Up in north Galicia on Monday, the traffic police stopped a quadriplegic man in a motorised wheelchair after he’d taken a wrong turn and gone 10km down the autovia in the opposite direction from the brothel he was looking for. “I was just going for a shag” he told the Voz de Galicia, “but I don’t want people to think I’m a randy bastard. I went there three years ago but couldn’t get the chair up the steps. I was hoping they’d had a ramp fitted by now. The police over-reacted and made too much of it. I prefer dark girls with Indian features and intend to try again when I feel like it”.

This will presumably be when he’s had a sat-nav fitted to his chair. Which, by the way, he steers with his mouth. Meanwhile, though, he’s returned to the simpler pleasure of painting pictures of the countryside with his mouth. . . Am I alone in thinking this could only happen in Spain?

Most of the time I’m impressed and happy that Spain is not cursed with the twin evils of an excess of Health & Safety inspectors and a surfeit of lawyers. But there are occasions when I suspect things could be a little different. These might include, for example, if one of my legs were to go through rotten boards on the walkway from my house to the communal gardens and I were left dangling 4 metres above solid concrete. Or if, 2 weeks later, the promise of immediate repair had not been fulfilled. If this really were to happen, I guess the boards would look like this. . .

Eating out is such a compulsive feature of Spanish culture I’ve even heard people who struggle to get to the end of each month justify it with the claim it’s cheaper than eating in. So I wasn’t too surprised to read yesterday that the Spanish head the European table for spend on food and drink. The stay-at-home Brits manage only 9% on internal and external consumption of food and drink, compared with 11 in Germany, 14 in France and 15 in Italy. Here, though, it’s a whopping 20%.

A book called “The Return of the Idiot” has been published in Spanish. It was reviewed in El Mundo last Sunday in an article headed “El Colectivo de Idiotas sin Fronteras”, which needs no translation. The six cretins featured here were:- Juan Perón, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Ignacio Ramonet and the Anglos, Noam Chomsky and Harold Pinter. I just mention this here to upset my old left-wing friends and to pose the question whether a Collective of Idiots is worse than a Confederacy of Dunces. Meanwhile, the book is called “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot” in English.

The Spanish press has naturally given extensive coverage to the events in Northern Ireland and it was nice to see El Pais giving credit to John Major for initiating the peace process. It reported his comment that he hadn’t attended the photo-shoot in Belfast because Mr Blair hadn’t invited him. Anyway, the best thing about these developments is we may never again see the name of Teddy Kennedy in the British press. A man who supported collections for IRA terrorists in the USA on the grounds they were ‘freedom fighters’. I once asked him whether he’d see Mexicans setting off bombs in California in the same light but answer came there none.