Every summer, three million people walk into Santiago de Compostela and photograph the cathedral. They stand in the Praça do Obradoiro with their phones raised, capturing the same façade from the same angle that fourteen million people captured the year before. They post it. They tag it. They feel they’ve been somewhere.

Then they eat in a restaurant with a menu in four languages and a photo of paella on the door, which is already suspicious because paella is Valencian and this is Galicia, and they pay eighteen euros for something that a local would describe, if pressed, as “technically food.”

There was an old woman in a small village who survived the Civil War. She was seven when the Nationalists took Galicia — no great battles here, just men disappearing in the night, the silence after, the names no one said aloud for forty years. She survived the dictatorship, the hunger years, the slow thaw. She survived emigration — not her own, but everyone else’s. She watched the village empty like a bathtub with the plug pulled. She survived the return of democracy, the European Union, the euro, the financial crisis, and the pandemic. She died in 2023, three months after ChatGPT was released, having never used it.

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.”