If you're researching the national and local papers for inspiration for your blog, it's probably best not to do this in the middle of the holiday month. And when the only items featured are the Olympics and an horrific plane crash . . .

As predicted, the Spanish company, Ferrovial, which owns BAA has effectively been told to sell off three of its six UK airports. Which will certainly help to solve cash and debt burden problems. The question has arisen in both the British and Spanish media as to whether Ferrovial merited this treatment. There are apparently two clear answers to this. One British and the other Spanish.

Quotes of the Week

The EU argument that pooling sovereignty leads to greater real power proved to be a sham; it led in practice to collective impotence and self-deception. Nato proved to be the international forum where real pressure was brought to bear on Russia, in part because it disposes of real military power, in part because it includes states, notably Poland, that are still conscious of their own sovereignty, hence respectful of other sovereign democracies.
John O' Sullivan's postscript on the Russian invasion of Georgia.

I've no reason to believe the spend on the 2012 Olympics will be go above the [revised] budget of 9.4 billion pounds.
Boris Johnson, the mayor of London. [The London team secured the 2012 games on a projection of only 2.4bn. And the Chinese are reported to have spent over 24bn on this year's. ]

I must ask Boris for his forecast of the arrival of the high-speed AVE train in Galicia.

Anyway, here I go again, venturing into the shark-ridden waters of Gallego . . . The Spanish for octopus is pulpo. The Gallego is polbo. As the letters V and B are pronounced the same in both languages, this means that the Gallego for octopus is said exactly like the Spanish polvo. Which means 1. dust, and 2. a bonk. So, I wan't surprised last night to learn from Galician friends who normally favour Gallego that they revert to Spanish when ordering octopus. At a Feira do polbo, for example. Which sounds like a fun event. There's one along the coast later this month. Might give it a try. Especially as it involves lashings of olive oil.

One of said friends is a socialist who teaches Gallego in a local secondary school. His bugbears are:-1. The ever-changing norms of the Standard Gallego he's expected to teach, 2. The fact this is increasingly removed from the Gallego spoken on the streets, and 3. The mistakes in vocabulary, syntax, grammar and pronunciation made by politicians speaking Galician to show they're more Gallego than the next man. But his most surprising comment was that, as they tend to come from the interior and the villages, the conservative [PP] party politicians tend to speak 'better' Gallego than the socialist [PSOE] politicians. Those of the Galician Nationalist Block [the BNG], as you would expect, speak excellent Gallego, but naturally immediately take on board the imposed changes - such as Grazas for Gracias - which my friend refuses to teach his kids and which he says he's never heard on the streets. And hopes never to hear.

Here's a photo of one of the Pontevedra streets that have recently been transformed. It used to have two lanes and spaces for parking down its entire length. Now it has only one lane and dedicated parking bays offering less space. So both single and [illegal] double parking have been much reduced.


But what I really want to point out is the chevroned area in the foreground. This is a bus stop and the funny thing is that, although the council put a lot of thought - and money - into transforming this street, they seem to have overlooked seats for the waiting passengers. Who are reduced to sitting on the nearby doorsteps. What makes this even odder is that there are benches further along the street, beyond the red car. See next picture. I guess the passengers could always use these and run like hell when the bus arrives. But they don't. And, worst of all, no one else uses the benches either. Money well spent, then.

If you look hard enough, you can see the wooden benches, just to the right of the open door. The car is, of course, illegally parked on yellow chevrons. And the pavement is wide enough to take an invading army. Or to allow an even larger group of gossiping locals to block it than before.