The construction-driven, hard-to-ignore corruption in Spain’s town halls has naturally caused the country to fall a few places down the ladder of international transparency and cleanliness. It now ranks 28th, after France at 23, the USA at 18, the UK at 16 and Germany at 14. Needless to say, the top three positions are taken by a couple of Scandinavian countries and New Zealand. My fondest memory of the last place is that it’s so pure waiters will give you your money back, if you try to tip them. Or they used to, at least. Anyway, Spain is not as bad as Portugal, Italy and Greece. Though I’m not sure this is much to write home about.

It’s reported that surveys show young Spaniards can’t quite grasp the concept of copyright. Which is not terribly surprising when virtually every supplier of computers offers them a pirate copy of Windows Vista. Or there’s a shop in their local mall which copies any CD or DVD they care to bring in. However, I think the Spanish government would like to do something about this. So perhaps things are about to change.

Sartre thought Hell was being confined to room with the same people for eternity. For what it’s worth, my guess is this was not based on his experience of life among the French. My suspicion is he’d hopped across the broder and had a coffee next to table of Spanish grandmothers. When it comes to a persistent cackle, they are truly unbeatable. Especially the richer ones. Thank-God the café I use every day is a long one.

Galicia

You can tell there’s not much news about when the local paper headlines a long artice – “80% of people pay their municipal taxes by the deadline”. Though I guess this would count as newsworthy if it were normally around, say, 27%.

So here’s a bit of news from yesterday’s paper – The Xunta and the Portuguese government insist that, even though we may not be connected with Madrid by high speed train until 2108 or so, the line between Vigo and Oporto will be up and running by 2013. I certainly hope so; there’s an excellent Indian restaurant in the latter. Not to mention an airport with a lot more international flights than any of Galicia’s three minnows. Or all of them put together, I suspect.

One or two readers have expressed interest in knowing how things are going with the Super Bark Stop. Well, we now have two nights of relative silence to support the conclusion the thing works. On the other hand, we’ve discovered that the relevant – and recalcitrant – canine got away from his tether and roamed free on both of these nights. So the jury is still out. And may never come in. For the machine has disappeared from its nail on the tree just outside our neighbours’ wall. So, apart from a noisy dog, we may now have some irate owners to deal with as well. More anon. Meanwhile, I should just add that – flushed with the apparent success of the dog version – my partner asked me yesterday whether there was anything on the market like a Super Neighbour Stop version. I suspect not but, even if there is, I fear it may not now be enough.

Finally – I’m still without the internet. Worse, I can’t even get through to the techies at Ya.com’s service centre to find out whether the problem is general or particular to me. Calling the premium-rate number either immediately or after some button pressing results in a Telefónica message that the number is ‘overloaded’. In the latter case, this news is imparted to you after you’ve been charged for the [useless] call. Isn’t life fun?