Well, it’s 6.30pm and not a single soul in the entire world of several billion has visited my blog site so far today. And this after a record 17 hits on Thursday. To make matters worse, Manoel has had 8. Anyway, I plough on. Or plow on, for my [abstaining] US readers.

I see that, while I plunder the Spanish press for ideas for blog entries that no one reads, the papers here are doing the same in reverse. Today we had an article about David Beckham anointing rosary beads with fashionability that had been lifted straight from yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. What goes round, comes round, it seems. But at least one person is reading the Spanish versions.

In El Mundo yesterday we had examples of the photos that will adorn packets of cigarettes sold in the EU. These are really quite gruesome. In the same edition, the paper featured only the top half of a picture taken from a web site closed down by the government for showing the mangled bodies of victims of the Madrid bomb atrocity. The paper said, piously, that the bottom half of the picture was just too dreadful to print. There were two ironies here. Firstly, even the top half of the picture would never have made it into any newspaper in the UK. And, secondly, I recall El Mundo opining only a few months ago that the proposed cigarette packet photos were excessive, as they were likely to offend peoples’ sensibilities.

As I was reading my paper today and partaking of some excellent Albariño wine and battered squid, I asked the three young boys on the next table to stop shouting while they played their army games. Impressively, they did so for about a minute but then returned to the previous noise levels. This is exactly what happens when you ask a Spanish adult to slow down his/her speech, though in this case the time period is about 20 seconds rather than a minute. So, always a totally pointless exercise but quite touching to see the attempt.