Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*
Living La Vida Loca in Spain and Galicia
See the first article below for some (alleged) differences between the youth of Spain and the UK.
The Alhambra is an even great treasure trove than I thought.
More on the squatting ‘plague’ and what’s behind it.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And blocked by useless bureaucrats?
María's Dystopian Times, Day 16.
The UK
Huge fines are now in place - belatedly - for breaching the no-party/raves rules. Up to ten thousand quid. Several were levied this weekend.
The EU
Germany wants to beef up the WHO but won't do it alone. As usual, though, France is alongside. If you can do that from the side . . .
The USA
There’s no doubt America’s in rough shape. It’s hard to look at the current presidential ding-dong — staged between two rambling old silverbacks — and not feel a sense of decline. And it’s frankly impossible to immerse yourself in the American public sphere without being troubled by the unending reel of distortion, resentment and rage.
But see the optimistm of the 2nd article below.
The Way of the World
See the 3rd article below on the moribund(?) full stop/period.
English
A new word for me: wokescold: The meaning is obvious, I guess.
English/Spanish
Three more refranes:-
- You could have heard a pin drop: No se oía ni (el vuelo de) una mosca.
- You have to suffer to be in fashion: Lo que es moda es incomoda. [One of the best]
- You have to strike while the iron is hot: A la ocasión la pintan calva. [Needs explanation]
Finally . . .
I've no idea where they've been but the sparrows certainly are back. Indeed, one of them yesterday managed to find its way into my (humane) rat trap that doesn't even have any bait in it - the 4th sparrow to do this in the last couple of months. The greenfinches don't seem to be so dumb/clever.
FWIW - Reader Perry used this in a recent comment. Short for For what it's worth, I believe.
I particularly like this from minute 2.24 on.
THE ARTICLES
1. Unhappy kids: Rod Liddle,. Sunday Times
I was thinking y'day that Spanish kids are not only not taught to think but also, relatedly, not to question either. Reminded by just reading this; My dissecting daughter makes no bones about why our kids aren’t happy:
Apparently British teenagers are the least happy in Europe, according to a less than comprehensive report from the Children’s Society. I asked my 14-year-old daughter why she thought this might be.
She was busy making a pendant from the scales of a decomposing slowworm that she had found in the forest at the bottom of our garden. The creature’s tiny bones had already been stored in a little glass vial, in formaldehyde. I don’t know where she got the chemicals. Teenagers are renowned for their love of chemicals, of course — but not these chemicals, surely.
I had always been proud of her love for and knowledge of nature, inculcated at a very early age — but it seems to have teetered into a kind of psychopathy. She even has a very sharp axe for dismembering larger dead animals, such as badgers or roe deer, and a kind of Black Museum in which she keeps the bleached skulls and reassembled torsos.
Perhaps this is it, I thought to myself: death. Our children have become obsessed with death and surround themselves with it. But her answer, once she had removed her rubber gloves, was different.
“We’re smarter than the other European kids. They are all gullible and deluded,” she said. “I’ve met some. They don’t have a clue what’s going on.”
I quite liked this as an answer and I suspect there is an iota of truth to it. I remembered — before lockdown — seeing a serpentine trail of Spanish adolescents being taken on a tour of my nearby city, Canterbury, and noting how they were all grinning broadly. There is a smugness and stupidity in telling people how happy you are. Some 82% of Spanish kids report themselves mindlessly, inanely cheerful — one of the highest levels in Europe — compared with 64% of our brats.
It certainly made more sense to me than the verdict of the chief executive of the Children’s Society, Mark Russell. Come on, you know what Marky thought was the cause of this abject misery among our children. “The increase in child poverty,” he said. Of course he did. This was published in The Grauniad.
But there hasn’t been an increase in child poverty in the UK. There has, instead, been a rise — slowing, admittedly — in general affluence. If Marky had looked at the European Commission’s Eurostat study of the subject, he would have seen that those Spanish kids were more likely to be at risk of poverty or social exclusion than were British children.
Further, what lies in wait for the Spanish kids is far more depressing than that which awaits the Brit brats: youth unemployment of 40.8%, compared with 12.7% over here. And if they do, somehow, manage to get a job, the average wage is miles below what it is in the UK.
Indeed, if Mr Russell had taken his study seriously, instead of simply parroting the usual right-on mantras, he would have noted a definite correlation, the opposite of the one he identified. Almost all the countries in which young people expressed the greatest mindless enthusiasm for life were those in which the average wage was the lowest in the continent: Lithuania, Croatia, Spain and Romania (the last of which was, in that other survey I mentioned, second-worst of all the European Union countries for child poverty and social exclusion).
I ought to point out that the Children’s Society survey did not include Bulgaria or Moldova or the former Yugoslavian microstates. But I will bet that if it had, those kids would have shown a similar level of happiness to those in Romania or Spain. It is clearly not child poverty that has anything to do with British kids being miserable. It may, instead, be affluence.
Or, if not simply affluence, then expectation and self-entitlement, which are, of course, handmaidens to affluence. A certain avarice, if you want to get Old Testament about it — and an expectation enhanced by the rather perfidious influence of social media, which has a stronger purchase in countries that use the English language. Dissatisfaction occasioned by envy.
And then there are the expectations we have of our own children, the weight we put on their young shoulders to succeed, to be better than the rest. It is not an absence of money that makes our children unhappy, but the very appurtenances of affluence
2. A minority that dares not speak its name. Atheism can be risky, especially in America, but change is coming: Matthew Syed
Pete Stark died earlier this year, but you may not have noticed. A congressman from California, he campaigned on healthcare and played a small role in allowing people to stay on their employers’ health insurance after leaving a job. But that is not why I’m mentioning him. I am mentioning him because he was a member of one of the most discriminated-against minority groups in America.
No, Stark was not gay; he was not in the trans community; nor was he black, Asian, Native American or any of the other labels that might have jumped into your mind. Rather, he was an atheist — in fact, the first person to “come out” as a non-believer in the history of the Congress, which he did in 2007. He didn’t last long, though, unable to win re-election in 2012. His opponent ran a campaign that focused on his lack of faith.
Indeed, to this day, as far as I am aware, no other atheist has won a seat in the House of Representatives or the Senate — and none has captured the White House. The most recent Congress is the most diverse in history, with Native American women, Muslims, a bisexual senator and the youngest woman to gain a seat in either chamber. But there isn’t an atheist — just one representative ticked the box saying “religiously unaffiliated” in a recent survey, but none admitted to no belief at all.
In his book Big Gods, the psychologist Ara Norenzayan collates the evidence that shows why politicians are so afraid of admitting to non-belief. He shows that many in America still cleave to the trope that non-believers are more likely to be amoral and untrustworthy – ironic given that nations like Denmark, with lots of atheists, are rated as among the least corrupt. One survey asks the following question: “would you be willing to vote for a presidential candidate of your own preference who is ......”, with responses such as African American, Catholic, female, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, and so on.
In 1948, only 48% of Americans said they would be willing to vote for an African-American president, perhaps unsurprising given the nation’s history. By 1999, this had doubled, and clear majorities expressed a willingness to vote for all minority groups — Catholics, Jews, women — except one. Only atheists had failed to reach that threshold and, according to dozens of more recent surveys, they remain the most distrusted group today.
In one sense, this discrimination isn’t wholly surprising. Atheists do not have a powerful lobbying group to fight our corner. We are not united by a belief, but by the absence of a belief. Atheists do not march on cities or proclaim an ideology. Ricky Gervais put the point rather well: “Saying [atheism] is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby.” Indeed, my sense is that most atheists are rather uncomfortable with the anti-religious evangelism of the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, regarding it as shrill. We are happy to live and let live.
Some of an atheistic bent — understandably — think this lack of activism is a mistake. They think we should insert ourselves more strenuously into a world where politics is getting pushier, where people are becoming more ideological and where power is coalescing within creed groups. Given the discrimination faced by atheists in America, and the starker dangers to which they are exposed in other parts of the world, wouldn’t it make sense for the non-ideological to become a bit more, well, ideological?
But this is where I wish to inject a bit of optimism. You see, I think that the quieter, more rational temperament of atheism is likely to win out in the long run. We can already see this in the Middle East, where disbelief is often a criminal offence punishable by death. In Saudi Arabia, the religious police believe that the more vicious the penalties against apostasy, the longer they will be able to sustain the grip of fundamentalism.
A writer named Raif Badawi started an online forum known as Free Saudi Liberals. He was motivated by the idea that it is possible to see the world from a non-religious standpoint and that people should be free to disbelieve. When this came to the attention of the clerics, he was convicted of “insulting Islam”, sentenced to jail and given 50 lashes in front of a Jeddah mosque. He remains in prison to this day.
Others have suffered a similar fate, such as Mubarak Bala, an atheist in Nigeria, who was arrested this year for blasphemy and has been threatened with the death penalty. Human rights groups have found a range of tactics being used against atheists, including “the criminalisation of blasphemy and apostasy, impunity for attacks, social isolation and discrimination”.
But another trend is under way, albeit under the surface of Islamic societies. A report last year by the BBC, which surveyed 10 majority-Muslim nations and the Palestinian territories, found that atheism is on the rise. The proportion saying (confidentially) that they are non-religious has increased in just five years by 15% in Tunisia and a similar amount in Libya, with big jumps in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and Jordan, too. Non-belief is the fastest-growing belief system by far.
From this vantage point, the brutality of the religious fundamentalists starts to look less like strength than weakness, while the rational decency of atheists is like a magnet to people exhausted by ideological indoctrination and factionalism. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian who won the Nobel prize in literature, recently wrote to Bala in jail. “You have fought for all humanity, to ensure a better, fairer, world for all. You have not sought to appease those that treasure scrolls. You have not bowed to pressure to revere their unseen deities. It beggars belief that religionists still demand such reverence and seek to control our individual conduct. Do they not see the futility of their quest? How can they hope to rein in technology, to rein in questioning minds?”
I know that my friends on the other side of the pond might regard this as patronising, but I think America would also benefit from a surge in atheism. Unlike in western Europe, where discrimination against non-believers has largely disappeared, zealots (particularly Christian evangelicals) continue to wield disproportionate influence. This undermines the rationality of discourse, particularly in areas such as stem cell research, and inflames ideological polarisation. It is certainly damning that in the land of the free, politicians who don’t believe (there must be a few) still feel unable to say so publicly.
In the long run, though, I remain sanguine. I suspect future historians will regard the various fundamentalisms we see in the world today as a series of connected spasms, the last gasps of those who struggle to encompass the concept of unbelief. The fall of state religions may be bloody in some regions, particularly the Middle East, but I doubt it can be prevented by any amount of force or indoctrination.
Reason and tolerance will, in the end, win through. That, at least, is my article of faith.
3. Does it have to end this way? The kids have killed the full stop Teenagers say the punctuation mark is too aggressive. That’s nothing compared with the insults thrown at dashes, semicolons and exclamation marks: Susie Dent
Ask teenagers what they think about the full stop and you’ll get an unexpectedly lively response. If you’ve always considered this piece of punctuation an innocuous but necessary mark of conclusion, be warned: according to a debate among linguists on Twitter last week, for the younger generation, when used in a WhatsApp or text message, it can imply sarcasm, unhappiness or even aggression.
I find this intriguing. If you’d asked me for the most controversial punctuation mark in history, the full stop would have been bottom of the list. Top spot would surely be occupied by the exclamation mark or, as it has been known over the centuries, the wonderer, admiration mark, shriek, screamer, boing, pling, bang, gasper, slammer and Christer.
Whatever you choose to call it, a pile-up of them is generally seen as a linguistic no-no. Sir Terry Pratchett called the excitable punctuation mark “a sure sign of a diseased mind”. A person who used more than one was, he said, “someone who wears his underpants on his head”.
Second-place honours for the most maligned form of punctuation go to the serial comma, or Oxford comma. A final comma in a list before the “and”, it is sometimes a matter of taste but at other times essential: the TV listings of The Times once included Peter Ustinov having an encounter with “Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector”.
Similarly, the dash, so ubiquitous in online language, was once viewed as the doing of the devil. It was, its critics protested, a jack of all trades that swerved any understanding of the finer points of punctuation. The pamphleteer William Cobbett decided it was a “cover for ignorance”. Today, as we speak with our fingers, dashes are everywhere, the ever-ready substitute for the unpopular colon or semicolon.
Those colons and semicolons have had a difficult time of it recently. Ben Jonson, arguably England’s greatest punctuator, loved the colon so much he inserted what he called a “double prick” between his first and last name, but their glory days are long past.
Kurt Vonnegut denounced the semicolon in a lesson in creative writing: “First rule: do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” I love a semicolon, even in a text message, but then I’m a nerd who finds them instinctively neat and elegant. In online discourse they tend to stick out like a misplaced aubergine emoji. Or, it turns out, like a full stop.
Many of us now — in certain contexts — opt for zero punctuation. A full stop, it seems, not only interrupts the stream of consciousness that flows all over the internet, but also conveys all the wrong emotions.
Before you decide this is linguistic anarchy, consider the following hypothetical responses from a friend to the news that you’ve had a pay rise:
“great”
“great!”
“great.”
Most of us would plump for the second. The first is a little muted, but the third hints either at envy or absolute indifference.
The omission of full stops is not a fad. Adverts have been without them for decades, and poets have dispensed with them for far longer. But our new written-spoken language is all about energy and spontaneity, and the plod of a full stop is clearly a party-pooper.
As the linguist David Crystal, who anticipated this evolution years ago, points out: “The line-break has taken over. We don’t need both.” Crystal will also tell you this isn’t just a young versus old thing — databases of language use suggest that for all of us the full stop is, paradoxically, firmly on the move.
None of this is to say that the days of punctuation are numbered: rather, like every aspect of English, it is simply adapting to our needs. A well-placed squiggle can make or break a piece of writing and, in some cases, have far-reaching legal implications.
Even on its own, a judiciously used punctuation mark can say more than the words it serves. Victor Hugo once sent a telegram to his publisher inquiring about the success of his book. It read simply “?”. The book was clearly doing well, and Hugo received the reply “!”. A full stop would have told a very different story.
* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.