The BBC’s highly successful celebrity ballroom dancing program has been emulated all over the world. I guess it was too much to expect the Spanish version to do without the divas who dominate the TV here and whose rickety bodies are several decades older than their faces. The upshot last night was perhaps the world’s slowest ever quick-step. Excruciating. But a lovely – if rather rigid – smile.

Tony is back from the sea and the noise levels next door have naturally escalated. Today I talked to the neighbour on the other side about this, in the hope of finding a Spanish solution to a very Spanish problem. He confessed he and his wife found Tony’s young boys even noisier but, nonetheless, my initiative fell on stony ground. The farthest he would go was a suggestion that Tony shouted all the time because he worked on tankers where the ambient noise levels must be high. A very Spanish response. Looks like I’m stuck with the turning-up-the-music solution, even when I’m trying to sleep at 7.15 in the morning.

In the art world of today, they say that art is whatever anyone says it is. And an artist anyone who says he/she’s an artist. It’s very similar in Spain with the words ‘country’ and ‘nation’. After the Basque Country and Catalunia, it looks like it’s Galicia’s turn now. There appears to be a widespread unwillingness here to view Spain’s regions as comparable to States in the USA, Landers in Germany, Departments in France or Counties in the UK. If they have one, the preferred comparison is with Scotland. Which is a view which seems to me to ignore some rather salient factors. Of course, all this is perfectly logical in a country where the words patria [homeland] and pais [country] are used to describe the region where you come from. And where people and companies from other regions are routinely labelled ‘foreign’.

We’re being inundated with pictures of the recently born princess. She looks exactly like any other new-born but the media consensus is that she’s stunningly beautiful. I suppose she’ll spend the rest of her life being called ‘guapissima’. A guaranteed candidate, then, for whatever wonders of cosmetic surgery are around in 30 years’ time.

For new readers – If you’ve arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, you might find my non-commercial guides interesting – at colindavies.net