Well, it didn’t take long for the interested parties to initiate their counter-offensive to the government’s plans to reduce the scourge of prostitution here. The president of one of the organisations I cited the other day – the Asociación de Clubs de Alternes – has said the plans must have been drawn up by some sanctimonious goody-goody [meapilas]. And he’s resorted to the traditional Spanish rejection of anything that smacks of that most heinous of sins, hypocrisy. Many of the people involved in the legislation must, he says, have used prostitutes in the past. Which I guess is true, though hardly relevant. Especially in a confessional country.

I’ve previously suggested it’s unwise to comment on another country’s judicial system but events here almost demand I ignore my own counsel. The backcloth to this is that I’m most familiar with a system – the British – where there’s no written Constitution and where senior judicial appointments are not, in practice, made by politicians. The result is that there’s no Constitutional Court and little, if any, controversy around the issue of who ascends to the highest reaches of the system. In contrast, here in Spain there’s been months and months of stagnation while the government and the opposition have slugged it out over which of their appointees would fill the vacancies in one senior body. And now President Zapatero has casued consternation – particularly in his own PSOE socialist party - by appointing a ‘conservative’ to [I think] a different senior court. What a distraction this must all be at a time when there are serious economic issues to address. Not for the first time – my conclusion is the UK is lucky to lack a formal Constitution and a Constitutional Tribunal. And, after all, right now Mr Brown needs all the time he can get to deal with the issues on his particular plate – both economic and non-economic.

Talking of British politics . . . Someone has written this morning that the speech of the Miliband Young Pretender at yesterday’s Labour Party Conference in the UK was rather wooden. I saw a bit of it and felt I was being addressed by a chimpanzee. Albeit a reasonably intelligent one. How cruel history will be to New Labour.

Foolishly believing the forecasts of major price falls at the pumps this week, I put only a moderate amount of petrol in my tank yesterday morning, just before the largest rise in the price of crude oil in history. No wonder I don’t make many predictions.

Galicia

There was something on Spanish TV this morning which one rarely sees – a weather map on which the only little sun symbol was hovering over Galicia. And so it has turned out to be, a fabulous September day. At least down here on the coast.

Making hay while the sun shines, the governments of Galicia and North Portugal have formed a new organisation – AECT – to spend 97 million of EU subventions over the next four years. Followed by whatever they can get either from the next round of EU hand-outs in 2013 or from elsewhere. The organisation is said to be the first of its kind in a eurorregion but my question is – What language will they use to communicate with each other? I think we can rule out Spanish so it boils down to either English for everyone or Portuguese on one side and Gallego on the other. I’m regularly told these are mutually intelligible - as it were – but I still wonder whether this really is true. En passant, why eurorregion [with two Rs] and not euro-region or euroregion? There’s a special prize for anyone who can answer both of these questions.

My elder daughter went home on an Air Europa flight last Friday. So I was more than averagely interested to read that the two pilots of the 7.30 Monday flight had been seen having a drunken fist-fight at 2.30am on Sunday morning. Fortunately for the passengers, they both later reported in sick, having ‘had a meal which disagreed with them’. Which is good to know.

It’s often said we underestimate the incidence of mere coincidence our lives, mistaking unrelated events for something they aren’t. So, is it just a coincidence that I have no internet today, having [reluctantly] tried to set up WiFi capability on my desktop for my partner yesterday evening? And is it also just a coincidence that the dogs that were ruining her sleep issued ne’er a single bark after I finally got the Super Bark Stop machine set up properly last night? I guess only time will tell.

To round off with another reference to judicial matters – Galicia’s Supreme Court has ruled in favour of expansion plans for the wood-mill in our estuary which were actually abandoned by the company three years ago. There must be an explanation, I guess. So there’s a really big prize for the person who can explain this conundrum as well as answering the two earlier questions.