With the Galician elections now in their 3rd day, the geriatric President, Mr Fraga, has begun to demonstrate the eloquence that only 60 years in politics can bring. “The Socialists will pee on you and call it rain’, he pronounced yesterday. ‘They say the Plan for Galicia is crap but this is what they’ll have to eat when we deliver it’. And you and I may have thought oratory was dead in the age of the soundbite!

So young Mr Nadal of Spain has won the French Tennis Open Championship. And young Mr Alonso is walking away with the Formula 1 Championship. Great for Spain, of course, but I can’t help noticing these are both rather individualistic sports. In contrast, the Spanish soccer team are the great under-achievers of our age. One wonders why.

Has anyone else noticed how ironic it is that Messrs Chirac and Schroeder - the very men who tore up their own EU Stability Pact when it didn’t suit them – should now be telling the rest of Europe that rules count and the show must go on as if nothing had happened in France and Holland?

Hits to this blog are now running at about 35 a day. This is tremendously gratifying but I’m a tad concerned this must mean the readership is not quite as select as it used to be when I could only scrape 5 a day. More worrying still is my calculation that, if the present growth rate continues for 5 years, I will have 2.8 million readers. This is far too many so, if there is anyone reading this who is anything other than crème de la crème, could you please stop now.