I read yesterday that oil reserves will start running down within 10 years, ultimately forcing us to return to local [and seasonal] self-reliance. If true, this will leave Spain in a far better position than, say, the UK where foodstuffs are transported thousands of miles so that supermarkets can offer everything to everyone, every day of the year. Here most produce is still locally grown and the seasons still mean something.

As I was musing on Spanish efficiency yesterday [I’m been waiting 2 months for an estimate], I asked myself what the standard reaction would be to the statement that time is money. Outside Catalunia, the Basque country and, possibly Madrid, I would guess a blank stare of total incomprehension. Or perhaps a dismissal of this attitude as ‘ultraliberal nonsense’.

It seems everyone on British TV younger than 40 now pronounces words containing the letter ‘T’ in a way that really grates for me. Especially if the word ends in ‘tal’, such as ‘hospital,’ ‘capital’ and worst of all, ‘total’. Is this a permanent consequence of Estuary English, I wonder. And am I the only person in the world to have noticed it? The widespread habit of using ‘amount’ instead of ‘number’ [‘amount of people’] pales into insignificance besides this trend.

Spain is passing through its worst draught since records began more than 60 years ago and the fire risk in enormous, even without the help of the those who deliberately start conflagrations. Against this backdrop, we’ve just re-learned that it’s not only on the road where individualismo has a price. A huge forest fire in Guadalajara was triggered at the weekend by some day trippers who decided to ignore the warning signs and start a bar-b-q. The fire has now taken 15 lives, including 11 volunteer fire-fighters who were ‘reduced to ashes’ [as they say here] when their cars were surrounded by flames. It’s hard to imagine a more horrific death but I wonder whether they’ll get the 2 minutes of international silence accorded to the UK terrorist victims. As they certainly won’t, it makes you realise the world was really mourning something more than the human deaths last week.