This is the time of year in Spain when you’re most likely to see ladders sticking out of car windows. This is because – as the feast of All Souls approaches – it’s customary to visit and clean up the graves of one’s relatives. And some of these are located in high-up niches in the multi-layered, vertical structures which dominate cemeteries here. A Spanish friend yesterday asked me whether we had this custom in the UK. I said we didn’t and that I saw it as more of a social than a religious event. She agreed and added that the main motivation was actually fear of the wagging tongues that would stigmatise you as a bad family if you didn’t fulfil your annual duty. So, no one would be seen dead not honouring their dead. And having a good chinwag at the same time.

Regular readers will know that what other foreigners take to be Spanish rudeness I [usually] put down to the fact folk here often lack antennae. In short, given a chance to open their mouths to talk, they promptly close their eyes to their surroundings. So it was yesterday when – for the nth time – my bar stool was taken after I’d left it for 30 seconds to change the newspaper. As ever, this was the despite the fact the counter was overflowing with my paraphernalia. And, as ever, I got the usual fulsome apology when I asked for the stool back. One of these days I’ll be able to laugh at this.

If you have property anywhere near the Spanish coast, you are cursed to be living in interesting times. For the government has just announced it’s going to do something to ensure the coast is free of buildings. This will be in furtherance of a law introduced 20 years ago and which a government spokesman said on the radio last night had become a model for the rest of the world. The problem is – however admirable this law has been – no one seems to have taken much notice of it. As a result – and as everybody knows - large swathes of Spanish coastland are blighted by illegal buildings and golf courses. The government has now said it will stop new developments and – to help with the cost of demolition – will throw 5 billion euros at the regional governments which turned a blind eye to all this in the first place. So . . . we all know what has happened to date but – truth to tell – no one has much idea about what will happen in the future. Though I suppose it’s pretty certain the regional governments will take the lucre on offer.

In a BBC panel discussion on the UK subject du jour – Britishness – it was suggested a major constraint was that it’s very un-British to indulge in this sort of ‘overstated’ discussion. The Chief Rabbi agreed and added the marvellous comment that, despite 4,000 years of development, Hebrew had never come up with a word for ‘understatement’.

As the British Prime Minister is finding vis-à-vis Scotland, once a nationalist party has hold of the reins of local government, there’s no issue which can’t be turned into a fight with the ‘arrogant’ central administration. A glance at the current furore around the Madrid-Barcelona AVE will quickly confirm this. In spades. Closer to home, the Galician Nationalist Party has reiterated its demand that the region have the more sensible [and logical] clock which is shared by its northern and southern neighbours, Britain and Portugal. However, this time it’s framed in the now-obligatory terms of energy-saving and environmental protection. Whoever said all politicians were opportunists? I still can’t see it flying.

The good news is that Galicia shares with the rest of Spain a recent increase in life expectancy for both men and women. The Spanish average is now a little more than 80, though women[83] here tend to live 6 years more than men[77]. Galician women do even better, achieving an average of 84. Must be the damp. Whatever, clearly the last thing you would want is a Galician mother-in-law . . .