For the first time in weeks, today dawned grey and damp. And then, smack on 8 o'clock, the Granitic Rockpecker began its mechanical dirge, knocking me out of my slumber. Not the best start to the week.

Having been lobbied successfully by the hotel Industry, the Spanish government is going to prohibit the renting out of rooms or properties by private citizens, unless they've been licensed, inspected and approved. This killing-by-bureaucracy seems harsh but the question is – In these days of the internet, will it be effective? I suppose that, as with many things in Spain, a lot will depend on whether one of your neighbours takes exception to your newly clandestine activities and takes out a denuncia against you. Fifteen kilometres north of Pontvedra lies Sanjenjo(Sanxenxo), sometimes referred to (flatteringly) as “The Marbella of Galicia”. There the hoteliers have accused private renters of competencia desloyal. I couldn't understand why they would describe the competition as 'disloyal', 'perfidious' or 'traitorous' but subsequently found that desloyal merely means 'unfair' in this context. Again, one wonders how many people will plump for hotel rooms instead of self-catering apartments.

In Spanish and Galician, Galicians are called Gallegos and Galegos. If you go to the word Gallego in the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, you'll find the several definitions include the words tonto(stupid) and tartamudo(stutterer). With little success, Galicia has tried over the years to get these meanings removed and there's now some hope that tonto will be removed late next year. But tartamudo will remain sine die. Both these words, I believe, reflect South American usage.

The relics of St Juan de Ávila came to town last week but left today to go to brighten up the lives of the pious, if gullible, inhabitants (or some of them, at least) of another town. Where, I guess, they'll be treated with the same pomp and circumstance as here. If you saw this sort of thing in, say, Indonesia, you'd think it was quaint but primitive. As, indeed, it is. No wonder there was a Reformation. Not that it ever reached Spain, of course.

Syria is a country blessed with 19 minority groups. The largest group (70%) are Sunni Moslems, but President Assad is of the Shia Muslim sub-group, the Alamites, considered heretics by their Sunni brethren. The current conflict in the benighted country is a proxy war, with Shiite Iran supporting the President and Sunni Saudi Arabia backing the rebels, primarily through Wahabbi fundamentalists. As if this wasn't enough, we then have Hizbollah, the Shiite Palestinian (“terrorist”) group, who, like Iran, are backing Assad. Whoever wins this (“politico-religious”) war – essentially an extension of a 7th century Islamic schism - we can be pretty sure the next government won't be as secular as Assad's has been. The odds are it will be like Egypt's and no less undemocratic, with the Saudi Wahabbis, triumphing over all the other groups. Which is why Syria's Christians are pretty worried. As for Syria's numerous Jews, they all left a while ago, when Israel came into being. As of now, the only things Jewish there are the rockets smashing into Hezbollah targets. This murderous but nonsensical spat would – like all the Middle East – be of no interest to us were it not for oil and I can't help wondering whether future generations won't shake their heads in wonder at out failure to develop alternative sources of energy until very late in the day.

Finally . . . My lovely neighbour Amparo – wife of Nice-but-Noisy Toni – brought me a dozen eggs today and asked me to let her have back the plastic container. She called it el cocharro, which I mistakenly took for cachorro, or 'puppy'. So I raised it with my cleaner tonight and she told me cocharro was Galician for 'plastic container'. So, what's the Spanish, I asked. “El tupper”, she replied. I'm not convinced about this since the dictionary I then consulted translated cocharro as 'A wooden dish, cup, or platter'. And it doesn't have el tupper. Whose origin I'm sure you can easily guess at.

Finally, finally . . . An unusual source for a proposal to ditch the euro - A German euro founder calls for the 'catastrophic' currency to be broken up. Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister who launched the euro, has called for a break-up of the single currency to let southern Europe recover, warning that the current course is "leading to disaster".

A couple of his quotes:-

• Angela Merkel will awake from her self-righteous slumber once the countries in trouble unite to force a change in crisis policy at Germany's expense.
• Hopes that the creation of the euro would force rational economic behaviour on all sides were in vain.
• The policy of forcing Spain, Portugal, and Greece to carry out internal devaluations is a "catastrophe".

I particularly like the one about hopes of rational behaviour. How out-of-touch can you be?