As I sit here typing this, at 10.30 at night, the sound of children playing comes up through the open window from the park below. Fifteen minutes ago, I was on my way home and the play area just down the road had about eight children in it, the eldest probably around eight years old. There were three adults sitting drinking at a nearby terraza, but surely not enough parents for eight children. Many visiting parents find it surprising that children should be staying up so late. The fact of the matter is, that disciplined timetables are not really a part of Spanish life whatever age you are, and less in the holidays. Wherever you happen to be during August at, say, one am in the morning, whether sitting on a beach in a warm Mediterranean breeze or in the plaza mayor of a medieval mountain village, there is likely to be at least one pram in evidence. In Spain there seems to be an understanding, particularly on holidays and at weekends, that although kids have their rhythms, you do as well – and that if you want to have that last drink on the terraza, then you’re well within your rights to do so. And the benefit of having the little angels yapping round your ankles until one in the morning is that at least you’ll get a good lie-in next day! Madrid is not a particularly child-friendly city at the institutional level – the children’s play parks are quite harsh-looking places, a swing and a slide set thirty square metres of sand – but the child-friendly air somehow makes up for it. If you push a pram around the centre of Madrid for half an hour then someone (often an elderly woman, but other women and elderly men as well) will stop to have a chat about the baby with you. People walking past will turn heads back to have a look inside the pram. The nastiness that seems to be infecting relationships between adults and children in other parts of the world seems not to have taken hold (yet): I remember reminding one Spanish man about the tragic (and internationally remembered) episode in 1993 in Liverpool, when little Jamie Bulger was walked two miles to his death, and being earnestly informed “that would never happen here. Someone would have stopped them”. You have the sense it’s true, and that makes you feel a little safer. Long may it be so. So while you’re in Spain, do let them roam a little, within reason, and let them develop their social skills until past bedtime. And if you live in Spain, you might as well be nice to them because, on current evidence, they’re going to be living with you until they’re thirty-five anyway.