Xuan Bello, a great writer in the Asturian language, a great writer of our time in any language, has died at the age of sixty. He died, as they say, unexpectedly, and that is consistent with him, because he never wrote, thought, or said anything predictable. This is evident in his books, in which surprise, the unexpected, lurked, as in Borges's maxim: "I have said dazzlement where others say custom." However, he was not seeking gratuitous dazzlement, an easy coup de grâce: the dazzlement in Xuan Bello's pages responded to the wonder of the very fact of living. A tragic wonder, the painful marvel of living. The glare, at the head of the street, to put it like another great poet, Jordi Sarsanedas.

"Gijón, not Xixón, Mrs Castañón". Just two weeks ago, a People's Party MP for Asturias Paloma Gázquez casually referred to a debate that has not yet surfaced in Parliament but that has been open for months in Asturias. She was addressing Sofía Castañón, a Unidas Podemos MP for Asturias, reproaching her for her defence of the co-officiality of Asturian in this community. For the first time in forty years of democracy, the Asturian government has broached the subject of making Asturian and Galician-Asturian, the two languages spoken in Asturias apart from Spanish, co-official. The president of this region, the socialist Adrián Barbón, is willing to reform the 1981 Statute and give them the rights of an official language that several Asturian cultural entities have been demanding for years. As expected, however, Barbón's intentions have met with rejection from the right. In a similar way to the crusade against immersion in Catalonia, the PP, Cs and Vox are also opposed to any attempt to give Asturian more rights.