With a general election in sight, President Zapatero has promised to devolve responsibility for commuter trains to the local governments. This is aimed, in particular, at placating the good people of Barcelona, who are less than happy with the way theirs are run. Joy will be more alloyed here in Galicia, I suspect. Someone wrote to one of our local papers this week to say the residents of Barcelona at least had something to moan about. Here in Galicia, he added, there are no such trains at all.

I read this morning that two local kids of 8 and 11 had been injured in yet another accident involving a quad bike. It reminded me of the recent comment by a British comic that ‘quad bike’ is Latin for ‘death trap’.

A little bit of semi Spanglish . . . Stocks pequeros – Fish stocks. I wonder what’s wrong with Reservas pesqueras.

The concept of ‘nation’ is of more-than-passing interest to some of my readers, most of them quite sane. As it happens, I’ve just finished Richard Ovary’s huge tome, The Dictators, which addresses parallels between Hitler and Stalin. One of the final chapters is on respective approaches to this thorny subject. To say the least, Hitler was clear and consistent from the very outset – ‘nation’ had nothing to do with territory, shared values, culture, ethnicity, community or even language; it was all to do with blood. Or race. Hence the German Volk. Stalin, on the other hand, took steps early in his equally murderous career to identify and foster every single group in the Soviet Republic which could lay claim to the title of nation on the grounds of at least common values. As Ovary puts it, This process pushed the Soviet state into the paradoxical position that it had, in many cases, to identify and construct national identities for populations that had little or no sense of their own ethnic character, sometimes even no written language. Soviet geographers and ethnographers spent years classifying every ethnic minority they could find, even in the remotest reaches of the Arctic Circle. By 1927, they had found 172, all of them granted official status. In a nutshell, Stalin saw all the citizens of these ‘nations’ buying into the Communist vision of a classless society as ever-happier campers whose local loyalties were respected. Of course, it didn’t work out quite like this and he ended up suppressing differences. Or, as Ovary puts it, A policy that had begun by granting nationalist concessions in order to stifle local separatism instead deepened the sense of nationality and weakened the links between the socialist centre and the nationalist periphery. . . . From the early 1930s, the regime began to unravel the complex web of separate ethnic identities in favour of a policy of greater assimilation. Needless to say, part of this was compulsory bilinguism. Which may nor may not be worse than compulsory monolinguism. Of any variety.

Talking of bilinguism, I noticed yesterday that the two waitresses in my regular café/bar were talking to each other in a mixture of Spanish and Gallego. By which I don’t mean they were using the linguistic mix called Castrapo here. No, one of them was talking in Gallego and the other Spanish. When I asked, they said they always chatted like this, Teresa using the language she favoured and Maria the one she preferred. I guess this is as good as example as one could get of ‘harmonious bilinguism’ based on freedom of choice. And, at dinner last night, my Galician friends confirmed it was a common occurrence, especially at home. It contrasts, I suppose, with the case of a British woman I visited this week who’s renovating a house in the hills. She was clearly unfazed by her daunting challenge and said the only problem she had was the town hall refusing to communicate in anything but Gallego. However, her Galician son-in-law has asked them to accord her the politeness of using Spanish and they’d said they would. This, too, seems a better option than demanding that a woman in the later stages of her life become proficient in not just one but both co-official languages. But, doubtless, there’ll be some readers who’ll disagree and who’ll write to say – with varying degrees of venom - it was her being impolite as she’d chosen to live in Galicia. It’s a point of view and, as they say, it takes all sorts. But perhaps age will change their perspective.

Finally – and almost incredibly - the link to this amusing take on Britain’s ‘one-establishment state’ is Uncle Joe. Enjoy.