That result in full; three goals, one ham, one happy Englishman to nil

One of the bigger factors in contemplating making the move here permanently, quite genuinely, was the fact that I'd no longer be a regular at the Albion. This of course played no part in my partner's thinking but for me it was, in all seriousness, quite a big deal. Waiting 34 years to get back to the top flight and I promptly leave the country when we finally get there. Something has to stand in its stead.

Step forward the unique charms of Club Deportivo Viana do Bolo, the village's own team, made up entirely of locals or near-locals, all, of course, playing for nothing more than the love of the game.

The Premier League this isn't, but that's to ignore its very different but no less enjoyable attractions. I pay €20 per year to attend all the games. I rock up at two minutes to kick-off and I know several of the players. I even, rather ludicrously given how terrible a footballer I am, play with and against several of them on Thursdays.

The ground itself may lack The Amex's comfort and facilities, but it sits against a spectacular backdrop of the Galician mountains. Aircraft contrails line the sky diagonally to the pitch, all heading towards a Madrid that's distant in every sense.

There was fevered anticipation ahead of the ham raffle.
The game, I mean. Sorry - ahead of the game.

Given the local population, the turn-out can be pretty good if the weather's nice and the team playing well. A hundred or so represents a decent percentage of the local populace, remember, and many of them are even there for the football. I say many, because it seems to me that the real draw for some of them is the half-time raffle for a ham. Yep - you read that correctly. Not for Viana a cash prize or a signed shirt. Here the only prize, apart from special occasions when there may be an infinitely less desirable second prize, is a whole ham. Here's one for which they drew earlier:

Oooh, let's 'ave a look at what ya could'a won.

Ome Euro per ticket (I always buy three) on entry gives you a shot at something that'd cost good money in the shop. Now my missus, who goes only occasionally, won the thing the first and only time she saw a game last season. This, coupled with the fact that no matter who wins it, they get absolutely slaughtered by everybody else (no pun intended), meant that I've been gently dreading ever actually winning the thing, despite my regular attendance.

But so it was, this weekend just passed, that my number was drawn. The chap who actually pulled out the winning ticket threw it to the floor in disgust, and so began the choi-oiking from all and sundry. 

Now I readily accept that, in a group of Galicians yelling over each other, I don't understand some of the Gallego I'm hearing. But I'm fairly sure I received a number of suggestions as to what I could do with said ham, and I'm reasonably certain they weren't all culinary advice. Even today, sitting in a bar as I write this over a coffee, people who weren't even at the game are coming up to me. "Fuck sake, I can't believe a bloody Ingles won the ham. Don't talk to me..." News travels fast in such a small place as Viana, and the winning of such a prize counts as news here. I'm not taking it personally, of course - I'm merely paying the same price everybody who wins it has to pay. You should have heard the grief the poor chap who won it twice in the same season got.

Anyway, back to the game. After the controversy of the guiri winning the raffle, the crowed swelled further for the second half with the arrival of a number of spectators who'd missed the first half to attend a funeral. You don't get that in the Premier League either. I'm pleased to report that the good guys won 3-0 and sit top of the league, which is a relief to me because, naturally, the first season I watched them after moving here, they were relegated and I saw only two victories all season. I was beginning to worry that I was a bit of a Jonah.

I never got any stick for that, though. Bring bad luck to the team, yeah - by all means. But for fuck's sake don't go winning the ham.

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.)

Ask no questions

I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend just gone in Madrid, ostensibly for a mate's birthday but basically to eat and drink a lot for a couple of days. It led, this morning, to the odd experience of waking up in another country but going to work in London in the afternoon.

Anyway, one of the many pleasures of Spain is the ability to get a decent coffee just about anywhere. In a country that has so many bars and cafés, you don't want to get a rep for making bad coffee. I've therefore had a decent cup everywhere from an underground station to the airport, and pretty much everybody makes real coffee at home - I've never been offered instant coffee in a Spaniard's house.

I was pretty unpleasantly surprised, then, to find that the only place I could get a coffee at Madrid's Barajas Airport this morning, once I'd gone through security at least, was a branch of Starbuck's. Now Barajas is a long airport. I walked the length of it, twice, but unless I wanted to sit down in a 'proper' restaurant, the only other option was a machine. Hobson's choice, as far as I'm concerned - I don't like Starbucks as a company and I really don't like coffee dispensed from machines.

Starbucks are a company that are not easy to like. They paid Corporation Tax for the first time in four years in the UK in 2013 only after adverse publicity and a drop in sales following the subsequent public backlash.Their branches are absolutely bloody everywhere. By far the worst thing, though, is that I think the coffee's just no bloody good. I simply don't like it and it means the other stuff becomes impossible to forgive.

But, hell. It's got to be better than a machine, right? So, reluctantly, I joined the queue. I do remember liking the cinammon roll thingy they do, so that and a coffee would have to do for a breakfast. Such sweet pastry delights are a rare treat for me these days. One snag, though. As the bloke in front of me ordered his drink, he was asked his name. This was a new, fresh hell that I'd forgotten about with this lot. I absolutely hate this gimmick - I'm there for a coffee, not to make friends with a corporate monolith. Were I a regular at Starbuck's I'd want to give ever-more ridiculous names; Zaphod. Ivanhoe. Jebediah. Moon Unit. Daphne. You get the idea.

Anyway, that was the final straw. I wasn't buying a coffee and going through the idiotic false intimacy of having them call out my name rather than just making sure the right coffee gets to the right person. Other coffee vendors manage this perfectly well without this folly. So I just took the cinnamon thingy, which you can buy without the name crap, and went and bought a coffee for half the price from a machine that wanted nothing more than coinage from me. It was blithely indifferent to my name or anything else as it dispensed what turned out to be a reasonably drinkable cup, for an instant.

And you know what? The bloody cinnamon thingy was dry.