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.

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.

England:
Just got back from two weeks in England. The local chemists has a sign on their wall saying that if we feel we haven't received our prescription medicine fast enough, then we should mention it and it will be delivered to our home free of charge. I waited twenty minutes and went to the counter, where I was told that the medicine was already waiting for us, that it had been for ten minutes ("we usually have in ready in about eight minutes"), and that my name had been called out. It was true: I'd been playing with the kids near the TV set they've installed to make your ten-minute wait less painful. The assistant apologised profusely: she was apologising to me because I hadn't listened.

Spain:
Me: Good afternoon. I'm calling to see whether you have any flat screen televisions in stock, say 20"-23".
Assistant: Wait a moment.
(3 minutes later)
Assistant: Yes, we have two 42" plasma televisions in stock.
Me: Actually, I was wondering about 20"-23" televisions.
Assistant: Oh yes, we have lots of those.
Me: Great. Could you give me a rough idea of how much they cost, please?
Assistant: I'm not at liberty to give out that kind of information by phone.
Me: Thank you! Bye!

This comes from today's El País (English edition):

"Recent statistics released by the polling organization Sofres bear witness to the fact that TV commercials are occupying more spots than ever. Collectively, Spain’s national and regional channels broadcast a total of 2,264,813 commercials last year — over 50,000 more than in 2004. Once again, Tele 5 was the channel to air most commercials, closely followed by Antena 3 and TVE-1 [the state TV channel]. If the 266,628 commercials shown by Tele 5 last year were played back to back, they would constitute 58 days’ television. There has also been an increased incidence of product placement: [the gardening centre] Decogarden placed as many as 105 brands in just one show last December, while Los Serrano [a popular sitcom] placed 56." So Decogarden and Los Serrano are also getting all this additional press (and blog) coverage, too. PdS Blog proudly announces that is is joining the club with the image above, and suggests that you switch off your TV and visit Decogarden.

Sorry about the long-term absence... work... but back on a regular basis very soon now... maybe even this weekend. And then we'll see what Movable Type's really capable of. And remember what Jonathan Swift wrote: "Men are never so Serious, Thoughtful, and Intent, as when they are at Stool".

You often see them as you zoom past on your way to somewhere else – Spain’s clubes de carretera, often looking like vulgar little mansions, often painted brightly and often with a neon sign, usually lit during the day, that might say simply “CLUB” or, if the owners are more creative types, “JOLY CLUB” or “CLUB VEGAS” or some such thing. There are 1,070 of them dotted around Spain. They often seem to be located in the middle of nowhere, stuck in the middle of an area of desert or with an incongruous mountain sticking up behind them, and often, during the daytime at least, there is a single car or a long-distance truck sitting there forlornly, lost in the huge car park. Anonymity seems to be the key. Inside (apparently), the better ones are cheaply plush, velvet-walled, red-lit, designed in a parody of luxury, but the bar prices are the prices of genuine luxury. An article in yesterday’s El País - based on a poetically-titled report by the Guardia Civil, “Tráfico de seres humanos con fines de explotación sexual” - says that there are now 20,000 women working as prostitutes in Spain’s clubes de carretera (19,154, to be exact), about double the number working there five years ago. The vast majority of them are immigrants who have paid for the pleasure, and some have been informed by people trafficking organizations that they would be coming to Spain to work in “respectable” jobs in restaurants or as cleaners or housekeepers. But the report also points out that the word is out on this, and that the days of women being kept against their will as virtual slaves in the clubes de carretera are passing. Nowadays, most of the immigrant women know exactly what it is they are getting into from the word go. (Only 225 women in total took the chance to lodge a formal complaint with the Guardia Civil that they were being sexually exploited during the preparation of the report.) 58.4% of the women are Latin American, 34% European; the highest number are Romanians, of whom there are 3,900. Anybody wanting to get a flavor of what life is like inside a club de carretera could have a look at a couple of films: Juanma Bajo Ulloa’s comedy Airbag, or Bigas Luna’s memorably surreal Jamón, Jamón, in which Penélope Cruz’s fictional mother runs one (that's PC and Javier Bardem under the flying pig in the picture). You get the feeling that there are films to be made and books to be written about what goes on in these places, in the stories that these women are carrying. So the next time you zoom past a club de carretera, have a think about all that.

Edge asked a range of high-profile "scientists and science-minded thinkers" the question: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" None of them answered that they believe, but cannot prove, that Atlético de Madrid is a greater football club than Real Madrid, that Madrid house prices are too high, or that both God and Santa Claus exist, but nevertheless it's fascinating stuff to browse through (and there's 60,000 words of it).
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Spanish Jesús Álvarez and Moroccan Mohamed El Chaouti standing side by side as Mohamed sang out this morning's winning Gordo (Christmas lottery) number, which fate rightly decided should end up in his hand. An appropriate image to bring to a close the year of the March bombings.

Today in Madrid, the weather is cold but sunny, and last night I stood on the balcony and looked up at the stars. A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from PdS Blog.
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I never dreamed that I'd ever have anything positive to say on this particular subject, but I've just sent the following e-mail:

Hi, Derek:
I was wondering whether you could tell me who to contact about my subscription to Variety's print edition. It is currently being sent to:

Jonathan Holland
Modern Languages Department
Madrid
Spain

This is the exact equivalent of putting:

Jonathan Holland
Modern Languages Department
London
England

Remarkably, it is actually turning up at one of the places where I teach, but there's no guarantee that postmen in the future will be so dedicated, so I'd like to beef up the address a bit (to include the university, street and postcode, say) to guarantee that my Variety doesn't go astray. Any ideas?

Cheers,
Jonathan

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I really must try to get to this next year. It would be nice to wallow around half-naked in tomatoes at somebody else's expense, for a change.
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