I’m off into the hills this morning so, with time short, here’s a couple of photos taken at last weekend’s Medieval Fair, the Feira Franca. There were quite a lot of lovely women at the event sporting the classic Middle Ages attire of very short skirt or tight shorts but the police politely asked me to stop snapping them for your benefit. I will be posting other photos to my Galicia page soon but meanwhile . . .

In an article on Mrs Sarkozy in one of today’s UK papers, a columnist suggests that “Thanks in large part to her, the tabloidisation of the country is well underway”. La pauvre France.

Meanwhile, not very far away, Belgium is now into its fourth month without a government. Some commentators have suggested the country is on the point of breaking up and ceasing to be a nation. But as one commentator has said, this shouldn’t surprise anyone as “There isn’t, in any meaningful sense, a Belgian nation: no Belgian language, no Belgian culture, precious little Belgian history”. I suspect even Stalin would have been hard pushed to see the case for a single nationality in this case and would presumably have gone for Flemish and Walloon variants, pending their possible absorption into Holland and France. Vamos a ver.

Talking of nations, my sincere thanks to all those Nationalist, nationalists and Galicianists who’ve recently boosted the readership of this blog. I don’t suppose you will stay once I get off the subject but it’s been nice having you. And your opinions.

Finally, on the issue of the moment . . . There's been a lot of comment - not only in the UK media - about the Portuguese police failing to display anything resembling genius. But I wonder. Is it not just possible that the latest incredible developments are part of a brilliant strategy on their part to flush out the repentant real perpetrator because he's sympathetic to the plight of Madeleine's parents? Or, at the very least, that it's all aimed at forcing the McCanns to flee Portugal so that the case can be slowly dropped and embarrassment contained?