This is a post when I again put my foot heavily into the turbulent pond of linguistic matters . . .

Prompted by a comment from reader Xoan-Carlos, I asked at the kiosk in town whether most visitors to Pontevedra came from within or without Galicia. The young lady laughed and said ‘From outside of course!’. I thought of this when I read a letter in El Pais from a Madrid lady who’d written to say how much she’d enjoyed a visit here but queried why all tourist literature was only in Gallego, making things difficult for visitors. Quite.

And still on this thorny subject – A friend who lives in Wales writes to say the Gallego/Spanish language debate is mirrored there. “There are many Welsh-only schools”, she says, but “the resulting problem is pupils are at a huge disadvantage when they want to go onto English universities. Although they may be able to speak English, they can’t write it and they spell English words in a way which is incomprehensible to English speakers”. At the end of the day, it all depends on your ‘super-ordinate’ goal – Do you want to promote your language at all costs or are you willing to compromise and – in the interests of the kids [or valuable tourists, even] - achieve more pragmatic goals?

The Galician Xunta says it plans to bring more R&D experts here. A laudable aim, of course, but the report reminded me of another letter to El Pais or El Mundo last week, in which a young woman wrote to ask how Spain could hope to achieve similar goals when her English language qualifications from Cambridge University were not recognised here. If she were to come back here to work, she said, she’d have to get a [grammar-orientated] diploma from the School of Languages. After being taught by someone with less English than herself.

As I say, everything depends on your primary goal and your willingness to compromise it. And it seems to me that both Spain and Galicia have a lot more thinking to do on this. Whether the goal is ‘language normalisation’ or job protection.

To change the subject - Having fond reflections of being a Scout, I’m impressed at the numbers attending the centenary celebrations in the UK this year. However, because of a shortage of adult leaders, the waiting list to join the organisation has reached almost 30,000. “Perhaps the unpalatable truth”, says the Sunday Telegraph, “is that the young of today are little different. It's the adults of Britain who have changed”. I rather doubt it. I suspect it’s more likely they’re averse to getting approval from the police and then worrying about being lynched as a paedophile after a tabloid campaign has whipped up a mob baying for their blood.

The world’s population and its demand for food continue to increase rapidly. However, “Our effort to slow global warming by switching from fossil fuels to bio-fuels is taking large tracts of land out of food production”. There’s a looming conflict, if ever I saw one.

Another area where more reflection on compromise and balance is needed, perhaps.

End of Sunday lecture.