Some Saturday queries:-

Does the behaviour of the Formula 1 drivers Alonso and de la Rosa fall within the definition of picaresca? I imagine not.

Ditto the falsification of medical certificates for the obtaining of driving and shotgun[!] licences by a group of Pontevedrans which included a teacher and a psychologist?

And the involvement of 5 members of the Vigo Guardia Civil [national police] in cigarette smuggling?

Have I been too generous in my praise of Spain’s heavy newspapers and in my insistence that there’s no tabloid press here? If not, why has El Pais today printed a ludicrous letter from someone who implies the ‘English’ [meaning speakers of English such as Brits, Americans, Australians, etc.] are pathetic, ignorant, arrogant, cold, unfeeling, whatever because some of them couldn’t converse with a group of Spanish, Portuguese and French who were looking for a lost child on a beach and who - we’re expected to believe - could all understand each other perfectly because their languages have the same roots. Just like the Germans and the Dutch, presumably.

Is it true most Spaniards think the only time the British take any interest in their children is when they're checking to see whether they’re cooked enough to eat?

Would many people be attending Mass in Spain if every priest here were removed – like one in next-door Asturias – for fathering a child and, thus, proving he was not ‘obeying the rule of celibacy’?

Are the Portuguese police who are quoted today as saying there’s no direct evidence that Madeleine McCann is dead the same ones who yesterday were saying she might be buried below a new road, or under the local church; or was killed in the adjacent room to her parents; or thrown in a weighted sack off a yacht belonging to a friend of the McCanns?