One of the joys of travelling in Portugal was to hear English song and film titles correctly pronounced on the radio. This rather contrasts with Spain, where they are usually contorted into unintelligibility. On the other hand, a major strike against the Portuguese is that even more of them than in Spain appear to regard it as the pinnacle of wit to have an illuminated Santa climbing up the front of their house. In one village we passed through, virtually every dwelling had one of these. Hilarious.

I mentioned yesterday I have to go to Madrid to sign papers around my daughter’s mortgage. My guess is this will take place in a notary’s office and there’ll be a cast of hundreds, if not thousands. The major reason for all this face-to-face formality – not to mention expense and waste of time – is that no one much trusts anyone else in Spain. And, if you are cheated, recourse to the courts is not usually a serious option. So there’s an enormous premium on compelling people to prove they are who they say they are and then having them sign the numerous documents that surround every transaction in Spain. It’s for similar reasons that you can’t get connected to utility suppliers without attending their offices in person, proving who you and your parents are and authorising direct debits. It’s no way to run a business in the 21st century but I guess it’s understandable.

Almost a hundred people were killed on Spain’s roads last week, when there were 2 bank holidays. The only surprising thing about this total is that it’s higher than last year’s, suggesting recent extensive safety campaigns have been less than effective. Actually, Spain’s average weekly death toll was 91 in 2004 so the reporting of these holiday figures is not as newsworthy as all the attention would suggest. For the record, Spain’s per capita mortality rate is 9% higher than Portugal’s and more than twice that of the UK. However, that’s nothing compared to the USA’s, which is almost 3 times the UK’s. A reader kindly wrote on this a few months ago but I’ve forgotten if he explained why this is so.

Accustomed as we Anglo-Saxons are to hearing that Spanish families are very much closer than our own, it came as a bit of a shock to read today that a young man had pushed his way through the police and paramedics at the scene of a car crash so that he could beat up his injured brother for taking their mother’s car without permission and then writing it off.