At last some good news re correspondence. I sent an email to El Corte Inglés [Spain’s major department store] asking them why their Domestic Appliances page didn’t work. And I got a reply! True, it took 4 days and essentially said it was my fault for lacking up-to-date browser and virus software; but it was at least a reply. It doesn’t explain why my software [which is, in fact, all up-to-speed] works for all their other pages but I’m not sure I can be bothered to tarnish the glow of this major advance by asking them to explain this.

Back up in Catalunia, it’s emerged the government there has instituted a system under which selected pupil-narks monitor how much Catalan and Spanish their teachers use. And, on a larger stage, they have rejected the state President’s suggestion that their new Constitution contains the statement ‘The citizens of Catalunia feel that Catalunia is a nation’. This, they retort, is ‘aggressive and lacking in respect for Catalunia.’ Am I the only person to whom the words Nazi, Hitler and Sudetenland spring to mind? Not to mention ‘tin pot dictators’. The only good news emerging from that part of Spain is that negotiations on the Catalan side are in the hands of a four-party coalition and President Zapatero finally seems to have understood the merits of the old British strategy of divide and rule.

And still on strategy – it was inevitable that France would eventually demonstrate the pain it’s feeling at losing its influence and power in both the EU and the world at large. But to threaten to nuke countries which harbour terrorists? Then again, I suppose if your taxpayers are paying handsomely for an independent nuclear deterrent, you have to make some sort of desperate deterring gesture from time to time. Perhaps they’ll be threatening a ‘tactical nuclear weapon’ for Clichy-sur-Bois next. But it couldn’t be a smart weapon which hit only Muslim rioters as this would be illegal under France’s rigidly laicist constitution. Ah, the tangled webs we weave.