Spanish bankers like nothing better than a good old gossip - preferably over an extended and palatable lunch under a bright blue sky. So it was last week. For there is no abstention here - wine flows as freely in January as it ever does in July. And tongues wag hotly, whatever the subject, and never more than on banking takeovers.

Bizarrely, for the country that gave us Hello!, Spanish newspapers are rather impenetrable beasts - bearing more resemblance to legal tracts than to their cousins elsewhere. No downmarket tabloids here then, but a stark and uncompromising choice between the edifying and the ephemeral. But Spain is a country full of contradictions. For wine is always drunk, but rarely too much of it. Lunches are always long, but there's invariably a return to work later on.