I bumped into my nice-but-noisy neighbours in town last night and stopped to chat. I took the chance to raise the subject of Amparo’s freestyle parking practices but this was not well received. So I quickly moved on to ask about the bathroom re-fit which has been going on for at least a month. Amparo said it needed to be finished very soon otherwise she and Tony would be getting divorced but he insisted it would all be worth the hassle. What I didn’t hear was anything along the lines of ‘Sorry about the dreadful noise’. Or even ‘Shame about the dust from the marble-cutting killing off your wisteria’. But one lives in hope.

The Galician election campaign is only a few days old but already the politicians have moved from badmouthing each other to insulting the intelligence of the voters. The socialist party have said they’ll provide a computer for every home in Galicia and give 5,000 euros to every child who wants to study English in the UK. And the nationalists have promised to arrange for surgeons to work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year until the hospital waiting lists are eradicated. Mr Fraga has simply said that to vote for anyone else would encourage nationalism and so bring terrorism to Galicia.

Talking of out-of-touch politicians, you have to hand it to President Chirac. There he is, the discredited [and possibly criminal] head of a faltering economy and one of the chief engineers of the destruction of the EU Stability Pact and yet he is calling on Tony Blair to make ‘a [financial] gesture of solidarity towards the European Union', while adamantly refusing himself to accept even a centime’s cut in the agricultural bonanza which flows to France under the egregious CAP. What panache!

It’s a rollercoaster this blog business. After I mentioned on Tuesday a daily average of 35 hits, the count shot up to 73 on Wednesday but then fell back to 28 yesterday and 30 today. Perhaps it was a mistake to invite the dross to depart.

I read that Michael Jackson owes 225m dollars. There must be an awful lot of people praying for an acquittal, regardless of guilt.

WordWatch
Un making off – The recording of the director and actors describing the making of a film.