The Catholic church fights back! Two major announcements this week. Firstly, there will be a new weekly paper for “all those who don’t think gay marriages are right, who abhor euthanasia and abortion, and who don’t want to kiss goodbye to 20 centuries of Christian culture”. Secondly, the archbishops have announced that they will be advancing the cause of Christian laicism by establishing a new Christian Congress. It’s a wonder to me that the Catholic church has to collect for the poor when it can afford such expensive initiatives. Anyway, details of the new journal can be found on www.semanarioalba.com

Meanwhile, the soccer race row rumbles on. Today’s papers report that only one Spanish journal and one brave person in the ‘football community’ have rejected the coach’s defence that he is not racist and that his comments were just a bit of fun. The captain of the Spanish team has gone even further and said that anyone who thinks the coach is a racist must be mad. This view is endorsed by the outraged sport commentators who point out that, whereas the French press has been quite muted, the British tabloid press has been rabid on the subject. Since these are known to be scabrous organs, they must be wrong, so what’s all the fuss? I never thought I would be siding with the British tabloid press, on the one hand, and sympathetic to political correctness, on the other, but ….. hang on a minute!

In the wonderland of Spanish banking, you never know what will be coming at you next. I went to my bank today, to hand over a letter from my daughter closing her account. I was told that there was a problem as the account was ‘inactive’. I queried how it could be inactive when they were taking annual charges from it. The rather petulant reply was that these were imposed exactly because it was inactive. In other words, if you lend the bank some of your money for them to make a profit, they will charge you not only when you then use it but even more if you have the temerity not to use it. It’s a very long way from this to giving you interest, however small, on your current account. But, then, someone has to pay for the legions of employees who sit down the side of each bank, waiting to satisfy any customers who might walk through the door. Or, in my case, not.

The News presenters on Spanish TV are falling over themselves to establish their ‘informal’ credentials. Off have come the jackets and now the ties. And today we had the weather forecaster in trainers. Where will it end? Presumably things will not go quite as far as the Canadian programme Naked News but we can live in hope. I speak, by the way, only of male presenters. Their female companions still dress as if they were going to a formal ball where décolletage is compulsory.