Well, well, well . . . . After eleven years, three official enquiries and the expenditure of millions and millions of pounds, the UK Coroner yesterday advised the jury enquiring into the death of Princess Diana that there wasn’t a scintilla of an iota of evidence that she had been murdered by the British establishment, led by the Duke of Edinburgh. What a shock. I now await advice from the Portuguese police that the McCanns didn’t kill their own daughter and then get seven or eight friends to help them concoct an alibi. Not that any of this will or ever could satisfy the world’s loonies, of course.

Today is April Fools Day in Britain, when it’s the custom to play hoaxes on one’s friends. This may well lie behind the report in the Daily Telegraph that the BBC will tonight be bringing us film of flying penguins. For me, the clincher is the photo of penguins diving down into the African jungle in order to ‘take some sun’. But I might be wrong.

On the other hand, I suspect yesterday’s report of text-age forenames being registered in the UK is - sadly - all too true. These include An, Cam’ron [why not ‘Camron‘?], Flicity, Lora and Conna. Then there’s Samiul. Which is bad enough but doesn’t really approach the heights/depths of Ikea, Paprica and Tame. In case you haven’t guessed, the last one stands for The Apple of My Eye. Given the love of acronyms there, this sort of thing could well catch on in Spain. Or it might if the government didn’t restrict your scope as free citizens to call your children what you like .

I suggested yesterday that Spanish attitudes in certain areas might be a bit too lax. Commenting on the failure of Iberia’s cheapie airline [Clickair] to change its clocks on Saturday night, John Chapell of Iberian Notes makes this apposite point - Unfortunately, this kind of complete screw-up ("chapuza" in Spanish) is all too common over here. One of the best things about Spain is that it's a low-stress, laid-back country, but sometimes we can get a little too laid-back around here.

I’ve read that here in the UK, when you want to change your broadband provider, you get an MAC [migration authorisation code] from your existing company and give it to the new one so they can make the switch quickly and easily. Has anyone heard of this in Spain? Or is this too much to hope for right now?

Finally, for all Celtically-inclined Gallegos, here’s a bit of a Gaelic language I picked it up in my bank yesterday. As you can see, it bears little relation to Latin or Teutonic tongues:- Y fford gyflym a syml o dalu I mewn a thalu biliau. It’s Welsh, of course, and means The fast and simple way of paying-in and paying bills. Or that’s what it says here, at least. I would have recognised biliau. And I think I’ve worked out the Welsh plural. My grandfather would be proud of me.