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
Good-ish news: People who suffer the most from Covid-19 are almost twice as likely to be deficient in vitamin D, a study has found — implying that supplements might help to protect against the disease. The findings, from a study of 216 Spanish patients, are the latest to suggest a link between low levels of the vitamin and serious cases of Covid-19.
Decidedly bad news: We are reaching the stage where the cumulative effect of lockdown and partial lockdown measures is going to inflict catastrophic damage on the economy. Companies could survive a certain period of inactivity, but are coming to the end of their resilience, of their financial reserves, and of effective government support. Unemployment and bankruptcies are set to soar, with all the human misery and indeed of deleterious health outcomes that will entail.
That second quote is taken from this article, of which the take-home messages - to me - are:
1.Given the probabilities as they now are, can anyone justify draconian, non-specific (panic?) measures that mean immense economic damage and personal pain for years to come?, and
2. Are governments mostly concerned with 1. saving their own skins by avoiding the collapse of inadequately financed/badly run healthcare system, and 2. saving the face that should have been lost because of their incompetence to date?
I’m sure you can guess accurately my own answers.
Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain
Correction: There are not only 8 (unread)information boards at the Lérez end of O Burgo bridge but 17. Duplicating the pages of the ridiculous glossy brochure.
By the way, 1: Both the boards and the brochures are only in Gallego. Which can’t be right. Except to a Galician nationalist.
By the way, 2: I didn’t t know the word Berce on the front of the brochure, which I initially took to be Berge. I believe it means something akin to ‘cradle’.
Diary entries from January 2004:
A high court in Andalucia on Friday pronounced that the owner of a brothel was obliged to include his employees in the social security system and, thus, pay taxes on their income. The inference to be drawn from the analogy the judges made with illegal immigrant labourers was that this was so despite the fact that prostitution itself was against the law. Three of the twelve judges went out on a limb and said they had misgivings about the brothel owner being able to dictate working hours [and practices?] to female employees. I wonder whether he will be similarly liable for accidents at work, whatever these might include. Pregnancy, for example. The mind boggles,
Later: The Association of Brothel Owners [yes, there really is one] is up in arms against the decision of the Andalucian court I cited earlier. They say that it institutionalises pimping. For their part, the Association of Progressive Women say that it is a small step in the right direction but that they reject the suggestion that the work of prostitutes is analogous to that of [illegal] waiters. The brothel owners also claim that the decision infringes the human rights of the prostitutes to work the way they want to but so far the press has not been able to find any prostitute who shares this view. And the Red Queen says that the law is whatever she says it is. To be honest, it's not called the Association of Brothel Owners. It's called the Association of Owners of Places of Sexual Contact. Or Locales Alternes, in [unusually brief] Spanish
As of this month, it is illegal to have either your car engine, your mobile phone or your radio switched on when you are filling up with petrol. Plus it will be an offence to have switched on anything such as a DVD or TV which might distract the driver. I will think of these safety-oriented rules - and the likely compliance rate - each time I see a car flash past me at 180kph with the driver talking on the phone while his wife bounces a toddler up and own on her lap in the adjacent front seat. Strangely enough, the one thing that can be guaranteed to distract the driver an onboard - a GPS system - is exempted from this ban. In addition it will soon it will be compulsory to carry a luminous jacket in your car, for the use thereof if you exit the car at night. Or possibly if you just sit in it when the car is stationery. There is some confusion on this point. Anyway, this jacket now joins quite a long list of things one is compelled to have in one's car in Spain, others being not one but two warning triangles and a set of fuses. In a country where the mortality rates are very high, l would have thought there was a good case for concentrating on a few essentials, such as staying on your side of double white lines or not being blind drunk - but there you go. That's why l'm not a politician.
Here's María's Days 43 & 44.
Spanish
Some (alleged) Spanish proverbs:-
- A buxom widow must be either married, buried or shut up in a convent
- Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry
- A woman's advice is a poor thing but he is a fool who does not take it
- By the street of By and By one arrives at the house of Never
- Forgive any sooner than thyself
- God comes to see us without a bell
- Honour without profit is a ring on the finger (Marriage??)
- If fools didn't go to markets, bad goods wouldn't be sold
- Let that which is lost be for God
- Many go out for wool and come home shorn
- Many things grow in the garden that were never sewn there
- There is no friend like the penny [centimo, now. I guess]
- One and none is all the same [i e negligible]
- Beware of an ox in front, an ass behind and a monk from all sides
- Tel a lie and find the truth
- The devil lurks behind the cross
- The diligent spinner has a large shift (=Industry gives comfort, it says here)
- The foot on the cradle and the hand on the distaff is the sign of a good housewife ('distaff' = a cleft staff on which the wool or flax is wound)
- There are no buds in last year's nest
- Those who live longest will see most
- Though the sun shines, don't leave your cloak at home [Written by a Galician, I imagine]
- Too much breaks the bag
- When one door shuts another opens
- White hands cannot hurt (??)
Finally . . . .
A very funny guy I seem to have missed to date.
* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.