I’ve mentioned a few times the Spanish custom of giving English-language films a title for their dubbed version that bears absolutely no relationship to the original. Thank-God, though, they decided to leave alone the Monty Python show ‘Spamalot’. The mind boggles at what they might have come up with.

I learned last night that an octopus has 3 hearts. I guess they must be very small as, otherwise, we’d see them on every Galician tapas menu, along with the rest of the unappetising creature.

A reader has commented that my tale of the coquettish, Spanish temptress should bring a few more strange hits to my blog via the Google search engine. Possibly but I’m more interested right now in how I can get a Spanish temptress to throw herself at me. Or, rather, I would be if I didn’t already have a wonderful Spanish lady friend….

Another reader has introduced me to the Spanish dictum ‘Try to live off your parents until you can live off your children’. This is a joke, I think, but with more than a grain of truth in it. So you can imagine how willing the Spanish have been to seek grants from the EU structural funds and how hard they are going to fight to retain them. One angry view gaining ground here is that Spain will be financing the eastwards expansion of the EU by gradually losing these cash allocations. As it won’t actually be contributing a single centimo from its own national coffers, I suspect this is the reverse of my sister’s view that you can increase your cash by buying products with huge discounts.

A third piece of enlightenment came in today’s El Mundo, which provided a Sudoku on every page of its magazine section. For weeks I’ve been wondering what it was that Private Eye was lampooning. Now I know. Though I’m not sure I want to.