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'm confused about the latest measures here. If only because the Galician government is taking a different stance from Madrid and several other regions. For example, only 5 of us can meet here, against 6 or even 10 elsewhere. Anyway, here's the latest from El País, in English.
Sweden. Still ploughing/plowing its own furrow . . Sweden Refuses to Impose New Lockdown Measures, Saying People Have Suffered Enough . . . As Newsweek acknowledged, Sweden’s COVID-19 death rate is lower than those of Spain, the UK and Italy, countries which all imposed draconian lockdowns. Unlike the rest of the continent, Sweden’s economy is also in a far better position to make a swifter recovery. More here.
Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain
More here on dispiriting Spanish politics/politicking.
Talking of lawyers and notaries. . . . I am regularly amused by the reaction of Spaniards to the news that notaries - the institution which dominates their lives - are virtually unknown in the Anglo world. Where lawyers carry out most of their functions - in the interests of their clients, not the state. Most obviously by checking out the outrageous claims - or unrevealed facts - of estate agents/realtors. British lawyers are either barristers, (high street) solicitors or corporate creatures, as commercial lawyers. Normally students take a degree in Law(s) and then take the (non government) entrance exam for the branch they've chosen. Solicitors can then start earning money, as 'articled clerks' in a firm of solicitors (un bufete in Spanish) but new barristers join a 'Chamber' and might not earn anything for a while, if ever. Should they succeed, barristers can end up earning a lot more than solicitors. As in Spain, there are an awful lot of lawyers among the members of parliament and the executive branch of government.The difference might well be that, in Spain, many of these will never have actually worked as lawyers, having been too busy swotting for the various exams that they can take. For example to be a judge at 30. Unthinkable in the Anglo world, Or Britain, at least.
There's nothing like Spain's dreadful/dreaded Oposiciones in the UK. These, as my reader pointed out, are vital to one's future employment in several fields. Things might have changed but years ago I was told they were locally marked, providing opportunities for corrupt favouritism. One famous case, as I recall, involved members of the family of the mayor of Ourense. All of whom proved to be geniuses when it came to exams.
Not many people at Pontevedra city's week flea market today. I see the gypsies have once again colonised it with junk worse than anyone else's. None them is wearing a badge showing they have a licence. So, all illegal. But I'm sure one of our several police forces will come along one Sunday and boot them off, without sanction. And the game will continue into perpetuity.
Here's María's Day 41. She mentions a zealous/officious cop in my barrio, Poio. In fact this idiot fined several drivers in one hour for 'Turning their heads more than the 28% permiittd by the law'. Such was the ensuing fuss, all the penalties were annulled. Which never would have happened under Franco!
Germany
This was meant to be yesterday's quote: German is a language which was developed solely to afford the speaker the opportunity to spit at strangers under the guise of polite conversation.
The USA
The view of a BBC columnist of the consequences of Trump's presidency to date.
Finally . . .
For those of you too young to know of the genius of Tom Lehrer, this is a useful catchup article. If you've never heard him sing, I recommend Poisoning Pigeons in the Park as your first experience . . .
Tom Lehrer’s genius went viral before its time: Ben Macintyre, The Times
The great American pianist singer-songwriter was, of course, mocking the spread of sexually transmitted disease. I Got it from Agnes is one of the most explicit songs ever written while containing not a single rude word. It combines, as Lehrer’s songs always do, the jauntiest of tunes with the grimmest of subjects. And as a prolonged joke about the casual way humans contrive to pass on a dangerous illness, it seems bizarrely relevant today.
Lehrer, now 92, has just announced that he is surrendering the rights to his songs so that everyone can help themselves to his “catchy and savage musical satire” without fear of breaching copyright. His timing, as ever, is perfect, because what the world needs urgently is a strong dose of Lehrer.
The musician is often said to have given up political satire and returned to teaching mathematics because, after Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize, it had become obsolete. But Lehrer’s brand of humour remains as pertinent and pointed today as it ever was.
He took some of the most unpleasant, frightening, idiotic or sacred aspects of modern life and lampooned them with merciless cynicism, to a tinkling piano accompaniment of cheerful ballads, lullabies and parody showtunes. Nothing was off limits: nuclear Armageddon, Southern racism, drug pushing, and the simple romantic pleasure of poisoning pigeons in the park: “My pulse will be quickenin’/ With each drop of strych-a-nine/ We feed to a pigeon/ (It just takes a smidgen)”
He ridiculed Catholicism (“First you get down on your knees/ Fiddle with your rosaries…”), cheerleading, and the boy scout movement in Be Prepared (“If you’re looking for adventure of a new and different kind,/ And you come across a girl scout who is similarly inclined,/ Don’t be nervous, don’t be flustered, don’t be scared./ Be prepared!”
He sang happily about masochism, necrophilia, pollution and the Oedipus Complex. His songs were furious, profound, brutal and joyful, all at the same time.
Lehrer won a place at Harvard to read mathematics at the age of 15, and it was to mathematics that he returned, as a teacher, when he stopped performing and writing in the late 1960s. He wrote just 37 songs in all, while working on such arcane problems as “the number of locally maximal elements in a random sample”.
Mathematical rigour lies at the heart of Lehrer’s work, and some of his greatest songs are really precise multisyllabic equations, most famously his fitting of the chemicals in the periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General Song. The Elements became a cult anthem for geeks, and Lehrer’s response was typical: “It spreads like herpes rather than ebola.”
Lehrer swiftly became extremely famous, and infamous. Time magazine dubbed him a “sicknik”, dispensing “social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams-kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world”.
His rhymes were sublime, his musical versatility remarkable, but it was the sliver of cruelty beneath the jollity — a trait shared with Roald Dahl — that made children and adults both wince and snigger.
And then, at the height of his notoriety, he gave it up, quietly, completely and still-mysteriously. No performer of the modern era has entered the limelight and then renounced it so suddenly and absolutely. He spread the rumour that he was dead, to discourage junk mail.
Thereafter he was content for anyone and everyone to plunder his work. When the American rapper 2 Chainz asked to adapt his song The Old Dope Peddler, Lehrer immediately granted permission, adding: “Please give my regards to Mr Chainz, or may I call him 2?”
Lehrer has not written anything (except mathematical papers) for more than half a century, yet his acidulous take on provocative subjects from plagiarism to pornography has lost none of its bite. As modern world leaders continue to brandish their nuclear arsenals, Lehrer’s song about global annihilation in a nuclear war might have been written yesterday: “When the air becomes uranious/ We will all go simultaneous/ We will all go together when we go.”
Music is a balm. Mozart, Abba and Louis Armstrong may help persuade us that it is a wonderful world. But frequently the world is far from wonderful, which is why we need songs that are prepared to laugh at its sheer unpleasantness, and ours. “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while,” said Lehrer.
While we await a medical antidote to Covid-19, as a temporary solace try watching the YouTube clip of Tom Lehrer performing I Got it from Agnes, a song written in 1952 about foolish human insouciance in the face of a highly contagious disease, and another form of infection-tracing that doesn’t work.
“It might have been at the club
Or at the pub, or in the loo
And if you will be my friend
Then I might … give it to you!”
* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.