The President of the Valencian government – a leading light in the PP opposition party – has been embroiled in a major corruption case. At his trial, the judge – a close friend, apparently – accepted his rather implausible defence and stopped the proceedings. Now it’s reported that 53% of Valencianos think their President lied. This is truly shocking. Can the other 47% possibly be so gullible? Whatever the answer to this is, the most interesting news is that, despite everything, the PP party would gain 6 seats if there were an election tomorrow.

Talking of corruption . . . it looks like the Galician government will be paying back to the EU most of what it got after the Prestige oil disaster along our coast seven years ago. The Xunta received a total of 969m euros for cleaning up the mess. But the EU has now said that this was ‘exaggerated’ to the tune of a mere 703m. I say ‘corruption’ but perhaps it was merely inefficiency on a spectacular scale.

Recently, reader Moscow has been trying to convince me that all European countries and cultures - including Britain - are essentially the same. I find this hard to accept. No more so than after reading this sort of stuff. Not that I would want to live in the UK, of course. It certainly is different in some ways that don’t appeal to me.

Spain’s Ministress of the Economy has said that she can’t rule out the reinstatement of the recently abolished wealth tax (El Patrimonio). Which presumably means its return is guaranteed.

But the good news is that Galicia is to become the epicentre of wine tourism. At least temporarily. There is a new Galician association and this will host a major event (Enotur) here in Pontevedra 5-8 December. I wonder if they have a native speaker to translate their brochures. Well, of course they do. But they won’t use him or her. Or even me if I offer to do the translation for free. Anyway, here’s a web page dedicated to Galician wine.

Finally . . . Developments with Tagged.com continue to almost surprise me. Women of all ages and nationalities have been contacting me on a daily basis and yesterday I had my first message from a young guy who “likes to have relationships with men of your age”. Today came a letter from Andy B, who’s an accountant in London with access to a large amount of money which he’d like to give me a chunk of. As the time had obviously come to become un-taggable, I cancelled my account this evening. Sorry, ladies. And gents. And shysters of either gender.