To begin the week on an indisputably positive note . . . Two of the joys of Spain are its absence of a tabloid press and the fact that no one ever looks at you askance here if you ask for a glass - or even a jug - of tap water. And I don’t just mean in my house. On the former, here’s an article on how the Spanish press dealt with a recent case of a missing child. On the latter, perhaps it’s suffice to say that I heard last week it takes seven litres of water and one of oil to make a litre of bottled water. In these energy conscious times, perhaps we can start to look towards the end of this madness. Or crowning achievement of marketing, if you prefer. Incidentally, the article cited mentions how bizarre the Spanish find British reserve. Strange people.

To be ever so slightly negative, judging by the contents of the green rubbish container in our street, some of my neighbours are having difficulty distinguishing between table scraps and paper. Either that or they can’t be bothered to walk the extra 20 metres to put cardboard cartons and the like in the blue container. But I suppose it’s possible they’re colour blind.

Kosovo comes into being today, though not as a truly independent state. For, as I’ve pointed out a couple of times already, the trouble is that the Eurocrats and diplomats who negotiated Kosovan independence distrust the nation state. The whole process of European integration is founded on the notion that national loyalties are arbitrary, synthetic and ultimately discreditable. If the EU conceded the principle that Serbs and Albanians should be allowed to go their separate ways, based on ethnographic frontiers, it would be striking at the assumptions that underpin its own existence.

Galicia Facts

Up in the hills, it seems depopulation is taking place even faster than the ageing of the populace. There are now said to be 1,261 villages with no one in them and a further 712 with only a single inhabitant. Who presumably cannot breed, whatever his or her age is. So, does anyone want to buy an entire village? Or maybe just a hamlet.

Down in Vegetables Square in Pontevedra yesterday, the new benches installed by the town council might just as well not have existed. One side of them had been colonised by the stallholders as shelving and the other as seating by the cafés who’ve gradually restored their tables to within inches of the new furniture. So things were exactly as they should be, with Spanish pragmatism triumphing once again. Screaming kids nowhere to be seen among us bon vivants enjoying the warm winter sun. Only the bloody pigeon vermin that some are daft enough to feed. Oh, and the gypsy witch who curses me every Sunday for not handing over any pasta. You’d think by now she’d have realised her spells are not having much effect. And her fortune telling is obviously a bit suspect as well.