These are confusing times for us Brits. Alerted by Arturo up in La Coruña, I read a newspaper article this morning which suggested the English are not really Anglo-Saxon but as Celtic as the Irish, Welsh and Scottish and that we’re all descended from roving fishermen from the northern Spanish coast. This, of course, would make Francis Drake – hated by the Spanish as a pirate – one of their own. Then, this afternoon, I read a rather more scholarly article in the October edition of Prospect magazine which said our Iberian ancestors came very much earlier than the Celts and were, in fact, from the Basque Country. This is not going to go down well with my friend in New Zealand, I fear. The writer of the Prospect article - Stephen Oppenheimer - sums up his gene-based research thus – “Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The [later] Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons. In fact, neither had much influence on the genetic stock of these islands.” And he ends his article with the following earth-shattering paragraph – “So, based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems that Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers who first ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.” What he doesn’t do, though, is explain why on earth they would want to stay in the God-forsaken place.

Here in Galicia, feathers are fluttering all over the dovecote after the announcement that a Madrid-based company is taking over a major local estate agency. Or real estate company, to our American cousins. Reading the local press, you get the impression the buyers are from somewhere as alien as Mars. Try as I might, I can’t imagine the takeover of, say, a Manchester firm by a London company causing anything like this reaction. But this is Spain and localism/regionalism – with all its jealousies and enmities – is very much a fact of life here.

But there was a truly depressing item in the press today. It seems mini-quad bikes are about to become the rage. It’s bad enough having to dodge bicycles on the pavement but God help us now. I wonder whether, if they are below 1.45 metres, the kids will have to sit on booster seats.