The government and the owners of the private TV companies have reached an accord around the content of children’s programmes, specifically ‘telly rubbish’ [tellybasura]. Under this, the hours between 6am and 10pm will be free of degrading content by Christmas. Coincidentally, this is the deadline I have set myself for learning Mandarin, Thai and the click language of East Africa. It will be interesting to see who makes more progress. If the government is successful, I guess we’ll have about 15 hours of white space per day on our TV screens next year.

Having read my blogs on this subject, the Spanish government has decided to drastically revise its strategy towards Gibraltar. After spending its first few months in power on a soap box, making belligerent but totally unproductive statements about British provocation, it has now switched to a policy of shelving the issue of sovereignty, while soft-soaping the Gibralterians. They’ll start by removing the petty restrictions on their mobility which helped to make them such intransigent opponents of the failed discussions on joint sovereignty of two years ago. Ah, the power of the fifth estate.

In case you haven’t noticed from the screaming headlines in the UK media, John Peel died yesterday. No, he wasn’t a war hero or a global statesman but just a disk jockey. Excessive as this reaction is, it was nonetheless impressive to see El Pais carrying an article about him today.

The Spanish have special cakes for most big feast days. All Saints day is coming up and this is the day when everyone visits family graves. The cakes sold this week resemble little bones and, indeed, this is what they are called.