Dawn

Dawn

Monday, March 14, 2005

Galicia had many wonderful ‘gastronomic’ festivals and this month it’s the turn of ‘caldo’. This is a stew made – it seems to me - from strange bits of the pig, pieces of salami, vegetables and large green leaves, possibly from a cabbage. It is, I believe, the traditional peasant dish of Galicia. If you’re raised here, it probably has strong childhood associations, just as Irish stew does for me. But then, having had the latter every bloody Saturday of my youth, I would find the idea of a Festival of Irish Stew a little hard to take seriously.

The front pages of yesterday’s local papers were dominated by accounts of the 30 years gaol sentences and 50,000 quid fines being demanded by the prosecutors of the three owners of a local brothel. The back pages of the same papers were full of explicit ads for numerous other brothels here and in Vigo. As far as I can make out, what you can’t do is bring girls in from, say, Brazil and force them to work off their passage. Whereas what you can do is open an establishment, give it a suggestive name and then rent rooms to women who, entirely of their own accord, get up to all sort of strange activities. And when you are raided insist that you had no idea what was going on. I find it all very odd. Especially in a nominally Catholic country. I wonder what the Moslem immigrants make of it.

Closer to home…. I’ve mentioned my cleaner’s capacity for breaking things. Tonight I made the mistake of being out when she came to clean. When I got back, it took me half an hour to find out why my computer wouldn’t come on. And then another fifteen minutes to determine why the keyboard wouldn’t function. I imagine she decided to clean under my desk.

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