There’s a garage in Ourense — not the fancy kind with diagnostics machines and waiting rooms with coffee, but the kind where oil has seeped into the concrete so deep it’s become part of the floor. Moncho has worked there for forty years. Maybe forty-five. He stopped counting when his knees started predicting rain.

A young man brings in his car. Won’t start. “The battery,” he says, confidently. “I already looked it up online.”

There’s a bar in Compostela — I won’t say which one, because then everyone would go and ruin it — where the bartender has never once asked what I want. He sees me walk in, he pours. Fifteen years of this. He knows by the way I sit whether it’s a coffee day or a ribeiro day. He’s never wrong.

I mention this because I spent an hour last week arguing with my computer about where it put a file.

Or: What the man who wants to throw out all his frameworks hasn’t learned yet

Look, I’m going to tell you about a blog post I read the other day. But first let me tell you about my grandfather’s hammer.

My grandfather had a hammer. Not a special hammer — just a hammer, wooden handle, metal head, the kind you could buy anywhere. He used it for forty years. The handle got replaced twice. The head got replaced once. My grandmother used to say “that’s not the same hammer anymore” and my grandfather would say “mulher, it hits nails the same way it always did.”