Includes video of snow felling a pine tree and a photo of a municipal bus which almost skated its way down-town.

Public auctions of wrecks in Barcelona, Pontevedra and Algeciras, with thoughts on how to reduce blogging competition.

With an excerpt from a plea for more state funding by the Bostonian Western Rail-road, in which we are given to understand that snow is not necessarily a bad thing.

A fragment from Italo Calvino’s quasi-17th century folk romance, Il visconte dimezzato/The cloven viscount, uses storks as a portent of battle. Several unconnected 2nd century Greek accounts might appear to do the same, perhaps particularly if one’s a lazy sod and doesn’t read anything but scraps of stuff on Google Books.

But getting there is still a pain in one’s posterior end.

“Discontented devil of a blackamoor, why canst thou not be satisfied to live here?” “Avast there; all our gold and diamonds can’t procure us here the bright sunshine and joyous people, nor the rich fruits and wine, of my native clime.”

Or rather, how my grandfather seems to have been named after a minor railway station.

Half roasted Frenchmen, some o’er Gratings Broil’d/Do mix with Spaniards in the Sea parboil’d;

Blasco Ibáñez says that actually we have always thought “at all hours of the Mediterranean rim.”

A Catalan children’s song remembered by Francesc Candel; early rave culture on Central America’s eastern seaboard.

Our itinerary, and that of Polo Polo on his Viaje a España.

I do hate to be beside the seaside, unless it’s raining.

At Giseno, Lago di Como.

Birdies that ain’t.

But will an ecclesiastical trawler turn it into cat food first?

The pros of walking to Barcelona Airport.

The cottaging zone is getting so popular they’re having to pipe the stuff in.

It’s no longer a swinging safari now the nature-lovers have got guns too.

But here are a couple of photos from the day after the great storm

Kalebeul’s investigation into Vosk and the Na’kuhl temporal conduit yields some surprising results.