The day started well. I checked the 6 euro lottery ticket someone had given me against the seemingly endless list of winners and was thrilled to see I’d won 1000 euros. Then I called my Spanish lady friend and she patiently explained that each 6 euro ticket has 133 divisions. So what I’d actually won was a trifling 7.52 euros. This, of course, is better than a kick in the head but I’m glad I didn’t race down to the lottery store and demand my thousand euros. I’m pretty sure the story of the mad Englishman would have made the local papers.

Needless the say - as part of 30 page analyses in every paper - the results are always broken down by regions, provinces, towns, villages, parishes, etc. This, of course, serves to increase the envy between the less and more fortunate parts of the country. This year’s big winner was Catalunia, which garnered both the first and the third of the five humongous prizes. This should, at least, allow them to drink enough of their champagne [Cava] to compensate for the boycott which continues in the rest of the country as a protest against their anti-Spain secessionist plans.

And still on Catalunia, a parliamentary committee there has recommended that a national radio station be prosecuted for ‘denigrating Catalunia and its political representatives’. Interesting to get a glimpse of how these self-important proponents of independence for the region would operate democracy once they had total control. I have this vision of Catalunia achieving the status to which they aspire and then immediately being booted out of the EU for being a fascist state.

Possibly because there’s no jury system in Spain, we often get prosecution and defence positions stated in the media well in advance of a trial. This week three youths were arrested for killing a beggar by dousing her in a solvent and setting fire to her. The defence lawyer appeared on TV to insist they’d got the can from a nearby building site and had thought it contained only water. This might just have sounded plausible if the father of one the accused hadn’t said they’d only meant to set light to a pool of the liquid near the woman – ‘just to scare her’ – but the can had slipped. Take your pick.

Meanwhile, over in the UK – now that memories of George Best’s death have faded – the main item on Sky News over the past few days has been the plight of a bloody penguin stolen from a zoo. Thank-God it didn’t happen during the funeral, creating a selection crisis for them.