Travelling to Mondariz. And some money matters.

Today I took the bus to Mondariz once again. Phil had gone earlier by car as his chess game began at 10.00. I had a few things to do and besides the car is a bit crowded with all of us in it. And so I walked down to the bus station later through the morning fog. For this morning we woke up to one of those Vigo days when you can see the cloud swirling round the buildings. Not really fog but just low cloud.

By midday the fog had already dissipated and the temperatures were rising again. It’s just as well they were playing this morning in the relative cool. Especially as by the afternoon Mondariz was an oven!

It’s a pleasant bus ride from Vigo to Mondariz, passing though some rather fine countryside. And I am still amazed at the prices: almost an hour’s bus journey for less than it costs to travel from our crossroads to the nearest village at home in the UK.

As the bus gets into Ponteareas, where it stops and waits at the bus station for a few minutes, it goes along what looks like a fairly main street lined with abandoned houses. It’s such a shame that nobody has invested money in refurbishing them as they look like good old traditional stone houses. Maybe nobody wants to live in such places any more. Or quite possibly, this being Galicia, there is some legal problem with an owner, absent or possibly dead, who has not given permission to renovate. So it goes! Somebody could make money out of it.


Talking of money, I came across an item about how much money George Clooney made in the last year. “Between 1 June 2017 and 1 June 2018, George Clooney made more money than any other actor has ever made in a single year, Forbes magazine has found. The star’s film-based enterprises accounted for only a fraction of his income, however, with most coming from the sale of spirit company Casamigos Tequila.”

However he made his money, he has plenty.

Here is the Forbes’ list of the world’s best-paid male actors 2018:-

George Clooney – $239m
Dwayne Johnson – $119m
Robert Downey Jr – $79m
Chris Hemsworth – $64.5m
Jackie Chan – $45.5m
Will Smith – $42m
Akshay Kumar – $40.5m
Adam Sandler – $39.5m
Chris Evans – $34m
Salman Khan – $33.5m

And, for comparison purposes, the Forbes’ list of the world’s best-paid actresses 2018:-

Scarlett Johansson – $40.5m
Angelina Jolie – $28m
Jennifer Aniston – $19.5m
Jennifer Lawrence – $18m
Reese Witherspoon – $16.5m
Mila Kunis – $16m
Julia Roberts – $13m
Cate Blanchett – $12.5m
Melissa McCarthy – $12m
Gal Gadot – $10m

So the highest-paid actress (I refuse to say “female actor” - what a load of nonsense!) earned the same as the seventh highest-paid actor. There is clearly something wrong there.

It would be interesting to compare earning for film actors with earnings for theatre actors. No doubt somebody has done the research.

The amount of money that top actors - not to mention top footballers - earn is quite crazy. Some people say that it is because they only have a limited “shelf life”. Well, maybe when they can no longer get the high-paying roles or play for the top football teams they could do something revolutionary like get a different sort of job.

And the limited shelf-life argument should surely mean that actresses should be paid more than actors as the number of roles for ageing actresses is considerably smaller than for ageing actors. After all Robert Redford has recently made what he declares will be his last film, at the age of 80!

Actors, of both genders, and footballers for that matter, should be doing what the rest of us are advised to do, putting money away for their retirement. Personally I suspect they enjoy their work too much. Take Ringo Starr (okay, not an actor but still in the entertainment business). All summer I have been seeing posters telling me that he has been appearing in various places around Galicia.

Surely he doesn’t need the money. I guess he just likes to be up there on the stage!