In Barcelona, things seem so different. For example, I know that it's traditionally the least Spanish city, but you'd never know they had a monarchy, coming here as a tourist - as opposed to the UK, where the Queen is probably the best-known animal, vegetable and/or mineral going when it comes to overseas visitors.

A wedding is a funeral which masquerades as a feast. And the greater the pageantry, the deeper the savagery.

People - and I include myself - get fat because they choose pleasure over self-denial.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.

But just think what a boring, bread-and-milk world this would be without the boastful.

Knowing that the 'Sex and the City' chicks now rack up almost two centuries between them, why do some of us fuss and hiss about a bit of retouching on their forthcoming film poster?