It’s official – most local drivers have no idea how to negotiate a roundabout. The Diario de Pontevedra today majored on this claim and added a diagram which helpfully showed that, if you are turning left, you should be in the left hand lane. Whereas, if you are going straight on or turning right, you should go into the right hand lane. The flaw in all this is it requires you to stop talking and start thinking before you arrive at the obstacle. Actually, the real problem is said to be there were no roundabouts in the town until 5 years ago, so no one learned how to deal with them. Now there is a new one every week and the traffic police say they’re ‘more dangerous’ than other alternatives. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they, if you and your co-drivers couldn’t make sense of them?

Talking of local papers, my elder daughter’s [Spanish] boyfriend told me that he’s amused when they read out headlines from the national and regional press on TV of a morning. The Galician ones, he insisted, tend to be rather ‘provincial’, along the lines of ‘World’s biggest crayfish netted off Finisterra’. This may be a bit of an exaggeration but it's true today’s Correo Gallego declined to go with news from New Orleans and trumpeted that 1 in 5 Galicians had managed to give up smoking.

Given what assaults one in the media, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Spain is still a Catholic country. But today, driving back from Vigo, I happened upon Radio Maria. This appears to be a new channel dedicated to playing 2 or 3 hymns on a continuous loop, interspersed with a plea for donations which will you result in you being blessed. The words ‘shoestring’ and ‘low tech’ sprang to mind but who knows what production miracles lie just around the corner?

I forgot to say yesterday that the low point on the long drive back to Galicia was stopping at a petrol station where a couple were taking a cigarette break next to one of the pumps. I didn’t tarry.