There was a dead dog on the pavement outside the supermarket entrance this morning. A great Dane, of all things. What made this even stranger was that I had just passed a dead Siamese cat on the grass verge, a couple of hundred metres away. A bizarre suicide pact, if ever there was one.

Talking of the supermarket, this continues its slow but purposeful progress away from any known concept of customer service. So much so that I have formed the theory that they are trying to drive customers away in order to justify closure. Herewith, my latest fruitful conversation with an employee:-
There hasn’t been any fresh ginger recently
No
Will you have some today?
No.
Are you going to have some later this week?
No.
Are you ever again going to have any?
No.
Why not?
No one buys it.

In a local village this weekend, they had one of the many ‘gastronomic festivals’ which dot the summer in Spain. This one involved the cooking – in a massive pot - of 1,400 portions of tripe, said to be a new Guinness world record.

So, there you have it – ‘customer service’ and ‘gastronomic’, two expressions without exact equivalents in Spanish.