Spot of bother on the Sports pages today. The trainer of the Spanish soccer team was yesterday recorded suggesting the following to one of his players, in respect of a black member of the French team - ”Tell him ‘I’m better than you. I shit on your whore mother, nigger shit. I’m better than you, nigger’”. But no problem, It was ‘only a bit of jocular motivation’ so we are not to take it too seriously. And, in fact, most newspapers don’t. One interesting aspect of this – though hardly the most important – was that the form of ‘you’ used by the trainer was ‘usted’, which is so formal, respectful and inconsistent with the rest of the diatribe that it almost makes you believe his story. Unless it was irony, of course.

Chip, chip. At the request of the Spanish government, the Guest of Honour at the 2006 or 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair will be the ‘Culture of Catalunia’, though specifically not ‘Catalunia’ itself. I trust the Culture of Galicia will get a look in within the next decade.

Talking of Galicia, the octogenarian President of the local government fainted in the parliament yesterday. Some say it was because he had returned to work too soon after a bout of gastroenteritis. I say it was because he wears his trousers with the waistband across his nipples. Perhaps this was fashionable in 1933.

Nice to see obituaries in all the Spanish papers today for the third [but almost unknown] member of the team which discovered the DNA helix, Maurice Wilkins. A New Zealander in fact but, like me [and at least one of my American readers], an alumnus of King’s College, London.