It’s 4.30am, my nostrils are streaming with cold and I’m writing this sustained by a large whisky ‘hot toddy’. And this is just to ensure that I don’t miss a blog entry for yesterday. Imagine what I would do if I were being paid for this. The whisky, incidentally, is a 12 year old single malt so this is probably a crime. But, after a bout of what is now called ‘aversion therapy’ when I was 20, this is the only form in which I can approach it. Even when my nose is malfunctioning and I can’t smell it.

Spain does not have a great reputation when it comes to donkeys. So I was pleased this week to come across mention of a place which doubles as a sanctuary and as an animal-based therapy centre. I was even more pleased to find it was only 15 kilometres from my house. More accurately about 7, after I had wound round the nearby mountains in search of its out-of-the-way location. This is its website for any of you who, like me, would like to sponsor a donkey. I was thinking of actually adopting one but concluded this wouldn’t go down well with my neighbours in the out-of-town, professional barrio in which I live. And certainly not if I tethered it in the communal gardens of our urbanización, rather than on what passes for my own lawn.

Talking of my neighbourhood, everyone here – with the possibly unique exception of myself – employs a chica ['girl'] to help out in the home. Most, if not all, of these are pretty full-time employees and many sport uniforms available from a specialist shop down in town. The range of tasks they perform is enormous. Basically, they are domestic servants and – as Giles Trimlett points out in his book – middle class Spain would collapse without them. I just make do with a cleaner 4 hours a week and do my own ironing. I think it helps with the image of an English eccentric to which I aspire.

In his chapter on Galicia, Trimlett mentions the utterly confusing nature of our province, town, village and hamlet names. I can certainly sympathise. The place I was looking for today was called Barro and I was told it was near one of the two official car testing places. The other one is in Borra. And the Spanish for donkey is burro. Is it any wonder I got lost? En passant, in Spanish, barro means mud and borra, dregs

I’m nonplussed that someone would arrive at my blog after entering ‘illegal street race Pontevedra’ in Google. In Spanish, yes. But in English? And, yes, we do have them, in the business park I can see on the top of the burned mountain on the other side of the city.

By the way, don’t be fooled by the time and date tag on this blog. It really is 5.15am and I’m returning to bed.