Venezuela's combative president, Hugo Chávez, has been in a loved-up mood recently.
First, he engaged in a hug-in with his regional nemesis, Colombia's Alvaro Uribe, and now he has extended an olive branch to King Juan Carlos of Spain.
In fact, a rose might be might be more appropriate metaphor - speaking on his televised Sunday phone-in show, Hug-o said he was looking forward to a reunion with the man who famously told him to "shut up" at an Ibero-American summit last year and expressed a desire to give the monarch "un abrazo".
But, by way of a thorn, he of course added he had no intention of shutting up. "We will keep talking for ourselves, for a just and equal world," he said.
However much Chávez hopes to bury the hatchet after riling the king by repeatedly refering to Spain's former prime minister José María Aznar as "a fascist", whether Juan Carlos will lend himself to a bout of back-slapping, as he did - more understandably - with members of Spain's winning Euro 2008 football team, is another matter.
He may rather opt for the side-stepping tactics of Vladimir Putin, who was deemed by the Russian press to "have held Chávez at arms-length" when he tried to hug him during a 2006 visit to Moscow. The Venezuelan leader was back in Moscow today on an arms-buying spree, but failed too to engage Putin's successor, Dmitry Medvedev, in an embrace.
Quite what has prompted such a degree of affection towards people more used to feeling the sharp edge of his tongue is interesting to ponder.
Perhaps Chávez is feeling outmanouevred on the world stage recently, or maybe someone been doing a bit of behind-the-scenes arm-twisting. Or have they been dropping something in the presidential drinking water?
