The ruling PP party of Galicia has kicked off the regional elections with a poster bearing the head of the 82-year old president bathed in so much light he looks at least 20 years younger. The strap line is ‘More President’, though it should read ‘More President, Fewer Wrinkles’. In El Mundo today there’s a wonderful cartoon showing his illuminated visage with an arrow pointing to it labelled Votox. This is even better in Spanish, where ‘v’ is pronounced ‘b’.

The papers continue to report that only 2 or 3% of Spanish drivers are found to be over the tough alcohol limits. But what they [apparently] lack in quantity, they can certainly make up for in quality. This week the police in a nearby town chased a drunken youth through the old quarter - after he’d smashed his way through a road block - and finally caught him after he’d wrapped his car round some bollards. The impressive thing is that he’d done all this with one of his wheels clamped. The police also stopped one driver doing 161kph in a 50kph zone and another at 223kph [139mph] on the autopista.

I read that Tehran is now the nose-job capital of the world. Hardly surprising, really, when this is all you’re allowed to show.

I also read, to my surprise, that the age at which one can marry in Spain is 14. This was in the account of a Supreme Court acquittal of a 30 year-old teacher of having illegal sex with a 14 year-old pupil, on the grounds that she’d been a willing partner.