Needless to say, a Galician nationalist party has said that they will be making Basque-like proposals for Galicia. I very much doubt that anyone in Spain will take this very seriously, unlike the threats from Catalunian parties. For one thing, Galicia is not rich enough to survive alone.

Apart from heralding a new tax year, the first week in January brings a veritable raft of price increases in Spain – newspapers, road tolls, local council services, postage stamps, phone charges and electricity rates, to name just a few. One feels rather besieged. I can’t make up my mind whether this is sensible pragmatism or just a reflection of Spain’s infamous bureaucratic mindset.

2005 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Cervantes’ Don Quijote. If, as a result, you feel the urge to finally get to grips with this classic, you could do worse than buy the latest translation, by Edith Grossman. I am meandering my way through this at the moment and, with only another 850 pages to go, may well have finished it by, say, the 405th anniversary. As someone who was occasionally [OK, often] accused of tilting at windmills during my working life, I can readily empathise with the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha.

Has anyone else started to receive spam in bloody Turkish? Or am I being favoured?