Before the royal marriage announcement drove it into a day-long frenzy, Sky News headlined its bulletins today with the story of a midnight fracas at a new IKEA store on the outskirts of London. This came complete with dreadful pictures taken on someone’s camera, followed by an interview with a chavette whose baseball cap appeared to be covered in zircons. The latter’s beef was that she and her 65 year old mother had been left stranded in the middle of the night as there was no transport back home. This, she seemed to think, was everyone else’s fault except her own. But, you will retort, surely the Sky interviewer pointed out that she and her mother had been imbecilic to go shopping in the middle of the night without knowing anything about transport arrangements. And you would be very wrong. Instead, she was accorded victim status and given a prime TV slot that would have graced Nelson Mandela. Oh, brave new world. I must find something else to do when enjoying my first coffee of the day. Neither Sky nor the coffee are good for my blood pressure.

Another recorded delivery letter this morning. This one was from the local council, rejecting our appeal against a fine of 115 quid for ‘dangerously blocking’ an unused verge already completely blocked by 3 huge containers belonging to the same council. Clearly, we’re not as enchufado as we‘d hoped. If you‘ve read Tuesday’s blog, you’ll know what this means.

Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that, when you get a recorded delivery letter, you have to complete a form which demands name, address, date, signature and your identity number. All this for a postman who sees you every day. And as if anyone would know if you wrote a false number. Or do anything about it. No wonder the Spanish have such a disrespect for paper forms of communication. They must be heartily sick of the stuff by the time they are 25.

Actually, the excess of paper in Spanish life has a word to itself – papeleo. The English equivalent is red tape – ironically, one of the few examples of where the English word/phrase is longer than the Spanish. Except it isn’t, on a syllable count.