Walking down to town today, I was astonished to see that a young lady had actually stopped her car to take a mobile phone call. I was rather less surprised to note that she had parked her car on a zebra crossing, thus forcing pedestrians to go round her and the cars behind to wait until she’d finished her languorous conversation. [There are no others in Spain]. What made this a perfect example of Spanish individualismo at work was that she only needed to have gone 2 metres to pull off the main road.

Well, we nearly made it. 29 days of high pressure and sun here in Galicia but today, on the last day of the month, things reverted to the winter norm and it rained. Albeit not much. But before you pack up and emigrate, ponder on November 2000, when it rained on 28 days of the month.

On Sky News today we were told that the locusts which invaded the Canary Islands this week were ‘thought to have come from Africa’. How else, may one ask? By plane from Manchester? On a cruise liner from New York or ice floe from Antarctica? Or perhaps on a flotilla of surfboards from Venezuela? What explains this tentativeness? Is it just incompetence or have things got to such a pass that it is considered racist to say anything ‘negative’ about an entire continent, simply because most people living there are black or brown?