the Republic, at least in the short to medium term. The costs would make the damage visited on the public finances and the economy by the banking and eurozone debt crises of 2008-12 look tame by comparison. This is because Northern Ireland is a hugely subsidised economy. So, as with Scotland, rather different from the Spain-Cataluña issue. 

The Way of the World

American academics have developed a colourful T-shirt emblazoned with a design that manages to send facial recognition algorithms haywire, rendering the wearer invisible to the camera’s detection systems.

Quote of the Day

In one way, Matt Hancock did pick the right time to have regular clinches. Of all the things you’d imagine you could get fired for in Boris Johnson’s Government, having an extramarital liaison with someone who is in some way linked to taxpayer’s money wouldn’t be it.

Spanish

Other new words learnt in the Madrid museum, albeit not terribly useful.-

- Basquiña - bustle

- Aguafuerte - Etching

- Buril - Engraving

Malditas crías - Take your pick: Variably translated as 'Bloody/Damn/Fucking kids’. No one in Spain will turn a hair if you choose the last one, of course.

English

Well, I never . . . 'Cheerio' emerged in the early 20th century from 'Cheero', which was simply used to wish someone cheer. The word 'cheer' used to mean 'expression', and comes from the Latin word carus, meaning 'face'. 

Finally  . . .

I have 2 (male) friends who are on Tinder. They are poles apart:-

Mr A: Swipes right for every woman and then pays to find who's liked him and takes it from there.

Mr Z: Rejects every woman who:-

- smokes

- has a tattoo

- doesn't show her face at all

- obscures her face in shadow or by wearing a Covid mask

- is wearing sunglasses

- has a 2nd or 3rd foto rather less attractive than her 1st one

- is overweight

- is underweight

- places too much stress on dogs or, especially, cats

- displays too much flesh or stresses her sexiness

- puts 'spirituality' in her interests

- Puts beach-going as a main interest

Pretty easy to guess who's having more success. However you define it . . .

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THE ARTICLE 

Spanish bill allows 14-year-olds to change gender: Isambard Wilkinson, Madrid

The Spanish government has approved a draft law that would allow children as young as 14 to change their legal gender with no medical diagnosis, despite strong opposition from members of the ruling coalition’s senior partner, feminists and conservatives.

The bill, drafted by the equality ministry — led by the far-left Podemos party — would allow those aged 16 and over to change their name and gender officially with a sworn statement, while those aged 14 and above could do so if supported by their parents or guardian.

“We are making history with a law that takes a giant step forward for the rights of trans and LGBTI people,” Irene Montero, the equality minister, said. She added that the law would put Spain “at the forefront of Europe in a context where some countries are profoundly questioning the rights of LGBTI people”.

The draft law, which still must be reviewed by advisory bodies and passed by parliament, would make Spain one of 16 countries, including Denmark, Portugal, Norway, Malta and Argentina, that permit gender self-determination without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

It would also allow changes in the official registry to be made more quickly than in most countries: up to four months from the first application to the change finally appearing in official documents. The process would be easily reversible for half a year, but it would require going to court after that.

Spain has allowed an individual to change their name and gender on ID cards without gender reassignment surgery since 2007. But to change their gender officially, at present a person must provide evidence of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Feminist members of the Socialist party of Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, have criticised the right to gender self-identification. A leaked internal document, signed by Carmen Calvo, the deputy prime minister, said that the concept of gender was “being used by certain movements to substitute the very concept of sex”.

Known as the “trans law” but properly titled “law for real and effective equality for trans people”, the original draft proposed by the equality ministry has been watered down slightly, eliminating a clause that would permit 16-year-olds to make decisions about receiving hormone treatments. Originally the draft proposed that 12-year-olds would be able to change their name and gender if supported by parents or a guardian.

Federico de Montalvo, a law professor at Comillas Pontifical University, a private Catholic university in Madrid, said: “I am in favour of transsexuality ceasing to be a pathology, but I am concerned that the trans law will open up a path . . . that will lead to minors being unprotected.”