Running in the rain and reminiscing and rubbish disposal.

Running in the rain this morning I decided that my so-called waterproof, a lightweight affair designed for runners, is really less than useless. I might as well have left it hanging up in the wardrobe! Galicia may have a dubious claim to be truly Celtic but it does share with other Celtic places like Wales and Brittany a tendency to rain.

Like Wales and Brittany it remains beautiful even in the rain ... just rather wet. Like Wales and Brittany it is proud of its independent heritage and its language. Some people claim links between the Breton language and Welsh but nobody can claim anything other than Latin for the origins of Gallego. I am always amused, however, by the people who insist that Portuguese evolved from Gallego and not the other way around.

Facebook reminds me that ten years ago we were in Santiago de Compostela, where we saw Bruce Springsteen in concert and ate egg and chips and drank beer at four in the morning on our return to Santiago from the out of town, open air arena. It was hot and sunny that day but, in typical Galician fashion, cool in the evening, prompting Phil to buy himself a Springsteen sweatshirt, which he has never worn since! Those were the days!

As I have followed my usual running route, up the hill, along the back roads, back down the hill, I have observed the progress of a pile of rubbish near the school on the back road. At the end of every academic year, late June, the school seems to do a clear out. Old filing cabinets, broken chairs, all sorts of stuff pile up alongside the rubbish containers. Now, rubbish containers are regularly emptied. I know this as I am regularly woken by the noise of the ones outside our flats being emptied in the wee small hours. Stuff alongside the rubbish containers must come under different rules. This summer alongside the containers close to the school was a sofa, a broken table, an old toilet and, mysteriously, what appeared to be the bumpers from three different cars. They remained on the ground, blocking the pavement for weeks before they finally disappeared.

Further along the road a mattress appeared one morning. Initially it was on the back of a small pick-up truck full of rubbish but the truck departed and left the mattress behind. There is stayed for several days. Then one morning all that was left was the outer covering of the mattress and a bit of padding, for all the world as if someone had removed all the springs for their scrap metal value! This may well be the case. The outer covering remains on the pavement.

Who is it who dumps stuff like this? The fact that stuff is left by rubbish containers suggests that they expect the local council to remove it but the system is clearly slow. And some must just be dumped, like the rubbish left by fly-tippers in country places in the UK.

Then yesterday I came across a story about a man who was caught on film fly-tipping a fridge down a ravine in southern Spain. It seems he works for a company that recycles domestic electronic equipment but on this occasion recycling meant dumping the fridge in the Valle de Almanzora in Almería. His workmate filmed the incident, the two of them laughing and joking about it. Then the video was posted on social media and went viral. Stupid!

The perpetrators were identified, fined and made to haul the fridge back up and recycle it properly. I should think so too! The man in question sounds remorseful but with reservations:

“I really regret what I’ve done because it’s meant I’ve lost my job and has aggravated the problems I have with anxiety,” he told the online news site El Español. “All I want now is for this to go away and the effect it’s having on my family, my girlfriend and me. I don’t want people to have this image of me, as though I were a murderer.”

That sounds a little bit too much as though it’s about his problems rather than really thinking about the environment as far as I can see!

 But it’s quite nice to see social media causing some kind of justice to be done!