Nuptials Nonsense: El Mundo today has what it claims is a topless picture of the future queen, as the centre-piece of a mural done when she was living in Mexico a few years ago. In a nice touch of solidarity, as I was reading this in my favourite café, the woman on the next table started breast-feeding her baby. What else would she be feeding, you might ask. Anyway, this is a new development for Spain - salacious pictures of royal personages, not breast-feeding - and I am left wondering what it all means. Are these the first tender shoots of the choking weed of real tabloidism? Or is it merely part of a desperate right-wing campaign to stop the Crown Prince marrying a woman who is not just a commoner but also a divorcee? We have already been told that one of her ex-husband’s books contains vivid descriptions of their sex life and that the Madrid authorities have invested in an ultra-strong safe to ensure that their divorce papers do not see the light of day. What next? I can’t wait.

A great deal of attention is being paid right now to road death statistics, especially in the light of impressive reductions made last year in France and Italy after the introduction of tougher laws. Stating, perhaps, the obvious, El Pais today pointed out that it wasn’t as simple as just having tough new laws; the real challenge was getting Spaniards to obey them. As it happens, I have been conducting an (entirely unscientific) study in town over the last week around the wearing of safety belts. These have long been compulsory in Spain – in the front seats at least – but my conclusion is that compliance is around the 50% level. As you might expect, women are nearer 75% and men 25%. As I write this, I am reminded of the report in a local paper last week of a driver who was decapitated when projected out of his car in the direction of wires holding up the vines at the side of the road. We had pictures of the wrecked car but not of the separated body parts. Believe me, if they could have got them, we would have had them. This is a speciality of the Spanish press.