August lunacy

En español abajo.

August here means fiestas. So the village is unusually full, with people who no longer live in Viana, or who have never lived here but whose family come from here, and are here for their holidays in large numbers. This weekend in particular, from Friday 12th to Monday 15th – a bank holiday – is when all sorts of events are laid on for the edification and entertainment of young and old alike.

There's a funfair, of course, and live music laid on for the important pre-lunch vermouth hour and evenings. The bars are rammed and the terraces throng with people, at least where there's shade at the moment. Some of the events are thought up and organised by locals rather than council, and are therefore entirely unofficial. One such is a midnight excursion of canoes and paddle boards onto the lake which almost surrounds the village. 

On the night of the full moon – and what a moon it was, a deep red at first, large and properly bright – about 40 of us headed down to the pontoon where a thriving club for paddle boarders and canoeists has its base. The lake being artificial, and its level subject to the needs of hydroelectric power generation as well as natural considerations like rainfall, meant the pontoon itself was stranded, sagging dry and forlorn some  distance from the water. So task one was to lug all the boats, boards, oars and lifejackets for those who wanted them down to the water's edge. 

Off we set. This is an illuminated affair - fairy lights, torches and so on are handed out so everybody is lit up and can clearly be seen even on cloudy nights. Round the tip of the peninsula we went, people watching us from high up on the bridge into town.

You can just about see the lower bridge which obstructed us at the foot of the main one.
Photo: S Lopesilvero

Though the bridge too is standing several metres higher above the waterline than normal, we'd usually pass under it and head off in that direction. But the water is so low at the moment that the medieval bridge that marked the original crossing, usually hidden deep beneath about thirty feet of water, is standing proud of the surface and blocked our way.

No matter. A wave at the spectators high above us and a 180-degree turn to head back whence we came, at which point events took a decidedly Galician turn. Now were this a British event, I imagine one or two might bring a beer with them, but in the main, beers would be taken either back on shore from cold boxes, or back in town afterwards, the boats and kit all safely stowed. Not here.

Pic: S Lopesilvero

Pulling all the boats and boards together into a sort of makeshift island, beers were passed round. Liqueurs, both coffee-flavoured and the most popular herby ones that I don't like at all, were passed round. Bread and jamon was passed round. A bottle of champagne opened to toast a club member's birthday. All this out on the water. Everything dutifully tidied away – we're big on not littering, having removed rubbish from the lake when it was even lower a few years back – and it was off into town for a drink. That's another thing that I never did back home; go out for a drink at well past 1 a.m.

Last night featured an 80s-themed party round the whole village, with the bars and locals dressed up accordingly and the bands playing era-appropriate music. A flash-mob type dance featuring around fifty of the locals in the main square went off superbly - genuinely joyful and uplifting. They'd been rehearsing in the town's sports hall for some days, including one night when forest fires and thunderstorms left them in darkness. 

Today, Saturday 13th, is feria, the busiest one of the year, and there will be more live music. This is possibly the day of the year, other than Carnival or the Mascarada, that Viana is at its busiest. Last night I got in at 4 a.m. Tonight, if my diminishing capacity to stay out late drinking allows, it could be later still. 

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Aquí, agosto es sinónimo de fiestas. Por ello, el pueblo está inusualmente lleno, con gente que ya no vive en Viana, o que nunca ha vivido aquí pero cuya familia es de aquí, y que viene a pasar sus vacaciones en gran número. Este fin de semana en particular, del viernes 12 al lunes 15, día festivo, se organizan todo tipo de eventos para la educación y el entretenimiento de jóvenes y mayores.

Hay un parque de atracciones, por supuesto, y música en directo para la importante hora del vermú y las noches. Los bares se llenan y las terrazas se llenan de gente, al menos donde hay sombra en este momento. Algunos de los eventos son ideados y organizados por los lugareños y no por el ayuntamiento, por lo que son totalmente extraoficiales. Uno de ellos es una excursión nocturna de canoas y tablas de paddle en el lago que casi rodea el pueblo. 

La noche de la luna llena -y qué luna era, de un rojo intenso al principio, grande y muy brillante-, unos 40 compañeros nos dirigimos al pontón donde tiene su base un próspero club de practicantes de paddle boarding y piragüismo. Como el lago es artificial y su nivel está sujeto a las necesidades de la generación de energía hidroeléctrica, así como a consideraciones naturales como la lluvia, el pontón estaba varado, seco y abandonado a cierta distancia del agua. Así que la primera tarea fue arrastrar todas las embarcaciones, tablas, remos y chalecos salvavidas para los que los quisieran hasta la orilla del agua. 

Nos pusimos en marcha. Se trata de un asunto iluminado: se reparten luces de hadas, antorchas y demás para que todo el mundo esté iluminado y se pueda ver claramente incluso en las noches nubladas. Damos la vuelta a la punta de la península, mientras la gente nos observa desde lo alto del puente que lleva al pueblo.

Aunque el puente también se encuentra varios metros por encima de la línea de flotación, normalmente pasamos por debajo y nos dirigimos en esa dirección. Pero el agua está tan baja en este momento que el puente medieval que marcaba el paso original, normalmente oculto bajo unos diez metros de agua, se levanta orgulloso de la superficie y nos bloquea el paso.

No importa. Un saludo a los espectadores en lo alto y un giro de 180 grados para regresar por donde vinimos, momento en el que los acontecimientos dieron un giro decididamente gallego. Si se tratara de un evento británico, imagino que uno o dos podrían llevar una cerveza, pero en general, las cervezas se llevarían a la orilla desde cajas frías, o de vuelta a la ciudad después, con los barcos y el equipo bien guardados. Aquí no.

Reuniendo todas las embarcaciones y tablas en una especie de isla improvisada, se repartieron las cervezas. Se repartieron licores, tanto de café como los más populares de hierbas, que no me gustan nada. Se repartió pan y jamón. Se abrió una botella de champán para brindar por el cumpleaños de un miembro del club. Todo esto en el agua. Todo se recogió debidamente (somos partidarios de no ensuciar, ya que hace unos años retiramos la basura del lago cuando estaba más bajo) y nos fuimos a la ciudad a tomar una copa. Eso es otra cosa que nunca hice en mi país: salir a tomar una copa más allá de la 1 de la madrugada.

Anoche se celebró una fiesta de temática ochentera por todo el pueblo, con los bares y los locales disfrazados en consecuencia y los grupos tocando música de la época. Un baile tipo flash-mob en el que participaron unos cincuenta vecinos en la plaza principal fue magnífico, realmente alegre y animado. Llevaban varios días ensayando en el polideportivo del pueblo, incluida una noche en la que los incendios forestales y las tormentas eléctricas les dejaron a oscuras. 

Hoy, sábado 13, es feria, la más concurrida del año, y habrá más música en directo. Este es posiblemente el día del año, aparte del Carnaval o la Mascarada, en que Viana está más concurrida. Anoche llegué a las 4 de la mañana. Esta noche, si mi menguante capacidad para estar hasta tarde bebiendo lo permite, podría ser más tarde aún.

Dark skies and dark thoughts in 'Galicia profunda'

(En español abajo).

I know, it's been a while. A combination of work, laziness, travel and lack of inspiration has kept me off these pages. But something's just made national headlines from here in Galicia, and it could not go unmentioned. Nothing like a bristling sense of indignation to get an Englishman's hackles up, and in the finest tradition of strongly worded letters to The Times, here's my tuppence-worth. 

Recently, a domestic case the like of which must pepper civil courts all over Spain and the UK, where the court must decide on custody of a child, raised alarm in Galicia thanks to part of the judge's reasoning for her decision. Here's a national newspaper's article on the incident. The auto-translated version isn't great, but it's good enough to get the gist. In explaining her decision to place the child in her father's care in Malaga, the judge explained that it would be better for him to grow up in a large city than in 'Galicia profunda' - 'deepest Galicia'.

While I can of course see the benefits of cosmopolitanism, such a phrase has no place in a judge's lexicon, displaying as it does a disrespectful lack of understanding of what Galicia has to offer and the compensatory benefits that I think a child would enjoy if they grew up here. Quite apart from the implications of that term, and even if you happened to agree with the wider ruling on a preference for a cosmopolitan upbringing, there are some simple facts of the matter which she appears to have ignored.

The area where the child's mother lives, as well as being visited by large numbers of tourists each year, is only 35 mins from Santiago de Compostela, a historic city of around 100,000 people, and a worldwide tourist destination thanks to the Camino, with an international airport, one of three in the region. It boasts a 526-year-old university, ranked fourth-best public university in the country. The region is home to large centres of the timber transformation, automotive, telecoms, electronics and banking industries. That good enough, judge?

No? OK. Crime in Galicia is among the lowest in Spain, with the province of A Coruña where the child's mother lives one of the safest in the country. That's got to play some part in your thinking about where you'd prefer your kid to grow up, right?

Galicians are commonly considered friendly and welcoming, with the food here having a superb reputation country-wide and the landscape - check out the video below - absolutely breathtaking. The kids in my village enjoy clean air, a swimming pool and other sports facilities, and neighbours who know and look out for them. We've got electricity and internet and everything(!), though the judge appears to believe people still point at passing aircraft around here.

This is, frankly, an example of the all-too common contempt for rural areas which are where most of the damn food comes from, and without which the cities would be screwed. The mother's lawyer is evidently going to appeal and you have to hope that any appeal decision is based on rather more informed and better-considered reasoning than leaning on insulting stereotypes.

Moving on to more positive stuff, and as if to further back up this region's offering, my missus and I just spent the weekend saying in a beautiful casa rural not far from here, as we attended the opening weekend of a spanking new observatory and planetarium in A Veiga, a village about half an hour from Viana.

The other side of the stone is the outer wall of the hotel bar.

Talks were given on black holes, the Islamic influence on modern astronomy, the detection of gravitational waves from a supernova millions of light-years away, and so on. I confess that the visiting Argentinian astronomer's accent, the scientific nature of the talk and my own standard of Spanish occasionally left me lost during that last one, but the fact that I followed them at all shows they were delivered in an accessible and engaging way, as good science should be. 

We were also able to sit on recliners in the planetarium to view an 'as live' shot of the night sky above our heads, with expert commentary on the constellations and galaxies visible to us from a resident astronomer, and watch spectacular animations of our solar system and beyond. We even climbed the stairs into the cupolas to check out the telescopes themselves. 

I'll see your mammary cupolas...

...and raise you a priapic weather station.

The video you saw above was shot from a viewing point next to the phallic meteorological installation pictured. That these installations are here at all is because the area has so little light pollution. The first night, we drove carefully through twisting mountain roads and a genuinely scary thick fog, then walking an unlit (obviously) path to the observatory itself from the car park. I was absolutely expecting zombie wolves or something to loom out of the fog. But the warmth of the welcome and the interesting talks made up for the freezing conditions and the lack of visible stars on the first evening.

Clearly an alien craft disguised as a rock.

The second night was completely clear. Even bloody colder, but seeing a photograph taken of the 2.5 million light-year-distant Andromeda galaxy in real time and hearing the enthusiasm of serious astronomers for the opportunities that this new facility affords them, was inspiring. It was also clear evidence of the modern reality of even the most rural parts of Galicia, in stark contrast to the judge's preconceptions.

I love it here and, were I a parent, would absolutely be happy to bring my child up in so-called 'Galicia profunda'.

Lo sé, ha pasado mucho tiempo. Una combinación de trabajo, pereza, viajes y falta de inspiración me ha mantenido alejado de estas páginas, pero algo acaba de llegar a los titulares nacionales desde aquí, desde Galicia, y no podía dejar de mencionarse. No hay nada como un sentimiento de indignación erizado para levantar los pelos de punta de un inglés, y en la mejor tradición de las cartas enérgicas a The Times, aquí está mi opinión. 

Recientemente, un caso doméstico como el que debe salpicar a los tribunales civiles de toda España y el Reino Unido, en el que el tribunal debe decidir sobre la custodia de un niño, despertó la alarma en Galicia gracias a parte del razonamiento de la jueza para su decisión. Éste es el artículo de un periódico nacional sobre el incidente. Al explicar su decisión de poner al niño al cuidado de su padre en Málaga, la juez explicó que sería mejor para él crecer en una gran ciudad que en la "Galicia profunda".

Aunque por supuesto puedo ver los beneficios del cosmopolitismo, tal frase no tiene lugar en el léxico de un/a juez, mostrando como lo hace una falta de comprensión irrespetuosa de lo que Galicia tiene que ofrecer y los beneficios compensatorios que creo que un niño disfrutaría si creciera aquí. Aparte de las implicaciones de ese término, e incluso si estuviera de acuerdo con el fallo más amplio sobre la preferencia por una educación cosmopolita, hay algunos hechos simples del asunto que ella parece haber ignorado.

La zona en la que vive la madre del niño, además de ser visitada por un gran número de turistas cada año, está a sólo 35 minutos de Santiago de Compostela, una ciudad histórica de unos 100.000 habitantes, y un destino turístico mundial gracias al Camino, con un aeropuerto internacional, uno de los tres de la región. Cuenta con una universidad de 526 años de antigüedad, clasificada como la cuarta mejor universidad pública del país. La región alberga grandes centros de transformación de madera, automoción, telecomunicaciones, electrónica y banca. ¿Es suficiente, juez?

¿No? Vale. La delincuencia en Galicia está entre las más bajas de España, siendo la provincia de A Coruña, donde vive la madre del niño, una de las más seguras del país. Eso tiene que influir en tu idea de dónde prefieres que crezca tu hijo/a, ¿no?

Los gallegos suelen ser considerados amables y acogedores, la comida de aquí tiene una excelente reputación en todo el país y el paisaje – mira el vídeo – es absolutamente impresionante. Los niños de mi pueblo disfrutan de un aire limpio, una piscina y otras instalaciones deportivas, y unos vecinos que los conocen y se preocupan por ellos. Tenemos electricidad e Internet y todo(!), aunque el juez parece creer que la gente sigue apuntando a los aviones que pasan por aquí.

Esto es, francamente, un ejemplo del desprecio demasiado común por las zonas rurales, de las que procede la mayor parte de los alimentos, y sin las cuales las ciudades lo pasarían mal. El abogado de la madre evidentemente va a apelar y hay que esperar que cualquier decisión de apelación se base en un razonamiento bastante más informado y mejor considerado que apoyarse en estereotipos insultantes.

Pasando a cosas más positivas, y como para respaldar aún más la oferta de esta región, mi novia y yo acabamos de pasar el fin de semana diciendo en una hermosa casa rural no muy lejos de aquí, ya que asistimos al fin de semana de inauguración de un flamante observatorio y planetario en A Veiga, un pueblo a media hora de Viana.

Se dieron charlas sobre agujeros negros, la influencia islámica en la astronomía moderna, la detección de ondas gravitacionales procedentes de una supernova a millones de años luz, etc. Confieso que el acento del astrónomo argentino visitante, la naturaleza científica de la charla y mi propio nivel de español me dejaron perdido en ocasiones durante esta última, pero el hecho de que las siguiera demuestra que fueron impartidas de forma accesible y atractiva, como debe ser la buena ciencia. 

También pudimos sentarnos en sillones en el planetario para ver una toma "en directo" del cielo nocturno sobre nuestras cabezas, con comentarios de expertos sobre las constelaciones y galaxias visibles para nosotros de un astrónomo residente, y ver animaciones espectaculares de nuestro sistema solar y más allá. Incluso subimos a las cúpulas para ver los telescopios. 

El vídeo que has visto arriba se grabó desde un mirador situado junto a la instalación meteorológica fálica de la foto. El hecho de que estas instalaciones estén aquí se debe a que la zona tiene muy poca contaminación lumínica. La primera noche, condujimos con cuidado a través de retorcidas carreteras de montaña y una niebla espesa que daba auténtico miedo, y luego caminamos por un sendero sin iluminación (obviamente) hasta el propio observatorio desde el aparcamiento. Esperaba absolutamente que los lobos zombis o algo así surgieran de la niebla. Pero la calidez de la acogida y las interesantes charlas compensaron las condiciones de frío y la falta de estrellas visibles en la primera noche.

La segunda noche estaba completamente despejada. Más frío aún, pero ver una fotografía tomada de la galaxia de Andrómeda, a 2,5 millones de años luz de distancia, en tiempo real, y escuchar el entusiasmo de los astrónomos serios por las oportunidades que les brinda esta nueva instalación, fue inspirador. También fue una clara evidencia de la realidad moderna incluso de las zonas más rurales de Galicia, en marcado contraste con las ideas preconcebidas de la juez.

Me encanta este lugar y, si fuera padre, estaría encantado de criar a mi hijo/a en la llamada "Galicia profunda".

Trouble at mill

I wrote in a previous entry about my experience of voting in local elections here and how it was a much more direct kind of process than back home, with the votes being counted in front of you by people you know, the candidates including people you know, etc. In that post I mentioned that people tend to talk not about the party they're voting for but the person. Well recent, quite startling, political events locally have served to disavow any doubts I may have had as to the importance of the parties in people's thinking when they vote.

There has been, dear reader, serious trouble at the Town Hall. Now partly because feelings are running high and I prefer to present what's been happening as neutrally as possible, and partly because I simply don't know enough of the ins and outs to offer an opinion with any confidence, what I'm going to write here is merely what's happened as I understand it. It is not a view on who's right, wrong, crooked, straight, etc. I simply don't know.

I said at the time to think of the PP as the Conservatives, PSOE as Labour and BNG as a sort of Galician Plaid Cymru. BNG had retained the mayoralty by dint of working with PSOE in a council where no party had a majority. Therefore the incumbent mayor, a tall and loquacious chap by the name of Secundino Fernández, retained the role. Today, however, he was removed from that position in a motion of censure at a rowdy extraordinary council meeting. I'll come back to this meeting later. It seems that two of the three PSOE representatives have 'crossed the floor', voting with their PP counterparts to remove him from office and share the mayoralty for half each of what remains of the current electoral term.

This has been boiling for a while – it could have happened at a previous meeting but a frankly comical occurrence pushed it back. The remaining PSOE councillor, aware that in the absence of a PP councillor who was away on holiday she suddenly held the balance of the vote in her hands (this bit I may have wrong, for which I beg forgiveness from both her and anybody in Viana reading this if so), sprang to her feet mid-meeting and ran from the room shouting that her cows had escaped and she had to go and deal with them. (This bit I don't have wrong. Everybody in the village who wasn't at that meeting has seen the video!) This does not, I imagine, happen in too many councils back home.

Locals who are against the two who've crossed the floor, or are supporters of Secundino, have made their feelings clear. Stickers have appeared on bins, lamp-posts and walls around the village commenting on what's going on. Posters have been tied to bridges and fences. These posters and stickers say that the two have been paid to cross the floor – critics of the two say that their motivations are greed, not politics. BNG supporters say that the current administration's achievements are manifest. The PP and PSOE councillors counter that the mayor's style is dictatorial and he's impossible to work with. There's a large gulf between these two positions and it made for an extremely raucous pleno (meeting) as the deed was done at high noon today.

I don't know how many people attend a typical pleno. Some make a point of being at as many as possible, but the Casa de la Cultura where it's held is certainly not full for all of them. Today it was as packed as social distancing allowed, and some 250 people were viewing a live internet feed. A total of maybe 300 people viewing one way or another is the equivalent of a town of, say, Basingstoke's size having around 15,000 people attending a council meeting either in person or online. There were actual members of the press, both print and TV as far as I could see, in attendance.

I tuned in for a bit of it. My understanding of Gallego is still poor when it's noisy or more than one person is speaking at once, and both were the case here. A lot of shouting from an enraged audience and, according to a local barman this evening, police had to escort the two now party-less councillors concerned from the hall. (I don't know if this is true – I didn't see it.) This is all unprecedented locally.

So what now? This is the only bit on which I'm going to express an opinion. The next three years will see a mayor who represents no party now, then a PP mayor, in charge for one-and-a-half years each. I find it difficult to see how a mayor who has attracted such ire can govern effectively. This is a small town and political divisions in Spain generally, and in the pueblos in particular, can run deep. In the long run, I can only see the BNG coming out of it with a 'win', if such a thing can be gleaned from this crisis. While PP voters may not feel particularly strongly about it, anybody who voted PSOE will likely feel they've been disenfranchised. Vote PSOE, get PP is unlikely to go down well with them and in circumstances like this the electorate usually punish the party concerned. Remember the Lib Dems' vote collapsing completely after they got into bed with the Tories?

PSOE voters are not, I suspect, likely to vote PP in future. They may simply not vote of course, but the likely destination of many of those votes, if anywhere, is the BNG. We're only talking about 540-odd votes so a couple of hundred either way can make a huge difference to the make-up of the council here.

What times we live in. Cantankerous cows, COVID and Council chaos – what the hell else has 2020 got up its sleeve?

No Mus loose about this hoose

Michelle Obama is a hugely admirable person. Quite apart from her activism, reason enough to look up to her, she has no doubt faced some shit during her life and career, some of it simply because of her gender or skin colour (or both) that I can't begin to imagine. She was also, I suspect, at least partly privy to some pretty dark stuff during her time as First Lady that didn't see the light of public scrutiny.

But now we hear she is, like so many, struggling to deal with all the shit that's going on at the moment. The weight of everything has got to even somebody like her, with all her undoubted resilience, with everything she's experienced, with everything she's known about going on in the world's darkest corners in the past. It's now, the era of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse; Trump, Putin, Johnson and Covid, that she lets on, publicly at least, that it's got on top of her.

She's not alone, of course, which rather belatedly brings me to the point of this entry. Thinking of how best to look up, not down in this blog, if it please Your Majesty I thought I might divert and entertain by introducing to you the world's oddest card game, Mus. (Pronounced something similar, though not exactly, like 'moose' - the vowel in this Spanish game's name sounds like it's being strangled, and isn't something you find readily in English).

Any attempt to explain the rules of this game to you is pointless. I've sat and watched, and had it explained to me, several times, and I'm still not entirely sure that I wasn't the victim of some practical joke. If that's the case, the jokers have gone to extraordinary lengths, because Mus is played so extensively here that the local newspapers publish a full page of league tables of local teams(!) But I'll at least try to explain what goes on from a spectator's point of view.

Now the first thing you have to know about any game of cards in Spain, even if you chose to play Snap, is that the cards themselves are weird. Not for Spain the normal, 2-3-4 etc up to King-Ace in four suits recognised worldwide. Oh no. They have swords, cups, coins and something resembling Captain Caveman's club. And you'll usually find that some bastard has removed all the 8s and 9s, but that nobody seems to mind. Quite what these, to me at least, innocuous numbers have done to deserve such ostracism is beyond me, but it means that a straight, if you're playing their version of rummy, goes 6-7-10. This caught me out on a number of occasions at first, and cost me several coins in lost games that I maintain I'd otherwise have won.

Anyway. You get four players, in teams of two much like bridge. They get four cards each. Then something like this happens. (Anybody who knows the game will immediately point out a string of mistakes here, but it all happens so fast and so weirdly, that it's impossible to follow). They act in turn, and the fourth player, the last to act in each round, is known as the postre, dessert, as apparently it's the weaker position. No, I don't know why:

"Big"

"No Mus"

"Pass"

"I can help you." (Winks at teammate)

"Mus"

"Pass" (Purses lips at teammate)

"Pass"

"Small" (Sticks tongue out at teammate.)

"Chica" (Player closes eyes)

"30"

"27"

"24"

"Nothing"

"Juego"

"Pass"

"Pass"

"Pass"

Then there's a complicated exchange of silver chickpeas. (No, I'm not making that bit up either. Out of the bizarre exchanges above, somehow they know who's scored what and they use silver chickpeas to keep score). Then the whole thing starts again. Oh and 3s are 10s, obviously. Can't believe I forgot that bit.

Often, at no point during what goes on above has anybody looked at or touched their cards after the first inspection. They can only change the cards they're initially dealt if all four agree, which is what the 'Mus' bit is about, apparently.

The bizarre gurning, shrugging of shoulders, sticking tongues out etc, is all part of the game and these gestures have their own rules. You can lie openly, but only by speaking. The body signals must be honest, and can be picked up by, and challenged by, the other team. You can be disqualified for using your own, made-up gestures, or for trying to deceive your opponents with them.

And the four cards you hold are used for all four rounds, despite the value of each card varying wildly from round to round. Kings (threes!) are valuable in one round but useless in another. Somehow this game, which originated in the Basque country, is hugely popular in Galicia, played all over Spain and wherever there are Spanish, particularly Basque, communities worldwide.

Now I flatter myself, dear reader, that though by no means an intellectual giant, I'm not an idiot. But this game just baffled me completely. My partner tried to teach me the game, but when I asked her to explain the rules in a more linear fashion because she was jumping around all over the place, she simply said "I can't. It doesn't work like that." We tried using dummy hands, to see which I'd keep and which throw away, using car number plates seen during long drives to stand in for the cards that I'd receive. A 3 would be a King, of course, but then do I keep the two 5s?

Even the chickpea scoring, where some chickpeas mean five points but others mean one point each, made me feel like Baldrick when Blackadder attempted to each him 'adding' using beans. (Four. Some chickpeas plus some chickpeas is four chickpeas. Points, sorry.)

Mercifully, during more normal times, most Wednesdays there's a game of Poker played in one of the village bars, using the normal Diamond-Club-Heart-Spade cards, with 8s and 9s and everything. I may lose €10 most weeks, but at least I know why I'm losing them.

Give this game a go, Mrs Obama. (I know she's an avid reader...) Its utter weirdness may at least baffle you long enough to forget all the shit that's going on for a few minutes.

Edit: My missus has just pointed out, having read and shared this, that it's not just the 3s that masquerade as another number in this game. I'd forgotten that 2s are 1s. Course they are.

People called Romans, they go the house?

Just back from a weekend seeing friends in Lugo, a small Galician city a couple of hours' drive from us. Now Lugo is not particularly well known outside of Spain, I imagine, but it boasts some extremely good reasons to visit.

Firstly, the frankly ludicrous standards of tapas that you get if you're out having a drink. Pretty much everywhere you go it's the same, to the point that I don't really know how any actual restaurants survive in the city at all. To illustrate: for breakfast this morning, I ordered your pretty standard café con leche, at around €1.50. (It may have been less, I'm not certain because it was one of a group order with other stuff). Served with that coffee, free, were two churros (long, straight, dunkable pastries made out of a doughnut dough), a decent-sized piece of bica (a delicious, light, Galician sponge cake that for some reason you're not allowed to call a cake...) and a small glass of orange juice. Freshly squeezed. There was also tortilla on the bar top – help yourself.

Evenings are even better – or worse, depending on your point of view on gluttony. The purchase of a caña, the typical small beer, and you're offered one of anything up to 20 tapas from a changeable menu on a blackboard. In one case this was a rack of ribs, in another a dinner-sized portion of spaghetti carbonara. There are also sandwiches, empanada and tortilla on the bar for everybody to help themselves. Again. It makes you wonder, to be honest, how the bars make any money in this most generous of cities. And, as I said, why there are any restaurants at all.

Lugo is also blessed with the complete circle of the original Roman wall surrounding its centre. A satellite shot here shows you the extent of this rarest, and in Europe quite possibly unique, feature. Many cities have chunks of walls left. Lugo still has the whole thing, and an impressive sight it is too. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the turn of the millennium.

Pic from 'Galicia Guide' website

The locals jog around its circumference and are rightly proud of this intact reminder of the genius of the ancient Romans for building, taking care to preserve their most precious tourist asset. So proud, in fact, that they hold a gigantic Roman-themed celebration, of which more in a moment, every year. I was particularly pleased with this piece of graffiti on a building inside the walls, though. I wouldn't, of course, normally condone such actions. However, when the obvious fan of Life of Brian painted this on the wall, they took local sensibilities seriously and, assuming the figure drawn on the right is the 'I', nailed the grammar:

Write it out 100 times. If it's not done before
sunrise, I'll cut your balls off...

That celebration, then. The Arde Lucus. As many as half a million people come to this city of under 100,000 inhabitants, to give you some idea of how busy and important it is. To suggest everybody 'dresses up' would be to do the thing a huge injustice. Everybody goes to extraordinary lengths, and the locals all seem to own Roman style clothing that's as close to the real thing as you could ask for. My partner's cousin, a local, has a full legionary's uniform and weaponry on proud display in his flat. Real leather, real metal, real everything. Imagine tens of thousands of people descending on the city dressed like that, (or as the local Celts, the Romans' contemporary opponents) to get pissed, eat heartily and recreate a siege of the city.

I have not yet attended this bacchanalian set-to because it often coincides with a time when we're not in Galicia for a few weeks but will certainly do so in future. Reports and photos from friends who attend regularly suggest that it's not to be missed. Terrific bunch of people, the Romans Lugoans. Terrific.

Edit: on reading this piece, my partner confirmed the coffee was €1. And that I'd forgotten the piece of ham on a slice of fresh bread that was also served with it...

For whom the bell tolls

On a warm and sunny Sunday such as today, with a billion tiny jewels of light winking in and out of infinitesimal existence on the lake's surface and the almond and cherry trees in bloom, this is a spectacularly beautiful place. It's a quiet beauty and Sundays are particularly still, even by Viana's standards. There will be a few people about having vermouth around what Brits would call lunchtime, enjoying the sun at a table outside one of the bars, but you could easily walk around the parts of the village away from the main square and see nobody.

That quiet, and the village's small size, is often reinforced by the one sound other than birdsong that you can reliably bet will intrude into the hush - the church's bell. In Britain we've all heard them chiming the hours, of course, whether it's the currently silent Big Ben or the local church bell, but here the bell has other jobs to do, and the fact that its sound can be clearly heard across the whole village enables it to do those jobs most effectively.

It of course marks the time on the hours and half-hours but at noon on Sundays it can also be heard calling the faithful to mass (at the same time, discordantly, that it chimes the noon dozen). It also serves a much more poignant purpose. If you hear the chime in the video below, you know a funeral has just started or somebody has died. The sound is appropriately mournful and, despite the large number of children in the village at the moment, it's an ageing population on average, so it's heard regrettably frequently.

(Excuse my fingers.) 

Despite the sad use to which it has to be put, I find the bell to be a reassuring presence in general. In the absolute silence of night here, if you can't sleep, it sounds through the dark like a nightwatchman, marking your wakefulness in half-hour increments. Where some might find that disconcerting, I find it a comforting indication that all is well. It even has the common decency to ring the hour twice, the second time a minute after the first, so if you're only half aware of it ringing (was that five or six?) you know you've got another chance to listen properly in short order.

I'm told that once upon a time the bell performed warning roles, letting people know if there was a fire, flood, plague of locusts or whatever. Nowadays we have a shiny new alarm, tested every few months, which will alert us if the dam upstream fails and we have to get to the high point of the village pronto, but how you were supposed to tell these warnings apart back then I can't tell you. Not knowing if we were about to be burned to a cinder, drowned in a muddy torrent or eaten by zombies (I'm assuming they'd have tolled it for the zombie apocalypse...) I'd probably just run around doing this:

until some professionals turned up to deal with it. So I'm more than happy with just the three jobs it does now, thanks.

Lactose-tolerant scatology

The great Billy Connolly, speaking in defence of swearing, once said that you never hear or read '"Fuck off," he hinted.' I've always been at one with the Big Yin in his view - far from being the sign of a limited intellect (as I've heard it dismissed), I believe that creative use of swearing is the sign of a lively and extensive vocabulary. Any idiot can simply drop the f-bomb repeatedly, but it takes real wit to use the profane to the fullest extent of its power.

It's often the swearing that anybody trying to learn a language will pick up first. The liberal use of this form, coupled with swearing's force of emphasis and general usefulness, make swearwords some of the first that many people distinguish. (Not forgetting the churlish delight many people have in learning rude words in other languages, of course.)

The Galicians have made things even easier for the keen-to-learn outsider in this regard, by focusing their swearing to an extraordinary extent on the scatological. I'd say more than half the swearing I hear is an excremental imperative. I'll give you an example. Late last Thursday night, returning to Viana from Christmas in the UK, the drive back from the railway station was marked by patches of fog and near-moonlightless darkness. Caution was necessary, none more so than when a deer suddenly ran out in front of the car, appearing from nowhere out of the gloom and forcing a sudden braking. "Shit on the whore of a deer!" pronounced the driver, perfectly delivering an exemplar of the most common form of swearing I hear.

Shitting on, or in, things, would seem an almost compulsive desire here, were you to take the locals' imprecations literally. I've heard hundreds of forms of it - the deer incident being typical of how specifically it can be adapted, but the most common are:

Shit on the mother who birthed you/him/her/it!
Shit on God!
Shit on my life!
Shit on ten! (No I don't understand this one either, and wonder if it's an example of my mishearing the dialect from time to time. But I'm reasonably sure I've heard this more than once.)
Shit on the whore!
Shit on the hostia. (The hostia is the communion bread, of which more later.)

And, given that I've named this entry in this phrase's honour, my absolute favourite:

Shit in the milk!

Now the first time I heard this one I dissolved into laughter, not only because of the inevitable mental image it conjures, but because to me it doesn't sound like an expression of outrage as it's normally used here ("The train's cancelled? Shit in the milk!"). No, to my English ears it sounds more like an expression of emphasis, alarm or surprise. (Shit in the milk, that's hot!). I also picture a baddie in some lewd kids' comic. ("I'll put a stop to their little enterprise. I'll defecate in their milk. Ha!")

I don't use these terms myself because they all sound faintly absurd coming out of a foreigner's mouth, and spoken with an English accent. I was, though, kindly told by a friend on Monday that I now use the Spanish equivalent of 'fuck', 'joder', just like a local. This was oddly pleasing, but joder is so mild here that you hear it on television at any hour of the day, unbeeped. They only beep two things, as far as I can tell. The aforementioned hostia, which can be used on its own as a sweary expression of surprise ("They were how much? Hostia!") but is obviously a Catholic reference to the host, and therefore offends many people in what's still a pretty religious country. The other thing is puta, meaning 'whore'. That gets beeped too - I have no idea why. Hijo/hija de puta ('son/daughter of a whore') is one of the strongest insults here but the only bit they beep on telly is the last word.

To truly swear like a Galician, though, I need to start using carallo. This reference to the phallus can be used so multifariously that it'd fill an entry on its own - I recommend this page for a much fuller comment on its ubiquity and versatility. Again, I hesitate because it makes me think I sound like I'm trying too hard. But if the day ever comes when I'm complimented on using carallo like a local, well shit in the milk that'd make me happy.

See what I mean? Emphasis, not outrage.

A rose by any other name...

One of the problems I faced over the many years I spent visiting Viana rather than living here was trying to remember everybody's names. As a fairly regular visitor, and a fairly rare English one at that, everybody was kind enough to remember mine. Sure, I got (and get) a few variations of it - I've been called James, Jamie, Jameson and others, but that was more about the difficulty of pronunciation of a name that doesn't really exist here. I knew that they knew me by name and couldn't honestly say the same was true in reverse.

Still, I thought - no problem. There was always the locals' trick to fall back on, which works just as effectively in English. We may call each other 'mate' or something, but here you can be called pretty much anything descriptive that fits, for just me or for me and my missus together, in Galego or Castellano - 'tio', 'chaval', 'caballero', 'joven', 'rapaz', 'Inglés', 'pareja', or most commonly here, 'rey/reina'. This last one literally means 'king/queen', and has got me into trouble because I initially thought it was Spain-wide, but it turns out to be a very local habit. I got some odd looks from friends from other parts of Spain when I used these, so no longer do.

You can be called by whatever you happen to be doing or wearing when greeted, even - 'Good morning, ironer.' 'How's it going, tennis player?' These are all handy ways out which served me well (or badly) until such time as we came here permanently, when I thought I'd easily put names to so many of these familiar faces.

This has been complicated by a number of factors. First and foremost, I'm getting on a bit, the memory is not what it once was and I'm increasingly shit with names. But the locals haven't made it easy for me, either. They seem to share about six names between everybody. There's much. much less variety than I was used to back in London, so for example I know at least three Maria-Josés and I can't tell you how many Josés or Carloses. It doesn't help also that some of the people whose names you were pretty confident of are not called what you thought they were at all because of the absolutely standard practice of changing some of them, just as we do. So where Alexander is likely to be known as Sandy in English, for example, people called Fransisco here are routinely called Paco. Apart from the ones who are called Fran, obviously.

I don't think it's just me for whom this can be problematic. This, for example, though I've changed the specific name and occupation to anonymise it (probably pointlessly because, given what I've said above, it could be about any one of half a dozen people, but anyway...), is an extract of a conversation I once heard:

"You know Lourdes?"
"Which Lourdes?"
"Lourdes, Lourdes's daughter."
"Which Lourdes?"
"The baker."
"Lourdes's daughter is a baker?"
"No, Lourdes, the daughter of Lourdes the baker."
"Oh. No, don't know her. What about her?"

See what I mean?

As if in recognition of this shortage of names (or perhaps in a village-wide plot to confuse the stupid Inglés), everybody has a nickname. Some of the nicknames are echoes of what happens in the UK - the carpenter is known as Chippy, for example. But why the hell is our mechanic friend called Gali - essentially, 'chicken'? Because his dad was called Gali of course. Why was he called Gali, though? Because he kept chickens. Right. Of course nobody else around here keeps chickens(!), so naturally he's the one who became so-known. I don't even know his real name.

In a further twist, some people have multiple nicknames depending on who you're talking to. One acquaintance of ours has at least three. So I still have to use the old tricks more than I like, and more than I thought I'd have to. It's getting there, though - I can now sometimes tell my missus, who's from here, what some people's names are when she doesn't know. She's still way, way ahead of me on all the familial connections, though, seeming to know who's so-and-so's second cousin, who's whatshisname's half brother etc.

Don't even get me started on that. I'll stick to trying to learn all the names for now, thanks.

Well roast my chestnuts, my bread's pregnant.

I mentioned in an earlier post about the importance of chestnuts here. At this time of year, they're everywhere. Many locals have chestnut trees, from which they sell the harvest to dealers who in turn sell them on to supermarkets etc. I confess I'm not much of a fan - I will eat them, roasted, but without much enthusiasm. My partner, though, more typically around here, adores them and will eat them raw, straight off the tree. In the supermarkets I've seen them on sale for over €5 per kilo - while that's obviously a lot more than the growers get for them, it's an indication of how popular they are here.

So popular in fact that they feature as the centrepiece of a yearly celebration called Magosto, not that Galicians need too much of an excuse for a party. Known as Castañada* in other parts of Spain, it's not limited to Galicia, being celebrated in several other regions and in Portugal, but evidently takes similar form pretty much everywhere.

We were away for this year's celebration, so the images (which are crap, sorry!) in this entry are from last year, which I did attend. The village's newest bar put on a Magosto of their own this year, which I also got to, and the format was essentially the same on a smaller scale - Galicians know what they like - and went down very well.

While this year's harvest has been good, last year's was disastrous because of the long drought. You wouldn't have thought so from the walk up to the old cattle market where the event was held, though. Giant trucks, their trailers already groaning under the weight of huge numbers of chestnuts, stood silently in the street while still more were being deposited into waiting containers:

Lorry-loads of these, hundreds of thousands of them.
And this in a terrible year.

Harvesting these things is laborious. Machines are available, if you can afford one, to get them off the trees in the first place - they look like an ugly love-child of a combined harvester and a giant hoover. But everybody I know who harvests them has the bastard-spiky cases which they come in removed by hand. So this represents a prodigious effort to get the things to the shops, even in a very low-yield year.

Under the corrugated roof of the market, your three Euros buys you access to essentially unlimited supplies of red wine (very young and not the highlight - best drunk in a Calimocho), barbecued sardines, chestnuts (of course), pregnant bread and bica. Now I love bica - it's a very plain-looking sweet sponge, but if it's made well and it's fresh, it's absolutely fantastic. There is considerable debate about which of the bakeries in the village, and which region of Galicia, produces the best bica. It goes beautifully with coffee and is often served after a big celebratory meal. It also soaks up the local fire water, aguardiente, rather nicely.

But pan preñao, pregnant bread, that was a new one on me. You're given what looks like a plain, warm roll, which at first glance I assumed was to go with the sardines. One bite into it, though, and it becomes clear that it's got a bun in the oven itself:

Congratulations - it's a beautiful, spicy sausage.

A delicious chorizo is hidden inside. This makes the thing very filling but they disappear like, well, hot rolls. People seem to be able to eat several of them. I limited myself to one of them, leaving space for the bica.

There was also, of course, music. Two bands doing their thing - one the typical charanga, playing the usual Spanish style stuff that you'll hear at any such gathering, the other a three-piece featuring a bass and an accordion, who went through a series of rock classics headed up by Smoke on the Water. A bit different from the usual sounds which back up these things.

It was dark and my camera's crap. Sorry.

Our bellies full and warmed nicely by the enormous fire at the back of the market-place, it was time to stroll back down the hill to the main square for a drink or two. Being Galicians, and therefore all serious gastrophiles, talk was of the merits of the bica, and the sardines, and the year's chestnut harvest. I suspect that this year's affair, with the vastly superior haul of castañas this autumn, will have been more cheerful still.

*Castañada better evinces the central role that the chestnuts play in the thing, castaña being the Spanish word for chestnut.

Time at the bar

I've always prided myself on a commitment to proper bar etiquette in Britain. I think most people understand the unwritten rules, the bar staff try to apply them when it's not so busy as to be impossible, and there's a general appreciation from your fellow drinkers when you follow said rules. You all know what I mean - don't, when and if asked 'who's next?', call your order ahead of somebody who got there first. I always make a point, if I'm served out of turn, of checking that whoever's ahead of me is already being served or letting them go first. All civilised people agree that this is one of the great features of pub culture and anybody who ignores those rules, boorishly shouting their order as soon as the staff catch their eye, can suffer what in Britain are pretty serious consequences - a hard stare, a disapproving sigh, the shaken heads of the gazumped drinkers. In extreme cases some people may even go as far as politely pointing out to the barman/maid that they were first.

Let me tell you that none of that applies here. Finding it difficult to shake off these old habits, I've found myself standing waiting quietly while others, arriving after me, are served, before eventually the server realises I want a drink and comes to serve me. The reason they don't even realise at first is because I'm not following the unwritten rules of ordering a beer here, which seem to be to be as follows:

Pretty much wherever you are in the bar*, whenever you got there, yell 'pour me a xxx cuando puedas' at somebody behind the bar, and in due course your drink will get to you.

That's it. This 'cuando puedas' is important - 'when you can'.  There's no expectation that you'll be served immediately, or in order, but your drink will get to you. I'm already used to the lack of urgency when waiting for your beer, but can't quite bring myself to just yell my order. This has led to some criticism. Criticism that I'm being too polite, both in waiting and in how I then order. A friend here who runs a bar has told me that I should, rather than asking, 'Would you pour me a beer, please?', be shouting, "Pour me a beer, for fuck's sake.' That's how he'd rather I ordered! That way he knows I'm waiting for a beer and that I won't wait longer than is fair. Needless to say I've yet to ask in such a manner.

Though the bar culture is ubiquitous and just as integral to society as British pubs, there are other differences. Nobody drinks pints, of course. The typical order of beer is a caña or a bottle, both around a third to a half-pint. The typical vuelta, the journey round the bars having a drink and a tapa in each, means that many people order a quarter of a pint - a corto. No way you could have a pint in all the bars, even in a place as small as Viana - you'd be paralytic. The one time I ordered a pint here, it was because we'd been cleaning the lake during a drought, and I arrived at the bar so hot, thirsty and dusty that only a pint would do. When it arrived it was clear that the glass had been forgotten in a freezer for some considerable time - so much ice had formed around it that it watered my beer down to the point of undrinkability when it immediately melted. Lesson learned.

No rounds here either, or at least very rarely. This can make paying for your own drink difficult. Not the excuse of a miser - I've always been happy to put my hand in my pocket in the pub - but quite genuinely, I find it hard to buy a drink here. You don't typically pay when you order here, unless it's during the bedlam of carnival or the August fiestas. You pay for everything when you leave. This can lead to people fighting to be the one to pay, often buying the drinks for friends of theirs who happen to be in the bar while they're at it. I've lost count of the number of times I've gone to pay for my drinks, only to be told I'm 'invited' - my beer's been bought for me. You have to get your money down quickly, often insisting at the start, if you want to get drinks for other people. Even this can get you in trouble, though. Not so long ago I spotted a couple in a bar here that I remembered had invited me a few days earlier. I paid for their drinks and when the landlord told them my mate seemed quite genuinely cross that I'd done such a thing, even though it's what everybody does. And it's what he'd done to me before. It's a minefield, I tell you.

Being a small place, the bar owners know all their regulars by name. (I'm not quite at the stage of knowing all the names yet, of which more in another entry soon). You can, if you go out of an evening, essentially guarantee there will be somebody in there you know regardless of which bar you choose, be it the owner or a punter. So while I'm still some way from ordering my caña with a cheery expletive, and don't entirely understand the complexities of when it's OK to 'invite' somebody and when not, I do feel very much at home in the bars here.

*Or indeed outside of it. Just this afternoon I was sitting in one of the bars here and a chap I don't know just yelled 'a white wine here' though the open door as he arrived, sitting down with his mates outside in the confident knowledge that it would come to him.

Drums, please

I've probably mentioned the frenzy of flour throwing that happens around here in the build-up to Mardi Gras, and will do so again shortly. It's all part of the Latin world's celebration of Carnival which closes as Lent begins, and it's kind of started already.

A couple of weekends back, various groups were invited to Viana from all over Spain to participate in La Mascarada, a parade of fulions (the locals' various drum beats) and masked costumery of all kinds. It's kind of a cultural exchange, showcasing in another town what you all do yourselves during Carnival. The people who were good enough to come and visit all did so out of a love of Carnival and a desire to showcase their own celebrations, and for no financial rewards at all. It was a clear demonstration of how important these annual rituals are that they'd come so far for just a couple of days, some of them sleeping in the local sports hall, to do this.

I've now seen so many of these parades that none of what happens comes as even a vague surprise, but I do wonder how this must look to anybody who's never seen it. The images here, used with the kind permission of local photographer J Luis Ortiz, give a much better impression than anything I could write as to what goes on. As for the sound of the huge drums being beaten to the various Galician villages' own rhythms, you'll have to trust me that you can quite literally feel your entire chest cavity vibrating to the beat. More on those in another entry later - the drums are hugely important to the locals and deserving of their own entry and images.

The first sign that the parade has started (other than the approaching thunder of the drumming, of course) is the sound of bells. Then these guys come charging down the road, clearing the path for the coming parade. 

Boteiros - crowd control Carnival style. Photo: J Luis Ortiz.

The headwear these Boteiros sport are all, of course, hand-made, and can weigh anything up to 20kg. Many of them wear neck braces under the masks to help support the weight, but I've seen just how tiring it is running up and down and pole vaulting with their sticks with that kind of weight on their heads. I'd be surprised if they don't all finish each Carnival a couple of inches shorter.

Once the route's been cleared, the Boteiros shuttling back and forth keeping people back, down come the various groups. If they're from this part of Galicia the group will almost certainly include drummers beating the fulion, but those from elsewhere come in all kinds of finery, from Guadalajaran devils wearing real cows' horns, potato chunks cut into bizarre teeth shapes jutting from their mouths, to whatever this is;

"Where are you taking this... thing?" One for Star Wars fans there. Photo: J Luis Ortiz.

I couldn't see where these horsemen and women came from - each group carries a small sign naming their home town - but they stopped in the main square and challenged each other to a sort of saddled poetry-off. I'd love to tell you what they said but it was all in Gallego, which I still sadly lack as a language, and it was in any case all but impossible to hear them over the cacophony of cow bells, drums and inflated animal bladders being used for percussion.

"Speak up! I can't hear a thing..." Photo: J Luis Ortiz.

The arrival of Viana do Bolo's own 'Alternativo' fulion group signals the end of the parade, and it breaks up into various impromptu drinking and drumming sessions. Everybody who's been part of it heads up to the top of the town, where food and drink has been laid on for them in the sports hall. Later, after a couple of cold drinks in town overnight - it was a Saturday after all - they go and do the same thing again in another village a few miles away, before heading home for their own Carnival celebrations. As for Viana, we can all expect to have our faces covered in flour pretty much as soon as February starts - much more on that in a later entry.

Yeah those aren't balloons. The were once inside a cow and they make a lot of
noise when they're banged together. Photo: J Luis Ortiz.

(Incidentally, as regularly as I've attended this sort of thing now, I was still told by one of the local kids that I 'looked really English' after the parade simply because I was wearing a long, black coat and carrying an umbrella. It was bloody raining!)

See? I told you it was raining. I was hardly the only person carrying a brolly.
Photo: J Luis Ortiz.

After the flames

We''ve just driven back, this time in daylight, through the area that was ablaze in the early hours of Monday morning, pictured in my previous entry. We, and our village, have been fortunate - the flames stopped a couple of miles short of us. Others, including friends of ours, have not been so lucky, losing crops which represent their livelihoods to the fire.

The mountainsides are charred black and smell, still, of smoke. It's an appalling sight and a heartbreaking one, to see what should be green and verdant beauty reduced to ashes as it is. The national news screens have been filled with images of burning forests and farms, Galicians weeping at having lost everything to the flames. Four people are dead. Portugal has had it even worse, with almost 40 people killed there. It's been a very difficult week and, understandably, despair is giving way to anger. Anger at the people who started fires deliberately - there have been arrests already. Anger too at what's perceived to be a passive, reactive rather than preventative fire policy from the Galician government. Certainly it's true that, driving back home today, freshly cut fire breaks were evident in the forests which cover the landscape - too late when the flames have already been and gone in so many places. It seems also that more than 900 of the firemen who stand ready during the long, dry summer months were stood down in very early October, despite the clear and ongoing threat.

It's simply too much of a coincidence for me that, with desperately needed rain finally coming on Monday night, more than 100 fires were active in Galicia that same day. Yes, it's entirely possible that it was the consequence of so little rain for so long, but 105 separate fires just hours before that rain finally fell, all over the region? I know nature can appear cruel but it's quite clear here that people, always capable of infinitely more cruelty, calculated as it is, have fanned nature's own flames here.

The areas around our town which burned in the fires of two years ago are now patchworks of green and black. Bushes and grasses are hiding the black scars of previous fires. Plant life recovers quickly, of course, and those areas will, if they're allowed to, recover eventually. The trees, though - they're gone. It's going to take a very long time for them to come back properly - too long for many of the residents here to live to see it.

I sincerely hope that anybody who is proven to have started any of these fires is given a very long time to think on what they've done.

Burning pain

It’s a deeply troubling feeling to wake up in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. That’s what happened in the early hours of this morning, though, in our house. The unmistakable smell of burning filled the house, and for a few moments we wondered if our home was on fire.

It turned out, though, that it was Galicia itself which is burning. The whole village, dark as it was, was wreathed in a smoky haze. Two minutes outside and our hair and clothes stank of smoke. There are already forest fires all over the area - the city of Vigo in particular being aflame in spectacular and horrifying manner, but the one we passed through this morning is the closest yet to our home. 

We had to get up at 5am anyway, to make the journey to Valladolid. It’s just as well we did, because the first part of the drive we were greeted by these scenes, and not more than half an hour after we passed, the road had to be closed as the flames reached the very edge of the road itself.

These images give an idea of what we drove through this morning, and it's got much worse since. As I type, we’re all too aware that the fire is growing, and getting ever closer to our home village. Already it threatens a smaller pueblo a short distance away, and we’re feeling anxious, though we ourselves are not there. 

One really troubling thing about these fires is that they’re so widely agreed to have been set, at least in some cases, deliberately. Of course the two-year drought that Galicia is currently suffering has a lot to do with it, but the region’s government has openly stated that their ‘principal hypothesis’ is that the fires are man-made, the starting sites chosen carefully. The reasons for this are so clouded in gossip and speculation that it’s difficult to see clearly what the truth may be, but certainly a similar case in Italy resulted in the arrest of six firefighters recently. It was so widely believed to be the case anyway, before any such comment was made official, that this is one of those things that’s become fact in the retelling, whether it’s correct or not. I’ve certainly heard it said by plenty of people in the last few months anyway.

The map of where the fires are in Galicia right now shows the scale of the task facing a firefighting force depleted, according to members of that same force, by cuts and stretched by the widespread nature of the problem. There simply aren’t enough men, aren’t enough fire trucks, aren’t enough helicopters and isn’t enough water to fight them effectively. (We’ve just heard, for example, that the effort to combat ‘our’ fire has been opened to anybody who feels able to give them a hand. Can you imagine that in Britain?)

Galicia, usually so green and beautiful, is becoming a charred ruin of its former self. There is, after months without a drop of it, rain forecast for tonight and the next few days. It’s come too late to help many people already. We can only hope it comes soon enough to help Viana.

Cowpats and conviviality

Pretty much no matter how small your community is in Spain, you can usually be reasonably confident that there's somewhere even smaller not too far away. I've seen news items here which have featured a single, usually elderly, person being the last remaining inhabitant of some minuscule settlement. Everybody else has either left or died, the population slowly eroding to one last man or woman, who has no reason to leave their lifelong home.

Castiñeira is not quite that, but it's much smaller than Viana. This tiny hamlet sits near the very top of the local mountains - the drive there is uphill absolutely all the way. There are no shops, nowhere to drink other than the local residents' association bar in the room of a house, and no pubic transport there. Its small size has not stopped it holding its own fiesta, though, and we were invited yesterday to attend this celebration and have a bit of lunch at the house of a friend who comes from there but, fairly typically, has moved away - in his case to London.

Its altitude gives it some stunning views over the valleys below. It's quite a pretty place itself, with stone houses on steeply angled and narrow streets, all sitting right in the middle of the land which the people who live there farm for their living. Sheep and cattle regard you with cool indifference from behind dry-stone walls as you pick your way around, and the cows have left the usual tell-tale signs of their presence pretty much everywhere.

The event comprised a 20-litre tub of sangria and a visiting three-piece laid on to provide the music. 'Style', led by a chap who looked quite startlingly like Armando Iannucci, and evidently used to entertaining small gatherings like this, were taking no chances; they'd brought their own applause, cleverly hiding hundreds of fans within the speakers to reliably mark the end of each song. Their stage was quite literally the back of a van, the side dropped down to reveal the entire set. Our man Armando was quite a musician, somehow managing to play piano, drums, bagpipes, castanets and violin despite appearing to have only a digital keyboard in front of him.

However, what they lacked in spectacle they more than made up for with volume and an absolute certainty as to which music was required. At first, everybody just stood there under a hot sun and looked at them, and I thought it was going to be a bit awkward to be honest. However, just a couple of songs in, two things started to work their magic. First, the free sangria. Second, much more importantly, the Spaniards' almost compulsive desire to dance. Soon much of the crowd, which numbered the majority of the population of the village, was doing the Paso Doble to a string of what I've already seen during multiple visits to Galicia, are old favourites.

Slowly, though, the crowd started to drift away in twos and threes - past 3pm, lunchtime was at hand. A few non-verbal signals essentially told the band to knock it on the head for now, and we went to our friend's family's house for the standard four-course, far-too-much-food, stuff-yourself-to-the-gunnels-and-then-burn-it-off-with-home-brewed-fire-water lunch which marks these August holidays.

I frankly have no idea if Estilo came back for a second part of their set - we were so full of food that we didn't move for some time, sitting around the dining table to talk and have coffee. This ritual, known as sobremesa, is almost as important as the food itself here and deserving of its own entry some day. Casiñeira may be home to only around 70 souls, but the warmth of their welcome and hospitality would stand for ten times that number.

Twisted views

I had to spend some time at Madrid's Chamartin station recently, waiting for a train to bring me back to Galicia on my way home from Britain. Sitting minding my own business, I was approached by a middle-aged woman who tried to sell me some car air-fresheners. "I'm homeless. Sleeping in the car. This is my only income."

Being on my way home from Gatwick, I had no cash at all, save for a few British coins. She took these anyway, 'for the luck they'll bring', and then sat down to engage me in conversation. I indulged her because I wasn't going anywhere for some time and I figured she'd be sick of people moving away from her, telling her they didn't want her wares, generally trying to ignore her. A few minutes' company would cost me nothing further.

We chatted about Galicia - the food, the places she'd been, its beauty, the current forest fires. But it didn't take her long to warm to what she really wanted to talk about - Muslims. Now bear in mind that this was before the attacks in Catalonia. Somehow she connected people working on farms in Galicia with a giant conspiracy to poison our food, citing the recent contaminated eggs scandal as 'proof' of her claim.

She also told me about the multiple parts of London that police 'won't go into' because it's 'too dangerous' because of 'all the Muslims'. On this I was at least able to convince her of the fact that it's, frankly, bollocks, because I lived in London for 25 years so have a rather better picture of the city than her. The problem is, though, that she held this to be a fact and certainly isn't alone in doing so. I did, in the end, tire of trying to reason with her, and excused myself to go to the gents. She saw me some time later and waved at me cheerfully but I was left feeling a bit depressed at the conversation.

So, oddly, as well as the visceral horror that you always feel in response to such attacks, I found myself thinking of her when the news broke of what was going on in Barcelona and Cambrils. No doubt this would only be, for her, further 'proof' of how Muslims are to blame for all our ills. My fear that she's not alone in her views was borne out in the response of a few people - and I'll come back to this because it's important - a few people, to the attacks. One person posted a picture of one of our village's most important assets, the open-air swimming pool, on the internet, citing it as the best of the best because for miles around you 'can't see a Muslim'.

This dreadful comment, with its attendant image of the pool and by extension the town, found its way on to a website called, essentially, 'that's how it is in Spain.com'. The long string of appalled responses to the original thought didn't, of course, garner the same publicity. It's so much easier to get the clicks with the outrageous stuff than with the reasonable stuff, after all.

So what we have here is a pair of facing mirrors, reflecting their own twisted views back on each other into infinity. The warped interpretation of a peaceful religion for terrorist ends provokes the attack in the first place. It's reflected with, in some quarters, an Islamophobia which stupidly blames an entire religion for the actions of a few murderous dickheads. (I don't recall many assuming all Irish people were terrorists during the days of the IRA bombing Britain - we kind of all knew it was just a few evils doing what they do). That response is then reflected and magnified such that people think, for example, that Galicians hate Muslims. So it goes, recapitulating its own hatred until you can't see the real picture any more.

The far more widespread response has, of course, been much more balanced. The same defiance from Catalonia that came from London, from Paris etc. The same refusal to take the easy way, to bow to hatred and in doing so give the terrorists exactly what they want. It's a few people murdering innocents. It's a few people hating all of their religious brothers as a result. And it's a few people with internet access, or mass-media access, that are showing us only little snapshots of all of this and presenting us with their own, twisted versions of reality.

I can only hope that, as appears at least to be the case from my own experience talking to people here, that the filters of common humanity that the vast majority seem to have, which inform and moderate their responses to such things, remain in place if ever they see themselves caught in this mise en abyss.

(I use the Anglicised form of Catalunya/Cataluña simply because I write in English. No offence or other meaning is intended or suggested by its use as such.)