Living here in Spain, it’s a tad worrying to hear Al Queda considers El Andalus [Andalucia to you and me] to be an Islamic land which is just as much occupied by infidels as Iraq is. So, President Zapatero’s withdrawal of Spanish troops from the latter seems to have made no difference in this regard. What next, I wonder.

In the two months since May’s local elections, more than 90% of the mayors in Spain’s provincial capitals have raised their salaries. In fact, one of them was so blatantly greedy he was forced to resign in disgrace. Trenchant comment on this came yesterday in the form of a cartoon in El Mundo. This had David Beckham in LA declaiming to the crowd that he hadn’t come to the USA to make money. If he’d wanted to do this, he added, he would have stayed in Spain and become the mayor of a small village. Of course, this could also have been a comment of the widespread corruption wreaked by the property boom of the last ten years.

Last week appears to have been Posturing with the President of Portugal Week. First, the president of the Galician Nationalist Party [the BNG] was pictured meeting with this gentleman and trumpeting that, together, Galicia and Portugal had the chance to become a leading region in Europe. Then the president of the Catalan government announced that Catalunia and Portugal had reached agreement on the publication of various historical documents. Needless to say, the first of these would be called ‘1640’, which turns out to be “the year when both Portugal and Catalunia rose up against King Phillip IV”. Of Spain, if you hadn’t guessed. I wonder how welcome it is to the Portuguese leader to be dragged into Spanish nationalist politics as he struggles to end a recession back home.

The Spanish government is planning to introduce Citizenship into the curriculum of secondary schools. This has not gone down well with the Catholic Church, presumably because it will include the teaching of [humanist?] ethics. At the very least, the Church would like it to be relegated to the status of a non-core subject [called a maría here], which I suspect is where Religion now is. My guess is the State will win this one.

I can’t say I’m too surprised to read that Spanish TV is to bring us a soap opera called ‘Without tits, there’s no heaven’. This comes to us from Columbia, famous for . . . well, drugs, I suppose. So it’s understandable the theme is – “The tortuous road to learning about life of a young girl of 18, seduced – when not bewildered – by the luxurious and supposedly easy life provided by drug trafficking and organised crime”. I guess they’ll locate the Spanish version in the region with most connection with these elements of Columbian life. Now, where could this be?