The outspoken army general I mentioned yesterday has been put under house arrest, pending his dismissal by the relevant committee meeting in a week or so’s time. There seems to be universal agreement this is merited, though the right-wing paper, El Mundo, has dismissed as disingenuous exaggeration the government’s suggestion that the general’s words caused widespread alarm. With some justification, the paper adds that it’s the ‘anti-constitutional’ nature of Catalunia’s demands that are actually causing alarm among the Spanish populace.

An excellent question today from the Director General of the Traffic Ministry – If you kill someone when you are driving at 200kph[125mph], can it really be ‘involuntary homicide’?

This year is, of course, the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart. A Dutch company [Brilliant] has issued a full set of his master works for 99 euros. That’s if you live on the continent. In the UK, the price appears to be 99 pounds, say 144 euros. And on Amazon UK it’s 140 quid, or 209 euros. Plus package and postage. Maybe there’s a simple explanation. Anyway, a writer in one of the Spanish papers today commented that, whereas Cervantes was only too human in his genius, Mozart was divine. Before him, he added, there was no music. This may be going just a tad too far but I find it easy to sympathise with his adulation. It contrasts sharply with the attitude of the BBC’s classical music channel, which said they wouldn’t be giving Mozart the special treatment they’ve given other composers because he was ‘too chocolate boxy’. So, stuff the public and its taste. This strikes me as even worse than the Spanish classical music channel, which plays little but modern rubbish after 10.30 - apparently because the director is himself a composer of this discordant nonsense and audience numbers are irrelevant to the security of his tenure.