Second post of the day – the one which isn’t about the World Cup….

By virtue of the casting vote of a its Catalan chairman, an EU committee has decided Spaniards can write in Catalan, Galician or Basque to their Eurodeputy [or to any administrator, in fact] and get a reply in the same language. The Spanish government will pick up the bills for this, I believe. God knows where they’re going to get Galicians who speak the numerous other languages of the EU but I suppose the development is more symbolic than real. The saving grace – as far as the costs are concerned – is that no one writes letters in Spain because – in this hyper-verbal society - answers are not usually forthcoming.

It seems I was too quick in being positive about the weekend’s road fatalities. Things deteriorated during the second half of Sunday and, in the event, deaths were only fractionally down on last year. This was despite the fact ‘displacements’ were well down. However, the number of people stopped for infractions was well up and the not-terribly-surprising statistics show that 28% were for driving over the alcohol limit, 23% for excess speed, 17% for not wearing a safety belt and 5% for using a mobile phone. Plus 1% for all of these at the same time. Not really; I made the last one up. Which is not to say it didn’t happen, of course.

It’s one of those cosmic ironies that, on the same day as Spanish drivers in their thousands refrained from driving 60kph over the speed limit, at least 41 people were killed in an underground train crash in Valencia because the driver was going too fast. Double the permitted speed, in fact. And it’s another cosmic irony that the Pope is visiting Valencia this week.

Spain is not a litigious country. At times, this seems an attractive aspect of the culture but then one reads there’d been regular complaints about the state of the line and one is forced to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better if there were more fear around of a negligence suit.