Spanish
Practices: As I was going into a shop yesterday, someone was coming
out. In true British fashion, we both instinctively recoiled and
apologised. In contrast, when two Spaniards are heading for the same
narrow space - even you and a supermarket employee with a trolley -
they both keep going until they meet and then silently work something
out. Not wrong, just different.
Franco: A
book is to be published this month on the finances of this usurper
and dictator who died in his bed in 1976. Up to now, there seems to
have been something of an omerta on this issue. For it seems that he
was very far from being the uncorrupt leader he's generally painted
as. For one thing, he was getting a monthly payment of 10,000 pesetas (now €11,000) from Telefónica. For another, by selling the coffee monopoly gifted to him by a Brazilian dictator in 1940, he
pocketed €7.5m. A few years later, his bank account contained the
equivalent of €34.3m. But maybe he later gave it all away to Catholic charities.
Troublesome
Spanish Region 1: Here's an article on the Catalan challenge to
Madrid over secession and its impact on EU unity. Such as this is.
Troublesome
Spanish Region 2: And here's an article on the origins of Cataluña's
equally bolshie northern near-neighbours, the Basques.
New
English usage: 'To monster': Another noun turned into a verb. It
seems to mean something like 'to make somebody out to be far worse
than they are", as with the right-wing media and the new Labour
leader, Jeremy Corbyn. BTW - I heard it pointed out last night that,
as the deputy leader is Tom Watson, the Labour party is now led by
Tom and Jerry. As if things weren't bad enough already. Incidentally
. . . What are we now to call the Labour party? New, new Labour? Or
Old Labour? Just 'Labour' no longer seems to cut the mustard.
Pontevedra: On the day
before I left, I intended to give to the little
gypsy/Romanian girl the fotos she'd taken at the flea market 2 weeks
ago. But I left them in the car. So I went to explain it'd be a while
before she got them as my car was across the river and I was leaving
for the UK the next day. She seemed unconcerned and merely asked
whether she could take few more fotos. That done, she said to her father:
"Daddy, can I go to this man's car to get some fotos." I
went a little cold and said this wouldn't be possible. Her father
naturally agreed. It was only later that it dawned on me he must have
thought the suggestion had come from me. Perhaps it's a good thing I
won't be in Ponters for a while.
Finally .
. .With no doctor's clinic being open on Saturday morning, I went to
the pharmacy yesterday morning to ask what analgesic would be best
for a colon inflammation that I occasionally suffer from. This sort
of consultancy happens less in in the UK than in Spain, where the
pharmacist is treated like a pseudo doctor from whom advice can be
sought on minor matters. The lady was brilliantly helpful, largely
because she's a fellow sufferer - of diverticulitis for the
inquisitive - and could not only tell me which analgesic would be
best but whether it was a high or low fibre diet I was supposed to go
onto. And maybe I will.
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