Another sunny day! This is beginning to go to my head . . .

With the Pamplona bull-running coming up, I thought I’d address the problem of why I haven’t been able to receive Spanish TV pictures for over a month. As you’ll appreciate, this isn’t something which had previously bothered me much. The company which administers our community said that a meeting of owners last week had decided to consider either replacing the defunct central terrestrial aerial with a digital system or just leaving everyone to their own devices. Given that the gap between this recent meeting and the previous one had been almost 6 years, I’ve concluded I’m on my own. Happily, the event will be streamed live on the internet. Of course, I only tune in to see how many ageing foreigners get gored. And how much mayhem is caused amongst the clowns in the ring before the bulls are eventually corralled into the stables. Sadly, this is usually not much.

In his blog from Barcelona, John recently asked who it was who was saying the new Nationalist government in Scotland had been a roaring success. Well, it seems it’s the Scottish people, 56% of whom expressed satisfaction with the “Nats’” first few months. However, this may well be because “We've had only one small piece of legislation but simply oodles of ‘stuff’ - all designed to make the Nats even more popular than they were at the beginning of May. The audacity, the sheer cheek of it, has been incredible. There's hardly been an interest group that's been left out of the "big tent" approach to buying votes”.

In similar vein – and ahead of next year’s general election – President Zapatero has decided to hurl cash at Spanish babies. But the devil, as ever, is in the detail. Under Spain’s highly devolved system of government, the ultimate decision on this expensive bit of largesse is left to each of the 17 ‘autonomous communities’. Or regions/nations as they used to be called. And the Voz de Galicia points out our Xunta has a poor record when it comes to helping families.

This electoral bribe was pulled out of the hat during a state-of-the-nation debate characterised [even more than ever] by insults between the President and the Leader of the Opposition. Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that each of them called the other a liar. I don’t know why they think this sticks; a capacity for porkies is surely a prime requisite for each job. Anyway, 64% of the Spanish are said to think Mr Z got the better of the mud-slinging match. Especially amongst pregnant women and their partners, I guess. Personally, it looks to me like a homophobic measure. Which I blame on global warming.

Poignantly, the Voz de Galicia complained that Mr Z never even mentioned Galicia [never mind Galiza!] during his address.

I asked only the other day whether there were kamikaze drivers in other countries. Today we read that the latest one yesterday drove the wrong way down a motorway near Toledo and killed a young child and her grandparents in the process. And up in Catalunia, the police stopped a 65 year old guy doing 208kph [130mph] in a built up area. It’s no great surprise, then, that the Spanish government is introducing gaol sentences for such offences early next year.

A final, meteorological note – Our average June temperature here in Pontevedra was 17.5 degrees, against 20.3 last year. And our rainfall was 134 litres per m2, against only 11 in 2006. The 30 year averages are 18.1 and 65, respectively. But what’s worrying about this is that the latter have been ‘improved’ by the warmer, drier summers of the last 4 or 5 years. So I’m wondering now how to markedly increase my carbon footprint.