July was blessedly free of the forest fires that plagued Galicia last year but August has come in with a vengeance. Over the past few days terrible conflagrations have surrounded the cities of Santiago, Vigo and Pontevedra and the air is thick with smoke, ash and acrid fumes. Plus the drone of the water-dropping planes and helicopters. It’s no real consolation but the one positive is that it makes for remarkable sunsets, with the sun going down in a blaze of brilliant oranges and reds. The police, as usual, say as many as 90% of these fires are deliberate, attributing them to an ‘outrageous wave of criminal activity’ stemming from a mixture of pyromania, score-settling and pure land-grabbing greed. Hard to believe, especially in view of the deaths caused.

I’m regularly accused of being too negative about a country I claim to love living in. But I doubt anything I’ve written is as critical as an article from the Sunday Times recently sent to me by a friend in the UK. In brief, this majors on the local corruption, drug smuggling, money laundering and prostitution which are said to have increased exponentially in the last 5 years or so. More or less since I arrived in Spain, in fact. The article also makes the point I regularly stress, that Spain’s impressive economic growth is based very largely on a false construction boom that must end one day, very possibly abruptly. Perhaps the writer confined his/her research to my blog. Delusions of grandeur on my part.

Once you’re infected with the illusion your region really is a nation, there’s naturally no stopping you. The Galician ‘nationalist’ party is again seeking – this time under the aegis of the new constitution for the region – the right to set up Galician embassies in real countries such as Portugal. These would then negotiate ‘international treaties’, presumably in Gallego. Even bigger delusions of grandeur.