Some Sunday thoughts.

A fine and sunny Sunday morning in Vigo and so before midday the sailing school was out in the bay. Lots of tiny little boats took to the water, perhaps not quite so many as in the summer months but still a good number. It may still be considered chilly enough to need the hood of your winter coat up and a big scarf around your neck, not to mention those woolly gloves, when you walk the dog, who also has a coat on, but it does not deter the intrepid apprentice sailors. Unless, of course, they are forced out there by their parents.

The boats seem tiny, one person, one SMALL person, affairs. But I imagine that even a little, tiny boat like that costs a pretty penny. I wonder if there is a market for second hand little boats, as there always used to be for second hand bikes, as you progress to something bigger. And does everyone here learn to sail? Or is it just the yuppies, the “pijos”?

It must be rather fine to get out there in the bay in your boat. There is a bit of me that would love to do it - cue the soundtrack: Carly Simon singing “I’m bound for the island, the wind is with me ...” - but there is another bit of me that is terrified at the idea. What if the boat overturned? I’m not sure that I am a strong enough swimmer to make it back to land!

I think I’ll just continue admiring from afar. We get a nice view from our seventh floor balcony. I’ll confine myself to walking and jogging instead and a bit of swimming in the nice, safe swimming pool in the summer!

Back onto some more serious stuff. One of the young people who spoke out after the Florida school shooting, Emma Gonzalez, age 17, declared, “We are going to be the last mass shooting”. Unfortunately, since then on February 16th there was one in Oklahoma City, 1 dead 3 injured, on February 17th there was one in Memphis, 5 injured, on the same day there was one in Kansas City, 1 dead and 7 injured, and on the 18th there was one in San Antonio, Texas, 5 injured. It’s now the 25th. Have there been more since then?

They need to get on with doing something about gun control! Even aome of the US airlines are pitching in, cancelling the discount they offered to NRA conventions and asking for their details to be removed from the NRA website.

But apparently it’s not all that clear cut. They view guns differently over there. Gary Younge, Guardian columnist and the author of a book called Another Day in the Death of America, writing in the Guardian, had this to say:

“When reporting for my book about all the children and teens shot dead in one random day in America, I asked each family an open-ended question: what did they think had made the tragedy possible? Not one mentioned guns. When I asked the more leading question, of what they thought about guns, most had an opinion: they were too easily accessible. After a while, I concluded that they looked on gun deaths as being a bit like traffic fatalities. If your child was run over by a car, you might call for a traffic light, speed bump or lower speed limit – and no one would claim that was unconstitutional. But you wouldn’t call for an end to traffic. Who could imagine a world without traffic? To these parents, that would be as bizarre as a world without guns.”

Sometimes America, despite supposedly speaking our language, is much more foreign than Spain or Italy.