A second man has been arrested driving a motorised wheelchair on a motorway in Spain. I wonder whether there are plans here to make this an Olympic sport.

This is the week of big bullfights in Madrid, where they’re celebrating the feast of their patron, St. Isidro. In El Mundo on Monday there was a cartoon which featured a bull dressed in a tutu pirouetting in front of an exasperated matador. His laconic comment is ‘I appreciate you want to get some artistry into your performance but the audience also demands a degree of violence’. This, of course, is a [sarcastic?] reference to the Spanish insistence that the activity is not a sport but a cultural event.

There is a way to get excellent customer attention in Spain. This is to visit the service provider, interrupt whatever he or she’s doing and demand it then and there. Face to face. To Anglos, Germans and even the French, this is time-consuming, rude and inefficient. But to the Spanish it’s a cultural norm which, on the plus side, is invariably effective. At the other end of the scale there’s the sort of service meted out to some friends who commissioned a house survey. First they had to pay in advance and to fax documentary proof of a bank transfer before anything would happen. Then, when the report was ready, the company both refused to incur the ‘expense’ of mailing it to the UK or to deliver it to their lawyers here in Spain. What they demanded was a faxed instruction in Spanish, accompanied by a faxed copy of their passports to prove who they were before even the latter could happen. Of course, if my friends had made a special trip from the UK to visit the company’s offices, it would have been handed over immediately, with a huge smile. But with no apology for the trouble and cost incurred. After all, that’s how things are usually done.

The Spanish economy reached a new growth high of 4% in the first quarter of this year, when the budget surplus was 1.8% of GDP and export share ‘held up reasonably well’. As someone who’s bet on the economy turning down over the next 12-18 months, I’ve begun to wonder about the wisdom of this wager. Specifically, I’m asking myself whether – even if there’s a collapse in the construction sector – the upsurge in the German and, perhaps, French economies will come to the rescue. Short term, though, here are a few comments from a UK article which sound rather ominous:-

Spain is exposed to a possible banking crisis if the property market swings from boom to bust. Total reserves have now fallen by two thirds from €41.5bn in early 2002. It appears the Banco de España has been draining the reserves to help finance the current account deficit, which has ballooned to 9.5pc of GDP, reaching €8.6bn in January alone."The current account is completely out of control," said Alberto Mattelan, an economist at Inverseguros in Madrid. "We have the worst deficit in our history and worse than any other country in the western world. It has not yet become a 'street concern', but I can assure you it is of great concern to us economists. This will turn bad over the next 18 months"

"Where this gets serious is if there is a property collapse in Spain and the banks get into trouble," said Prof Tim Congdon, an expert on monetary policy.According to Morgan Stanley, construction accounts for 18% of GDP, even higher than the 15% peak reached in Germany after reunification - a boom-bust saga that left German banks prostrate for years.

Spain's private sector has amassed $600bn in foreign debts. Corporate borrowing is 100% of GDP. The overall stock of mortgages has increased six-fold in a decade. Household debt has reached 120% of disposable income.

If you think all this is gloomy enough, you’d better not read a report called ‘The End is Nigh’ from Lombard Street Research. This says Madrid is now making matters worse with a new law to hit property speculators. According to the author, “ All this screams of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. House price growth has clearly peaked and is decelerating quickly. Speculators appear to have got out already, sensing the dangers that lie ahead. The government cannot devalue its way out of trouble, so it will have to deflate. Pain seems to be on Spain's doorstep."

Oh dear.