Just before Christmas, a Spanish friend I met for coffee told me he’d wanted to invite me to the annual pig-killing event in his village in the hills outside Pontevedra but I’d been out when he’d called. I expressed regret but was inwardly relieved and when he asked if this sort of thing went on in the UK I felt pleased to be able to say it didn’t. But now an article in Prospect magazine advises that the early-winter slaughter of pigs used to be a ritual throughout Europe but is now largely confined to Eastern Europe “where subsistence agriculture is still alive”. And, I would add, to those parts of Spain and other rule-averse places where the EU’s “cold hand of regulation” is honoured more in the breach than the observance. And where they don’t yet have the UK’s poisonous mix of gold-plating bureaucrats and officious government employees keen to justify their salaries and quite happy to deprive others of their livelihood in the process.

En passant, the article provided a clue as to why the waiter in the Brazilian grill declined to give me scraps for stray dogs a week or so ago. Under EU rules, only waste vegetables can be fed to animals. Not meat. Even if you’ve just eaten most of it.

Going further back, I was excoriated by several readers a few months ago for suggesting the invention of the dome came from the Muslim world. I was forced to concede it first appeared in earlier cultures, probably somewhere near present day Baghdad. But my belief had been based on something I’d heard when living in Iran many years ago and I’m pleased to say I’ve now stumbled on a paragraph in Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana which gives me some comfort – The palace of Ardeshir, founded at the beginning of the 3^rd century AD, is a landmark in the development of building. Its revelation of the squinch, a simple arch across the angle of two walls, coincides with the appearance of the pendentive pier, in Syria; and from these two inventions derive two primary architectural styles, in the wake of two religions: medieval Persian, branching into Mesopotamia, the Levant, and India; and the Byzantine-Romanesque, spreading to the confines of northern Europe. Previously, there was no means of placing a dome on four square walls, or on a building of any shape whose outside area much exceeded that of the dome itself. Henceforth, a dome became possible for buildings of all shapes and sizes. The Christian expansion of this possibility reached its height in St. Sophia at Constantinople, and began a second life with Brunelleschi’s dome at Florence. The Mohammadan is waiting to be mapped, by anyone who can keep his temper among the jealousies of modern archaeology. But one thing is certain. Without these two principles, architecture as we know it would be different, and many objects familiar to the world’s eye, such as St. Peter’s, the Capitol and the Taj Mahal, would not exist.

If you want to argue with this, please start by telling us what on earth a squinch is. And then move on to the pendentive pier. But, if you want to disagree with what I've written because you think nothing good ever came from the Islamic world, please don't bother.

Meanwhile, the Spanish stock market has recovered a little from what one paper called a hecatombe on Monday. This turns out to mean merely ‘disaster’ in Spanish. Which compares with Webster’s definition of the English word hecatomb as:- 1 : an ancient Greek and Roman sacrifice of 100 oxen or cattle 2 : the sacrifice or slaughter of many victims. So, another false friend.

Descending from all this educative stuff, I pose a much more relevant question – Is there anything noisier in Spain that a table of six grandmothers taking a coffee? Possibly a table of six grandmothers snorting coke.

Finally, a request to my Galician nationalist contributor[s] . . . A young reader doing a dissertation on Galician nationalism needs citations of relevant web sites in English. Suggestions welcome. I might even read them myself.

Postscript for architecture buffs: "The dome of Hagia Sophia has spurred particular interest for many art historians and architects because of the innovative way the original architects envisioned the dome. The dome is supported by pendentives which had never been used before the building of this structure. The pendentive enables the round dome to transition gracefully into the square shape of the piers below. The pendentives not only achieve a pleasing aesthetic quality, but they also restrain the lateral forces of the dome and allow the weight of the dome to flow downward." Wikipedia.

Postscript 2: Before anyone writes in, the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy has additional meanings for hecatombe, in line with the English usage:-
1. Mortandad de personas.
2. Desgracia, catástrofe.
3. Sacrificio de 100 reses vacunas u otras víctimas, que hacían los antiguos a sus dioses.
4. Sacrificio solemne en que es grande el número de víctimas.
But, in consolation, there is a real false friend among the definitions. Unwanted dogs get sacrificed by vets in Spain.