The Spanish media is as adept as any in Europe at portraying the UK as a reluctant, parsimonious EU member which takes more than it gives and, in doing so, steals the bread from deserving Spanish mouths. The truth is that Britain makes a large net contribution. Bigger, in fact, than that of France. Until recently this was 2.8 billion pounds a year but one of Tony Blair’s last acts in power was to virtually double it to 5.5 billion. Some feel this is not unconnected with his ambition to become the first EU President. And who’s to say they’re wrong?

Talking of beliefs . . There are some in Spain who think that possibly everyone in the world and certainly everything good in it descends from the Celto-Iberians. More specifically, from those who once inhabited their village. Closer to home, there are some in Galicia who insist this region/nation is an island of Celticness in a sea of, shall we just say, non-Celts. I might have known this latter nonsense is all the fault of the Brits. For it appears that, in the 19^th Century, the 12^th century French myth of the fisher king and the holy grail was resurrected in England and dressed in handy Celtic garb to help foster the notion of Britishness. And, indeed, the notion/nation of Britain. Which, of course, is exactly why the Galician nationalists do it today. You’d think they’d get their own bloody forbears. Like the Visigoths, for example. Though these certainly are a less colourful bunch, albeit a bit better known than the earlier Swabians. Who actually left even fewer traces than the even-earlier [pre-Roman] Celts. At least when it comes to language. Anyway, if you want a flavour of the sort of thinking I’m talking about, try here. I love the victimist sentence - Monarchical absolutism, Catholicism and official Castilian culture were to be the three driving forces that would [unify] Spain and [kill] Galician culture. Presumably like Scottish, Welsh and Irish cultures were killed by forced union with imperialist England. Couldn’t possibly just have faded away until it was re-vitalised by the Romantics of the 19^th century. Who jumped on the Celtic bandwagon.

By the way, one of the main reasons why the ancient fisher king myth fell out of currency for a few hundred years was the success of Cervantes’ Don Quijote. Time to blame those awful Castilians again

A while back, this blog went through a period when hits were over 200 a day, as against a norm now of 140-170. At the same time there was, firstly, a flurry of insults [in both English and Gallego] aimed at me and, secondly, the bizarre practice of regular commentators having their identity ‘stolen’ for the purposes of tendentious comments. So, I finally added the requirement that people register their names and I also introduced a special email address - thoughts.from.galicia@gmail.com – to which readers so inclined could send their opinions and/or insults direct to me. Strangely, not a single email has been received in several months. So, I’m left with the conclusion that many of the hits to my blog were from idiots merely checking to see whether their inane comments had been published. What a strange [cyber] world.