This is the view from my face most mornings from about 6am. It's blurry because I don't have my glasses on yet. It's effectively my daily friendly reminder that the cat is empty. Somewhere along Ted's six-day odyssey to Spain the evil shipmasters chopped off some of his mane, presumably because it was covered in poop.

It's been a rough few weeks for the cat and also for the toilet officer in our house but thankfully the fluffy little bastard is his old self again. The cat, I mean. So now when we go out we can be reasonably sure that we won't be returning home to any cat-related floor schmeers.

This is one of the plazas in which the annual winter festival culminates in the ceremonial 'burial of the sardine'. According to the government website we were right on time – 7.31pm – yet, as you can see, there's not one sardine in sight nor are there sufficient personnel on hand to bury it even though the hole required presumably could be quite small.

I'd rather have my scrotum caught in a revolving door than go to a supermarket on a Saturday morning. In Spain they do have equivalent supermarkets – many with revolving doors, so there are some intriguing possibilities opening up – but reliance by locals on these corporate behemoths is a lot lower than it is in Australia.

"That fat woman over there eats too much food," she said, rather more loudly than I had anticipated.

We're sitting on the hard floor in an apartment with no furniture watching our cat Ted, heavily burdened with diarrhoea, scrooching his arse along the otherwise pristine vinyl in an attempt to clean himself after a particularly nasty litter box event.