The Basque terrorist group, ETA, yesterday exploded some small bombs along the Galician coast. There were several strange or ironic aspects to this. Firstly, it is usually foreign tourism which is targeted and there ain’t a lot of this in Sanxenxo and Bayona. Secondly, Galician tourism has already been amply devastated by the worst August rains in living memory and so the bombs were really a waste of time and money. Finally, having had 19 days of cloud and rain out of 21, it was going to take a lot more that what ETA came up with to keep people out of the sun when it finally arrived yesterday. The beaches were crowded again within 15 minutes of the explosions.

My friend Manoel tells me that the Galician Academy of Letters [or whatever it is called] has announced that the Galician word for thank-you is now officially gracas and not the Castellano gracias. Manoel has added that he has never heard this word in his life, except on recent TV bulletins from Galician TV. As I’ve noted before, this seemingly artificial language-creation by a bunch of crusty academics does little for the credentials of what is said to be a living language and not just a dialect. Especially when their aim seems to be merely to differentiate words by the addition or – as in this case - extraction of a vowel sound.

There is humour all around, it seems. The emergency department of our major hospital has a lubricant gel on its shelves called Sulky. I know this because I found myself staring at it at 5.30am this morning, having taken my elder daughter there with a severe bout of gastroenteritis. The first and last time I will make clam chowder, I suspect. Anyway, we were out by 9am and into the bureaucracy of avoiding a hefty bill. I don’t know about more ‘internationalised’ parts of Spain but the E111 process is something of a lottery up here. Last time I had to take a daughter to the emergency department we were given a long prescription and told [correctly] that we would have to pay the full cost of the medicines at the pharmacy. This time we were told that the doctor couldn’t even prescribe any medicines under the E111 scheme. Neither of these is true - at least, not according to the information given out by HMG - but it is pointless arguing. Likewise, it is ‘nice’ theory that, if you are charged 100 per cent for prescribed medicines, you can go to the department of Social Security in town and claim back 60 per cent. From experience, I can tell you that what you will get is a blank stare. I can’t help wondering what happens with the infamous NHS tourists to the UK, including the Spanish component. Especially the Spanish component.