Jeanne Calment was recognised as history’s oldest woman upon her death at age 122. Now Russian scientists claim she may have actually been a 99-year-old imposter.

I love it here. If I could, I’d live here full time.

An oddity in today’s publishing industry is that the number of words used in a manuscript is what matters in the first selection. Publishers want novels by debutants to be of 80,000 to 120,000 words. I realise that this makes some sense in some instances, but what many great novels we would be missing had the rule always been applied.

• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (27,000)
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (28,000)
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (29,000)
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (30,000)
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (36,000)
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (46,000)
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (47,000)
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (49,000)
• The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison (52,000)
• Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck (55,000)
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (59,000)
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding (60,000)
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (68,000)
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (68,000)
• Exit Ghost by Philip Roth (68,000)
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (69,000)
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (70,000)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (73,000)
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (80,000)
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (83,000)
• 1984 by George Orwell (89,000)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (95,000)
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (95,000)
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (96,000)
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (97,000)
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (99,000)
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (104,000)
• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (104,000)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (106,000)
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (107,000)
• One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (108,000)
• World War Z by Max Brooks (117,000)
• The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (122,000)
• Atonement by Ian McEwan (123,000)
• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (130,000)
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (135,000)
• The Human Stain by Philip Roth (137,000)
• Light in August by William Faulkner (151,000)
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (156,000)
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith (169,000)
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (169,000)
• We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates (172,000)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (174,000)
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (174,000)
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (183,000)
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (195,000)
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (197,000)
• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (208,000)
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (209,000)
• Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (210,000)
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (216,000)
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck (225,000)
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (248,000)
• The Hunger Games (trilogy) by Suzanne Collins (302,000)
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (339,000)
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (418,000)
• Lord of the Rings (trilogy) by J. R. R. Tolkien (455,000)
• Harry Potter (full series) by J. K. Rowling (1,002,000)

The same parliament that decided that Britain will leave the EU in less than three months has now voted no to a no-deal Brexit. Had it not been better to do things the other way around?

Later today, Nicolás Maduro will be sworn in for a new second six-year term as president of Venezuela. He has a claim to be the worst president of any country not at war. Under his rule, Venezuela’s GDP has dropped by nearly half, violence has soared, and health care has all but collapsed. About 3,000,000 people, a staggering 10% of the population, has emigrated since 2014.

Once again, we witness how a nation falls into poverty and misery by socialism. I realise that socialist ideas appeal to many people, but the hard truth is that it never works in reality. If you want socialism, you’d better implement it on a small-scale basis in a free market economy. Create small companies owned by their employees and settle with that. As soon as the same model is transferred to whole nations and governments are allowed to act on behalf of workers, authoritarianism arrises and no one but the men at the very top has any say in what happens. The top-down socialism makes workers poor and dependent. It’s feudalism.

The leader of the Centre Party, which is the biggest of Sweden’s two liberal parties, has had a press conference this afternoon to announce its intention to back the Social Democratic Party. The situation with an unprecedented hung parliament has forced to socialists to great concessions, which includes lower taxes for workers and businesses. The most important aspect of the deal is that the far-right Sweden Democrats is now left in the cold with no influence over Swedish politics.

Yesterday, I took a taxi from my flat in Playa del Inglés to a shopping centre in nearby San Fernando. I paid the driver with some coins I had in my pocket. To get to the coins, I had to remove my wallet. Then I left the car, which drove off. A few minutes later, I realise that I had forgotten the wallet in the taxi. I phoned the taxi company, which was a bit like talking to Siri. Instead of calling the taxi cab, they offered me a reference number. I realised that this wouldn’t help me, so I phoned my banks and the Swedish authorities to block all credit and ID cards. There was only about €40 in cash, so that’s not too bad.

Now I’m here without access to my money. Thankfully, a friend is heading to Gran Canaria today, and he picked my passport up from my husband yesterday. He’ll also help me get cash so I’ll manage for two weeks.

I’ve never lost my wallet before. But this has taught me a lesson. Never put everything in one wallet! Keep an extra credit card and cash somewhere safe for use in an emergency. Lost cards can be blocked, but no one can survive without money.

Oh, well, the sun is shining…

I’ve had a cold for a couple of days. So, what happened in the world as I snuffled? Not much, except that British Government was hit by its biggest ever defeat in parliament on May’s Brexit deal, and that Sweden’s communists have come out in favour of policies they label neoliberal.

As a big fan of the single European currency, I’m worried that desperately needed federalist reforms won’t be on the table before it’s too late. The EU needs government bonds issued jointly by the member states.

“One in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated, according to a poll marking Holocaust Memorial Day,” Harriet Sherwood of the Guardian reports. “Almost half of those questioned said they did not know how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and one in five grossly underestimated the number, saying that fewer than two million were killed.”

Horrific! But in this era of extremism, I’m not as surprised as I ought to be.