As of this month, it is illegal to have your car engine, lights, mobile phone or radio switched on when you are filling up with petrol. Plus, once you have set off, it will be an offence to have on anything such as a DVD or TV which might distract the driver. I will think of these safety-oriented rules – and the likely compliance rate – each time I see a car flash past me at 180kph with the driver talking on the phone while his wife bounces a toddler up and own on her lap in the adjacent front seat. Strangely enough, the one thing that can be guaranteed to distract the driver – an onboard GPS system – is exempted from this ban.

In addition it will soon it will be compulsory to carry a luminous jacket in your car, for the use thereof if you exit the car at night. Or possibly if you just sit in it when the car is stationery. There is some confusion on this point. Anyway, this jacket now joins quite a long list of things one is compelled to have in one’s car in Spain, others being not one but two warning triangles and a full set of light bulbs. In a country where the mortality rates are very high, I would have thought there was a good case for concentrating on a few essentials – such as staying on your side of double white lines or not being blind drunk - but there you go. That’s why I’m not a politician.

My least favourite company – Telefonica – have once again demonstrated their flimsy grasp of the concept of customer service. At the back of the latest bill, there is a form saying that, unless you mail it back to them, they will sell your details to numerous suppliers. Pre-paid envelope attached? You must be joking. To the amusement of my sceptical Spanish friends, who say it won’t make the slightest difference, I have taken the trouble to find an envelope and mail my negative response back to them. After this, le deluge?

The Minister of Development has unexpectedly quit politics, laying some blame on intrusions into his private life by the pink press. This had become rather interested in the details of his 4th partner in 10 years and, even more so, in the fact that his ministry had recently bought an awful lot of pictures from the gallery she owns in Madrid. She was pictured in the papers at his final press conference and I have to say that I have never seen anyone looking quite so miserable at the prospect of being photographed, especially in this celebrity-obsessed country. The government TV channel reported the outgoing Minister as being 54 and born in 1947. I trust they have a higher degree of accuracy elsewhere. Mind you, El Mundo got on the bandwagon yesterday, reporting a survey of attitudes towards to foreigners in which the various groups totalled 140 per cent. Albeit not to two decimal points.