When I was 16, I wrote a miserabilist Elvis Costello-type song that started:

"I've been away for a while, but I don't suppose you noticed..."

Which may be true of PdS Blog. If you're one of those fine people who did notice, then sorry!

The grand old man of Spanish soccer, Luis Aragonés, has made a very bad joke. In the UK recently, former soccer manager Ron Atkinson said something similar when he thought he was off-mike and lost his job as a soccer pundit on the Guardian for it. In Spain, however, reaction has been, as the Yahoo article points out, "muted", with several newspapers rushing to Aragonés's defence, and it's unlikely that anyone will suggest he should stand down as the team's national manager. (Some papers seem to believe, implausibly, he's a kind of messiah of multi-culturalism.) The famously grumpy Aragonés is known here as the "wise man of Hortaleza", and it seems he's wise enough to know that racist comments that would topple governments in other countries, if the media got hold of them, are unlikely to have any effect whatsoever in Spain. There's no shortage of racism in soccer here, as 20 minutes spent on the terraces at Atlético de Madrid (a team Aragonés has managed several times) will teach you.

Meanwhile, it seems that Brit kids prefer Spanish. (This may be the first and last time that I link to the Leicester Mercury.)

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