Putting two and two together

I was in the UK for a couple of days a little while ago. I noticed the car number plates. Actually I notice car number plates as a matter of course. No idea why but I do. I particularly noticed that Britons still have a liking for those personalised plates. I can understand that to a point. If you're called Simon and you have money to burn and you buy 51 MON then that's pretty good but, for the life of me, I couldn't work out why people had paid (presumably) good money for the strange letter number combinations. Why is LFC 24V in an auction with a buy now price of £1750 and a bid of £750?

Anyway, in Spain, you have no choice. You get the next number and letter combination in the sequence. You can't buy and sell number plates. Up to the year 2000 the plates used to indicate where the car was registered with one or two letters to identify the province. Not any more though; now it's just a sequence of three letters and four numbers.

I thought the sequence was AAA 0000 then AAA 0001 etc. till AAA 9999 when it would become ABA 0000 and so on. But I was mistaken. There are no vowels in Spanish number plates and, as soon as someone told me, I realised it was true. And the reason? Well a bit of prudishness maybe. Apparently the Dirección General de Tráfico (look at that you understand Spanish) isn't keen on words like ANO (anus) PIS and GAY (crikey you really understand lots of Spanish) on number plates but also they were against the idea of personalisation; so no EVA (Eva is the equivalent of the name Eve), or LUZ or TEO or POL (all normalish names) as well. There are a couple of other letters that don't get used for their potential confusion - Ñ and Q - and the combinations LL and CH because of their former linguistic use.

Oh, and whilst I'm on number plates I pointed out one of the blue plates with white numbers on the back of a car the other day to Maggie. They are used to identify taxis and the VTCs (Cars with a driver) like Cabify and Uber. I suppose they were introduced as an identifier for the restricted zones of cities, for bus lanes and the like but they also make it easier for taxi drivers and the police to spot the "illegal" taxis of the airport run.