A judge has sentenced a couple of ETA terrorists to 2,775 years in prison. Each, that is. I guess there must be some sort of logic to these surrealistic terms but I have to admit it escapes me. I wonder how many years you have to do before you come up against the parole board. Only to be told – this being Spain – that a key photocopy is missing from your application form so you have to go back to the beginning.

Talking of missing logic – I'm lost as to why three of the five dearest cities for petrol are in Galicia, one of Spain’s poorer regions. The other two are in mega-rich Catalunia. My guess would be a cartel. Though there just might be some connection with the right of the largest operator to veto the construction of new service stations.

After a month of piano lessons, I can now play a few scales and one or two chords but I haven’t yet been introduced to anything as useful and interesting as a tune. So it’s doubly worrying that my teacher warned me today that the next month will be ‘more abstract’. So, email me in a week or two if you want to know anything about the construction of 18th century pianos.

Quotes of the Day:

Patience in enduring inconsistency and contradiction - an awareness of the contingency of all things - is the soul of irony; it is also what makes Englishness both so enduring and so difficult to grasp.
Germaine Greer, finding a way to use ‘enduring’ twice in one sentence, albeit once as a gerund and once as an adjective. And confusing us all in the process.

The penalty that good men pay for failing to participate in public affairs is to be governed by others worse than themselves.
Plato, commenting on the recent British general elections