I’m occasionally taken to task by Spanish readers for being too negative about Spain. Now and then I’m even told to eff off back to my septic isle. Or something like that. I like to think that, notwithstanding my barbed comments about the banks, the bureaucracy or whatever, a love of Spain shines through my posts. In particular, I hope it’s clear I regard the Spanish as the most sociable, affable and [most of the time] the most noble people on the planet. Just in case it isn’t, here are two tales of events during the 12 hours between 10.30 on Saturday night and 10.30 on Sunday morning . . .

Crossing the bridge into town on Saturday night, I came up behind 4 or 5 teenage youths who were blocking the pavement the way young men do. Weaving my way through them, I came up behind the last one and a sort of unintended pas de deux ensued. In place of the taunts I would have expected in the UK in similar circumstances, our impromptu performance was met by good-humoured laughter and applause. I may well be over-jaundiced but I can’t imagine this happening in similar circumstances in Britain these days.

On Sunday morning, I was walking my dog through the forest and came up alongside one of the several cars parked on or off the track. The front seats were occupied by two rough-looking coves – one of them with a tell-tale aluminium strip on his lap. And when the driver opened his window and spoke to me, I feared the worst. But he merely asked which breed Ryan was. And having established we were both English, he then treated me to the details of every motorway and major road he’d travelled on from Dover and Portsmouth in the direction of Birmingham. Specifically to some shopping centre in Courcy Street, which he obligingly wrote out for me. His companion then launched into a dissertation on English Setters, in particular the two ‘white and orange’ examples he owned and which were the offspring of some world champion or other. As he did so, the driver pulled out a sketch pad and began, I thought, to draw Ryan. In fact, it turned out to be a [generous] cartoon of me, on which he’d written their names and his phone number. As I thanked him and said my farewells, he reached into the back seat and presented me with the gift of a bull horn used, he said, by hunters/anglers to hold their knife-sharpening tool. As we parted, they insisted I call them one Sunday morning so we could go drinking, hunting or fishing together. So, I now have two close mates in Pedro and Amadeo, plus an invitation which I may well take up. Not to mention the cartoon and the horn. All in all, it reminded me of this article by John Carlin, reproduced on my Galicia web page.

To end this post – yet another bit of positivism. Saturday night was both one of our four bullfight nights and also the opening night of our big annual fiesta. The tradition is for the young of the city and its environs to gather in their thousands, to get terribly drunk and to spray one liquid or another on both each other and anyone else in the vicinity. It’s a true bacchanalia and the quantities of rubbish produced are prestigious. Not to mention the urine and the vomit. But by mid Sunday morning the city is again pristine clean. Most remarkable of all – and utterly unimaginable in the UK - there’s no violence. And everything passes off without the looming presence of dozens of police officers dressed in more battle gear than soldiers on patrol in Iraq.

I need to go and lie down now. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.