One sometimes reads that one profession or other has the highest suicide rate in the country/world. Usually it’s dentists but what I can’t understand is why it isn’t weather forecasters on British TV. I mean, what can it be like, every single day of the year, having to tell at least half the population that rain is going to fall on them today? Incidentally, one of the main challenges for these people is to think up new ways to describe the arrival of the UK’s daily dose of showers. Having heard it this week on two different channels, the in-vogue expression of the moment seems to be “Showers will be bubbling up during the morning”. I guess it makes them more exotic. Like witches.

Readers with long memories may recall I once corrected the menu of a place along the coast here which, among other oddities, was offering “Mussels to the seaman’s blouse”. For Mejillones a la marinera. I was there again yesterday to find that, while most of the menu was now OK, they’d added the dish of “Gallega teat of fumbling with grelos”. This is simply Galician cheese – which comes in the shape of a breast – with turnip tops. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out where the fumbling element comes from. Perhaps some professional translator could help.

Talking of restaurants . . . I was in one on Sunday night where the two highly efficient waitresses spoke excellent English – still a rarity around here. They turned out to be Polish, leaving me wondering why foreign labour is needed when local employment rates are so high. Apart, perhaps, for a requirement to speak good English, my friends tell me that few young people here are prepared to give up their summers to hard work when they can live comfortably off their parents, doing (and paying) nothing. Which is understandable, I guess.

Here in Pontevedra, the guide for our July-August events finally emerged on Saturday. Needless to say, two of them had already taken place. So one wonders how well patronised these were.

I mentioned recently that I drive slowly down the road to the bridge into town as I have to pass two kids’ playgrounds frequented by youngsters from the nearby gypsy encampments. As if this wasn’t worrying enough, I also have to contend with five-year-olds racing their bikes down the middle of the road as they head home. Typical contrary gypsies. Why can’t they terrorise the pedestrians by using the pavements, like everybody else? [Note for American readers: Pavement is sidewalk in British English, not the road surface.]

Finally . . . In Pontevedra’s Vegetables Square – which actually has a (meat-serving) vegetarian restaurant in it – we used to have an “Indian” restaurant. Though it wasn’t very good, it did at least it had a soupcon of international flavour about it. But it didn’t last long and was converted last year into a Kebab house. This apparently found it hard competing with the other five Kebab houses that had sprung up almost overnight and now it’s become a tapas bar. Which is just what the city needed – another place offering exactly the same menu as the other 543 options in the old quarter. But I guess it’s profitable. So what do I know?