The Galician nationalist party, the BNG, lost votes at the last election but, paradoxically, gained power by becoming the coalition party of the much larger Socialist Party. Support, of course, has to be bought so last week we saw the introduction of a measure making it compulsory for candidates for certain government jobs to answer entrance exam papers in Galician. I suspect we’ll see more of this nonsense so it was good to see the leading regional newspaper – The Voz de Galicia – roundly condemning this for being gratuitously divisive. They also criticised the Xunta’s Christmas card for having a montage of Galicia’s famous sons which omitted those of the wrong political stamp. So there’s some hope we won’t end up as the poor man’s Catalunia.

A reader has queried that the Spanish anti-smoking law is the toughest in Europe. He points out that only in Spain will the owners of [‘small’] bars and restaurants be allowed to decide whether they’ll be Smoking or No-Smoking establishments. He’s right, of course, but I think the oft-repeated comment re the hardness of the Spanish law relates to the penalties. These escalate rapidly for serial offences, provided there’s the will to enforce them, of course. For the record, I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life and share our friend’s view that it’s at least unpleasant to drink or eat in most Spanish bars and restaurants. Happily, my own favourite café/bar is more than 100m2 in size so will have to close off the smokers by end August. Would they would do this before then but this, I suspect, is asking too much. And I also hope the few non-smoking places flourish way beyond expectation. Against all that, the libertarian in me regrets that the signs on the doors of Smoking establishments remind us that smoking is seriously prejudicial to our health. This seems to me to be far more intrusively nanny-ish than putting it on the cigarette packets. And, besides, can any smoker really be unaware of this now?