Walking through town today, I saw a young woman standing in the middle of the pavement on a busy corner. She was clearly waiting for someone and, while she herself blocked the pavement, her illegally parked car was doing the same for the road. As I was building myself up into a lather about this, I dropped the packet of 400 air rifle pellets I’d just bought in the middle of the road. Scrabbling to pick them up, I was suddenly aware that not only was the young woman helping me but she’d also roped in her 3 year old daughter for the task. This encapsulates the Spanish – thoughtless until you give them the chance to be polite, considerate and helpful. Whereupon they confuse you by outdoing the rest of the world. Or, as I’ve put it before, you don’t exist until you register on their radar, at which point you become very important.

Under Spain’s new traffic regulations, you’re given 12 points on your licence and then you progressively lose them according to the gravity of the offences committed. In a newspaper this week, there was an interview with a man who’s one of the first in the country to get down to 4 points. “I’m very nervous now about losing my licence,” he said. ”So I’m careful never to go over 140kph [88mph]”. The speed limit is, of course, 120. Another encapsulation.

The Galician ‘nationalist’ party – a minority partner in the local government despite losing votes at the last election – is insisting the region’s ‘national anthem’ be sung at all official events. At the same time, they’ve done a deal with the right-of-centre opposition party around the reference to ‘nation’ in the region’s new Constitution. This, of course, has irritated their partners in government, who’ve learned yet again that politics makes strange bedfellows. And thus does the nationalist tail wag the socialist dog.

It’s August and most Spaniards are on holiday. But not the workers on the building sites fore and aft of my house. These may well be Portuguese but whatever they are, they start pile-driving at 8am. Which goes down really well with my holidaying guests.