Years of living abroad can give you a kind of split personality. Part of me is now Spanish, I suppose, and I’m most aware of it when I’m back in England and contemplating the idea of leaving the house at 11pm to go out for a few drinks or refusing to leave a tip (tipping isn’t such a big deal here). But part of me is still English. Now here’s a moral dilemma. You arrive back home late one night with a car full of Spanish friends and pull up into the parking space in your underground garage. One of the friends opens the back door a little too enthusiastically, and it bangs into the “4” of the “A4” badge of your famously grumpy neighbours’ Audi, detaching the metal “4” and knocking it to the floor. What would you do? When this happened to me recently, the English part of me won out and I told my friends that I’d leave a note on the Audi and tell the owners the bad news the following morning. My friends howled with laughter. That was not the right solution: the solution was the picaresque one. La picaresca is a particularly Spanish character trait –of which they seem to be simultaneously proud and ashamed - which starts off in 16th century tales about lower-class, anti-heroic protagonists who aim to improve their social status by swindling and trickery. Nowadays, it’s more often used in self-defence against bureaucratic excess. If a friend gets you an early medical appointment or gets some papers authorized, that’s la picaresca. When a doctor friend of your father’s forges a medical note for you, that’s la picaresca. Recently, I took a morning off work to visit the Ministry of Education to be told that they hadn’t accepted my application to have my degree recognized (I wrote about this in a previous issue) because they weren’t sure I’d attached my original degree certificate. Why weren’t they sure? Incredibly, because London University used an embossed seal, not an ink seal, so it wasn’t visible in the photocopy I’d presented. I complained about this to a taxi driver, who told me to get some ink and simply “do” the seal myself. “A ver si cuela”, he said: “let’s see if it works”. Now I’m all for la picaresca if it means fighting silly bureaucracy, but what about the fact that ABC newspaper recently published a survey in which 36.9% of university students claimed that copying in an exam is justified? La picaresca justifies some pretty appalling, sometimes criminal behaviour, too – whether you’re English or not. But anyway - needless to say, there I was at 3 a.m. in the morning, on my hands and knees behind the Audi, a bottle of superglue in my trembling hand. If you see them, please don’t tell them: a ver si cuela.