At last some good news about prostitution in Spain. After 9 years of trying, the council of a town in Murcia has finally managed to shut down a large brothel convicted of numerous offences, including the exploitation of more than 20 East European minors. Reading the details of the charges levied, one is forced to wonder why it all took so long. Incidentally, the place was situated on an industrial park called La Polvorista. This means pyrotechnist or firework-maker. But polvo has a sadly appropriate slang meaning.

Spain leads the world – relatively speaking – in the sphere of international adoptions. And in 2005 the favoured source was once again China, with over 50% of babies coming from there. I’d be prepared to bet most, if not all, of these were girls.

The Canary Islands has become the latest region of Spain to publish a draft new Constitution defining its relationship with the Spanish state. This is said to include sections copied wholesale from the Catalan model and a Preamble which majors on a tendentious run through the history of the islands. As El Pais commented today, a formal Statute really is no place for this. But this is the flavour of Spanish times.

A young woman fired from her job here in Pontevedra has taken the company to court, claiming she was sacked merely for insisting on talking to clients in Galician. This, of course, is inevitable when legal steps are taken to protect or promote a race, language or whatever. The inevitable consequence is that the lazy and the incompetent can then always argue their inalienable rights have been infringed. I guess we’ll see a lot more of this, as the country’s ‘nationalists’ all now have quite a lot of wind in their sails.

There’s an annual book fair in Pontevedra this time of year. My impression is this year the vast majority of the books are in Galician. They seem very expensive but, even so, I suspect publication of all of them is in some way subsidised by the Galician government. My other impression is that attendances are well down on previous years and the books are not exactly flying off the stalls. Indeed, some evidence of low sales came in the form of unsolicited offers to help me from several of the stall holders. Believe me, this is not normal.