Earlier this week, the beer brand Watney’s Red Barrel was withdrawn from the market in the UK. I was reminded of this when cutting up chicken and beef for a couple of curries this morning and wondering just what is injected into the meat. It suddenly occurred to me that I was cooking near water. If this makes sense to you and brings to mind an old joke, you must be as ancient as me.

The Frenchman, Jean Monnet, is revered as the great visionary behind the EU. Fittingly so, it seems. For in 1948, he bought a property from a Swedish seller, making a last-minute demand that the price be paid in French francs and not the US dollars previously agreed. The very next day, the franc was devalued to a tenth of its price, leaving the poor Swede well out of pocket. You could put this down to good and bad luck but, then, this would be to ignore the fact Monnet was on the committee responsible for the devaluation. Plus ca change . . .

The comments to the Devolution section of The Economist’s Review of Spain have now passed a thousand. Interestingly, the most recent – as of late Sunday morning – have been among the best reasoned. If not exactly eye-to-eye. Talking of reasoning and argumentation . . . Over at [Barcelona-based] Kalebeul, the ever-trenchant Trevor had this riposte for the Catalan fanatics - What surprises me is that the ethnic supremacists think that the arguments which failed to convince a considerable majority of guiris [foreigners] will now suddenly work on an interested, international audience. You need a new gameplan, folks.

Living as I do in another region where the minority-supported Nationalists have arguably a disproportionate influence on how things are done linguistically, I also found myself agreeing with this comment from a [?]Dutchman - The Internet is wonderful. Just by reading the comments to this article, anyone unfamiliar with the situation in Catalonia and the Basque Country will get a more accurate image of the attitudes of ones and the others than by reading the original, and brilliant, article. I especially love Pere Joan's message, as it beautifully portrays the sort of fanaticism, fundamentalism and violence that drives regional nationalism in Spain.

I certainly wouldn’t want to say or imply that things have gone as far here in Galicia but the trend is clear. So it will be interesting to see how the Galicians vote next March and how things develop if either of the major parties have an absolute majority and so don’t need to have the Nationalists as part of a governing coalition.