If you'd like to know where Spain features in the international murder rankings, nip across to Iberian Notes. You might be surprised. I was. One wonders what percentage of Spain's total stems from violencia de genero, or domestic violence. This is regularly said to be an increasing problem here, despite government attempts to minimise it.

And if you'd like to see dozens of photos of this lovely part of Spain, go to Google maps, search for Galicia and then click around the various buttons until you arrive at the photos. I'm in one of those for Pontevedra. Honest.

On 15 May 1665, the rather lecherous Samuel Pepys wrote that someone's maid was very 'formosa' (handsome). Either this is a corruption of the Spanish hermosa or our Samuel was versed in Gallego. Wonder if he ever did the camino to Santiago.

Finally, here's two similar views of a mausoleum in Iran - regarded by Robert Byron as one of the great buildings of the world. You probably won't believe it when I say it was built in the 10th century. Albeit AD. Byron claims it has a character unlike anything else in architecture. Hard to disagree.

























If you'd like a bit more detail, here it is, from the man himself:- A tapering cylinder of cafe-au-lait brick springs up from a round plinth to a pointed grey-green roof, which swallows it up like a candle extinguisher. The diameter at the plinth is fifty feet; the total height about a hundred and fifty. Up the cylinder, between plinth and roof, rush ten triangular buttresses, which cut across two garters of Kufic text, one at the top underneath the cornice, one at the bottom over the slender black entrance.

Having learned Persian as a young man, I can actually read the inscriptions and it's one of my few ambitions to do so in the flesh before I depart heavenwards. Or wherever.

Can you tell I don't have much to say about Spain today?