I forget where I saw it but this phrase keeps coming back to me - Europe increasingly looks like a debtors' prison managed by Germans. Which reminds me - I wrote a post on the EU earlier today. After which I read this piece on Europe's new politburo, the GdF. Scroll down to my earlier post, if you're interested in the 73rd chapter of the eurozone saga.

As part of Brussels' (Germany's?) plan to punish states which deviate from norms set by the Franco-German duumvirate/the GdF, Spain has been told to reduce its unemployment rate from 23% to 10% or face a fine of one billion euros or 0.1% of its GDP. Which should help. Not. I wonder what will happen if a miracle occurs and they get it down to only 11%.

Talking Spanish politics - The leaders of the two main parties had a TV debate last night, about which you can read more here. The surprising thing is that Sr Rajoy - a poor performer - is adjudged to have won it. The unsurprising thing is that he called his opponent a fibber to his face:- “You are lying. Knowing you, that doesn’t surprise me.” I'd be very surprised if the holier-than-though Sr Rajoy wasn't doing a bit of lying himself. But, hey, that's what politics is for.

James Michener's book Iberia is more than 700 pages long. More than enough, you might have thought, to say something about western Iberia. Or, as we call it, Portugal. But he doesn't. Bit of a misnomer, then. But so far quite enjoyable.

The Al Jazeera TV station has aired an excellent four-part program on the 2008 financial meltdown, under the title "The men who crashed the earth". Here's one link but you may need to search for other parts, using the above phrase or the word meltdown. Fascinating stuff.

Talking about visual pleasures - Here's a link to some pretty dramatic fotos of Spain's landscapes at night. Hard to believe they're the work of an amateur.

I have a ridiculously stupid practice - Whenever it occurs to me that what I'm about to do with, say, a cup of coffee, a glass of water, a sheet of glass or anything similarly 'delicate' may well to lead to an accident, I go ahead and do it anyway. Even if this tempting of fate involves passing a cup of coffee over my laptop, when the probability of anything untoward happening might be low but the consequence of realisation is certainly very high. So it is that I've knocked over numerous cups, glasses and mugs that I've placed on the floor, forgotten about and then kicked over. Or smashed glass or porcelain objects I've consciously placed where, say, someone opening a door would hit them. You get the picture. I mention this in the hope that someone will read this and either post a comment or write to me here to tell me/the world they do the same thing. In which case, I won't feel so bad about myself. Please.

Finally . . . Like buses, there's none for ages and then two or three come along together. So it was today that a couple of people (well men, I assume) arrived at my blog searching for verin galicia whore house and luxury brothels spain. I'm guessing they were disappointed.