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 19
Interesting: Face masks may be inadvertently giving people Covid-19 immunity and making them get less sick from the virus, academics have suggested in one of the most respected medical journals in the world. The commentary, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, advances the unproven but promising theory that universal face mask wearing might be helping to reduce the severity of the virus and ensuring that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic. If this hypothesis is borne out, the academics argue, then universal mask-wearing could become a form of variolation (inoculation) that would generate immunity and “thereby slow the spread of the virus in the United States and elsewhere” as the world awaits a vaccine.
Meanwhile . . .
Living La Vida Loca in Spain and Galicia
Yesterday I read of a couple being prosecuted by a squatter who objected to being 'insulted' by them . . . There's a view around that Spain's squatter problem has been blown up out of all proportion by those in whose interests this would be. One of their arguments is that most of the occupied properties belong to the (nefarious) banks, as if this were an issue-settling point . . . In this article, Nick Corbishley in Barcelona doesn't seem to share this view.
There are alway forest fires in Galicia in spring, summer and autumn. A mayor up in our hills insisted yesterday, firstly, that every day brought a new one and, secondly, that they're all started deliberately. If true, this is very sad.
As this foto shows, our local police yesterday began enforcing the new rule that, even on the terraces of bars, you can't lower your mask unless you're actually eating or drinking.
Surveying the scene on my regular terrace, I concluded that the majority of both smokers and non-smokers were either ignorant of this new injunction or were simply ignoring it.
Efficiency/bureaucracy . . . Someone's TIE calvario. Should have applied here in Pontevedra.
Yesterday I did what I should have started to do weeks ago - rode my (non-E)bike the last 2km into town. For reasons best known to itself, the chain came off the gear spindle after about 3 minutes. As I wrestled with it, the first chap to come along offered to help me. Whatever they are or aren't, the Spanish are superb Samaritans. And the most generous in the world with their organs. Post mortem, I mean.
María's Dystopian Times, Day 29
The USA
A blogger again goes to town here on Trump's dangerously egregious Covid lies. If the American people vote him back into power, they'll truly deserve him.
English/Spanish
A reader advises that this is a more modern version of one I listed yesterday.
- Two breasts pull more than two carts: Tiran más dos tetas que dos carretas.
Finally . . .
I am an atheist but love to visit cathedrals, temples and mosques. Likewise, I really love this song re talking to Jesus by the MagnifManTran
* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant