There were more than 60 youths injured in a bull-running event in Madrid yesterday, 2 of them seriously. Needless to say, even the serious papers carried graphic pictures of the terrifying pile-up in the entrance to the bull ring. The by-line in El Pais helpfully pointed out that you could just make out the bull’s horns piercing the cheek of one of the youths.

It struck me - when reading shortly thereafter the latest report of a wife murdered by her husband - that, if a neighbour captured such an atrocity on film, we’d be sure to see it in the Spanish media. Nothing seems to be bad enough here to fall under the heading of tasteless. Certainly not the lines of burned corpses from Beslan in one Sunday paper.

The wetter weather of the weekend seems to have put a damper on the forest fires. I continue to read suggestions that the majority of these are started deliberately and one paper helpfully printed the main reasons for startinga a blaze:-
1. To get yourself new pastures for your grazing animals
2. To demarcate your land
3. To achieve a change of use that would be difficult otherwise, and
4. To wreak revenge on your neighbour.

They say the last of these has a particularly Galician quality about it, land being scarce and precious up here. So a source of many feuds, both within the family and without.

Slipper of the Yard and Gerry Fitt were both given fulsome obits in the Spanish press. As I’ve said before, it’s impossible to imagine British newspapers according this honour to foreigners.