Another sunny day here in southern Galicia. It’s good to be alive. Even if your internet connection is still not working. And the granite-cracking machine is still in business behind your house. Accompanied today by a chain saw for cutting up the trees it hacked down yesterday.

I took another route into town yesterday and passed a different seven estate agents – all without a single client. It was the same story with the five of the other day, which I passed on the way out of town. The only surprising aspect was that only one place had a sign on the window saying the business was moving. In Spain, this is usually code for closing down. I don’t suppose it will be the last.

As a result of peering through shop windows, I noticed a couple of other things new to me. Firstly – though this may be my imagination - there were more boarded-up premises than at any time in the last 7 years. Secondly, I clocked two or three places specialising in finance/credit I hadn’t noticed before, with names like Renticredi. I guess these are the high-street equivalent of the endless day-time TV ads for ‘easy’ finance, but offering the personal touch so much favoured by the Spanish. These were also empty but I suppose it’s possible cash-strapped families will soon be beating a path to their doors. Either that or they, too, will be closing in a hurry. Like the Dial-a-Cake place I never gave any chance to.

The Spanish government has introduced a subject labelled Citizenship into the school curriculum. This has not gone down well with the Catholic Church, which naturally sees itself as the guardian of the nation’s morals and ethics. Even if only a small and declining percentage of the population agrees with it. Intriguingly, there’s now a proposal to kill two birds with one stone and have this subject taught in English. Personally, I’d be more impressed by this if a seminar on the concept hadn’t been entitled ‘Education for the Citizenship”.

As it’s Saturday . . . . If you read the comments to this blog, you’ll know I have a contributor who specialises in writing to tell everyone how stupid I am and, by inference, how clever he is. [I don’t entertain the thought it’s a female]. Despite thinking my blog is ‘crappy’, this cove feels the need to read it every day and, on top of that, to send a daily dose of personal abuse – quite possibly not the only bit of this he goes in for. Even worse, he says he won’t stop as he can’t help himself. This is very sad as it betokens an empty life. So I’ve rejected the passing thought that I should, for the benefit of readers at least, filter out his asinine contributions, as it would surely be cruel to deprive someone so unfortunate of one of his few pleasures. Instead, I’d like to encourage him to continue to amuse me, and possibly some of you. Additionally, I’d even like to thank him for the following thought . . . How about a survey to find the single most common word people think adequately describes my blog? You can send your word anonymously and in any of these languages but, if I don’t know or can’t remember the word, I won’t bother look it up and it won’t count. So, for example, I would ignore the words caca and mierda as I don’t know what they mean:-
English
French
Latin
Creole
Farsi [Persian]
Indonesian
Gallego
Spanish
and
Rubbish

Vamos, chavales. Y chavalas, por supuesto.