Ahead of consideration by the Constitutional Court of Catalunia’s controversial new constitution, Spain’s main political parties are locked in an internecine – and unedifying - struggle to bias the tribunal in its favour. When Gordon Brown talks of major constitutional reform in the UK in the direction of more formality, clarity etc., this is the sort of nightmare that occurs to me at least.

A group of Spanish experts is somewhat less optimistic than the government about 2008 economic growth. They suggest a [still-high] 2.7%, against the official forecast of 3.3%. Meanwhile, the use of concrete in 2007 here is forecast to be the same as last year, essentially because public works have compensated for the slowdown in the property market.

El Mundo got itself up to 9 sections yesterday. Not quite as many as the UK Sundays but bad enough. Possibly in jest, its business section raised the question of whether Fernando Alonso could sue McLaren for ‘mobbing’. For inexplicable reasons, in Spain this English gerund is used to mean harassment in the work place. I didn’t bother to read the article but its tenor contrasted with reports in El Mundo or El Pais last week that McLaren’s test driver – one Pedro de la Rosa of Spain – had rejected claims that McLaren had disadvantaged Alonso in any way as simply ridiculous.

The Spanish magazine Intervíu specialises in putting nude unknowns on its cover. In this regard, readers may recall our local hairdresser heroine, Ana María Ríos. This week’s star is a young woman [what else?] who serves in the Spanish army in Ceuta. She’s quoted as saying she has a lot of respect for the military and this is why she has posed without any military insignia. How touching. Who says young people these days have no values?

British Lunacy

A couple of maids used a master key to enter a hotel room and found the occupant ‘having sex with a bicycle’. Rather than run off laughing, they told the management, who reported him to the police, who prosecuted him. He’s now been placed on the sex offenders’ register. I wonder - amongst other things - how they determined that the bicycle was offended.

Finally . . . click here if you want to see the sort of accident that happens at 6am of a Spanish Sunday. This one involves a car and a roof. Neighbours are reported to have said the road is a post-copas rat run and that, unsurprisingly, this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.