How the world turns. When I lived in the Seychelles for a year in the mid 60s, it was a poor, innocent place of little interest to anyone. Now El País tells me it’s a favourite venue for Saudi Arabian princes who hold ‘conferences’ to which hosts of beautiful young women are invited. Possibly not just to pour the tea. I guess things have got rather more professional than way back then, when the whores were very far from either young or beautiful. And, since there were seven women for every man in the islands, rather redundant.

Talking of folk who prostitute themselves, I think I’d better revise my forecast of the LibDems’ performance in this week’s elections. Not because of the endless polls showing them somewhere between 23 and 33% of the vote but because I’ve just read they got 22% last time round and they’re rather unlikely to fall below this, aren’t they? So, I’ll go with around 25%.

Well, the fusion of the Galician savings banks (the caixas) continues to elude the President of the Xunta, who’s been pushing for this for months now, against the resistance of the Madrid government and the Bank of Spain. Not to mention most of the citizens of Vigo, who fear their interests will be subordinated to those of La Coruña, should it come off. The latest negotiations between Caixa Galicia and Caixanova broke down on Friday when the President of the latter insisted on being President of the new entity for ten years. In normal circumstances, I guess this might have been acceptable, even if his bank is the smaller of the two. But the bugger is already 79 and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion he was taking the piss. On to the next chapter.

Meanwhile, another strange Spanish-English translation: The Holy (Turin) Shroud becomes El Santo Sudario. OK, sudario is translated as ‘shroud’ in the dictionary I’ve just checked but it comes from sudar, ‘to sweat’. So it’s really The Holy Sweatshirt. Which rather removes the mystique, I think. Not that I’ve believed in it since I was about 11.

Finally . . . One of the hits to this blog today was after a search using “Galicia is a stupid region that no one cares about”. I may be wrong but this seems to me to be the same sort of search done by those who enter something like “Spaniards have Arab blood” just so they can find someone to rant at. I believe they’re called trolls. The only sadder people I can think of are those who use troll activities as fodder for their blog posts.