In an interesting BBC discussion of what’s called Globish - the ‘easy’ version of English used by non-native speakers in business circles around the world - it was suggested that, in time, this will oust the real thing as the world’s lingua franca. Which is a bit worrying for us native speakers, as it’s said to be hard for us to understand. More appealing was the comment from a contributor to the discussion that the USA already had an advanced form of Globish, called Spanglish. In which, he said, at least one novel has recently been published there.

Talking of English and Spanish . . . I noted today that when Anglos weep a lot they “cry their heart out”. Whereas Spanish speakers “cry their lungs out” (Llorar a pleno pulmón). An interesting difference in organ choice. I think Anglos may well use ‘the lungs’ in an expression related to shouting. But, as this is the norm here, I imagine the Spanish don’t have the need for an equivalent expression using either these or any other of the body.

My Sunday tradition, as some readers will know, is to take a glass of Alabriño or two with a plate of squid down in Vegetables Square in Pontevedra’s glorious old quarter. If I get there early enough, I do this while reading El País. I prefer this to El Mundo but this is a tad academic as the former is the only one the bar buys. Anyway, I mention this because I came across this laudatory mention of El Pais in an FT article this morning:- “The link between newspapers and democracy has perhaps become something of a cliché, but it didn’t appear to me that way when I lived in Spain in the early 1980s. The founding of El País as the first truly serious newspaper, free from the dead hand of autocracy, to emerge in Spain for generations was a key event in the miraculously peaceful Spanish transition to democracy – quite as important, in my view, as other structural reforms to the constitution, education and the judicial system. El País in those early days didn’t just report on a country but helped to remake it. It was a beacon for mature democratic debate and for cultural renewal; one of the best ways of repairing the deep damage done to Spain’s soul by 40 years of repression. For me living in Spain in the early 1980s, it was a way of learning the language, the history and culture. I saw in it the late flowering of the enlightened liberalism cut down by the civil war; I remember in particular the wise essays by the non-conformist Catholic philosopher José Luís Aranguren. El País became a rallying point not just for Spanish but for Hispanic culture. In its pages I encountered essential Latin American voices such as those of the Uruguayans Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano. I have always liked the way international news comes before national news in El País. Nowadays El País is not quite the paper it was; too closely linked to the Spanish socialist workers’ party (PSOE) on the one hand, lacking in its former philosophical reach on the other”.

Said paper today carried the results of a survey on the planned general strike of late September to protest against changes in employment law. It seems that, while 51% of the Spanish population support it in principle, only 27% of workers have any intention of taking any action (or inaction) to support it.

Finally . . . I’ve always marvelled at the waste of water in Spain, a sort of collective ignoral of wider considerations than one’s own, perhaps. Here’s a relevant video, from The Economist.