Suddenly the country’s fall of martyrs. A doctor in Catalunia, after three months of hitting his head against the wall, has said he’ll go on hunger strike because his daughter’s school has refused to meet its legal duty to teach her Spanish. This obligation is apparently enshrined in three different constitutional documents, proving just how useful these are when there’s no political will to abide by them.

Well, the handover of power in the Galician PP party went more smoothly than anyone might have predicted six months ago, though one of the feuding barons from the hinterland decided to stay away from the party conference which saw Manuel Fraga hand over the presidency to Núñez Feijóo. Mr Fraga, despite being at least 82, will not retire from politics but will move to the Senate in Madrid. Mr Feijóo says he’s a man of the people and will base his politics on a ‘Galaico-Spanish ideology’. I think this means he’ll be less nationalist than the ruling Socialist party and their coalition partners, the Galician Nationalist party.

In the 30 years since Franco died, there’s been a massive extension to the tax base in Spain, especially via sales taxes and personal income tax. However, a report published today says 75% of Spaniards still believe that there’s either ‘A lot’ or ‘Quite a lot’ of evasion. Nonetheless, only 7% would report any they knew of. The biggest evaders, it’s suggested, are businessmen and those operating in the ‘liberal professions’, with a total of 57,000 companies said to be ‘escaping fiscal control’. I’m not sure what the ‘liberal professions’ actually are but they’re clearly allowed to be more liberal with their earnings than the rest of us are.

A columnist in one of the local papers today opined that one of the worst aspects of the ‘antidemocratic’ new smoking law was that it encouraged non-smokers to crawl out of the woodwork and attack smokers for being [would you believe] insensitive, inconsiderate and even evil. Why didn’t non-smokers show such anger in the face of the failing education system, he asked. Surely, he added, there were things far worse for our health than passive smoking, such as being slaves to lying, cheating politicians. I’ve long felt that nicotine progressively destroys exactly that part of the brain which allows one to formulate arguments on the subject of smoking so I was grateful to him for further evidence of this. His photo, need I say, showed him puffing on a pipe.