I can’t say I’ve experienced it myself but it’s said that, here in Spain, members of the medical profession still see themselves as close to God and brook little discussion about their diagnoses and prognoses. My elder daughter certainly came up against this when trying to get treatment for an under-active thyroid a couple of years or so ago. But, anyway, I mention this because the wife of my neighbour, Nice-but-Noisy Toni, is a GP and yesterday presented me with one of the upsides of being treated with great respect – several kilos of potatoes and a dozen eggs offered as tributes by grateful patients from the hills. This is kind of her but, living alone, I’d find it hard to consume all of this before it went off. So I’ve just spent an hour or so making enough soup to last me until after Christmas. Assuming I have a bowl a day. Actually, being pretty tasteless, it could last a great deal longer.

This article has made me feel a lot better about my car and the cowboys running the Rover company when it was made in 2004. Not. I would say it was enough to turn me against capitalism but, of course, it isn’t. As with the author of this interesting article, my problem is with its offshoot, consumerism, and not with capitalism itself.

If, like me, you were daft enough to buy a property in Spain during the last year or so, you’ll now be waiting nervously for a letter from the tax authorities accusing you, the seller and the public notary (a state employee) of being liars and cheats and demanding that you, the buyer, hand over a considerable sum in addition to the staggering 7% of the price you’ve already paid. As the author of this article explains, this is because the age-old process of under-stating the price adopted by a percentage of buyers and sellers to mitigate the tax bite is now being used to justify hitting all buyers – however innocent – for extra tax. This, of course, is little more than state larceny and it’s at times like this one wonders whether one isn't living in the Third World, rather than in Western Europe. And it does little to encourage even the honest citizen to abide by the tax rules. But desperate times, desperate measures. Stuff the rule of law.

And now we hear that petrol taxes are to rise significantly and that our value added tax is to rise by 2 percentage points, or 12.5%. Which should do a great deal for economic growth. What price the state’s tax revenues actually decrease, as Spaniards decide to be as dishonest as their government thinks they are?