Sub Needed at Daily Telegraph

He may be Scottish, but that's no excuse for the Telegraph's football writer, Sandy Macaskill, nor for his editors. His report on Sundays's match between Aston Villa and Everton included this howler:

"If Dunne and Warnock were crucial as the game wore on (as was Collins) it was Young's inclusion which paid off first, when Marouane Fellaini miss-controlled a pass in the ninth minute, the ball flicking to Ashley Young in what the rugby buffs term the pocket."

Please, Macca, no rugby – stick to football, if you have to … and bookmark Kicktionary.

And one more word of advice, Sandy. Stick to whatever it is you're speaking (Scotch, I assume – or is that what you’re drinking?) and never attempt foreign languages again (apart from English, if you must):

"Villa, surely, will now reflect that a new manager is needed toute suite."

Mon dieu, Jock! Did ye nae pass your Scottish Certificate of Education French?

Forum Seeding

Most advertising in Hong Kong is so appallingly derivative (why do all tutorial schools display photoshopped images of their teaching staff dressed like extras from Reservoir Dogs on the backs of buses? and why, while we're at it, do all companies that produce sanitary napkins always pour blue water onto the pad – what’s wrong with green?) that, like many others, I hardly notice it.

I was, nonetheless, interested when I met up with an old friend from the advertising world at the weekend who told me about a growing trend in Hong Kong, "forum seeding". In a nutshell, this is when a company gets their staff – or pays outsiders (not preferred in Hong Kong, apparently, because it makes the operation more difficult to control) – to post under different aliases to popular internet forums and chat rooms to promote its products or services.

The latest example of this growing trend that he had come across featured a leading logistics company, which had asked its staff to make fly-by posts in a dozen popular forums, using different pseudonyms, to create "noise" (he's an okay bloke, but he can't free himself from the linguistic shackles of his trade) for its latest advertising campaign.

I'm waiting for the day (sadly, unlikely ever to come to Hong Kong where The Weakest Link failed because people here have no taste for the ironic and the humiliating) when people get hired to write trenchant "anti-advertising" copy. It worked for Guinness (in their famous "Guinness? But I don’t like Guinness!" television campaign), although I'm not sure whether the same can be said for Gerald Ratner's infamous "My products are total crap" campaign.

The Art of Creating Pseudo-responses

In his own inimitable style, Foamier has been pointing out the phoniness of much of the local populace’s response to the horrifying death of eight Hong Kongers in Manila. In a world where so much smacks of pretension and insincerity, such sentimentalising was well described by Roger Scruton as "a way of enjoying the luxury of warm emotions without the usual cost of feeling them".

Professional mourners provided a similar service in the Near East in Biblical days and still do today in various places including the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, cultures that not coincidentally provide a refuge – or perhaps that should be "welcome" – for the overactor and the talentless and self-deluded karaoke singer. Watching the likes of William Hung "perform", one is reminded of Charles Dickens, who wrote in Great Expectations that "all other swindlers on earth are nothing to the self-swindlers".

The growing trend towards dissimulation may be seen as one result of the 65 years of peace that much of the Western world has enjoyed, which has brought with it increasing prosperity and greatly increased leisure time. It is the other side of the coin that finds wealthy, semi-educated middle-class people with a lot of time on their hands only to willing to embrace scares and have a jolly good panic every now and then, a trait that was ably documented by Christopher Booker and Richard North in their book Sacred to Death. Here in Hong Kong, of course, we have to look no further than the SARS "pandemic" to see how scares can, on the one hand, mislead a gullible public and, on the other, propel those who promote them into the top post at the World Health Organisation.

Those who take an interest in such matters may wish to take a look at Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society, a book that came out in the wake of Diana's death and which devotes one of its best chapters to the bemusing outpouring of "grief" on the part of millions of people who had never met her but who jumped at the newspaper-fuelled opportunity to play a vicarious role in the massive mourning business.

As one of the book's contributors, Bruce Charlton, writes in his chapter on the sentimentalising of medicine:

"When ... people find themselves in the role of passive spectator in a frightening media spectacle, then striking a sentimental pose may be the most natural response ... To fail to express sympathy for the victims of a disaster, or condemnation for the perpetrator of an atrocity ... is taken as evidence of some peculiar moral deficit."

With all their insecurities and irrationality, human beings are easy prey to any "encouragement to indulge in sentimentality untrammelled by social consequences", the upshot of which is "a habit of generating pseudo-responses".

For many people, Diana had assumed the role usually reserved for their pet. And any such sentimentalising of pets, as Scruton observes, "is a way of enjoying the luxury of warm emotions without the usual cost of feeling them, a way of targeting an innocent victim with simulated love which it lacks the understanding to reject or criticise, and of confirming thereby a habit of heartlessness". (from the essay "Animals rights and wrongs")

Fear of Flying?

Ten years ago, I was travelling to Shanghai twice a month as part of a team tasked with establishing a new centre there in partnership with Fudan University. Before my first trip, I was duly presented with tickets for China Eastern Airlines. When I demurred, on the grounds that airlines in the PRC had an appalling safety record, and asked the HR drones to rearrange the flights with Dragonair, I was told that I would have to pay the difference. I told them that this was unacceptable and that safety concerns must come first. They dug their stilettos in, as only Hong Kong’s secretarial class can, and by the time that I moved on to my current position, with a different employer, the situation remained unresolved, and I was still owed around HK$3,000.

Once before in Hong Kong had I decided to dig my heels in with a relentlessness that matched the Chinese variety when I had been rear-ended by a truck whose driver had failed to see that there were a hundred cars tailed back in front of him. First, I was offered 50 percent of the claim, which went up to 80 percent – after 18 months – at which point I told them to give me the full amount or I would take legal action. Another six months later, and exactly two years and one week after I was shunted on Waterloo Road I went to Wan Chai to collect the cheque that reimbursed me for the damage sustained to my car.

Steeled by this experience, I prepared to hunker down for the long haul, with all the sidetracking of main issues, pretended incomprehension and delays that the local variety of negotiating inevitably entails. As luck would have it, that magic key that one always dreams will suddenly materialise in front of one’s eyes was indeed dropped into my lap. One morning, I received a call from a former colleague who had seen the expense claims of the directors of the company, and they had all been flying Dragonair. A quick phone call later and a cheque was winging its way over to me.

With a friend of mine currently based in Harbin, my first response to hearing about the deadly plane crash in Heilongjiang was to check that he was okay. He seemed surprised with my concern, which surprised me in turn.

"I've got a driver who was trained overseas. You won’t catch me taking any tin pot airlines."

I had forgotten that he had a private pilot's license of his own.

Zheng Jie Sichuan Siren

I was going to write something about how Sir Donald Tsang is such a dipstick, how his first reaction to the tragedy in the Philippines was to tell the world he was upset because Manila made him lose face by not returning his phone calls, how he'd got his PR machine to issue media releases specifying that his voice had choked up "in a rare display of emotion", when everyone knows it requires no more than a reporter actually doing his job to make the silly little man fly off the handle.

But, I decided not to write about any of that, and instead to give you a bit of a pick-me-up by tracking down this photograph of the little tease from Chengdu (I had to go all the way to Germany).

That she has a thing for lying around in the open air on rocky outcrops and lush grazing land giving her near naked mokkels a bit of an airing is frankly refreshing in this age of prurient prudery where "sexuality" comes in anodyne packages with all the appeal of a cardboard box.

Before going any further, I feel a warning is in order. This photo is just a sampler; the real thing has been carefully concealed by the Telegraph as number 4 in their slide show. Those with dicky hearts – and those whom these images are likely to put between a rock and a hard place – are advised not to look at a portrait that features not just generous, if bleary, cleavage, but eyes that seem not so much to say “Come to bed” as to scream “If I let you into my bed, are you sure you’ll still be up for it when we're locked in the third set tie-break?”

The Painted Forest at Oma

The world's largest totem pole collecton?

Setting off with my daughter one morning from our casa rural near Ibarrangelu in Bizkaia to do a recce of the nearby Santimamiñe caves, we happened across two interesting sites, which was just as well since the caves have been closed to the public for the foreseeable future to protect them from the damaging effects of carbon dioxide.

One was a nice grassy area by the road where my 14-year-old could hone her skills at the wheel – being keen to graduate to something a bit more challenging than a golf buggy – and the other was a walk which starts just across the way from the caves. This ramble takes you through the Oma valley to the painted forest (bosque pintado), a creation of local artist Agustín Ibarrola, who started applying paint to tree trunk in 1982 and never looked back.

The walk itself is a loop of 7.5 kilometres and takes around three hours – you go out through forest, the furthest extent of which is the site of Ibarrola's brushwork, and return along a valley floor dotted with cottages, mills and hermitages, some inhabited, some long since deserted.

Oma Valley looking back to Santimamiñe caves

If the hat fits ...

Beaches in the Basque Country

Laga Beach from Cape Ogoño (279 m)

I can't really praise the Basque Country too highly. It's an area that seems almost untouched by tourism (or indeed by time in places). Show a little interest in Basque culture (typically, my way in was through football – especially, one Andoni Goikoetxea, AKA "The Butcher of Bilbao", who played in the glory years for Athletic Bilbao) and the people are incredibly friendly and, incidentally, quite prepared to speak in Spanish. (Only around 20 percent of Basques speak the language – in no small measure, due to the repression of the language under Franco.)

The food is arguably the best in Spain (although still some way behind French standards) and the beaches are excellent and varied – if popular. Here are a couple of contrasting beaches just 15 minutes apart on the magnificent coastline east of the Gernika river towards Lekeitio.

Laga beach – good for surfing and body-surfing

Lapatza beach - good for diving and snorkelling

Boulders at Lapatza beach

Shing Mun Reservoir Walk: After Rain

Reservoir reflections

It's always pleasant to do a reservoir walk after heavy rain, as the watercourse looks like a real lake and the moisture has washed away the pollution, allowing some decent snaps to be taken. Plus, my lot don't like hills, and the only type of walks they trust me with these days are those round reservoirs, as my definition of what constitutes "hilly" doesn't align with theirs.

A gentle stroll – with time to take a few piccies – takes about two and a half to three hours, and is around 11 kilometres, I’d reckon. Be sure to take the compacted sand trail on the eastern (Needle Hill) side, which hugs the shoreline, and take the Nature Trail just north of the Visitor Information Centre, on the other (Tai Mo Shan) side, otherwise the entire walk will be on concrete. Plenty of parking available on the roadside up by the Centre.

Shing Mun Reservoir from near Pineapple Dam



Twig framed by reservoir

Seed pods at Shing Mun

Hamster Power

Our youngest hamster, Eyjafjallajökull, has just had her second litter of pups. Like last time, she had six. Unlike last time, she didn't kill them all. Well, to be more precise, she ate one, did a Dracula job on four others and neglected the sixth, who managed to cling on to life for 11 days before giving up the ghost. This time round, she's being the perfect mum: feeding them, bathing them, taking them to soccer, immersing them in Mandarin … Here she is, with her life partner, Digger, finally solving the mystery that had been perplexing me since we got back from Spain: just why our internet connection has been so slow recently.

You Havin' a Laugh?

Hats – or, in their case, itchy wigs – off to Susan Kwan, Alan Wright and Line (sorry, don’t know your Christian name – are you new here? - post-post note: it's Peter), who have dismissed the appeal against his two-year bribery conviction by poor old John Hung, once head honcho of Wheelock/Wharf Holdings, in no uncertain terms.

Displaying the kind of Jane Austenian irony to which all judges aspire, when they are not explaining that their boss’s niece deserves another chance because she has caring parents and got a first-class degree in sociology, the appellate judges have given Hung’s appeal such short shrift that if it got any shorter Donald Tsang would be in danger of receiving it.

"The concept of criminalising the taking of a reward from a third party when acting for another in relation to that other’s affairs is straightforward and should remain so."

The best line in the judgment, though, is supplied by the comedians in the membership section of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, no doubt unhappy that Director of Racing, Bill Nader, should always hog the limelight as chief clown. Try to imagine how difficult it must have been to type the following out with the tears rolling down your cheeks and threatening to cause a short-circuit on your keyboard:

"The stewards are dependent on Voting Members to recommend high-quality candidates and to take responsibility for ensuring that the integrity of candidates is beyond reproach."

The judges tell us that this letter was sent out by the Jockey Club to all its voting members on 27 June 2002, but what it doesn’t tell you is that the letter was actually was dated 20 June 2002 but took seven days to post to its 200 recipients on account of the fact that one of the clerks tasked with licking the envelopes happened to read the contents and showed it to the rest of the typing pool, with the result that the entire administration of the club ground to a halt as a fit of mass hysterics swept through the Sports Road headquarters.

How can a mere mortal like David Brent compete with that kind of deadpan delivery?



If you don’t believe that comedy in 1970s’ Britain was really that bad, check this out:

CS Lewis on Democratic Education

He wasn’t too keen on it – understood as the dumbing down of education and the lowering of standards in the wake of wartime curricular reforms – as you might expect:

"The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority … There is in all men a tendency (only corrigible by good training from without and persistent moral effort from within) to resist the existence of what is stronger, subtler or better than themselves. In uncorrected and brutal small men this hardens into an implacable and disinterested hatred for every kind of excellence."

More on the green-eyed monster:

"The kind of 'democratic' education which is already looming ahead is bad because it endeavours to propitiate evil passions, to appease envy. There are two reasons for not attempting this. In the first place, you will not succeed. Envy is insatiable. The more you concede to it the more it will demand. No attitude of humility which you can possibly adopt will propitiate a man with an inferiority complex. In the second place, you are trying to introduce equality where equality is fatal."

Both extracts are from Lewis’s 1944 essay "Democratic education".

Do FInns Drive You Round the Bend?

If so, it's more than they can manage for themselves:

CS Lewis Democrat and Monarchist

It was not for nothing that French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once referred to classification as "symbolic violence". In biographies, histories and journalistic pieces, labels such as "radical", "liberal" and "conservative" so easily lose all meaning and become mere purr or snarl words that tell you far more about the writers than about their subjects. It is with this proviso that I address a question raised by a reader, who wondered whether CS Lewis wasn't a monarchist rather than a democrat.

Of course, the first thing that might be usefully said is that the two systems, and indeed belief in the two systems, are not mutually exclusive. It's quite possible to live under a constitutional, largely ceremonial, monarchy, as millions of Euopeans can testify today. As long ago as the sixteenth century, Anglican priest Richard Hooker understood that a society where the king was subservient to the law would be a happier one than one in which a tyrant ruled. (Lewis, in his Preface to Paradise Lost, acutely referred to tyranny, defined as "rule over equals as if they were inferiors", as rebellion.)

"Happier that People whose Law is their King in the greatest things, than that whose King is himself their Law. Where the King doth guide the State, and the Law the King, that Commonwealth is like an harp or melodious instrument." (Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity)

(Some, incidentally, might argue that the roles of King and Law are conflated in Sharia (arrived at by scholars interpreting the words of Allah as recorded in the Qur’an), if it underpins a system that lacks the institutional safeguards provided by a body of elected representatives empowered with the freedom to make what laws they please.)

Secondly, Lewis believed that man's spiritual nature was more important and more enduring than his bodily nature, and that ceremonial monarchy played a part in reminding human beings, who have a history of being so easily seduced by tyrants, of this. The hierarchical nature of monarchy also served to remind us that, "when equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority" (Lewis, "Equality").

Those who call Lewis a Conservative (conservative and conservationist in a pre-politicised, pre-Friends of the Earth sense, he undoubtedly was) would do well do read this paragraph from the same essay, originally published in The Spectator in 1943:

"We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be "debunked"; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison."

Film-stars ... millionaires ... gangsters ... prostitutes – surely Lewis couldn't have been speculating on future occupants of the White House?

WH Auden

Best known to modern audiences as the person who wrote the poem ("Stop all the clocks") that Hamish reads out at the eponymous funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Wystan Hugh Auden was one of the foremost poets of the last century, drawing praise even from the conservative CS Lewis – at least in his early days.

Even if your tastes are more in the line of narrative poetry, particularly on the grand, epic scale, there is much in Auden to admire. I rather like what may be taken, tongue in cheek, to be his motto, expressed as a birthday wish for a friend:

"Happy Birthday, Johnny,
Live beyond your income,
Travel for enjoyment,
Follow your own nose."

Well, the second and third parts, anyway.

In the same poem, his take on envy is novel and provoking:

"Then, since all self-knowledge
Tempts man into envy,
May you, by acquiring
Proficiency in what
Whitehead calls the art of
Negative Prehension,
Love without desiring
All that you are not."

He takes up the theme in "Songs and Other Musical Pieces XXXIV":

"Hearts by envy are possessed
From the moment that they praise;
To rejoice, to be blessed,
Place us immediately
In mortal danger."

His understanding that "Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our table" led him to he conclusion that some form of democracy was necessary for mankind. In his "New Year Letter" of January 1, 1940 to a friend, Auden writes:

"In this alone are all the same,
All are so weak that none dare claim
'I have the right to govern,' or
'Behold in me the Moral Law,'
And all real unity commences
In consciousness of differences,
That all have needs to satisfy
And each a power to supply."

This appreciation of human weakness, and the tendency for man if unchecked, to exercise dominion over others was shared by Lewis, who wrote as follows in his "Reply to Professor [JBS] Haldane":

"I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects."

Arculli Pronounces on Bokhary Case

"Mr. Arculli, eleven years ago you walked out of Legco in disgust at the failure to prosecute Sally Aw. Will you be pressing hard for the Court of Appeal to overturn the lenient verdict in the Amina Bokhary case?"

"Absolutely not, the two cases differ on a central point of law – Sally Aw wasn't my niece."

Tragedy of Mariam

Trust ATV to cock it up. On last night's evening news, presented by dear old Tony Sabine and the woman with the Japanese name, the broadcaster joined a select group of people (three out of 67,000 according to Google) who render Amina Bokhary's middle name as Miriam rather than Mariam.

There is a difference, guys. Mariam was married to Herod the Great - until he bumped her off on the orders of his evil sister Salome. She also had a play written about her by a proto-feminist 400 years ago. Miriam, on the other hand, is my godmum and lives in Sutton Coldfield.

And note to the magistrate who thought a slap on the wrist was fair recompense to Ms Bokhary for driving her car into a busload of people, refusing to give a breathalyser and slapping a police officer in the face.

Anthony Yuen, you said : "The focus is not rich or poor. It is whether a defendant is good or bad in nature, can they be rehabilitated and will they repeat the offence?"

I say, "Nonsense! It is making sure that the punishment fits the offence."

For, as CS Lewis wrote more than 60 years ago in a gem of an essay called, and critiquing, "The humanitarian theory of punishment", "It is only as deserved or undeserved that a punishment can be just or unjust".

Top Judge Responds to Charge of Favouritism

"You see, the thing you must understand is that the courts operate without fear or favour – any relative of any top judge would be treated the same."

PRC Set to Buy Liverpool FC

Besides having US$332 billion to spend on the team, Mr Huang, can you convince diehard Reds that the Chinese Government is serious about the club?

Well ... We hate Man U, and we hate Man U, we hate Man U and we hate Man U, we hate Man U and we hate Man U, we are the Man U HA-TERS!

Top Judge Delivers Verdict on Niece

"My Lord, does violence run in the family?”"

"Ah, you see, the thing is, if I were to tell you, we'd have to kill you."

Amina Bokhary Breaks Her Silence

"Ms Bokhary, what treatment are you getting for your bipolar disorder, ADD and alcohol problem?”"

"Fuck off! I’ve also got Tourette's."

Sangre Flamenca

One of the more memorable evenings of my 20-odd years in Hong Kong was spent about 15 years ago in Yuen Long.

In those days, before the crocodile put it on the map, Yuen Long was a pretty godforsaken place accessible only by minibus and green taxi. These days, of course, it's such a popular destination that KMB buses pile into each other in their desperation to get there and the world's least thought out and most pointless train service, the West Rail Line, has discovered to the taxpayers' cost that no passengers wanted to leave it so they could get deposited in the middle of the West Kowloon reclamation.

On that night I watched a display of Flamenco dancing by a Spanish chap called Raul that was so breathtaking it made me an instant fan of Spanish men in high heels who strut their hour upon the stage while a couple of anonymous guitar players fret away in the background, one of whom breaks into a sort of caterwauling from time to time that you wish will be heard no more.

Which is all by way of saying that another troupe of Flamenco arists is coming to town (and what a town too – Sha Tin, the wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Hung Kai Properties), Nuevo Ballet Español, which, I am reliably informed, is the resident dance company of the Theatre of Madrid.

According to the blurb for their Bangkok gig, in their show, Sangre Flamenca (which I thought meant "Bloody Flamenco!" but apparently means Flamenco Blood), the 11 guys and gals will be performing solos, duets, bulerías, tangos, zapateado, jaleos and martinets.

Sha Tiners are a pretty discerning bunch and tickets are selling fast, if you want to savour the occasion and ponder once again the eternal question why women flamenco dancers are so crap compared to the men.

Scared to Death

"A genuine concern for mankind and the environment demands the inquiry, accuracy and scepticism that are intrinsic to authentic science."

So wrote Paul Reiter, an expert on mosquito-borne diseases, in his reflections on the operations of the International Panel on Climate Change, who had just kicked him off the team due to produce the IPCC’s fourth report in 2007 because he wouldn't play ball over man-made global warming.

This is one of a litany of disturbing claims made in a book called Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming – How Scares Are Costing Us the Earth, by Christopher Booker and Richard North. As might be expected from a lead author (Booker) who cut his teeth as the first editor of Private Eye nearly 50 years ago, the book is punchy and readable, as well as heterodox and controversialist.

As a food safety specialist and former Research Director in the European Parliament, North, Booker's co-author and long-time collaborator, is seemingly well placed to contribute to the first half of the book, which deals with the food scares in Britain of the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the BSE/CJD debacle.

Having devoured mad cow for starters, Booker and North proceed to gorge themselves on a veritable smorgasbord of a main course consisting of unleaded petrol, speeding motorists, passive smoking, asbestos and, of course, the holy cow of the tree-hugging brigade, global warming ("the new secular religion", as the authors call it).

The chapter which resonates most strongly with me (as a former "traveller" – that's commercial traveller, or "rep", rather than gypsy) is the one on driving, entitled "Speed Kills". The authors' thesis is very simple: by switching the emphasis of traffic policing from regular patrols to speed cameras, the police contributed to deaths on the roads rather than preventing them. Within ten short years of the shift from human judgment to mechanical reliance on cameras, Britain had, it is claimed, gone from having the safest roads in Europe to being down there with Spain and Portugal (at 18th).

For those of us who remember the days when a traffic cop would pull you up for having a defective brake light, or berate you for not pulling off the road if you had had only a "no injury" accident, there is much common sense in what they write. (For those of us who live and drive in Hong Kong, where the traffic police are happy to crouch down for hours behind concrete road dividers tending their tripods like demented birdwatchers, while letting a pallet that has fallen onto the carriageway lie there for as long as it takes to be broken up into splinters, this chapter stands as a reminder of the sorry state into which public service has descended.)

Ironically, the most poignant chapter in the book deals not with a mountain being made out a molehill (i.e. a scare) but with its opposite, the alleged cover-up up by the British Government of the widespread damage caused by organophosphates, the active component in sheep dip, damage which the Government was loath to admit because it had licensed the products and any admission would have led to a flood of legal action against both it and the manufacturers.

Atatcked by its critics as a "surrealist masterpiece", Scared to Death is well worth a read. Private Eye's loss may well have been the inquiring and sceptical mind’s gain.

In and Around Cuenca

Parador, Cuenca

Cuenca is 100 miles east of Madrid and this being Spain - the land of roads built by immigrant Moroccan labour - accessible in just an hour and a half. Fortunately, all the ugly, expensive and - frankly speaking - pretty useless wind turbines are further north in Castilla la Mancha. The Parador, a converted convent, is as good a place to stay as any. Prices in these government-run establishments have come down 30-40% in the three years since we were last in Spain; our room for three people cost 150 euros a night, breakfast included.

Nightview of Cuenca

Cuenca Cathedral

Museo Diocesano, Cuenca

Casas Colgadas (Hanging Houses), Cuenca

Clouds over Cuenca

Las Majadas

Serrania de Cuenca