Given the nature of Spanish ‘individualism’, one is afforded several opportunities each day to utter some sarcastic comment along the lines of ‘After you!’. The problem, though, is that, in order for a polite phrase to bear the weight of heavy sarcasm, it must first exist. And in Spain such phrases are conspicuous by their absence. One is forced, if one can be bothered, to resort to a curt insult such as ‘Cabrón!’. It’s a further irony that, although this can be satisfyingly infuriating to your target, it means only he-goat in English. Or, indeed, in any language.

And while I’m moaning – Manoel style – about Spanish character deficiencies, I should add that few of them share the British [and Portuguese] love of gardening. I already knew this but Manoel commented on it last night, as I was watering the latest additions to my garden brought home by him and my tree-mad, elder daughter. My instinctive explanation for this is that the Spanish prefer their pleasures - their much-vaunted ‘fun’ - to come without much more exertion than the raising of the elbow and/or the moving of the lips. But not necessarily in that order.

This, in turn, got me wondering about – and expatiating on – the fact that the traffic police here appear to be very ready to book people for things which fall outside a wide concept of ‘fun’ but fight shy of penalising people for stupidities which fall within it. The former include such innocuous things as not having two triangles, a spare set of bulbs and/or a luminous jacket in your car. And the long list of the latter includes such genuinely dangerous things as driving stupidly fast, driving while drunk, driving with kids in your lap, driving while talking on your mobile phone, riding a motor scooter with the silencer silenced, etc., etc. OK, the last one isn’t really very dangerous but it’s bloody annoying. If you are Spanish and this paragraph irritates you, feel free to post a comment with your own explanation for this bizarre dichotomy.