Happily, the Galician movement for independence from Spain is not quite in the same league as the Basque ETA group. It very rarely does anything newsworthy and, when it does, one's tempted to conclude it's not terribly serious. Or do I mean competent? Their latest achievement was to place an artefact in the doorway of a Vigo branch of our new bank, Novacaixagalicia, yesterday, having first - cartoon-like - attached to it a note saying ‘danger, bomb’. The package was taken out and blown up at the cost of a few nearby windows.

Having queried a few months ago why the Telecinco TV channel would want to air a Spanish version of Cheers, I can't say I was terribly surprised to read that low viewing numbers have led to the cancellation of what the channel had hoped would be its best bet for high ratings over the autumn.

Back in the UK, a female columnist on the Sunday Times has asserted that:- "One of the unintended consequences of feminism has been to marginalise men. Feminism has in practice been a long march not just towards emancipation but also against masculinity. Last week, in a new sign of this, the chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (a woman) announced that young women were now earning more on average than young men. Among women aged 22-29, the gender pay gap has been reversed, partly because these women are better qualified than men of their age. This is not good news. Surely it is not what feminists fought for. The battle cry was for equality with men — including equal pay — not for victory over them. . . . . I was horrified when I heard my nine-year-old daughter firmly telling my four-year-old son that boys do all the bad things in the world, and are rough and selfish. Girls, she assured him, were good. She was only mouthing the politically correct attitude of the time. People had suddenly discovered testosterone, the male hormone, as the root of all social evil, competition, teenage violence and war — all attributable to men. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings comes the cant of the day. . . . It is odd that so little fuss is made about all this. Perhaps people are tired of the gender wars. Perhaps men and boys have internalised the prevalent idea that somehow masculinity is rather a nuisance: aggressive, impulsive, selfish with a poor attention span, and self-evidently the stuff of feral youth and violent crime. The notion that manliness was valuable — that a manly man would protect his wife and children and provide for them — has been undermined by the freedom of women to manage quite well (apparently but not actually) without them, indeed very much better without them at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, since this country’s benefit payments could have been specifically designed to make men redundant, and feel it.Now young women are beginning to earn more per hour than men of their age. Imagine how that must feel to any young man trying to prove himself as an adult, a lover or a father: the effort would hardly be worth it. If this trend spreads to other generations and to other pay grades, we will soon have generations of deeply disaffected and angry men. That was not, surely, what generations of feminists had in mind."

I must ask my daughters. And possibly my ex-wives. About the UK situation, I mean. I venture to say that whatever feminism Spain has seen in the last 30-40 years has not done much, if anything, to suppress masculinity here. Nor femininity, thank God.

But, anyway, it's good to read that foreign buyers of Spanish properties are way up this year on last year. 38% up, in fact.

Finally . . . Click here for a gallery of amazing street art in Brussels.