Just when I was getting excited about seeing my annual Patrimonio [wealth tax] payment disappear, along comes yet another survey to reveal that 82% of Spaniards don’t think pre-election promises of reductions should be taken seriously. What a cynical world.

Perhaps a more accurate augury is the recent street demonstrations in Salamanca against high increases in municipal taxes and utility bills. Now that the golden goose of property transfer taxes is at least moribund, I guess we can expect more of these as town councils struggle to balance their books.

El Mundo is again showing ads for fraudulent products from Andalucia in its Sunday editions – this time for a product which stems from “revolutionary research that reveals the 5 real causes of a fat and flaccid stomach”. Its sister paper continues to promote a higher speed limit on Spain’s motorways. This is currently 120kph but a recent editorial insisted that “Everyone knows places where it’s safe to drive faster than this” and proposed an increase to 140. Perhaps they think it should be left to personal discretion. I know quite a few men who do, quoting Germany as the model. God forbid.

Meanwhile, the stiffer penalties for reckless driving have now come into force and 151 drivers were arrested around the country in the first few hours of its application. Of these, Galicia had a disproportionately high 23%. To Galicia also went the dubious honour of having the first driver collared for doing a speed which might send him to jail – 140kph in a 50kph zone. Or 88mph in a 31mph zone. To add to this tale of local woe is the news that Galicia has a very high rate of pedestrian deaths on the road – 52 so far this year. Reasons given are lack of pavements and hard shoulders, nil lighting and ‘dispersal of people’. The latter factor is a close relation to the ‘dispersal of the towns’ which is always given to explain the high road accident rate here. I’m not sure I understand either of them.

A happier Galician tale – A young bride waiting to depart from La Coruña to Rome on her honeymoon got so fed up with the delays she commandeered the airport’s public address system to loudly ask why on earth no information was being given. She was promptly arrested but common sense prevailed and she was released in time to make her trip of a lifetime. What a player!

And still in Galicia – Flushed by his success in getting some goodies from the central government for helping to block a censure vote against the Minister for Public Works, the President of the Galician National Party is trumpeting from the roof tops that they’re now the successor to the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties as the power-brokers in Madrid. Well, we do have an election coming up and delusions of grandeur are probably understandable on the part of someone who’s seen his share of the vote go down but his power to influence local events go up.

Finally, a seasonal tale – Someone wrote to a national paper this week to complain about Christmas ads on the TV as early as 29^th November. The 29^th of November! He should be so bloody lucky. In the UK, I suspect he’d be slitting his throat sometime around the middle of September.