I have to admit I don’t know whether the Spanish media dealt with the suspected suicide of Princess Letitia’s sister with the dignity requested by the royal family. But a cartoon in the Voz de Galicia today suggests not. This shows her ascending to heaven pursued by a huge vulture with ‘TV’ written on its chest.

Also in the Voz today is an article on global warming which contains the sentence - Lo único que ha aumentado son los debates a la francesa, que consisten en hablar mucho de un tema y cobrar por ello, sin que nada cambie en la realidad. I’ve tried to check the highlighted phrase on the web without success. So, can any of my readers advise whether the Spanish really describe outcome-less debates as French? I would ask my Spanish friend, Elena, but as she’s also French, this might not be wise.

I may have been guilty of suggesting Spain is a noisy place. So it was interesting to read that, down in the Canary Islands, the imminent Carnaval/Mardi Gras celebrations are at risk of being suspended because some of the locals are tired of getting no sleep for 5 nights in a row. What on earth is this country coming to? We Galicians are made of stronger stuff of course but, truth to tell, some of the fine folk of Xinzo de Limia, up near Ourense, are beginning to make similar mutterings. Never one to be out of fashion, I blame globalisation. And climate change.

Galicia Facts

In the past few years, Galician couples seeking to adopt a child have favoured China as their main option, followed by Ethiopia. But now the country of choice is Nepal. I would say this was a Nepalling situation but I subscribe to the ancient view that ‘a pun should be a feather with which to tickle the intellect, not a pistol let off at the ear’.

The town of Lalín, up towards Lugo, will soon kick off the Galician Gastronomical Year with a fiesta centred on the Galician ‘national’ dish, cocido. I can’t do justice to the make-up of this but ‘Every bit of the pig plus a lot of other things in water’ might come quite close. As you may have guessed, I’m not really a big fan and will happily sail past every restaurant displaying the sign ‘Cocido here today’. But it’s very big with the locals and who’s to say they're wrong. Certainly not me. If you’re going to have a national flag and a national anthem, you’ve surely got to have a national dish. So I guess Spain has about 18 of each of these, making for a very rich and varied quilt. Although a bit frayed at the edges.

Those of us who dislike the giant windmills that increasingly dominate the Galician mountain ridges will have been depressed to read that those measuring a mere 30 metres in height will soon be replaced by more economical models of 80 metres. Time for a modern Don Quixote, surely.


Finally - a very depressing statistic yesterday. As they descended from their nude-pictures-driven surge to 200 plus a day, hits to my blog were exceeded for the first time by the number of spam messages I received, at well over 100 a day. And that’s not a sentence which would have made sense to anyone 10 years ago. Possibly only 5. I’m not sure it makes sense to me even now. But I blame globalisation. And climate change.