Turk’s head

Scapegoat in Catalan is cap de turc, in Spanish cabeza de turco. I haven’t got the OED, but Hector Zimmerman says (Tres mil historias de frases y palabras) it comes from the French tête de turc and refers to the decapitable Aunt Sally mannequins used at fairs. Johann Georg Heck’s Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature…

“When I arrived in Seseña there was just this guy with a donkey”

Paco “El pocero”–in Wales he’d be called Jones the Drains–is Francisco Hernando, the 57-year-old illiterate building a €6B, 13,500-house development, Spain’s largest ever, in a village near Madrid, whether the mayor likes it or not, and he doesn’t. The mayor, Manuel Fuentes, is receiving police protection, and Alfredo Urdaci wants to know what happened to…