Signing off for the adverts, Sky News this morning asked whether Britons lived to work or [like the Spanish] worked to live. The answer came in the very first ad. This was for a cold remedy and trumpeted that the product would help you work at home if you were unlucky enough to go off sick.

Needless to say, the Pontevedra town council has claimed that it is their enlightened policies which have kept the rate of property increases to amongst the lowest in Spain. Hmm.

The President of the Basque region has rejected the right of the Spanish parliament to kill the secessionist plan he’s already taken through the local parliament and now plans to submit to the Basque people via a referendum. He has asked the Spanish President to ‘negotiate’ with him, in preference to ‘coming to blows’. It seems to me that there is something terribly ironic about the Spanish constitution coming apart at the seams whilst the country is preparing for a vote on the supra-national EU constitution on February 20th. If I were the Spanish President I fancy I would call the Basque President’s bluff and encourage him to unilaterally secede and then prepare for an invasion.

As for said referendum on the EU constitution, the government has announced the star team that will promote a Yes vote in all the media. This consists of reporters, footballers, actors and just one ‘intellectual’. Yes, it’s true – in Spain reporters have a status even higher than that of footballers and actors. This is because there’s no real tabloid press here. As for the No team, well there isn’t one. The impression one gets is that no one in Spain believes there is anything at all wrong with the EU. Except the proposed ‘draconian changes’ that will have the effect of pushing Spain’s snout out of the trough a little bit, in favour of the poor new entrants.

I’m so tired of being hit by Spanish men looking for more details of a certain brothel in Vigo that I have been back through all my blogs and replaced the name with an abbreviation. Those in the know will immediately recognise the C. de E. and will understand why I had to stick a bit of Spanish into the abbreviation. Otherwise, I would have been labelling a house of ill repute the C of E. For non-British readers, this is the Church of England. I now wonder whether my site is going to be plagued by bishops enquiring into Church matters. That should make their day. At least it will be one group of people in colourful attire reading about another.