That master of the art of giving hostages to fortune - President Zapatero - has just promised the single Deputy of a small Catalan party that their region will have an agreement providing for more money within three months. This was done, allegedly, as part of a deal under which said Deputy would refrain from casting his vote on an Opposition motion that Zap appear in Parliament to explain his budgetary policy. It will surely end in tears.

Because of my mother's bad fall, I mentioned the British National Health Service the other day. In fact, I'd been meaning for a while to cite one major difference in healthcare between the UK and Spain. Here it's one of the matters devolved to the 17 autonomous regions, who take separate views of what's possible. So 'inequality' of delivery is built into the Spanish system and this is accepted by consumers as a fact of life. In the UK, inequality of service is viewed with abhorrence and better provision by one local authority compared with another is frequently criticised as resulting in a must-be-stopped 'post code lottery'. This British obsession with fairness in the system would be admirable if it meant everybody got what some local authorities could afford to pay for. Too often, though, it seems to mean not the provision but the denial of something - a new cancer drug, for example - to everyone in the country. Levelling down, as they say. Not up. Actually, things are taken to worse extremes. If you want to pay yourself for a drug to which you are denied access, this will be refused as being unfair to those who can't afford to do so. This obsession with fairness seems to me to be a major reason for the NHS being the politicised behemoth it is, delivering a service inferior to the mixed public-private systems prevalent in the rest of Europe.

For Spanish speakers, here's an irreverent take on tourists, including the Spanish. By Arturo Pérez-Reverte of XL Semanal. By The English, he appears to mean The Americans, mostly. Or The Anglo Saxons, I suppose. Someone said somewhere the other day that Spain is the only country that uses this label but I fancy they meant in Europe.

Galicia

If you read the diatribe against English I quoted yesterday, you may or may not have picked up the nuances about Latin. Firstly, Norman French was dismissed as 'pathetic Latin', and then the Francs' language was termed an 'extremely corrupt form of Latin'. Why this obsession with a dead language of nil relevance today when it comes to considering the beauty, effectiveness and relevance of Spanish, English or Polynesian? Well, you see, it's one of the proudest boasts of fanatical Gallego speakers that it's superior to Spanish simply because it's closer to the mother language of Latin. And so it is - with the Spanish H usually staying as the original Latin F in Gallego [facenda, farina, formigon, etc., etc.]. To the rest of us - especially to those of us who revel in the flexibility of a mongrel language that changes faster than we can talk it - this may appear to be straw-clutching but there we are. For me, the writer would have been on far safer ground to boast that Gallego is a more lyrical language than Spanish, with an attractive softness and a lilt that reminds me of the Welsh-English comparison.

Going back briefly to the Galician National Block - The essence of my view is that it's neither fish nor fowl. It's not a full-blown Nationalist party demanding independence for Galicia nor a party committed to getting the maximum for Galicia from the existing Spanish set-up. As the writer of the Saturday article said, it betrays the interests of Galicians by majoring on language and on the pipe-dream of a federal state responsible for the creation and dispersal of all its ['increased'] wealth. That said, I suspect it would see Brussels as a handy replacement for Madrid when it came to handouts in the name of solidarity. If it doesn't actually lose votes in the upcoming elections, it certainly deserves to do so! When I am President of the Xunta in ten years' time, I will ban it.

Which reminds me . . . I have to say I'm very disappointed. I've written disparagingly of the Galician National Block in the past couple of days and I've not had a single rude comment from a Galician nationalist. I must be losing my touch. I reject the possibility that they're not reading the stuff as this week the hits have risen from 150 to over 200 a day. Come on, chaps! A por ellos/elos!

My neighbour, Nice-but-Noisy Tony, left for 6 weeks on his petrol tanker on Saturday and I duly annotated my wall calendar, so that I and - more importantly - my visitors can be aware of what we are in for and when. Or not. Can there really be anyone else in the world marking the movements of his or her neighbour like this?

Finally . . . My mother has taken me to task for publishing her photo in my blog. Not because she looks awful but because I might upset someone with my criticisms of the NHS. How very British. Having grown up amidst such sensitivity, how on earth can I have ended up living happily in Spain? I guess because I've lived in 5 or 6 other cultures en route. I suppose my mother will be even more upset after today's post. What a terrible son.