Ninety seconds

The match this evening kicked off late. Ah, I thought, the Spanish have already imposed their pattern of play on the Germans...

Away fan

As usual for a Saturday, we came to Huesca this morning from the village, turning right in Angüés and going down the hill, on the carretera, our leaving of Angüés marked by a large sign by the side of the road.

All Spanish towns and villages possess these signs, or ought to - and indeed there may be more than one, as there is when we enter Angüés from the north, and have the choice between a sign that says ANGÜÉS, and another, immediately below it, that prefers to omit the accent and renders the name ANGÜES.

On the exit signs, there is always a thick red line, running from the bottom left-hand corner to the top right, crossing out the name of the place which is written on a white background: and therefore, seeing a red diagonal line on white, I can never leave anywhere without immediately thinking of the Peruvian national football team.

Hallucinations

A little before two o'clock today I wandered out, briefly, into the Plaza del Mercado, and looked across it, distracted by a bright patch of green in a corner. Behind the building on the lefthand corner, where the road comes through, there's a tree, in a courtyard at the back of the building which houses the magistrates' courts. There is a wall, the top of which blocks one's view of the tree below its higher branches, and on the left, as I looked it, the ends of those branches went behind another wall - on the right, they were truncated by the building in the Plaza and thus the patch of green appeared essentially as a square, attached to the Plaza building about fifteen feet above the ground. And seeing this illusion, in the heat of an Aragón June during the mediodía, I thought, for a moment, that the patch of green that I was looking at was, in fact, a pub sign.