Many Spanish women would die to be thin. Two more actually did this week when they passed away during botched cosmetic surgery operations in the same Barcelona clinic. I wonder if the contract warned they might lose something more than their belly fat.

My sister stayed with me last week. As a regular traveller to the USA, Italy and Holland - and as an even more practised spender - she was confounded by the need to prove her identity whenever she made even a small credit card purchase here. Tackled for an explanation, I said the answer given by retailers was always that this was for our protection. But I added I suspected it was really to minimise risk for them, allied to an obsession with proving you are who you say you are in a country in which there is little trust of strangers.

Which reminds me . . . When your credit/debit card expires in the UK, they just send you another one in the post. Here, though, it arrives with the instruction you make a premium-rate call to your bank so you can wrestle with a machine that demands various numbers before your card can be activated. Why? After all, no one can use it without your PIN. Could it really be just a revenue exercise on the part of your bank? Yes, it certainly could. No wonder their profits are vast and they can currently afford to hoover up British and American operators.

I’m regularly asked why I stay in Spain when I find so much to criticise. Glossing over the obvious riposte that’d I’d be critical of any country I lived in, I usually reply that – for all its faults - it’s a far more sane and congenial society than the UK’s. There was a time in Britain – during the prior-Thatcher 70s – when the economy was so bad and the grip of the unions so strong that wags took to referring the UK as the ‘first country of the Fourth World’. In other words, a post-industrial basket case. In the past decade, though, at the same time as achieving impressive economic growth Britain has become the exemplar par excellence of the Age of the Bureaucrat and Meddler. For evidence of this, read Mark Sparrow’s comment to yesterday’s blog and ponder this report from today’s UK press – “Police are to train people to operate radar speed traps to catch neighbours breaking the limit. They call it Community Speed Watch but it would be better called the Nark Next Door”. And then think about this madness – “Under the imminent anti-smoking law, a home owner will be allowed to smoke at home but not if a work colleague arrives to discuss a business plan. Similarly, home owners will be able to smoke if friends are invited but not if caterers are there to help with the food and drink”. To me, the question is not why I live in Spain but why anyone stays in the UK if they’re not rich enough to live in London and insulate themselves against the grind of daily life in Britain in the 21st century.

Galicia Facts

Galicia has 12,000 hamlets with no inhabitants at all. Up in the Ourense and Lugo provinces, the number of these ghost villages has increased by 13 and 20% in the last 6 years alone, as people have died or moved to the towns of the coast. Since the rural regions have traditionally been bastions of Gallego, this must be worrying for the nationalists. Although many of the incoming Brits may well be culturally sensitive, this is unlikely to be sufficient compensation for this adverse phenomenon.

The other thing disappearing in the region is bookshops; Galicia lost 40 of these last year. If Pontevedra is anything to go by, the main reason is there are too many slow and inefficient outlets where consumer service is conspicuous by its absence - mainly because they used to survive on captive sales of school textbooks. But the dastardly socialists/nationalists have now made these free. Especially those in Gallego, I suspect. . .

To be more positive - This blog has just been awarded the Boa Vista ‘Blog of the Year’ prize and will now be entered in the English Language section of the even more prestigious Poio competition. In line with one of the town’s claims to fame, the prize is a small statuette of Cristobal Colón. Or Christopher Columbus to some of you.