It says in one of the local papers today that there are 8,000 prostitutes in Galicia. The article conjectures that each of them turns an average of 2 tricks a day at a unit price of 60 Euros. This means, says the paper, that almost 350M Euros a year is being lost to the taxman. I am struggling to understand this. It’s not the maths; that’s quite easy. It’s the concept that the tax authorities can’t get to grips, as it were, with the business. For, at the back of each local newspaper – just after the heavily religious ‘gravestone’ reminders of the illustrious dead – there are 2 to 3 pages of ads which leave nothing to the imagination. Including the name, address and phone numbers of the establishments offering a bewilderingly wide range of services. And then there are the pink-lit, roadside places [with discreet parking and names like ‘Venus’] which have the word CLUB in 5 metre neon-lighting on the roof. This, as we all know, is short for ‘puti club’ – puti being a corruption of the Spanish for whore, puta. So, you’d have to be a particularly dense taxman not to know where this ‘missing’ revenue is being generated. But perhaps there is a another explanation.