According to various sources, house prices are falling here. Which would certainly be a logical response to a massive oversupply of property, rising mortgage rates and a credit crunch. The Spanish government, however, insists they're rising, albeit at the low annual rate of 2% to the end of June. But, to quote Mark Stucklin again,"The problem with the Housing Ministry’s figures is that nobody believes them. A recent article by a Reuters writer sums it up well. 'I don’t know their methodology, but quite honestly the official statistics are no use to me. They don’t reflect reality.'” One wonder where else there are slips twixt cup and lip.

I decided this morning to personalise my Google News and chose Spain for my International Section. So it was a tad surprising to be given an item on Ecuador as the lead article. Perhaps the Google folk - or their spider-bot - think that, if the source article is in Spanish, it must relate to Spain. More on Google's deficiencies later . . .

As part of its Guardian-admired energy campaign, the Spanish government is giving every household a couple of long-life bulbs. So I was interested in a letter in El Pais at the weekend suggesting that, if one follows the rather common practice of switching them off and on, then they actually don't last as long as ordinary bulbs. Best to leave them on, the writer suggested. Can this really be true? Or is it an urban myth?

Spanglish: Seeing the expression una fabrica de chopped [a factory making 'chopped'] in a cartoon, I went on the net to find out what it could mean. Any chopped meat, apparently. Though - ever the stickler - the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy has it down as Chóped [From the English 'chopped']: A sausage similar to the mortadella. So, now you know. And mortadella is defined in Chambers as:- 'A large smoked sausage made of beef, pork, and pork fat and seasoned with pepper and garlic'.

Your guess is as good as mine but someone arrived at this blog last night searching for mastodonic tits.

Galicia Facts

Madrid has announced plans to privatise Spanish airports. The immediate reaction of the President of the Galician Nationalist Party was naturally to suggest the three here should come under the control of the Xunta. Which rather misses the point, I feel. Still, it might get him a few votes in the upcoming elections. So, who can blame him? He's possibly been taking lessons from the doyen of divisiveness, Alex Salmond of the Scottish Nationalists. Though as a long-standing expert in victim-ness, he might not have needed them.

Much as I love the place we've bought up in the hills behind Pontevedra, it would be an exaggeration to say our neighbours have taken steps to make us welcome. But their dogs certainly have. In fact, the three chained up in our nearest neighbours' yard welcome us each time we drive past. And sometimes even welcome us throughout the night. Or at least until the cockerel gets up and takes over. As you can imagine, we are now very fond of them.

Of course - given that the dogs respond to any noise - it's not their fault that they bark at, say, one-thirty in the morning, if this is the time chosen by your neighbour to do a spot of drilling and hammering. And I thought Tony was noisy and inconsiderate!

Finally, if you want to know something about the white wine of southern Galicia - and the women who make it - click on this WSJ article. It comes to me me - by the way - from this week's Google Alerts for Galicia. Which once again fails to pick up my blog . I fancy they are beginning to overreach themselves . Sell now.