Isabel The Catholic – the Spanish queen who sent, she thought, Columbus The Wayward to India in 1492 - is being touted at the Vatican for sainthood. Or at least beatification. Despite my Catholic upbringing, I’m no longer clear on the distinction. Anyway, the process is not proceeding smoothly and, according to one Spanish priest, this is because it is being blocked by a Jewish lobby led by the Archbishop of Paris. The latter is ‘of Jewish origin’ and it may well be this that it preventing him from seeing that Isabel’s expulsion of the Jews and forcible conversion of those who remained was not due to any anti-Semitism but ‘simply to a desire to achieve cohesion of her kingdom’. Indeed, stresses the priest, some of her best advisers – and even her confessor – were Jews. The same cleric dismisses the troublesome Inquisition as just a feature of its age which processed numbers well below those elsewhere in Europe. Although he is confident of new developments in the next few years, one can’t help feeling that, in this ecumenical age, he is up against it.

There was a nice article on the Gibraltar issue on one of the local papers today, with a UK-tabloid-style ‘8 Things You Need to Know about Gibraltar’. I was most interested in Q8: “Is there any difference between Gibraltar and [the Spanish North African enclaves of] Ceuta and Melilla?” Answer: “Yes, there is. Ceuta and Melilla were never Moroccan. Ceuta has been Spanish since 1415 and Melilla since 1497. However, Morocco cites the doctrine of geographic unity and the contiguousness of states, which disfavours the permanence of the enclaves as city states.” So, that’s alright then. What used to be ours is ours and what used to be – at least as far as we are concerned - nobody’s remains ours. Stuff Morocco.

By the way, today’s Daily Telegraph rather points up the accuracy of a point I made recently, viz. that British governments would love to get shut of Gibraltar. It turns out that the Heath [Conservative] government of 1973 believed that one of the advantages of joining Europe would be that this eternal problem could be quietly solved. It seems they underestimated the unholy alliance of the pesky Gibraltarians and the British tabloid press.

My T-shirt slogan survey is not proceeding well, at least as regards the number of bizarre English phrases recorded. Worse, my survey of 3 year olds loose in a car has been nothing short of a disaster. In over a week, I haven’t seen a single instance. This is not, I must stress, because all 3 year olds – in accordance with the new law - are now well strapped into special seats; it is because I haven’t seen a single 3 year old in a car during this period. It is as if all the parents, warned of police checks, have decided to leave their toddlers with the grandparents while they head off for the beach. As and although the heat is on, as it were.