Whatchamacallits, thingimijigs and wotsits

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 full entries of words in current use. Once you add on all the odds and ends (the words found stuck up in trees or sewn neatly into the hem of a pair of trousers worn by W.C.Fields in 1935, for example) you end up with about a quarter of a million words. The 22nd edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Español contains 90, 000 words. In other words, if words were missiles then the English language could launch a successful first strike against Spanish and still have plenty left over to deal with the French.

Now, the way in which we respond to this information will depend, quite clearly, on our nationality. The British will sit back smugly in their chairs, turn on Radio 4 and fall asleep. The Spanish, on the other hand, will deny loudly the fact that English has more words, blame the politicians and then go on holiday for a month in August. However, I should point out that I have yet to see Spaniards lost for words. So, the fact that Spanish operates with 90, 000 words has never stopped any Spaniard from expressing himself.

It should also be pointed out that it could be argued that Spanish, as a language, does not exist. In 1714 Philip V took one look at the list of languages spoken by his subjects and said:
-Bugger that, the only one I'm going to listen to is Castilian. And I'm the king so do what you're told!
Confronted by this creation of an official language, the speakers of High Aragonese, Aranese, Asturian, Basque, Caló, Catalan, Extremaduran, Fala Extremaduran, Galician and Mirandes, did what Spaniards usually do when confronted by a strong central authority intent in interfering in the cultural identity of its citizens: they ignored it. Even Franco could not stop the people of Spain speaking the language of their faithers and mithers. And by the way, the speakers of Valenciano get really pissed off if you say they speak a variety of Catalan and never, ever say that they both sound like French. No wonder the Habsburgs, after a century or so of governing a bunch of people, or peoples, who couldn't even agree they lived in the same country said:
-Game's a bogey,
and left it to the Bourbons to sort it out.

I should also add that Spanish, if it exists, and Castilian if it doesn't, is an incredibly economical language. English depends a great deal on phrasal verbs to convey meaning. Without the sentence "Shall we get on the bus now?" the English-speaking world would have ended up as a group of aimless nomadic-wanderers clustered around bus stops. A Spaniard, on the other hand, would say:
-¿Subimos?-
After all if you are already at the bus stop and if a bus is there and everyone knows that they are there to get on the bus then why in the name of ¡mis cojones santos! (my sainted balls) would anyone want to discuss this? ¡Coño!

You'll notice that I didn't translate Coño. That's because I can't. You see, it's the "C" word in English. In Spanish (Castilian), however, it is an incredibly useful interjection that can be used in a variety of situations. It can be used to express anger: ¡Esa abeja me ha picado!¡Coño! - "That damn bee stung me!"; it can be used to express surprise: ¿Están saliendo juntos? ¡Coño! - "Are they really going out? Jings!" It can even be used by grandmothers. So, once again Spanish/Castilian has found a way of expressing different feelings with a single word. They just had to pick the one word which in English can never be used in public.

So, once again, context is everything when living in Spain. I found this out, yet again, a couple of weeks ago when my girlfriend and her daughter were having an argument. Or, possibly, they were having a barney, a set-to, a strong exchange of views, a right old ding-dong. a shouting match or perhaps they were even going at it like cats and dogs. You could call it a dispute, a disgreement, a squabble or a bit of a rhubarb. After all, voices were raised, the phrase -¡No me escuchas!- ("You're not listening to me!"- four words and a contraction in English compared to three in Spanish, by the way) was used repeatedly and forcefully. They were, in Spanish, discutiendo; in English, arguing, from the verb discutir, to argue. However, and this would explain why they could break off from shouting at each other and laugh at the look of concern on my face, discutir also means to discuss. Far from having an argument, they were merely having a loving discussion between mother and daughter.

Now, there are other words in Spanish which mean the same as discutir , for example disputar. But I have only ever heard them use discutir. To be honest, I think they do this on purpose, use one word to express different meanings. The longer I stay here the more sympathy I feel for anyone whose lot it was to be in charge of this bunch of linguistic acrobats. When the subjects of Philip V were paying him homage, rindiendo homenaje, it could never have been far from his mind that a synonym of rendir is fatigar, to exhaust or tire out. More than once, swamped by this never-ending outpouring of ambiguity, he must have thought:
-Oh Jeez, gie's a break!
To which I can only add:
-¡Coño!-

Pandora's Box, and the opening thereof

-Los catalanes huyeron y recorrieron por la universidad. No se pararon hasta cuando estaban en Argüelles. Y por eso los moros enteraron en la ciudad.("The Catalonians fled and ran through the university. They didn't stop until they reached Argüelles. That's how the Moors entered the city")
The guide paused and looked us each in they eye. No one spoke. No comment was made but I knew everyone in the group was thinking the same thing. Except me, who was thinking:
-There's nothing a Spaniard likes doing more than blaming other Spaniards when things get fucked up.
The left blame the right for rampant urban corruption. The right blame the left for the growth of nationalism in the Basque Country. The Madrileños blame the Catalonians for speaking and being Catalonian. And everyone thinks the folk from Seville are great to invite to parties but are just the kind of people who would leave a baby on a bus and forget all about it.

I had gone on a guided tour of what was the site of one of the most important battles in the Spanish Civil War, the Siege of Madrid. From November of 1936 to the early Spring of 1937 the people of Madrid endured daily air raids, artillery bombardment, hunger, cold and the presence of enemy troops on their doorstep. When I write of a doorstep I am not speaking of a collective and metaphorical doorstep but rather of the unsettling feeling of waking up one morning and finding the enemy on your own, and very real, doorstep. Today this battlefield is largely hidden by the modern development of Madrid. Largely hidden, that is, if you ignore the countless bullet holes, bunkers, trenches, artillery emplacements, republican command centres, air raid shelters, craters and battle scarred buildings that litter much of the city.

It took a good four hours to walk through the site of the battlefield, the ten of us in the group and the guide. To be honest I had pretty worked out the sequence of events from my own visit a few months before and reading Jorge Reverte's book La Battalla de Madrid. But it's always interesting to start a visit to what is a site of major historical importance and the guide begins by saying:
-Voy a hablar de la historia del sitio. No voy a opinar a las actos de las protagonistas ("I'm going to talk about history of the siege. I'm not going to voice an opinion about what the different sides did"). It's hard to imagine a guide at Culloden or Bannockburn saying the same thing. We just assume that what we are going to hear is history and not opinion. But you have to remember that in a country like Spain, British authors who write about the Spanish Civil War are more trusted than Spanish authors because they are:
a) Not Spanish and
b) They are British.
Spain is a country where not only was history written by the winners but, unlike the Scots, the losers did not get to set it to music. Spain is a country where opinions matter greatly, particularly when you are leading a group whose members may have grandparents who shot at each other.

The guided tour took us from the Puente de los Franceses where the men of the International Brigades held back wave after wave of attacks by the legionaries and the moors, crack troops of Franco's army; the Facultad de Filosofía where the men barricaded the windows with the works of Hegel, Plato and Aristotle; the Clinico where the men fought from ward to ward and where the English poet John Cornford manhandled his Lewis machine gun across the blasted landscape and knocked seven kinds of shit out of the fascists; all the way to Argüelles where General Miaja, dismissed by his contemporaries as mediocre and devoid of imagination but who gave Franco his first defeat, pulled his revolver on the fleeing Catalonians and made them turn and face the charging moors. And how many monuments did I count to these, and many, many more, examples of devotion to the democratically elected government of Spain? Let me put it this way: there is a street in Madrid named after one of Franco's Generals, General Yagüe, whose Nationalist troops, after their capture of the Republican city of Badajoz, massacred between 1,500 and 4,000 civilians, many of the men being castrated before they were killed.

There is one very good reason for this collective amnesia about what happened here in the Winter of '36. After the death of Franco the politicians negotiating the shape of the new democratic Spain decided it would be better if no one mentioned the war. Nobody would go to jail; nobody would have to account for what they had done; Spain could join the family of democratic nations and everyone would be happy. As for the thousands of families who didn't know where their father was buried, well, no one bothered to ask them. Franco had made sure the victims of the forces loyal to the Republic were exhumed and reburied with honours. As for the socialist mayors of the little pueblos outside of Toledo; the leaders of agricultural reform movements; or the people with the appellido Rojo or Red, they could stay where they were, in mass graves, many of which still remain unopened.

There have recently been a few attempts to affect a cure for this amnesia. The socialist government has passed a Ley de la Memoria Histórica. Amongst other things it will allow the families of those sentenced by Franco's tribunals to have these sentences annulled. This will include those sentenced to death. The Partido Popular (the party of the right) has called it "innecesaria, extemporánea, errónea, hipócrita, falsaria y jurídicamente irrelevante" ("unnecessary, untimely, wrong, hypocritical, false and legally irrelevant"). I'm not quite sure what they would have made of the family of Gregorio Mazariegos Sebastian. In 2006 they had him, and his seven companions, lifted carefully out of the mass grave where their francoist executioners had left them on the 14th of October 1936, just outside the town of Hornillos de Cerrato. Their coffins, draped with the flag of the Second Republic, were then buried, following a public ceremony, in the local cemetery. Presumably they would have said "We're very sorry for your loss but we think what you did was unnecessary, untimely, wrong, hypocritical, false and legally irrelevant". Gregorio was 40 years old. He worked as a labourer and he had seven children.

Bigamists who Live in Glass House Should Always Wear Clean Pants

The street cleaners here in Madrid don’t just sweep pavements. They check the walls, street lamps, benches, trees and telephone booths. People here with something to sell advertise with photocopied fliers which they tape to walls, street lamps etc., with tear-off slips which have their phone numbers. I’ve seen lawyers advertise themselves this way. I even saw an flier for a psychologist. If you phone one of the numbers you can borrow up to 6,000€. But for the most part they are from painters, decorators, plumbers and electricians; or art class teachers, dance instructors and school tutors. The saddest one are from Rumanian women offering help around the home. They are always hand-written in blue biro. These are people who can afford paper and pens but can’t afford the cost of photocopying. It’s also very normal to see flats for sale advertised this way. Have you got a spare half a million euros? Well, call this number and you could soon be the proud owner of a three bedroom flat with a terrace. Prostitutes, by the way, would never advertise in this way. They use the national newspapers. But, whatever is being advertised and however it has been copied, the street cleaners tear them down and put them in with the rest of the rubbish.

I didn’t find my flat this way. A friend saw it advertised in the weekly magazine Segundo Mano (literally Second Hand). He phoned the owners. I went to see it a couple of times and about a month or so later I had bought it. Notice I said that my friend phoned the owners. He didn’t phone an estate agent or a lawyer. No, this sale, like many in Spain, was a private one. And there was more. To be precise, twenty five thousand euros more, stuffed into an envelope and which I handed over to the owners. You see, everyone here under-declares the value of their property once it is sold. This way you cut down on taxes. Everyone does it. The banks connive in it. The government knows but, in the end, that’s just the way they do things here. As the buyer you need to bridge the difference between the declared value of a house or flat and the price at which you are buying it. At any given time there must be hundreds of thousands of euros, possibly millions, being carried through the streets of Spanish towns wrapped in envelopes. I’ve yet to read one report of even a euro of this money being stolen. It’s as if even the criminals accept that this practice is so essential to the stability of Spain that it cannot be abused.

A system like this, be it buying a house or employing a painter, with few, so it seems to an extranjero or foreigner, formal legal safeguards, clearly requires a lot of trust. It’s the same in the bars. The camarero will ask you at the end of the night when he’s working out your tab:
-"¿Cuantas cervezas has bebido?" How many beers have you drunk?
A Spaniard would never lie about how many he’s had. He pays his three euros forty and walks home happy. Compare that to Glasgow where the answer would be a very slurred:
-None.
Followed by a loud crash as the speaker falls to the ground unconscious.
Jokingly I once said to my girlfriend that the Spanish only trust their mothers and then judge the trustworthiness of everyone else according to the distance between them and her. She looked me evenly in the eye and said:
-Of course.
I immediately made a mental memo to myself:
-Never make fun of Spanish mothers.
However, it was my girlfriend who also said:
-There must be a lot of bigamists in Britain.
Her reasoning was this: as a country that has no DNI ("documento nacional de identidad") it must be easy for people to claim to be somebody or something that they are not. To marry in Spain you must present your DNI to prove who you are and to show that they you are not already married. Therefore, Great Britain, a country which does not have a DNI, must suffer from many bigamist marriages. And, given that fact that while buying my flat I also had to show my DNI to prove who I was, and, given the fact, that I had admitted on many occasions that Great Britain does not have a DNI, it must also be very easy, according to my girlfriend, to buy a house when you have no right to do so. I wondered if all Spaniards saw us this way: a nation of bigamists living in other people’s houses under assumed names. God only knows what they would think if they knew that in Scotland we can change our name to whatever we want, whenever we want as long as we tell our bank who to send the monthly statements to.

Apart from saying “No, you’re wrong” I couldn’t really put up much of an argument. After all, she was right. We don’t have a national ID and identity theft and fraud is a problem. If we had a national system of identifying ourselves we wouldn’t have these problems. So, what is it that stops us from descending into a abyss of bigamy and serial house buying? It was my girlfriend’s sister-in-law that gave me the answer. At lunch one day we were discussing the differences between the UK and Spain. Told that we didn’t have a DNI she asked incredulously:
-But what would you do if you were stopped by the police and they asked you for your name?
To which I could only reply, somewhat lamely:
-I would tell them.
But that’s what we would do, just as we don’t marry bigamously, on the whole, or buy homes and pretend to be someone else, generally speaking. If you do you generally end up being arrested, put on trial and the judge makes a long speech about the need for people to be able to trust public institutions and then he sends you to jail. Everyone thinks you are a nasty person and when you come out of jail your friends always pretend to be out when you ring their doorbell but you know they are there because you can see them hiding behind the curtains.

Of the many things not to do in life, such as fighting a war simultaneously on two fronts, is lie to the police. It’s wrong and it’s very, very stupid. Looking at the stunned disbelief on the face of my girlfriend’s sister-in-law that I would, without a second thought, tell the truth to the police, I realised that this was not an attitude universally shared. Another Spaniard expressed it this way: the moral issue with cheating in Spain is not the act of cheating it’s being caught. Now before we get all high-and-mighty about all this it should be remembered that in Spain, a country where it is essential to be "enchufado", literally “plugged in”, that is, to have a relative who can help you with that all-important job promotion or stand the aval, financial guarantee, for your "hipoteca" or mortgage, anything you can do to give yourself that all-important advantage is quite permissible.

In the last month or so the Spanish government has decided that the British in Spain will not have to renew their ID cards. Perhaps they think that since we can be trusted it’s not worth getting us to carry them. If I say I’m Dave Macdonald then that’s who I am and not the late Elvis Aaron Presley, who never really died but instead, tired of the pressures of stardom, decided to jack it all in and start life again as a Financial Risk Assessor from Kilsyth. Whatever the reason for the decision, it means that we will not have to stand in line in the "Comisaría" waiting to be ignored/insulted and/or patronised by the "funcionarios" who work there. You might think that this would make us very happy. But a lot of us are quite worried by this change to the law. The ID card is such a part of life in Spain that without it buying a pair of pants from the pants shop and finding out that you don’t have cash and need to use your cash card and the owner of the pants shops asks to see your ID before he hands over the pants, well, it’s going to be difficult. So, what will I do then when the police stop me and ask:
-So, Mr. Presley, are you wearing clean pants?

Marble on the Brain

We were meeting friends of my girlfriend in a bar in the Santiago Bernabeu, home of the football team Real Madrid. Now whatever you might think of Real Madrid, and the camareros in my local bar, fans of their arch rivals Atletico Madrid, would certainly have some strong feelings about them, they are not short of a bob or two. Although lacking the important silverware in the trophy cabinet over the past few years, they have made some very neat property deals. Very, very neat property deals. To put it bluntly, they have shitloads of money. Now, a dedicated fan of Real Madrid might ask themselves why, with all this money, can’t they buy a team that is just that, a team and not a bunch of talented individuals who play as a bunch of talented individuals? I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but think, as I stood in the bar, eating baby squid in their own ink, “Why do I feel as if I’m in a brothel?”.

I suppose it could have been the amount of marble used in the bar. Apart from the chairs and tables, I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t marble. The bar, the walls, the floor - everything was made of marble. Now, I’ve got nothing against marble. In fact, it’s a lovely material which in the hands of a Michelangelo can express the very essence of what it is to be human. In the hands the of the designer of the bar in the Santiago Bernabeu it said quite simply “We have shitloads of money”. It may have been the pictures on the walls. The visual presentation of food, in the hands of a crack advertising team, will tend to emphasis its sensuality, its eroticism. Everything that a brothel, for example, where sex is simply another commercial transaction, can never do. Looking at the photographs on the walls of the bar it appeared that Real Madrid had given someone a disposable camera and a selection of plastic food. Out of focus and underexposed, populated with blurry images of what you could only guess were Spanish celebrities, they would have shamed the greasiest of greasy spoon cafes. In their own way the photographs were also saying “We have shitloads of money” while adding “And we don’t care”.

You see, I have a theory about the Spanish. They don’t have the shame gene. For example, a British person running for a train will, when the bus or train pulls away, break into that special slowing-down jog which says to the world “I wasn’t really running for it. I was just exercising a little”. A Spanish person, on the other hand, will, as the train is moving, run even faster, press the button on the door in an attempt to open it and when that doesn’t work will hit the door. In fact they only stop their attempt to get on the train because it is accelerating away at sixty kilometres per hour. At traffic lights, people who have missed their bus, will knock on the bus doors very, very loudly to attract the attention of the driver. Sometimes they even have conversations. To this day I haven’t found a way of embarrassing a Spaniard in public. It was this lack of public shame that lay at the root of my reaction to the bar in the Santiago Bernabeu and nowhere was this clearer then when Guillermo, one of my girlfriend’s friends, took me on a tour of the place. There, on the way to the gents, just where there was no need for it, was a huge fucking chandelier.

I sometimes think that the Spanish got to the eighteenth century and everything went a little weird. On the one hand you have a genius such as Goya hiding his pictures of nude women from the Inquisition (imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury turning up on William Blake’s doorstep telling him that the neighbours were a little bit upset at him and Mrs. Blake sitting naked out in the garden and if they didn’t stop it he’d have to, well, burn him; all this would be done in embarrassed, low voices, with no eye contact and William Blake saying “Yes, yes. I quite see what you are saying.”) and on the other the wholehearted embrace given by Spanish culture to the Baroque. An embrace which can be summed up in a simple phrase: “huge fucking chandeliers”. It’s as if the Spanish all went on a day trip to France and despite the very careful explanations given by the French on the nature of form and function, the importance of achieving balance in the elements of a building, they all got off the bus in Madrid, turned to each other and as a people, "el pueblo de España", said with one voice:
-Huge fucking chandeliers.

You only have to go to Zaragoza, up in the north east in Aragón, to see the Spanish baroque in full flow. On the spot where the Romans had built the forum, the public expression of the city’s civic values, and where later the Moslems would build their mosque, the visual expression of a faith that shunned images, Saint James built himself a cosy, little gang hut with twigs on the spot where Mary had appeared to him and gave him a nice statue of herself. Eighteen hundred years later the Spanish came along, kicked over his gang hut and built a marble Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar the size of Hampden stadium. Clearly I’m exaggerating here (the gang hut “burned down”). But only slightly. It’s the kind of building that, if transplanted to presbyterian Edinburgh, Scots would ignore very, very pointedly. As in: “Look how carefully I am ignoring this building”. It’s that baroque.

After eating our baby squid in their own ink and the roasted red peppers, we went through to the night club. After my reaction to the bar I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But I have to admit I was impressed by what I saw. The night club with its dance floor and bars had been built on a deck that extended out into and over the pitch. It was open air and you could look up into the stands and the night sky above. It had begun to rain, that gentle, warm, summer rain that falls in Madrid in July. I turned to my girl friend and her friends to say
-"Impresionante. ¿Verdad?"
But there was no one there. They had vanished. I looked around me and saw them, five Spaniards, adults, clustered under a plastic column that could just about give shelter to a small child.
-"Llove." (It’s raining) They said as if the rain was lashing down in torrents. If they’d had umbrellas they would have opened them and probably said:
-"Raro ver a lluvia tan fuerte en julio, ¿no?"
Which could be roughly translated as
-Unseasonable weather for the time of year, isn’t it?
Shameless. Utterly shameless.

A Long Day's Journey to the Doctor's

I looked at my finger. I’m not a doctor but I could tell that it wasn’t meant to be that red and swollen. Not being a doctor also means that my knowledge of anatomy is limited but I was sure that a finger should be able to bend at the joints. Otherwise the human race would have evolved into a race of finger-pointers rather than the creator of clay pots, serge worsted material and spaceships. With a heavy heart I realised I would have to pay a visit to the ambulatorio or doctors’ surgery.

My heart was not heavy because the quality of public health care in Spain is poor. Far from it. Without an appointment I was seen by the nurse who then contacted the emergency doctor. Within half an hour I had my diagnosis of an infected finger and a prescription for antibiotics. However, I do want to add that being Spanish neither the nurse nor the doctor could hide their disgust at the state of my finger, the nurse actually taking a step backwards and saying words to the effect of:
-That’s not right is it?
No, the reason my heart was heavy was that I knew I would have to cope with the Spanish inability to cope with a queue.

I’m not going to claim that I’ve made a startling discovery here. The difficult relationship that Spaniards have with queues of any description is well-known. For some reason little old women (being Spain there is a definite shortage of tall old women) are the worst offenders. If violence doesn’t work (being small they are closer to your vital organs and a blow to your kidneys with a walking stick can leave you paralysed long enough for them to skip in front of you) they resort to persuasion.
-¿Te molestará si paso adelante? They’ll say. Solo tengo tres cosas (Do you mind if I go in front of you? I’ve only got three things).
Other Spanish women are never taken in by this and, without looking at the little old woman, will reply:
-Pero señora, yo también (But madam, so have I).

I would claim, however, that I have identified a major difference between Spanish and British culture. The British see a problem and write strong letters of complaint to the newspapers. The Spanish look at a problem and turn to the person next to them and talk about it. So, instead of organising a tannoy system that announces your name and the doctor you are to see; putting outside the doctor’s room a screen that shows your number and place in the queue; even sticking a handwritten list of all the patients due to see that doctor that day, the Spanish rely on three words without which Spain would grind inexorably to a halt:
-¿Eres el ultimo? (Are you the last?).

If you stand still long enough in Spain someone will ask you this. It’s as if Spaniards rather than see queues in the way that the British do, sense them with a gland that we don’t have. So that, if you are, say, standing near but not actually in a shop then to a Spaniard you may be waiting to be served. To avoid the possibility of jumping this queue, which of course does not exist in the sense that we would think of it (certain scientists are beginning to argue that these queues do exist but in an alternative and theoretical universe), they will ask:
-¿Eres el ultimo?

The person to whom this is asked may not be the last person and, as in the ambulatorio when I returned to have the finger lanced, may then indicate a very elderly woman who is quite clearly at the opposite end of the waiting room and, in fact, is sitting at the door of a different doctor. However, as any Spaniard, will assure you, she is, in fact, waiting in the queue. Your queue. Up to now the waiting room has been fairly quiet. However, with this simple question the flood gates open. People compare how long they have waited. People who are in the wrong queue are guided to the right one, rather unnecessary in my opinion since it appears that if you stand anywhere in Spain you are, in a very real sense, already in your queue. Surprise is expressed that surprise is being expressed that one has to wait for such a long time. People in white lab coats stick handwritten notes on doors announcing the closure of a doctor’s room. People, to check if this is the case, knock and then enter the examining room, presumably to the surprise of the doctor and patient still in there. Voices are raised. Chaos threatens and anarchy is only avoided when the doctor comes out with a list of all the patients (where the hell did he get it from?) and gets everyone in order:
-¿Señora Garcia Lopez?
-Aquí.
-Eres la proxima. ¿Señora Rodriguez Zapatero?
-Aqui.
-Eres la proxima. Señor ...
Like schoolchildren caught being naughty by the teacher everyone is suddenly very quiet and you half expect someone to say:
-It wisnae me. Big boys did it an ran away.
God knows how the Germans cope with all of this.

As British people it is very easy to be self-righteous about this. I remember hearing of a friend, a very tall and very statuesque British woman, while waiting in a queue for a bus, being lifted, gently but lifted nonetheless, by a very small Spanish gentleman and put down to one side so that he could get on the bus before her. This is just the sort of behaviour that a century ago would have seen the prompt despatch of a fleet of British naval gunboats and the burning of various small villages by an expeditionary force led by a man with a large moustache. But the more time you spend here the greater the danger of “going native”, which is why British expeditionary forces were always led by men with big moustaches, this being the only guarantee that the small villages would indeed be burnt down. I remember going to the pictures with my girlfriend. We bought our tickets and went to wait outside the cinema. Very quickly I saw that, without meaning to, we had, in fact, skipped the queue and would get into the cinema before people who had been waiting longer than us. I pointed this out to girlfriend who reassured me that we were in the queue, the Spanish queue. I looked around at the people waiting with us, chatty, smiling, relaxed. I could see no one who looked as if they were mentally composing a strong letter of complaint to a newspaper. I could be British and go to the end of the non-existent queue or go in the cinema, sit down and watch the movie like everyone else. To be honest, it wasn’t much of a decision to make. After all, would you want to be el ultimo?

Zombie Squid and Shops the Size of Wardrobes

The daftest thing I’ve ever done in Spain was to go into a shop with a recipe for a bean stew. In the great scheme of things this might not seem that important compared to, say, when the guy in charge of building the Titanic said “Is that how much watertight doors cost? Ooooh that’s expensive!”. But context is everything and in Spain walking into a shop which sells Asturian food with a recipe for fabada (which is what I did) is a bit like walking into a fish shop with a picture of a fish and then telling the man who sells the fish how fish work. You see, fabada is much more than just a bean stew. Made well, as it is in Asturia in the north of Spain, it’s everything it shouldn’t be. As a dish made with large white beans, or fabas, smoked morcilla, a little like black pudding but sweeter, chorizo, Spanish sausage, and a lump of pig fat, and a large lump at that, it should lie heavy in your stomach, a warning against eating a pig. And yet it doesn’t. It’s the kind of food you could give to someone recovering from a tropical illness or an elderly relative who needs to eat food that is both nourishing yet very light. You feel that the Asturians had a good look at chicken soup and said “This is nice but can you imagine what it would be like if we made it from a pig?”. In fact this is just what you would expect from a race of people that is slightly insane but like a challenge.

I suppose there is a recipe for fabada. But Spain being what it is, a large country with lots of people who like talking, you just know everyone’s recipe, which they naturally got from their grandmother, is better than, well, everyone else’s. This is the trouble with oral traditions - nobody can agree on anything. I downloaded my recipe from the internet and this is what I handed over to the man in the shop. An Asturian man, wise in the ways of Asturia, above all its greatest export - fabada. A man, doubtless, with a grandmother. In fact, very possibly, with two of them. Each with their own recipe for fabada. When you included his wife, there in the shop with him, an Asturian woman, even wiser in the ways of Asturia, you now had four Asturian grandmothers, all with their own recipe for fabada. True, my recipe had the word “Asturia” printed in a nice shade of blue but the few seconds spent printing it out was a dagger aimed at the collective heart of Asturian grandmothers. But here’s the weird part. The guy in the shop read it. Something which he must have known by heart he read carefully before scurrying off to find the ingredients (given that the shop, like many in Spain, was the size of a wardrobe he didn’t have to scurry far to find them). Each time he came back he placed them on the counter, re-read the recipe, looked at me (I could swear I saw a line of sweat on his upper lip), looked at the recipe once more and resumed his scurrying.

Throughout all this his wife stood in the back of the shop watching me carefully. She said nothing and took no part in the search for ingredients. She did draw a little closer to her husband as he explained the importance of soaking the salted pork before putting it in the fabada. She clearly suspected something was not right: either her husband’s recipe or the tall foreigner who seemed to be taking up an unnaturally large amount of space in her shop. I don’t know if Spanish women think that every foreigner is a spy but I’ve met this reaction quite a few times. I’m in a shop and the husband is serving me. In the back of the shop is his wife, standing, looking at me, not saying a word. Not long after my experience in the Asturian shop I decided I’d like to make pulpo a la Gallega, a wonderful dish of squid served on a bed of boiled potatoes, covered with olive oil and paprika. Like a lot of Spanish food it sounds ridiculously simple and is stunningly delicious. The fishmonger explained the importance of using fresh squid and cooking the potatoes in the water with the squid. His wife folded her arms and stared at me. As I paid for the squid she suddenly said:
-You must put the squid in the boiling water three times before you cook it. In and out. Three times.
I now realize that this was a test because cooking a whole squid is, frankly, a little weird. Following her instructions I dunked it three times in the boiling water. Now, the squid was quite clearly dead before I put it in the water, a shapeless form of tentacles and suckers that slid easily from the serving spoon. However, when I took it out for the first time there, staring at me, was the liveliest dead squid I’d ever seen. It was sitting up on the spoon and if a squid has eyebrows then I’d swear this one had cocked one of them at me. Each time he surfaced from the boiling water his cooked body was firmer then before, the tentacles stuck in their pose of casual disinterest at all that was happening. I guess the fishmonger’s wife thought that if anybody could cope with the Beast From The Deep and then eat it must be alright after all.

Even buying something as ordinary as ham from a woman can be an experience akin to making an appointment with the Inquisition. Below my flat is a fiambría, a shop that sells cold meats. Being Spain this includes the wonderful jamón de serrano. I started going there about six months ago. If the guy served me we’d chat a little about the weather. Being Madrid the conversation tended to go along the lines of:
-Hace calor (It’s hot).
Or:
-Hace mucho calor (It’s very hot).
Or sometimes
-¡Que calor! (It’s bloody hot!).
If his wife served me I always had the feeling she was thinking of calling the police. But by then I was used to this level of suspicion exhibited by married women working in shops the size of wardrobes and thought nothing of it. Then one day as she put away the things I had bought she said:
-¿Como le comes, el jamón? (How do you eat jamón?)
I wasn’t sure how to reply. After all, up to that moment all she had ever said to me was
-¿Mas?
That wonderful way the Spanish have of asking
-And would sir be requiring anything else today?
Perhaps it was a trick question and she was simply keeping me in the shop long enough for the police to arrive.
-Con pan. I answered nervously. With bread.
She thought for a moment
-¿Mantequilla? (With butter?). She had obviously heard of the unspeakable practices of the anglosajones with bread and butter.
-No, I answered, solo con pan. No, only bread.
She thought for a moment.
-Mejor, she finally answered, mantequilla le moja (Good, butter makes it wet).
And with that she handed me the bag with the jamon. She probably gave some kind of secret sign because by the time I left the shop the police snatch squad was nowhere to be seen. I don’t know what would have happened if I had answered yes but I might well have been writing this from the prison of San Marcos in Leon, Spain’s very own Bastille, and where apparently it is very, very cold.

I’d like to think I could reassure all the married women of Spain who work in shops the size of wardrobes that I’m not really a spy, here to steal the secrets of Asturian grandmothers. I’m just a very tall foreigner who likes to eat (and cook) Spanish food. I know they’d be reassured if they knew that the fabada I made was far too salty and the pulpo a la Gallega too tough. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spanish had a pithy saying about this, along the lines of:
-You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
Which I like to think would translate into Spanish as:
-Show a foreigner a pig and he’ll tell you it’s a chicken.

The Time Machine

The British have a reputation for punctuality which, I think we would say, is a sign of good manners rather than, in the case of the Germans, the means by which trainloads of soldiers can be brought to the borders of France as quickly as possible before the sleeping giant of Russia awakens and beats the crap out of them. Naturally I exaggerate but you only have to look at British popular culture to see the interest we take in time. Generations of British children have watched the eccentric timelord Dr.Who struggle to maintain the integrity of the space-time continuum with only a sonic screwdriver, a very pretty young assistant and some bloke we don’t really care about. Across the Atlantic the crew of the Starship Enterprise regularly struggled with time paradoxes: should Captain Kirk let the young woman die in the car accident and thus ensure the defeat of fascism or give her a snog, thus ushering in a thousand years of the Third Reich? Tough call there, Jim. Again, I am being flippant. But I only do so to highlight the way in which the nature, direction and function of time are such a part of our lives. In Spain it is slightly different. What gives, at least in British culture, rise to popular expressions of what are complex scientific and mathematical concepts is summed up in Spain with the eternal question: “When am I going to eat next?”.

I am not being flippant. It can appear if Spanish people live in perpetual fear of going hungry, and with good reason. You only have to look at the forties in Spain, in the aftermath of the Civil War and during Franco’s attempt to force self-reliance on the country, when people did go hungry. The large number of small old people you can see today, sometimes almost half my height, is not a result of a Spanish “small” gene, it is the result of severe malnutrition in their childhood. This cultural memory of hunger, if it exists, has not led to overindulgence or obesity on the part of the Spaniards, although there are worrying signs that, in common with much of the Western world, it has begun. What I want to argue is that it has put in place a commonly accepted timetable of eating that ensures that a Spaniard is never more than three hours from his next meal.

Let’s start with breakfast or desayuno, which can be both a noun and a verb as in “¿Has desayunado?” - “Have you had breakfast?” or literally “Have you breakfasted?”. A friend of mine who has lived in Spain for thirty years told me that one of the great pleasures of living here is having breakfast in a bar. She’s right. When I first came here I had my breakfast in my flat, just as I had done in Scotland: a cup of coffee and a slice of toast with jam. Now I have my breakfast in a bar and I have a cup of coffee and a slice of toast with jam. Which begs the question: why would I pay one euro eighty to eat the same food? If I kept eating breakfast in my flat I would save in a month almost forty euros. In the first place, either as a result of pouring all the love that is in his heart into the food or as the result of a bizarre breakfast-related pact made with the Devil, Pedro the camarero makes brilliant toast and coffee. Science, I think, can explain why the toast tastes so good. The bread is put on a plancha or hot plate, the oiled surface giving the bread a surface which is both toasted and soft. Spread with strawberry jam and eaten with scalding hot coffee it is a simple yet delicious breakfast. Why the coffee here is so good, I’m afraid science has to admit defeat and accept that there are in life forces of which we know nothing. Whether it is bitter, sweet, hotter than the sun or iced, coffee in Spain must be some of the best in the world. For some people that is breakfast. Most mornings when I am in the bar a guy comes in and orders his cortado. In English we’d call it an espresso which , of course, is actually an Italian word. The coffee is put on the counter, drunk in a couple of gulps, one euro ten is handed over and with a “Hasta luego” or “See you later”, he leaves. Time taken from entering the bar to leaving, less then five minutes.

Don’t think that this happy state of affairs has always existed. Like any good relationship, in this case with Pedro the camarero, it had to be worked for. At the start I always asked for a cruasan because, given my level of Spanish, that’s all I could ask for. Note that I used the word cruasan rather than croissant which is what we would call them in English, not forgetting that it is, of course, a French word. The Spanish may have to live just to the south of France with its long history, rich culture and famous cuisine but that doesn’t mean they have to pay it a blind bit of attention far less use any of its language. So cruasan it is. To be honest, after a while, I would have liked to had something else but as soon as Pedro saw me come in the bar, sometimes when he saw me cross the street, he had everything ready for me. An americano and a cruasan. He’s a good camarero and prides himself on knowing his customers. I could never bring myself to ask for anything else. Then fate intervened: the bakery van driver began arriving late at the bar. When I arrived at 6.40 there no were cruasans. This left Pedro in a quandary. What to give me? I should be having my usual breakfast but no hay cruasans (there are no croissants). I could wait until the bakery van arrived but I only had about ten minutes before I had to leave to catch the metro. Or he could give me a tostada de pan molde con mermelada (a slice of toasted white bread with jam). This last option was offered regretfully and I accepted it happily. No te preocupes. Está bien (Don’t worry. It’s fine). And it was fine until the day the delivery arrived just when Pedro had put the bread on the plancha. With relief he threw the slightly-toasted bread away and give me a cruasan. Naturally I thanked him and silently cursed the delivery van driver. This went on for a couple of weeks. On the days when the delivery driver arrived late Pedro would apologise and ask if toast was okay. On the days the cruasans arrived on time I thanked him and silently cursed the delivery van driver. But eventually the late days became the norm and Pedro could stop worrying. A new routine had been established and, importantly for Pedro, I was happy with my breakfast.

If breakfast in a Spanish bar is one of life’s pleasures then the menu del día must be up there with meeting God or Elvis Presley. I’d also like to think it would also be equal to spending an afternoon with Clement Atlee, leader of the Labour Party and victor of the 1945 General Election which ushered in the Welfare State but I’ll not push that comparison too much. If you’ve never had a menu del día then imagine a three course meal with a bottle of wine all for about a fiver. Because that’s basically what it is: a three course meal with a bottle of wine all for about a fiver. The food might never be fancy but it’s good and it always comes with chips. The story is that this was something brought in by Franco: a legal requirement that every Spanish bar should provide a cheap, nourishing lunch. But I’m not prepared to give that murdering bastard credit for anything, apart, of course, from the whole murdering and being a bastard thing. A cheap, nourishing lunch is just the kind of thing the Spanish could think up for themselves. Anyway, from midmorning you’ll see the menus, usually chalked up on boards put outside the bars where they will stay for most of the day. However, lunch starts at two and goes onto to about four, leaving time, at the weekends at least, for a siesta. Aha, you say, I thought you told me that a Spaniard is never more than three hours away from a meal. Eating at two is a lot more than three hours from having breakfast. Aha, I say, who’s writing this, me or you? Round about 11 o´clock people will pop out to the bars and get themselves another coffee and a pastry. A little bit like Winnie-the-Pooh except without that sap Christopher Robin or Tigger who I never really liked although I always thought Owl was pretty cool. Also at one o’clock people will go back to the bars (again) and have an aperitif. Hence this is called la hora del aperitivo, thus neatly avoiding the need to use a French word. Again. Usually this is a glass of vermouth and a tapas or two. These are the little snacks which you should get free with your drink and which can range from a plate of olives to a slice of tortilla. As far as I know this is the only time when Spaniards drink vermouth. It’s not written down anywhere this when it must be drunk. It’s just that every Spaniard over the age of six knows that to drink vermouth in the evening, for example, would, well, whatever it would do, it wouldn’t be nice.

I remember the first menu del día I had. I’d spent the morning up in Segovia. It was a cold March day, I’d walked a lot and I was hungry. I walked past a bar with its menu del día chalked up on the board on the wall and decided to give it a go. When the waiter brought me the first course and the bottle of wine I asked him ¿Es para mi? This is for me? I doubt in all his years of being a camarero he’d ever been asked such an idiotic question. Let me explain. As I said above a menu del día is a three course meal with a bottle of wine. It’s divided into primer plato, segundo plato and postre. For the first two there’s usually three or four choices. For example paella followed by rabo de toro (bull’s tail) and usually finished off with some kind of milk pudding. For my primer plato I recognised the word sopa (soup) so I chose that. It turned out I’d chosen garlic soup, very filling, very warming and just what you’d want for a cold day in Segovia in early Spring. It also came in a huge earthenware bowl. With bread. And a bottle of wine. I couldn’t believe that all this was just one part of a meal which was going to cost me nine euros. That’s why I’d asked ¿Es para mi?

I also didn’t know that I didn’t have to drink all the wine. Well, it was wine. Which for anyone from Scotland, which is not noted for its terraced vineyards and Mediterranean culture, is a valuable commodity. If I’d paid all of nine euros for this meal then I had to at least drink all the wine. Of course, I didn’t, which any Spaniard would know. A glass or two is plenty. There is, and this does come as a shock to Scots in Spain, no shame in leaving drink undrunk. I also didn’t know that I could mix it with casera or lemonade. It makes the wine go further and stops you getting too drunk. It’s also very refreshing and we should drink wine the same way in Scotland. We should also call it a wine shandy. But we won’t. I think we’re afraid the French would make fun of us. Anyway, by the time my segundo plato came, roast chicken (which, by the way, was just that: a roast chicken with chips: no garnish, no sauce with peppercorns and marmalade and definitely no side salad of five pieces of lettuce, flavourless tomato, sliced onion and watercress) I must have been half cut. I do remember it was delicious but I couldn’t tell you anything about the postre or pudding except that it was very likely milk-based. But that’s just because I know that’s the kind of puddings Spanish like. I do remember walking back to catch the bus that would take me to the railway station and thinking “I’ve just drunk a bottle of red wine in under an hour” and “I wonder what that ringing noise in my ears is”.

The menu del día should take you up to, at least, four o’clock. If you add on the sobremesa you might even make it to five. Sobremesa, literally “on the table”, is the period after the meal. People are relaxing with coffees and licores, usually a licor de hierbas or patcharan. In English we’d call them liqueurs, which of course is actually a French word...well, you know where I’d be going with this one. But the important feature of the sobremesa is talking. And not being rushed out by the staff. So actually there are two important features of the sobremesa. I remember one menu del día in my barrio bar when the camarero asked if we would mind giving up our table. There was another group of people who had come in late, there was no other table, if we went through to the bar they’d be happy to give us more drink. For free. Naturally, we agreed. So, you can see that the sobremesa is very much a moveable feast which doesn’t even need a table. Being a Spanish custom it is all about taking your time, being with friends and, above all, talking.

The Spanish do worry about us, los anglosajónes. They worry about what we eat and, just as importantly, when we eat. To hear that we may have our dinner at five o’clock, six at the latest, raises the dreadful possibility that we are not going to eat again until breakfast, more than twelve hours away. If you ever find yourself talking to a Spaniard about the evening meal in Britain, do add, very quickly, that you do quite like a slice of toast and a cup of tea at eight or so. It’s not quite the same as eating suckling pig but it will reassure your companion that you are not in the habit of attempting to starve yourself on a nightly basis. Here the evening meal, or cena, is at nine, or ten, or eleven or twelve o’clock. Going by the noises I can hear from the other flats in my block, people seem quite happy to be eating their dinner at one in the morning.

One of the many joys of living in Spain is the relatively few cooking programmes on TV. There are no super-chefs, no new eating fads, no recipes for mange-tout and braised venison flank. The Spaniards have been eating pig for a thousand years and they have no intention of changing for anyone. Particularly the French. I used to wonder about this absence of cooking programmes until I realised that, certainly in Madrid, the bars in the evenings are full of people drinking and eating. They’re not at home cooking every night, particularly in summer when it can be touching 40 degrees. That’s not to say that they don’t cook it’s just that it’s easy to go out and eat well without having to pay a lot of money. One very hot summer when my sister was over with my nephew we would wait until the evening before going out. This way we avoided the worst of the heat. We’d go for a walk in the park, watch the in-line skaters, the other families, the young couples and generally marvel that it was safe to go to a park at ten o’clock at night. By half past ten we’d head back to a bar in the barrio for a bite to eat. In these last two sentences I think I’ve just about summed up the salient differences between Scotland and Spain: families go for walks at night and you can walk into a pub at half past ten and order chips and curry sauce, the name given by my nephew to patatas bravas, black pudding, morcilla, sausages, chorizo, and all washed down by ice-cold beer. Oh, and not forgetting the ice cream for my nephew afterwards. I don’t think the camarero ever worked out why I felt it necessary to ask every night if it was okay for my nephew to have an ice cream, but it would have taken too long to explain the whole I’m-Scottish-I-don’t-want-to-be-a-nuisance thing. And it all costs about a tenner. Imagine, just for a moment, a Scotland like this. True, we’d probably have to change its name to Spain but we would be able to throw out all the clocks. Want to know the time? Just work out the last time you ate.

Cometh the Camareros, Cometh Spain Triumphant

I have a theory. If Spain was run by the camareros (barmen) it would still be a world-power feared, and probably, respected by all. Why do I believe this? Because they get things done. If there is a secret oath sworn by camareros (and I like to think there is one) it might be “Let the customer ask and if I have it or I know where it is, I solemnly swear to hand it over at a very reasonable price”.

But before I get too fanciful here it might help if I contrast the efficiency of the average camarero with the attitude displayed by the funcionarios. These are the people who have sat their oposiciónes, public competitive exams that you have to sit if you want to enter the civil service, which includes everything from being a teacher to being allowed to stamp building permits. The Spaniards will only ever accept a document once it has been stamped. I once saw a scribbled handwritten notice outside a bar announcing a temporary closure. It had been stamped. If it hadn’t it wouldn’t be real and people would have wrongly turned up for asking for a drink. I like to think all these stamped documents are later transferred to a national archive which includes everything ever stamped in Spain. Including the stamp collection of Alfonso XIII. Which, of course, has been stamped.

The higher the mark in your oposiciónes, the higher you are placed in the list for your particular job. As vacancies come up, the people at the top of the list get them first. If you are at the bottom you have to wait until everybody ahead of you is dead. There is no attempt to find out how good you are, say, as a teacher. If you’re at the top, then the job is yours. This has one very important consequence, as I found out when I applied for my tarjeta de residencía. THEY DON’T CARE! They know that if they pull out a gun and shoot you then they might go to jail but they wouldn’t necessarily lose their job. Spain didn’t lose her empire because she failed to develop quickly as a modern European country in the nineteenth century. She lost it because some funcionarío refused to stamp the navy´s form requesting ships-that-didn’t-sink.when-hit-by-small-stones.

There are no oposiciónes for being a camarero. In fact I’m not sure how they are recruited but I wouldn’t rule out some form of press gang. The last group of people that would ever be allowed to be camareros in Spain are students. Here being a camarero is a skilled job which takes years to learn. Being a student, on the other hand, involves living with your parents until you are in your thirties and actively not looking for a job. Would you entrust your food and drink with someone whose mother still irons his shirts? And he’s thirty seven?

Just for starters, as a camarero you have to know how many combinations of coffee and milk there are. At least ten, and that doesn’t include the little sachets of instant coffee, decaffeinated just to make things more complicated, served templada, that is with milk that isn’t really hot and isn’t really cold. Oh, and in a glass. An English friend who speaks excellent Spanish worked as a camarero in a Spanish bar in Lanzarote (the owners thinking, presumably, it would be good to have him to deal with the British tourists). He was asked to leave after a couple of hours. He just didn’t know his coffees. Instead he went to work in an English bar where people only wanted beer or a decent plate of fish and chips and the most exotic thing you can ask for is a cappuccino.

A camarero, unlike the funcionario only knows how to serve. Without being servile. He’s not your friend. He’s not your brother. He’s not your dad (unless of course he actually is). He is the means by which the stuff he keeps behind the bar gets across to you. It’s that basic. He doesn’t like the idea of anyone going hungry or being thirsty but that’s as far as the relationship goes. He’ll never let you marry his sister (unless of course he actually does). Walk into most bars in Madrid and the first thing you’ll hear is “Dime”. Literally “Talk me”. He doesn’t want to hear about the weather; the game last night; the lies told by politicians or the latest scandal involving building flats on land that not only belongs to your cousin but actually doesn’t even exist in the first place. That’s what you have your family for. All he wants is that you talk him. Tell him what want. You.

A word of advice. When talking to a camarero never use the conditional tense. It makes no sense to him. The only reason you are in his bar is because you want something to drink or eat. So why waste valuable time by saying “I would like...” or “Would it be possible...”. Worse still is if you say “Could you get me...?”. By saying this you are raising the possibility that he wouldn’t get it for you, which for a camarero is as close to an insult as you can get. If you listen to Spaniards ordering in a bar they tend to say “Me pones una cerveza por favor?”. A very simple phrase which I struggle to translate. I suppose the closest would be “Give us a beer please” or perhaps “Will you give us a beer?” . Literally it would go something like “Me put beer, you, please?”. I’m not even sure about the question mark. Intonation in Spanish can be so subtle for someone from Britain as to be almost invisible. The real test for a non-native speaker is to be in a group of Spaniards, with the usual level of noise that tends to come with more than two Spaniards, and to know that the person standing behind you has just asked if it’s true that British people spend all their time in the pub and children are forced to leave home at eighteen.

It can be a delight to watch a camarero at work, especially when he’s at the top of his game. They tend to be in their late forties or early fifties, often carrying a few extra pounds and always, always smoking. I don’t think Spanish law allows you to employ non-smoking camareros. The best time to watch them at work in Madrid is in June or early July, before everyone leaves for the beach. This is the time of year when the bars spill out on to the streets and people escape from the heat by drinking in the terrazaz that cover the pavements. Carrying a tray in one hand, balancing on it glasses and bottles of whisky, gin, coke, tonic and the wonderful but dangerous patcharan, he weaves his way between the tables, accepting orders shouted by other customers with a “Muy bien” and swapping comments with the other camareros.

Dressed in the obligatory white short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, his face damp with sweat these camareros will regularly put in eight hour shifts six nights a week, often finishing at three in the morning. Like nearly everything in Spain their work is six parts hard graft and four parts pure theatre. The good camarero will get your drinks onto the table and pour them with such an understated flourish that you hardly notice he’s been there. They don’t want your thanks. Sometimes they don’t even want a tip. To be honest I’m not quite sure why they do it. But when you see the number of young guys doing the same job, putting up with being called “chaval” by the older camareros (imagine in a British pub one of the older barman saying to one of the younger ones “Hey boy, get those drinks out now” and you get the idea of the strict hierarchy that operates in the world of the camareros. In my own bar in the barrio the oldest camarero there, Juan Antonio, helps prepare the tapas, a job usually done by the owner. The young guy who shares his shift gets to sweep the floor) they must really want to do it. You should also keep in mind that it is very rare to see a camarero in his sixties. A good camarero can reckon on having thirty years at the most in his job. The lucky ones end up as owners of their own bars. The others? Maybe there is a rest home somewhere in the north of Spain where they go to retire and talk about the old days. A bit like priests. Except they’re not allowed to marry anybody but they do get to hear confession.

So what would Spain be like if it was run by camareros? For a start you could forget the “jobs-for-life-so-screw-you-mentaltiy” that characterises the attitude of the funcionarios. If can’t do your job, the criteria being that there is somebody out there somewhere who is lacking something, then don’t bother turning up for work on Monday. Foreign policy would be characterised by an mixture of common sense, which they all learned from their mothers in the pueblo, and outright obscenity. It brings a smile to my face to think of Spain’s representative in the United Nations admonishing the world’s leaders with “¿Gillipollas, que coño haceis?” or “¡Me cago en la madre le parió!” I’m afraid that I can’t translate any of these words on the grounds of decency but trust me, they make their point. Forcefully. I can’t say for certain that the Spanish navy would once again command the respect of its enemies but at least its ships wouldn’t sink at the first sound of gunfire and if you wanted an amphibious landing backed up by tanks, jets, missiles, heavily-armed marines and submarines wreaking havoc in the North Atlantic. No problem. You’re the customer. Dime.

Never Argue with the Pharmacist

My sinus had been getting worse. I decided to go to the barrio farmacía and buy something to take the pain away. The pharmacist looked at me and I knew immediately the scale of the error I had committed. By saying “¿Hay algo para sinusitis?” (“Do you have something for sinusitis?”) I had just diagnosed my own illness. I had not only called into question his professional authority I had done away with the need to have a conversation. What I should have said was “Me duele la cabeza” (“I have a headache”) to which he would have answered “¿Donde?” (“Where?”). Over the next five minutes we would have discussed the intensity and location of the pain, the presence or absence of “la flema” and, if present, its colour. All this would be done in public and at a volume that I consider akin to shouting. At the end of the conversation he would diagnose sinusitis and give me an off-the shelf remedy. However, I was not prepared to play his game this time. I met his look with one of my own. Like two Wild West gunfighters we faced each other, waiting for the first move. “So”, he said finally, “You have sinusitis?”

It’s difficult to define just what a barrio is. You could call it a village except that there is already a word for village in Spanish: “aldea”. There’s no point in calling it a town because you’ve already got “pueblo”. The dictionary calls it a neighbourhood which will do except in English neighborhood takes on more of feeling of the layout, the buildings, everything physical. A barrio is more than that. Although for many of its inhabitants they would never call it home. For that you need the word “tierra” which also means earth. So someone might live in the barrio but his or her “tierra” might be in Oviedo up in Asturias. They may have lived in the barrio for fifty years but they will still visit their “tierra” every year. Spain is not a land of the abstract. Everything is very physical, visible, tactile: familia, amigos, tierra: family, friends, home.

But don’t think a definition is impossible. Spain may be difficult to understand for an outsider (how can a country have two verbs for “to eat”: “comer” for the afternoon and “cenar” for the night, for example?) but don’t make the mistake of overanalyzing what is basically a way of maximizing opportunities to talk. For example if I wanted to buy aspirin in Britain I might pop down to the local shop and buy it there. In my barrio I need to go the chemist and discuss it with the pharmacist. In Britain if I wanted to buy underwear I’d pop across to the supermarket and buy a pack of three for a fiver. Here, I need to go to the underwear shop and discuss my underwear with a complete stranger. I am prepared, sometimes, to talk to the pharmacist about my headache but I have no intention of discussing my underwear with anybody. But perhaps you are beginning to get the idea: aspirin or underwear, in themselves they’re not important; they only take on meaning because they provide an opportunity to chat.

The basic necessities for living are food , shelter and warmth. To this list the Spaniard would unhesitatingly add “talking”. My brother once asked at what distance would a Spaniard not call for the attention of a camarero, or barman. The answer is if you can see the barman it’s worth a try shouting even if they are at end of a very crowded bar. Or indeed in another bar altogether. It’s not the result of bad manners; it’s just that talking for a Spaniard is akin to breathing. So, for example, when I go to my local bar in the barrio for breakfast at twenty to seven in the morning, Pedro, camarero and son of the owner, is always there, unfeasibly cheery at this unfeasibly early hour. “Buenos días,” he says “¿Que hay? ¿Que tal?” “Good day. What’s up? How are you?” And we’ll chat about work, holidays or I’ll ask him about his wee girls – the two year old always “muy mala” (this “very bad” always said with a smile). We never talk about what it is I’m going have for breakfast because Pedro knows: café americano, toast and strawberry jam. He doesn’t bother with the butter because he knows I never use it. By the time he puts the toast on the bar there are other customers in the bar and he goes to serve them and, of course, talk. Now this could appear tiresome, this need to chat. But the barrio is a microcosm for Spain; a very social country where being part of a social network of family or friends is very important. You’ll never know when you’ll need your friends. As I found out the day when I went to pay for my breakfast and realized that I had forgotten my wallet. My apologies to Pedro were met with blank incomprehension. “You need to eat,” he told me. “And what is money between friends?”.

The pharmacist turned his back on me. He was deep in thought. I knew this because he joined his hands, fingertip to fingertip, and placed his index fingers on his pursed lips. “Look!” I wanted to shout. “There! On the shelf! That’s what you’re going to give me. So cut out this nonsense right now and give it to me!” But I didn’t. I had to allow him this exercise of professional authority. Also I knew if I even so much as touched anything that was on the shelves he’d call the police. Not because he’d think I was stealing but that I was prepared to self-medicate with something as dangerous as sinusitis and was therefore clearly insane. I paid for the medicine, thanked him and went to leave. Even with such a display of stubborn silence on my part the pharmacist couldn’t let me leave without saying something. “Remember,” he said, “You must only take one a day and drink it with plenty of water.” Now all this I could have read in the directions but as Sartre once said “Hell is other people”. For a Spaniard hell is other people but no one is talking.