The botellón is the custom amongst Spanish youth of drinking en masse in the street until they collapse, usually on Friday and Saturday nights. The favoured drink is calimocho, an appalling mix of cola and wine/rum/whisky, etc. Unlike with any British variant of this bacchanalian pastime, there is very little violence. But a lot of noise, rubbish, urine and – needless to say - vomit. In recent years, even the hedonistic, live-and-let-live Spanish have begun to wonder whether things haven’t gone too far. Especially when they see pictures of girls as young as 12 dressed to out-whore the local prostitutes and gripping 2 litre bottles of calimocho in their hands. There has, naturally, been much talk but, so far at least, little action. But now comes news of government plans for a law placing limits on the sale of alcohol to young people and criminalising the drinking of alcohol in public places by the under 18s. Well, maybe. A similar measure planned by the last government 3 years ago was quietly dropped. By the way, a interesting aspect of the planned law is that parents will be made responsible for breaches by their kids. Imagine that in the UK!

Spain is not generally seen as a country of animal lovers. This is unfair, though inevitable given the continued existence of bullfighting. But this week the entire country has been gripped by the affair – in a Galician village - of a vet who is being variously defended and attacked by his fellow residents for blowing the gaffe on a neighbour who was in the habit of viciously beating his dog. In fact, he recorded it on video. Even The Guardian in the UK would have been happy to print the angry letters sent by aggrieved animal-lovers to the local and national papers. Apart from the dog, the biggest victim of this brouhaha has been the image of village life in ‘backward’ Galicia.

Whenever I say something is ‘typically Spanish’, I get angry emails demanding that I explain exactly how. Well, undaunted, here is another sad example . . . A young man of 21 driving on a fast national road sees his 22 year old friend coming the other way, driving his new car. He decides to swerve a little into his path as a joke. The manoeuvre goes wrong and there is a head-on collision. Both of them, plus a passenger, are killed. This, anyway, is the belief of the police, since no one is around to give a better explanation for a bizarre accident on a straight road.

Gypsies are not popular in Spain. And, putting aside possible culpabilities on either side, I can say from my own experiences over the last 6 years that I can understand why this is so. And then there are the reported incidents such as one last week of 200 gypsies walking out of a Madrid restaurant without any suggestion of paying the bill, while their kids distracted the staff by helping themselves to items on sale. Strangely, there was no police response. Though perhaps this wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to those of us used to hearing stories of gypsies routinely terrorising nurses, doctors, consultants, anaesthetists, surgeons, etc. Nearer to home, passing a Chinese bazaar in town this week, I was assaulted – almost literally – by the sight of the owner fighting with a woman from one of the local permanent gypsy encampments. The former was holding a rather garish pink bra and noisily claiming that latter had tried to nick it. The owner’s husband came out and said he’d called the police. The gypsy woman’s response was along the lines of ‘You’d better let me go. I know where you live’. I didn’t wait to see whether the police would respond in this case. Judging from the number of times they ring my bell, the gypsies know where I live as well.