Sipping albariño wine with my daughter and friends in one of the town squares at 2.15 this morning – quite early by Spanish Friday night standards – we were accosted by the world’s worst accordion player and his young apprentice. I have never been so pleased [or quick] to part with every piece of loose change in my pockets, despite the fear that he might think we wanted to finance an encore.

There is a permanent gypsy camp in the woods on my side of the river and I regularly see family groups on their way into and out of town. One woman – with 2 small children in tow – is always pushing a serious wheelbarrow back home, laden with whatever they have found around town. This morning, though, she was pushing it into town - full of vegetables, fruit and shellfish whose provenance smelled rather doubtful. It was hard to believe anyone would buy any of the stuff, especially the mussels. But, just in case, I will eat at home tonight.

We had a lot of fires in the mountain forests last week, when the temperatures and the winds were both high. Most of these, it was reported, had been started deliberately. And at night, when the water-laden helicopters can’t reach them. It was disturbing to read today that the main suspects are ecologists who resent the replacement of oaks and chestnuts by fast-growing pines and eucalyptus. Easy to sympathise with their views but not their protest methods.

Watching the tense late stages of the England match on Thursday evening, my elder daughter and I shared the irreligious hope that my younger [and rather more Catholic] daughter was praying sufficiently hard for victory. If so, she was convincingly out-prayed by Louis Figo. Today’s El Mundo reports that he responded to his substitution by nipping straight along to the ground’s shrine to the Virgin of Fatima to put in a few impassioned pleas for a Portuguese victory. Down on the Catholic farm, it seems, some animals are more equal than others.

Final word on that bloody match….. Very near the end, I suggested that a free kick on the edge of the Portuguese penalty area demanded a ‘Johnny Wilkinson moment’ from David Beckham. It did come, of course. But only when he took the first penalty.