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.