My recent mention of problems at Heathrow led to accusations from some readers of British arrogance and anti-Spanish sentiment, on the grounds that the criticisms only arose because the owner – Ferrovial – was Spanish. It was also said all the problems were due to government- imposed security measures and not to corporate investment strategies. My contention, though, is that Brits don’t care about the nationality of ownership, only about the quality of service provided and, therefore, the commercial strategies of the owners - be they British, American, Japanese or Spanish. There’s an article in the Daily Telegraph today which claims “Heathrow is expected to net its owners a profit of £600 million this year” and that the last year of ownership by Ferrovial had seen “a drop in the level of investment made in general airport infrastructure”. The paper goes on to say “We used to give these [airport] companies the benefit of the doubt during terrorist alerts and banks of Christmas fog that kept planes grounded. Now we know that it is the understaffed, badly run terminals themselves that cause more long-term delay than all the security alerts combined”. I can’t say whether or not this is all true but, if it is, it won’t surprise me if Ferrovial’s monopoly is broken up and I will regard it as having been complicit in this reversal of its fortunes. Any suggestion that it will have been an ‘anti-Spanish’ measure will demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work in Anglo-Saxon economies. If you want to make money there, you have to abide by the rules. They’re not the same as in Spain, where consumer protection is widely regarded to have some way to go and where customers appear to be rather more docile than elsewhere. An editorial in El Mundo or El Pais a week or so ago [on the fines imposed on BA] made a similar point, stressing that companies in Spain tended to ignore the rules and then tried to wriggle out of their responsibilities once they were caught out doing so. But I must stop or I will soon be mentioning Telefonica yet again. And I wouldn’t want to do that.

I think I’m right in saying that, in the last few years, the Spanish government has made two changes to the law on motorbikes. Firstly, it lowered the permitted age for riders to 14 and, secondly, it permitted everyone with a car licence to ride bikes up to 125cc without the need for any training or separate licence. I wonder if these developments are connected with the recent announcement that fatal motorbike accidents increased 27% in the last 12 months.

Only 5% of Spain’s streets are said to sport the names of women. The accolade for the city with the lowest percentage – a mere 2.7 – goes to our neighbouring metropolis of Vigo. Which gives the genteel residents of patrician Pontevedra another reason to despise this ‘commercial’ upstart. Which they’ve been doing for well over a hundred years so far. Read George Barrow on the subject. Chapter XXVIII.

Vigo also scores badly when it comes to flouting noise regulations; almost 40% of its residents are said to suffer from acoustic pollution, as against ‘only’ 20% for Galicians as a whole. Santiago, it’s claimed, is in blatant breach of EU regulations and has been told to get its house in order by as early as 2012. You’ve been warned.

Finally, for those readers who followed the recent dialogue in the Comments about the Formula 1 spat between the monster egos of Hamilton and Alonso, here’s a couple of apposite quotes from a very balanced article on the subject. You can read it in its entirety here:-

No F1 team is big enough to comfortably contain two sporting alpha males of this stature.

Forget Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell at Williams in the 1980s, Mansell and Alain Prost at Ferrari in 1990, and even, so far, Alonso v Hamilton. All pale into insignificance when compared to the daddy of F1 feuds - Prost against Ayrton Senna.