Our local police this week announced they’ll be breathalysing drivers over the next two weeks. My prediction is that, at the end of this period, they’ll self-satisfyingly announce the rate of conviction has been astonishingly low. At least among drivers who can read.

Spain, we’re told, has 36 public holidays a year, against only 28 in the UK. But Finland takes the biscuit at 44. Mind you, the Finns might not take Monday or Friday off every time one of their holidays falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday. Called a ‘bridge’ here.

In the Daily Telegraph this morning, Michael Henderson asks whether Britain’s celebrity artist Tracey Emin is a man in drag. I have an even more outrageous question – Is she an artist? The answer is that, in an age when art is anything which anyone says it is, the answer must be she’s every bit an artist as you and me. Just paid rather better. In the same way these days, it seems a nation is anything which anyone says it is. On balance, this is a bigger problem.

Did anyone else have to be told the two staggering figures in the UK Olympics logo were, in fact, the number 2012? How very ‘last century’ I must be.

The British writer, Colin Bateman, is henceforth to be known as merely Bateman. According to his publishers, ‘Colin’ is not a butch enough name for a thriller writer. And Mr Bateman himself says it’s a tad ‘nerdy’. Well, that’s at least one reader less. Or should this be ‘fewer’?

After a year of granite-cracking which has brought us endless noise and vast quantities of dust, a few buildings have finally gone up on the building site in front of my house . . .

True, they’re not quite as enticing as the artist’s impression in the ads now appearing in the local papers but it’s progress of a sort. And something serious must be about to happen as Portuguese labourers have appeared on site. As I’ve mentioned before, these are all-weather, twelve-hours-a-day guys. Except on public holidays and ‘bridge’ days, of course.