A Spanish court last week ordered the seizure of all copies of Spain’s satirical magazine, Jueves. This was because the front cover featured a rather scurrilous cartoon of the Prince and his bride, the lovely Leticia, in a compromising position. Needless to say, this immediately meant millions went onto the net to see it. But the really bizarre aspect of this is that the left-of-centre government has spent the last few days defending the courts against attacks on this Royalty-centred censorship from right-of-centre newspapers and political parties. Politics can be a funny game. Especially in Spain, perhaps.

You know the Spanish economy must really be booming when its citizens complain of being ripped off by timeshare companies. One couple who thought they were buying a luxury flat in a castle in Edinburgh found themselves in an unheated hovel on the outskirts of Glasgow. But some things haven’t changed. The crooked company is registered on the south coast of Spain.

The average gross annual salary of Galicians aged 18 to 35 is said to be 11,300 euros [7,500 pounds], compared with a national figure of 13,250 [8,825]. The cost of acquiring their own flat is now said to be in the region of 60% of this. No wonder most of them live at home until they’re married. But, then, they always did. My impression is the money thus released goes on cars - some of them quite powerful and/or spectacularly customised. I think there’s some pictures of these in the photo gallery on my Galicia page.

Talking of property prices, the recent news of falls was naturally analysed in the Sunday press. El Mundo reports that repossession cases in Madrid have risen 67% in the last year but that the construction industry is saying things are changing smoothly and there’s no reason to worry. Neither of which is very surprising.

One of the bigwigs of the Galician Nationalist Party [the BNG] will be heading up a new sub-group aimed at “stopping a new fall in support for Galician nationalism in the face of a threat the BNG will conform with ‘autonomismo’ and so fail to reach its peak of Galicia’s national and social emancipation.” He stressed this group would stop the BNG foreshortening its horizons and conforming with the opposite of what it is demanding. Specifically, he reminded us “The BNG only accepts autonomismo as an institutional politico-juridical framework for the project of institutional politics, and not of social politics”. The only bit of this mumbo-jumbo I think I understand is that autonomismo involves accepting Galicia can only ever be an autonomous region. But, as the BNG gave up demands for independence some years ago, the rest of it is completely lost on me. And probably would be if it were put more clearly. Perhaps a nationalist/Nationalist reader could help me out here. See p9 of Sunday’s Correo Gallego for the original text.