In this Guardian article, the British philosopher, Roger Scruton, claims that high culture is being corrupted by a culture of fakes. I read it with great interest but was disappointed not to see names like Hirst and Tracey cited. Perhaps in the follow up.

The BBC last week aired a program by its Economics Editor, Paul Mason, entitled The Great Spanish Crash. If you can fool the BBC into thinking you live in the UK (zombie URL?), you can get it on the BBC iPlayer. If not, you'll have to make do with this.

Just a rider to my comment about Spain moving (back) to GMT . . . One Spanish commentator encapsulated the case like this - “We have to stop eating when others are working. And vice versa.” It put me in mind of an interview given to a friend of mine, when she was told that English clients were 'funny' about the company's employees not being available for three hours in the afternoon and then expecting them to take calls at 8 or even 9 o'clock at night. Marching to the beat of a different drum.

I was a tad shocked this morning to read that Galicia has the two most dangerous roads in Spain. And that the next most perilous region is Asturias. Which is rather worrying for those of us who drive regularly through both of these to the north coast and beyond. Thank God we can relax when we get to Cantabria.

I read last week of a prompt resignation from the ranks of the PP party and thought about citing it. Maybe I did. But, anyway, here's Graeme from South of Watford doing justice to the subject.

Which reminds me . . . The recent (aborted) trial of Chinese mafia members operating in Spain has thrown up a list of prominent Spanish persons accused of laundering money on a grand scale. According to El País, The list of well-known people who reportedly used the alleged money-laundering network to obtain money from abroad reads like a who’s who of the gossip press. Names of well-known businessmen, high society figures and even some members of the extended Spanish Royal Family appear in the file. They would go to Malka for help to secretly bring back money they had stashed away in tax havens long ago. This, of course, is the backcloth against which ordinary Spaniards are being asked to pay higher taxes and receive lower benefits. Will they continue to merely shrug their shoulders and mutter “That's the way things are here.”?

Finally . . . There's at least one place in Spain – Palencia – where the city's patron is Nuestra Señora de La Calle. Or Our Lady of the Street. An unfortunate phrase, which would have some of us thinking of Mary Magdalene, rather than the mother of God.