Needless to say, the goings-on down in Tenerife provided un-missable material for the endless TV gossip shows. The one I was unlucky enough to zap into offered us the inane musings of one of the performers who’d been received badly. Having seen the act in question, it was clear her ego was in inverse proportion to her talents so I was rather nonplussed by her celebrity status. Plus, she was rather ugly and clearly very reconstructed from her [blond] hair down. I later learned she was the ex-girlfriend of a bullfighter. And possessed of a big mouth. In Spain, this explains everything.

The Barcelona cosmetic surgery clinic which saw the death of two women under the knife this week turns out to be called Hospital Evangelico. Which is a nice touch. Presumably they were wafted to Heaven on the wings of angels. But the Devil is in the detail and the clinic has been closed down while its procedures are investigated.

One of the reasons I love to learn new languages is that, apart from everything else, it’s always good for a few smiles. A plane highjack was foiled this week when a stewardess poured scalding water on the hapless man’s crotch. In Spanish, this was given as entrepierna. Or ‘betweenleg’. In similar vein, when I was a kid, the biggest tough in the area was referred to as ‘cock of the walk’, an expression that may well have since fallen out of use. So I was amused to see that, as part of its Entroido [pre-Lent] celebrations, the town of Poio offers two competitions for young men who fancy their chances either on a pole across the river or on a vertical, greasy pole. The first is called Galo no rio [Cock in the river] and the second, Galo na vara [Cock on the bar]. Still with Gallego, I wondered what Xoan Carlos thinks of the placards hoisted at a meeting of our local council this week:-

CO BLOQUE NO GOBERNO, VIVIMOS NO INFERNO
With the BNG [Nationalists] in government, we are living in Hell

And

BLOQUE: VIVES DO POBO E JODES AO POBO
BNG: You live off the people and you screw the people [More or less]

This blogging, as I’ve said, is a rum business. A couple of days ago I was delighted to read this on the page of a popular American blogger based in Barcelona: “Colin Davies has excellent commentary on Spain and especially Galicia every day; he's one of the most regular and consistent bloggers out there. He's on my daily reading list”. But today a reader has pointed out that the net is full of comment trolls and cyber-stalkers and that you’re not really popular until you’ve got at least one of the latter. I can only live in hope.


Finally – and only for those who are interested in views on UK society – here are:- 1. Another insight into the insanity that passes for normality there, and 2. A quote from a UK columnist about the imminent anti-smoking law and the bureaucratic consequences thereof:-

Last week a mother boarded an easyJet flight with a one-year-old and a three-month-old baby. When the older child's booster seat didn't fit properly, the mother found herself in difficulties, whereupon a woman in the neighbouring seat kindly offered to hold the three-month-old on her own lap throughout the flight. This, however, awakened the suspicions of the ever-vigilant easyJet crew, who promptly ordered the mother and her children off the plane on the grounds that the baby might be subject to abuse.

“Government expands all the time whether or not there is any work. There was a perfect illustration of that depressingly universal law last week. On July 1, smoking will be forbidden in bars, restaurants, taxis, buses and all indoor public places (with the exception of hospices and asylums: if you're about to die or insane, the Government will allow you to smoke). Councils have already been given £29.5 million of taxpayers' money so they can "train staff" to enforce the ban. They could have given the money to medical research, spent it on looking after patients with cancer, or on hiring more nurses for the NHS. But no, it's going to fund local government officials so they can perform the essential task of issuing fines to smokers.

The Local Government Association has stated that at least 1,000 officers are to be trained in that task. It is not one for which special training is actually needed. Even if it were, every council already has dozens of officials who are expert in the practice: parking attendants.

But who cares about need? Certainly not the Government. The new ban is a wonderful opportunity for taxpayer-funded courses and jobs, for the production of official documents, for rules and regulations on how to issue fines, so of course officials are exploiting it to the full, regardless of the fact that it is a total waste of your and my money.

Bans on smoking in public places have proved to be almost perfectly self-enforcing. Our own Health and Safety Executive has noted that the experience in other countries has shown that there are likely to be "very few breaches" of the ban in England. In Scotland, where the ban has been in force since last summer, phalanxes of inspectors were trained on how to enforce it. They have had nothing to do. The Beer and Pub Association reports that only 11 fixed penalty notices have been issued to people who have lit up in Scotland's thousands of licensed premises in the 10 months that the ban has been in force. . . . Most of the hundreds of specially trained officials in England will do what council officials usually seem to do: nothing. But some of them will start behaving like bullies, using the power the law and their "special training" gives them to make miserable the lives of ordinary people going about their lawful business. It's a small example of the relentless tendency of officials to expand their powers. Collectively, they are on course to produce their own utopia, in which everything not prohibited is compulsory, and no one is allowed to make any free choices at all.”