Sunday thoughts!

Another Sunday.

The nasty weather appears to have calmed down. Friends and family in more northern parts of Europe (ie. NW England), and friends and family in the South of Spain have vied with each other to prove that they have suffered more from the inclement stuff - snow and wind bringing drifts on the one hand and wind, rain and huge waves on the other. And I have had to explain to both that in Vigo we have been protected from the extremes because of the particular geographical situation, on the ría with the Islas Cîes protexting the bay from the worst of the storms off the Atlantic.

We had a bit of an electric storm in the wee, small hours Friday-Saturday but, apart from a fair amount of wind and rain, that was all. I was half convinced I had made the whole thing up but it seems I just incorporated the flashing and banging into a dream in which the whole building shook. Dreams are odd: last night’s involved waiting for a train that was stuck in a tunnel. Where that came from I have no idea.

 Ian Jack, writing in the Guardian about “Who do I blame? Eight reasons we ended up in this Brexit mess”, gives a nice description of three products of the playing fields of Eton, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg as, in turn, a too-confident incompetent, an opportunist and a cartoon version of the ruling class. The damaging effect of the first of these, he says is especially hard to forgive.

His comments on the immigration question, something many give as a big reason for their voting to leave the EU, are interesting. “Immigration”, he wrote, “had begun to die as a political issue until, in 2004, Tony Blair’s government decided to open the UK labour market to the eight eastern and central European countries that had joined the EU. Only two other member states, Sweden and Ireland, did so as freely. Between 5,000 and 13,000 migrants were expected; within the first year, 129,000 turned up.”

Even Tony Blair and co agreed later that it had been a mistake.

And the rest is history!

Yesterday we went off to Pontevedra for lunch and to meet some people for chess related matters. Walking back to the station later we went past a furniture store with a piece of furniture on display described as a “cheslon”. It looked rather like a sofa but we decided thatbit was really a “chaise longue” and that this intriguing new (to us anyway; others may be quite familiar with it) word was a Hispanicised version of the French term.

Sitting in the station cafe as we waited for a train back to Vigo (maybe that sparked the train dream!) I skim-read a local paper and came across another one: “gurmé” for “gourmet”. In context it read: “Vendemos las conservas en tiendas gurmé y ‘on-line’ en varios países de Europa”. I find it interesting that in that sentence “gurmé”, which seems to be an adjective, does not agree grammatically with the word it describes.

I love the Spanish habit of making foreign words into Spanish ones by altering the spelling. The oddest one, for me at least, is “croissant” morphing into “curasán”. This is the kind of thing you get excited about when you are a language geek!

As our train made it’s speedy way through the final long tunnel (another dream provoker perhaps?) into Vigo Urzáiz station, the public address system told us in Castilian Spanish, Galician Spanish and Mexican accented English that we were approaching the station, the end of our trip, thanked us for travelling with them, reminded us to be sure to take all our possessions with us and warned us to mind the gap - or rather, to be careful about the distance between the train and platform! A rather wordy warning, delivered with the accent that always sounds as though the speaker has a big fixed smile on his face.

Are there no native English speakers around?

Where to live?

According to this website Oldham, where we live in the UK, is the 9th worst place to live in England. Dover comes top of the list. Oldham has always struck me as a place trying desperately to improve itself and never quite managing it. The bit where we live, Saddleworth, is not at all bad. Mind you there are some residents who still consider that they do not live in Oldham at all, nor even Greater Manchester. They are still living in the early 1970s when Saddleworth still belonged to Yorkshire and they adorn their houses with white roses accordingly.

It doesn’t really matter which county it belongs to; the young people still cannot afford to buy houses in the place where they grew up. As houses go on sale they are increasingly sold to people fleeing places like Oldham and looking for somewhere nicer to live.

Meanwhile, we need to do something to provide accessible housing for our young people.

 I read that Finland has been successfully tackling the homelessness crisis. Last year, in fact, Finland was the only EU country not currently in the middle of a massive homelessness crisis. The number of homeless there has been decreasing year-on-year. How have they done this? By introducing an initiative to get people off the streets: it's called Housing First. These radicals from Finland had the crazy idea that giving people a permanent home gives them... well, gives them a place to live and get off the streets. And they provide individual support to help people to sort out the issues that have led to them becoming homeless.

Having a place to call home actually helps people sort out the rest. The people pay rent and are given housing benefits. And while a lot is paid for by the local government, if they earn enough the people given shelter will eventually pay for the help they receive.it probably saves the government money in the end.

Back in the UK it was suggested by some that the borough of Windsor should clear the homeless off their streets in time for that wedding. That caused something of an outcry. Now it seems that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are inviting 2,640 members of the public to the grounds of Windsor Castle on their wedding day.

The lucky commoners, 1,200 of whom will be chosen “from every corner of the United Kingdom”, will get to watch the arrival of the bride and groom as well as their wedding guests, and then the carriage procession as it leaves after the service. The happy couple apparently want members of the public “to feel part of the celebrations too”.

But they don’t want them to attend the ceremony inside St George’s chapel at Windsor Castle on 19 May, or the reception. But that’s okay because after the ceremony there will be a carriage procession through Windsor before the couple join their guests for a reception at at St George’s hall.

You have to be nominated for an invitation. Nobody had better nominate me!

Time for a weather report. Last night we had strong winds and thunder and lightning! I wasn’t sure whether I had dreamt the thunder and lighning bit but Phil assures me it was so. Storm Emma was finally hitting us.

On the previous night a stretch of the M62 between Rochdale and Huddersfield , in other words just up the road from us, was closed and drivers stuck overnight. At one point 3,500 vehicles were stuck. Our daughter reported that our road, the A62 was also closed. Saddleworth may be a nice place to live but it has been a little inaccessible in the last few days.

And here is an unusual consequence of the cold and snowy weather: in West Yorkshire, the snow unexpectedly led police to discover a cannabis farm. Two officers found an estimated £80,000-worth of the drug at a property when they noticed that only one house in a street in Keighley had no snow on its roof.

I bet the growers hadn’t planned for that eventuality!

Identity crisis?

It seems that someone has been nominating President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. On what grounds anyone might think he could deserve such a prize is a mystery, to me anyway. No doubt there are people among his supporters who believe he deserves all the prizes going. Imagine the statements about this being the “best Nobel Prize ever!!!”.

However, the nomination has been made using a stolen identity. What is more, it appears that the same person was responsible for forging nominations last year as well, according to the Nobel committee secretary Olav Njolstad. “Every year, we get lots of invalid nominations, but these are nominations that are not valid because those who nominate are not qualified to do so,” Njolstad said. “As far as I know, this is the first example of someone nominating someone by stealing another person’s identity.”

The name of the identity thief has been given to the police. Why was this not done last year? Presumably it was that oversight that gave him the encouragement to have another try this year.

The outcome is that there is no Nobel Peace Prize for Donald!

This is not the only identity theft story I have come across recently.

In New York a Russian woman is charged with attempting to poison a woman who looked just like her so that she could steal her passport, identity documents, credit cards and such like. It seems she turned up at the home of the other woman, another Russian speaker, bearing poisoned cheesecake. Maybe she has been reading Snow White too frequently, replacing apples with cheesecake!

When the poisoned lookalike passed out she put her to bed and scattered pills around to make it look like suicide. Unfortunately for the poisoner, fortunately for the poisonee, another friend turned up some time later, found the victim and got her to hospital, where she recovered and identified her poisoner. The poisoner has form; she is said to have drugged and killed another woman in Russia before fleeing to the USA. Clearly a woman of bad habits!

And finally, an identity crisis of a different sort:-

When we lived in Vigo on a more permanent basis I used to attend a reading group at the Alliance Française here in the city. I still follow them on Facebook and get updates about what is going on. Their latest post advertises the Fête de la Francophonie later this month. It asks followers for their favourite French word - “Quel est votre mot français prèféré?”

This is a good question for linguists. “Crépuscule” and “libellule” are good candidates. I always used to ask that question when recruiting students into A-Level courses in French and Spanish. “Proper” linguists always have favourite words.

However, the Alliance Française de Vigo, surprisingly for an organisation belonging to a country that makes a point of defending use of its own language in all things, heads its post in ENGLISH with the instruction “Tell us!”.

Really! I am quite shocked!

Stereotypical stuff!

The weather app on my phone told me this morning that it was -3 degrees in London and -2 in Edinburgh. The school where our daughter works in Greater Manchester was closed because of the snow. So was the school the middle grandchildren attend and the nursery that the smallest one goes to. So they spent the day all tucked up at home keeping warm. Later she told me that a tree had blown down opposite their house. Great drama! I suspect that her partner had to go into central Manchester to work, assuming the trains and trams were running; banks don’t like to let a bit of snow close them down.

A friend of mine has gone to visit her mother in Hamburg and has been complaining of -10, made to feel colder because of the wind. Her main complaint is that it is too cold to go out onto the patio for a cigarette without her fingers freezing. This is a woman who always liked to turn up the heating in the classroom we shared. Yet she still goes and stands in the cold to smoke. That is a measure of addiction, surely!

All in all, with temperatures such as those and snow making travel difficult, I am not going to moan about 12 degrees and a bit of dampness here in Vigo. Sunshine would, of course, be preferable but you can’t have everything. And besides, my suster is having storms in Andalucía. And another friend tells me that he has been comprehensively rained on in Seville! He should know not to expect stereotypical “sunny Spain” weather as his parents were Spanish, refugees from the Civil War.

Stereotypes exist though. We know we should avoid them but they do persist.


In Orleans, France, they have a sort of festival every year in honour of Joan of Arc. The French go on a bit about the English having burnt poor Joan, forgetting that it was the French who handed her over - an uppity girl thinking she could lead armies! Whatever next?

Anyway, every year a girl is selected play the part of Joan of Arc, dressed up in appropriate armour and riding a horse through the city, celebrating the breaking the English siege of Orleans in 1429. This year they have chosen a certain Mathilde Edey Gaamassou, 17, chosen from 250 hopefuls.

There has been a twitter storm because Mathilde’s father is from Benin and her mother from Poland. “Joan of Arc was white,” read one Twitter post. “We are white and proud of being white, don’t change our history.” Another comment, on the anti-Muslim site Resistance Republicaine, complained: “Next year, Joan of Arc will be in a burqa.”

Oh, boy!

Mathilde’s defenders, including the French women’s equality minister, the president of the committee in charge if the festival, and the mayor of Orleans say things like:-

 “The racist hatred of fascists has no place in the French republic.” Women’s equality minister.

 “This girl was chosen for who she is; an interesting person and a lively spirit. She responds to our four criteria: a resident of Orléans for 10 years, a student in an Orléans high school, and a Catholic who gives her time to others. She will deliver our French history to everyone, as have previous Joans before her.” President of the festival organising committee.

“In 2018, as for 589 years, the people of Orléans will celebrate Joan of Arc played by a young woman who shows her courage, faith and vision. Mathilde has all these qualities.” Mayor of Orleans. 

There’s nothing like a bit of fuss about national treasures. Some time soon I expect a fuss when some people discover that Saint George is also the patron saint of other countries besides England. 

Meanwhile here is a link to some pictures of Vespa Club Uganda.

Who knew that little scooters, an Italian stereotype, could be so well thought of?

Begging in the 21st century!

We have a new beggar outside the supermarket next door. He’s not very efficient as beggars go: no badly written notice, no whine, no hangdog expression, merely a weary lean against the wall and the sudden realisation that he should stick his collecting box out so that passersby know he is not just waiting for a friend to come out of the store.

Since the new, bigger Mercadona opened at the other end of the street we have fewer beggars here. And as for “Soy muy pobre”, the young woman who was always here for several years, she seems to have moved on.

I read about a new problem for beggars and sellers of the Big Issue on the streets of the UK. More and more people are telling them, in response to a request for spare change or an attempt to sell them the newspaper, that they have no cash on them as they only ever use their card.

 This is common across the board. Cash payments, I read, are in steep decline across Britain. In 2006, coins and notes were used for 62% of all transactions. Last year that fell to 40%, and by 2026 cash is expected to account for only 21% of purchases. I have seen people pay by card, especially contactless, which is so easy, for items costing less than one pound. My daughter-in-law, like the queen, rarely carries cash on her person.

Now, one Big Issue seller I read about has responded to this trend by buying himself a contactless card reader. He has seen his sales of the Big Issue increase. The problem was not that people did not want to buy, it was that they really did not have cash with them. I have to confess that my first reaction was to wonder how this could be. Surely, I reflected, to be a Big Issue salesperson you were supposed to be homeless. For the card reader to work you needed a bank account but to open a bank account you need to have an address. Catch 22 strikes again!

But then, I went on to think, nowadays there must be a fair number of people who have been made homeless but who still have their bank account from more fortunate times. You even hear of homeless people who are in employment, not very well paid but still employed. Some of them live in, and out of, their car. They are often still members of a gym and so manage to shower at the gym before work. Some move around from friend to friends, sleeping on sofas or in spare rooms. So, yes, a Big Issue seller with a card reader is not as strange as it seemed at first.

Charitable organisations are doing it too. An organisation in Bristol called the Rough Sleeping Partnership was looking for a “modern fundraising solution” to keep night shelters for the homeless open. So they tried out setting up two contactless donation centres in a local shopping district. “Come rain or shine, the terminals would receive donations of £2 and provide information about Streetlink, an outreach programme for rough sleepers. “From May to November [the terminals] raised, on average, £370 each a month,” explains one of their workers. “That’s considerably more than a small cash collection tin would have been able to do.” A third terminal has since been installed on the city’s waterfront. They are already fielding inquiries on how to install new donation points from interested parties up and down the UK. “It’s new technology,” says their spokesperson, “but I think it’s within the grasp of all charities to be able to embrace it and see if it works for them.”

Such is modern life!

Points of view about this and that.

Back in the Northwest of England, a friend has been expressing concern about whether she can get out to her poetry group meeting this evening because of snow. Our daughter has sent photos of the view from her classroom window - a good two inches of snow. However, the school has stayed open, unlike many in the UK when snow falls.

Here the cloud has moved in and rain is forecast. In the Froiz supermarket I overheard conversations about a storm on its way. Well, I reckon that’s Spring over and done with and we are perhaps back to Winter. Opinions vary, of course. It’s still showing 10 to 12 degrees on the various temperature gauges so it’s not really wintery.

On Saturday, walking along in the sunshine I heard a small boy on a scooter comment on the heat to his mother: ¡Qué calor hace aquí! She replied that it was beach weather: ¡Para ir a la playa! Just a little further along the road we came across a lady all muffled up in her winter coat, a big, think scarf round her neck and a woolly hat with pompom! She was clearly ready for the snowstorm! Just in the wrong place. But I suppose that if you have gone out and bought a wooly hat and scarf set, you really feel you should get some wear put of it before summer arrives. Rather like English girls shivering in sundresses on a summer’s day when the temperature struggles to reach the 19 degrees we had here in Vigo the other afternoon!

In Iceland, where they have volcanoes and hot geysers but presumably some cold weather in the winter, it’s not the weather they worry about. One of their big concerns I read about is the disappearance of their language. Theirs is apparently one of the few languages to try to insist on using their own words for information technology but they are fighting a losing battle, especially amongst the young. Young Icelanders, like young people everywhere, enjoy computer games. These exist in Icelandic but it is often easier for youngsters to download the English version onto their iPhones and iPads and tablets. Besides they often play against other gamesters all over the world and the international language is English. An odd consequence of this is some youngsters are not really literate and competent in Icelandic or in English. Here’s a link to an article about it.

Such are the consequences of modern technology.

Back in the UK experts are once again complaining that children are being introduced to technology too soon. “An overuse of touchscreen phones and tablets is preventing children’s finger muscles from developing sufficiently to enable them to hold a pencil correctly, they say. “Children are not coming into school with the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago,” said Sally Payne, head paediatric occupational therapist at the Heart of England foundation NHS Trust. “Now, children coming into school are being given a pencil but are increasingly not be able to hold it because they don’t have the fundamental movement skills. “To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers,” she added. “Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills.”

Some of this is because tiny tots are given phones and tablets to play with at an age when they should be stacking bricks and playing with shape-sorters and threading large beads on strings - developing dexterity in other words instead of learning how to use a touch pad.

Of course there are some who argue that children no longer need to be able to write as they will be able to do everything on a keyboard. But how sad that would be! How would the artists of the future learn the fine motor skills to be able to draw properly? What about the poets who feel a direct connection from the brain to the pencil?

And what about the handwriting experts? No more would they be able to analyse someone’s character and personality according to their handwriting style. I don’t think the font you use on your computer really says a great deal about what sorts of person you are. Unless, that is , you type in BOLD all the time.

Wifi, renovation, figs and stuff!

Yesterday we discovered a new wifi cafe. Well, we didn’t really discover it yesterday. We already knew it was there but sometime last summer it closed. And now it has re-opened, which is good because it is rather depressing to see empty shops and closed down cafes in an area. It makes it all look rather run down.

What we didn’t know was whether the newly opened Patuá (that is its name - is this a Spanish spelling of the French “patois” or does it have something to do with ducks, “patos”?) had wifi or not. Yes, it does! So now we have another place within easy walking distance to go and access the internet.

Our area can manage to look a bit rundown without having empty shops and shut down cafes. Over the last couple of years, almost all of Calle Aragón has been repaved, smartened up with bright, clean stone slabs. Clean and bright, that is, until they get splatted with a polka dot pattern of spat-out chewing gum! That is a different matter!

Anyway, the repaving stopped about fifty yards from our building and didn’t pick up again until after the small roundabout with the lighthouse affair on it. Maybe it’s because there are a number of car repair workshops on the ground floor along this stretch, meaning that cars are driven over the pavement. But surely a dropped kerb would be all they would need. Who knows?

Whatever the reason, we still have the old, ratty-tatty, ridged paving stones, some of them cracked and broken. The “gentrificación” of Calle Aragón has passed us by and we remain, a kind of blot on the smooth new look of the street.

The municipality has, however, planted some new trees in what used to be empty tree spaces outside our building. I am unsure whether to take this as good sign, a sign that they are trying to make the place look nice, or as an indication that they have given up totally on repaving our stretch of the street.

Walking down from Calle Aragón to Travesía de Vigo, the next street down, you pass through what remains of the district as it presumably was before tall blocks of flat were built: individual houses with their own bit of land where vegetables are grown as well as flowers. In one of the gardens stand two fig trees, so close together that their branches are interwoven. When the trees are in full leaf you are easily misled into thinking it is one big old tree. At the moment, though, they are completely bare, in strange contrast to the lemon tree in the same garden, in full leaf and covered in lemons.

When I was a child, indeed for quite a lot of my adult life, I never saw a fig. Figs were something that you got in those odd fig biscuits, which I am convinced my grandmother bought because nobody really liked them. She could not be said to have failed to offer biscuits but it was not her fault if no one ate them. Okay, I exaggerate a little!

Nowadays I look out for them in season and have a range of recipes involving figs. Of course, after the UK leaves the EU (if it comes to pass) figs may become again a fruit that another generation of children never sees! Be that as it may, I found a bit of information about figs, under the heading, “Figs are made of wasps. Sort of.” That’s a rather off-putting idea, so I read on.

First of all, it seems that the fig is not technically a fruit but really a bundle of flowers and seeds sealed up inside the fig shape. Because the flowers are not open to the air, pollination is difficult. That, it seems is where the wasp comes in. Literally! There is a type of wasp called - would you believe it? - a fig wasp. The queen fig wasp burrows its way in through a tiny opening, pollinating the flowers and laying its eggs before giving up the ghost and being absorbed into the fig. The eggs hatch, a new generation of fig wasps eat their way out and the whole process starts again. YUCK! 

Fortunately, humans have been domesticating figs longer than they have been cultivating grain crops and the figs you buy in the fruit shops and supermarkets will not have been exposed to waspish invasions. That explains why the figs don’t have little holes where the baby wasplets have made their escape.

Thank goodness for that! However, I might be a little wary of figs grown in a friend’s garden!