The things I have to do. Here in Pontevedra we have a chap who calls himself Draculín and claims to be a vampire. Now a woman in Portugal has emailed me a letter and asked me to pass it on to him. She would like to know, inter alia, what he thinks about the death of Vlad’s wife in 1462. Needless to say, she has the numbers 666 in her email address. So, I’d better do what she asks.

Over the last 3 months, I’ve been compiling temperatures in several Spanish cities for the Weather section of my Galicia web page. Perforce, I’ve had to listen to bits of a daily programme about witches. This is American but, like everything else, is dubbed here in Spain. The experience has served to amplify my already strong aversion to this process. My impression is there are only 2 or 3 women in Spain who work in the industry. This creates problems when there are 5 or 6 female characters in a programme, leading to pathetic attempts at voice alteration. But things descend into farce when there are either teenagers or [worse] young girls on the screen. Can anything be more excruciating than adults trying to mimic the voice patterns of kids? How I wish they would adopt the Portuguese practice of using subtitles and leave the original voices intact.

In Spain, rubbish is collected every night of the week from large containers in each street. Depositing my daily offering yesterday, I caught sight of a piece of gym equipment behind the bin. This was in pristine condition and even had the plastic cover still on the bench bit. My heart went out to the poor soul who’d bought [or received] it but never got round to using it. And my hand went out to the item in question. We all have our dreams. And our spare tyres.

Speaking of which, I dreamt last night that I was propositioned by both the wife and daughter of the editor of The Spectator magazine. I suspect this says rather more about me than about them.