It was a good day for me yesterday. Not only was I offered a miracle anti-mad-cow disease product to make a fortune from but the ex ‘personal aid’ of Mrs Benazir Bhutto wrote to say he had 46 million euros to find a home for and offering to give me some of it. Who says this blogging lark isn’t profitable? Incidentally, I wonder whether a ‘personal aid’ is the same as a ‘personal aide’. Or whether it’s some sort of sex toy.

I guess history will decide when it was that the UK system of government became quasi-presidential. Under Mr Blair would be my guess. This thought is prompted by the saturation media cover of the last 24 hours of the fact that Gordon Brown ‘favours the use of human organs without the prior consent of their dead owners’. Well, who cares what Mr Brown thinks? He is only primus inter pares in a cabinet at the head of a government administration, not the elected UK President. I suspect we’d only have to go back as few as 10 years to find the British media saying “The government proposes . . .”, rather than “Mr Brown thinks . . .”. And I guess the Labour Party must feel it’s a good thing to have every idea and policy associated with a ‘strong and experienced’ leader, as opposed to the wet-behind-the-ears toff in charge of the Opposition. But this is no reason why they should be allowed to get clean away with it. Most obviously, of course, by lazy journalists.

Pontevedra’s magnificent old quarter has several lovely little squares, my favourite being Vegetables Square. This is where I take my Sunday squid and Albariño, surrounded by the stalls of the weekly flea market. About six years ago, it suffered what I saw at the time as a bout of municipal vandalism, when the old trees were all uprooted and the ancient, uneven flagstones were replaced by boring, brand-new, flat ones. But these have weathered and the new trees have grown remarkably quickly. And, aided by the towards-the-centre table-creep of the bars and cafés down its side, the square had developed a wonderful all-season ambience and become a popular all-hours place for people of all ages. But the town council last week suddenly installed eight wooden benches in spots which look suspiciously like they were chosen to force the tables back to the threshold of the bars and cafes. As a result, the square is now a wonderful place for parents and kids to gather and play, with which it's hard to quarrel, of course. But something has been lost apart from the profits of the bar owners and this is a shame. And the question has arisen of how the Sunday stalls will now be erected around the bench fixtures. I would have checked today but the Galician weather gods have decided to compensate for the dry last four months of 2007 and have been pouring the Atlantic over us for the last 24 hours. I very much doubt that anyone even considered putting up a stall today, benches or no benches.

Picking up on yesterday’s Footnote – Here’s how the American dictionary, Merriam-Webster, treats the word ‘mayoress’:- 15th century. Chiefly British. 1: the wife or official hostess of a mayor; 2: a woman holding the office of mayor. So it's not banned, just unusual.

Still on words . . . There’s an awful lot of granite in Galicia but I wonder whether I’ve ever seen any granite-slap. Or, indeed, any granite transformations. My suspicion is each of these is related to kitchen surfaces but I’m not sure. And I don’t suppose I much care. But I have to end this post somehow.