Sadly, I spoke too soon about reduced road fatalities during the Christmas period, which officially ended at midnight on Sunday. The final total was 32 up on last year. And for 2005 as a whole, there were 182 deaths more than in 2004. Is this the Fernando Alonso effect I’ve mused about?

I also got it wrong about there being 4 family dinners between 24 December and 6 January. I’m told that in many homes there are 5, as the New Year’s Eve marathon is followed by another gathering on New Year’s Day. Just as at Christmas, merely a week before. By 7th January, then, most Galicians must have seafood coming out of every orifice. No wonder the prices soar into the stratosphere.

Time to salute the citizen who has spent the last 2 to 3 years monitoring 935 telephone booths and now has enough evidence to bring an action against Telefonica for defrauding the public of 1.2m euros a day by short-changing them. Couldn’t happen to a nicer company. Perhaps he’ll move on to one of the major banks next, as these have a similar attitude to customer relations.

In a related vein, I came across a new bit of Spanglish today – El slamming. This is the practice of making it incredibly easy for you to sign up to a phone contract and then virtually impossible for you to extricate yourself when you are fed up with the abominable service and the fraudulent billing practices.

In a country where rule compliance is possibly less pronounced than elsewhere, the gypsies are in a class of their own. Simply put, they frequently act as if they were completely above the law. One of the worst examples of this happened yesterday in Sevilla, when a young gypsy girl ran into the road and was hit by a passing car. She was only lightly injured and the 64 year old driver got out to attend to her. For this he was beaten up by the girl’s family and then murdered with 11[!] shots into his head and body. This atrocity received rather less prominence in the media than you might have expected, possibly because we regularly read of deaths in gypsy clan wars that are invariably referred to as 'a settling of accounts’.

Hits to my blog are now running at about 60 a day. All very gratifying but I have a suspicion several of these stem from people googling my namesake who appears to be big in the world of marijuana. And then, of course, there’s those looking for ‘brothels in Spain’. Or even Wallasey. And, now that she’s in Celebrity Big Brother, for ‘naked pictures of Faria Alam’. It takes all sorts. Funny how no one ever seeks nude pictures of Sven Eriksson.

Interesting to note Word’s spell check recognises Sven and Eriksson but neither Faria nor Alam. Surely time to sue Microsoft for sexual discrimination. Everything else has been tried.