I read in El Mundo today that someone in Barcelona who had been given a 2 year jail sentence for knocking out his friend’s teeth had had his sentence reduced on appeal, on the grounds that the victim’s mouth had been in a rotten state prior to the assault. It reminded me of a case in Jakarta where a Brit who had fled the scene after knocking down a pedestrian [this being standard advice from the embassy] had his sentence commuted because the injured party had actually been dead, so there was nothing the driver could have done for him. It must all make sense to someone.

It seems that the Spanish secret service tapped the phones of the Madrid bombers for months prior to the massacre last March. Sadly, though, they didn’t have any Arabic speakers to translate the tapes. This, too, must have made sense to someone at the time. With hindsight, it looks like an exercise in lunatic futility.

There were 50cm of hailstones in Sevilla one day this week. Up here in rainy Galicia, we have had constant sun and record highs. So, global warming for us and global freezing for them. A cosmic joke.