Spanish TV news refers to Israel as both ‘Israel’ and ‘the Jewish state’. But it doesn’t refer to Lebanon as ‘the Arabic Sunni Moslem state’. Or to Iran as the ‘Aryan Shiite Moslem state’. And the USA isn’t called ‘the polyglot Christian state’; nor Spain ‘the Indo-European Catholic state’. I wonder what this different treatment signifies, if anything. It can’t be merely because there’s only one Jewish state in the world and so no possibility of confusion; there’s only one Aryan Shiite Moslem state as well. Thank God.

Spain is approaching the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the vicious Civil War of 1936 and a brave decision has been to establish an archive of related papers both from Spain and other countries and to throw it open to the public. This is a major step away from the vow of silence on the subject respected since the death of Franco and the transition to democracy. And it will be fascinating to see what emerges. Though very painful, no doubt.

One of the great things about Spain, if you are a cyclist of any age, is that every village and town here is laced with cycle tracks. But they’re not quite as dedicated as those, for example, I’ve seen in Hamburg. Here they are what are called pavements in the UK and sidewalks in the USA.

The Galician government says 95% of the region’s bars have done nothing whatsoever to comply with the anti-smoking legislation that comes into force in 50 days time. They add that, since only a couple of planning applications have been received, it’s inevitable many businesses will be facing fines after September 1. Which is surely true. As to how many of them will pay these, well that’s quite another matter.

Last night I tried the experiment of including in my blog a few of the words which I believe are picked up by Spanish ‘nationalists’ anxious to read every word written about their respective ‘nations’. I wanted to check if this markedly increased the hits to my blog. Sure enough, these rocketed to over almost 500 today, more than double my previous record. But, in fact, this was because I was dumb enough to refer to the death of Princess Diana in the same post. And the world appears to be full of sad souls who can’t get enough of her, alive or dead. Especially if there’s a whiff of scandal, no matter how manufactured.