Mercifully, the regional and local elections in parts of Spain take place next weekend. So, there’s only one more chance, I earnestly hope, for the Sunday papers to devote upwards of 40 pages to them. I’ve often said I’m an admirer of Spain’s serious press but this is surely too much for anyone. Recovering from battle fatigue last night, the only thing I could remember was that the right-of-centre PP party stands to lose control of Navarra to a coalition of the left-of-centre PSOE and a [new?] nationalist party. As of now, I don’t know whether the latter is merely regionalist or full on Nationalist. For the distinction, see the Nationalism link.

Here in Pontevedra, the voters have long placed the city’s perennial traffic problems top of their list of concerns. Standing for his third term – i. e. after 8 years in charge – the nationalist [BNG] mayor has said it’s got nowt to do with him. It is, he insists, all the fault of his PSOE coalition partner and the PP opposition. Apparently, they combine central and local forces to bar his way to the achievement of nirvana. Very astute.

My friend, Elena, tells me that, up in her parents’ village, people are attributing a plague of snakes to the chemical/pharmaceutical industry. Their objective, it’s claimed, is to sell more preventative/ curative products. Well, either they’re succeeding or it isn’t really necessary; a recent survey found per capita consumption of medicines in Galicia to be the second highest in the country.

A more interesting conspiracy theory doing the rounds today is that the massive bullion hoard found by an American company comes not from a British galleon which sank south west of Cornwall but from another ship which went down in Spanish waters. In which case, everything would belong to Spain. The company says the government has made a number of false assumptions in order to arrive at a wrong conclusion. Which, of course, will only serve to strengthen suspicions.

I may have given the impression in the past that noise and ‘localism’ were particularly Spanish things. Perhaps no longer. I’ve read this morning, firstly, that more than a million Brits have been forced to move home because of intolerable noise from neighbours and, secondly, that the Direct Democracy movement in the UK wants to ‘fan the embers of localism so as to "shift power from Brussels to Westminster, from Whitehall to local councils and from the state to the citizen"’. So, as global warming proceeds, the UK may well be turning into Spain. And Spain, I assume, will be turning into Africa. To which, incidentally, many arrogant French think it already belongs.

The possibility that Britain is becoming an ever noisier place is, in fact, endorsed by hits to my blog. A fair number of these have put something like getting revenge on noisy neighbours in their search engine. But always in English, never Spanish. I'm not sure anyone Spanish would recognise the concept of 'noisy neighbour'. And revenge would surely be ‘ignoble’.