If I had to choose one word to describe the way things are done in Spain, it wouldn’t actually be ‘slowly’ or ‘inefficiently’, tempting as this might be. Rather, it would be ‘piecemeal’. Not everything, of course. But quite a lot. As a good example - in the community in which I live, we took a decision just over 3 years ago to have urgent repairs done on the rotting walkways which go down to the garden behind and below our houses. As I type this, I can see through my window the chap who comes every often to do a plank or two and then disappears for anything up to a month. And it’s not as if he has done things in a linear fashion, starting at one end of the garden and working through to the other. There are, in fact, 5 separate walkways and he has repaired part of each one but leaving gaps and loose planks where he has decided to suspend things in that particular location. In the UK, this would be an invitation to sue somebody but no one thinks of that here in Spain. A second near-to-home example – the house next door was sold 3 or 4 months ago and the new owners are having the old wooden floors ripped out and new ones installed. Work is proceeding at a snail’s pace, largely because the word ‘sporadic’ would hardly do justice to the way in which things are being done. I would guess that, on average, work takes place on only one day a week. And I suspect that the workmen are doing something similar in several other houses at the same time. You may not be able to please all the people all the time but Spanish workmen certainly seem capable of displeasing all the people all the time. Though not really because this is what is expected of them. Finally, just across the road from me in the car park of the School for Granite Carvers, work has been suspended for months now on a rather handsome granite horreo, which is a small grain store on stilts, common in both Galicia and northern Portugal. After it had been like this for a while, it struck someone as a good idea to put up a little sign saying that one shouldn’t touch the structure as it was dangerous. A little bit down the road, the horreo has a companion piece in the form of an unfinished fountain. Can it simply be that they get bored and move on to something else? Or is all this yet another reflection of the fact that Spaniards live only for the day and make little connection between today, tomorrow and all the days that might or might not follow?