A quick follow-up to yesterday’s comment about the food-fest over Christmas and New Year here – the Voz de Galicia says the average weight gain will be 3 kilos, or 6.5 pounds. Hardly surprising, is it? The Spanish Hypertension Society encourages everyone to counteract it via vigorous physical exercise. As if.

Entering a photo exhibition here in Madrid last night, I had to wait for a minute while they struggled to identify what it was on the chap in front of me that was setting off the alarm. It turned out to be his watch. Twenty seconds later, I sailed through with a watch on my wrist and the keys to my daughter’s flat in my pocket. Not exactly confidence-inspiring. But at least it wasn’t an airport. Actually, it was the Telefonica building, so perhaps it's not a bad thing it wouldn't be too difficult to blow it up.

En passant . . . The photos had all been taken between 1908 and 1940 and I couldn’t help noticing a lot more Spanish men had white hair back then than appears to be the case now. Probably the improved diet.

Those readers who’ve noticed my campaign against the ads for highly dubious products in El Mundo’s Sunday edition won’t be surprised to hear the police have raided a company accused of including illegal hormones in its offerings. It’s based in Malaga, of course, and has a range of 30 products guaranteed to cut your weight – even as you sleep – and to increase the size of your breasts. Possibly at the same time. Interestingly, the top men are reported to be Greek and British. Though no arrests yet.

Quote of the Century?

I regret having left Palestine. It is refreshing to find a country endowed with great natural beauty, with a capital whose appearance is worthy of its fame, with a prosperous cultivation and a prodigiously expanding revenue, with the germ of an indigenous modern culture, in the form of painters, musicians and architects, and with an administration whose conduct resembles that of a benevolent Lord of the Manor among his dependents. There is no need to be a Zionist to see that this state of things is due to the Jews. They are pouring in. They have enterprise, persistence, technical training – and capital. The cloud on the horizon is Arab hostility.

Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, 1933.

Some cloud.