The annual meeting of the George Borrow Society broke up this morning. Sadly, the members hadn’t been advised that Spain is the noisiest country in the world. So some of them came without earplugs and therefore lost another night’s sleep last night. On Tuesday this had been because it was the last night of a big fiesta but last night it was just the usual Friday binge drinking (the botellón) to the crack of dawn and beyond. This is when Spanish youth demonstrates it can drink to the max while showing consideration for others to the min. But at least they aren’t violent.

Someone - possibly me - appears to have signed me up to a social network site called Tagged. Or maybe it’s one of those sites for finding a partner. For suddenly I’m being deluged with the names and fotos of women who would like to know me. Given my age and location, it’s a bit of a surprise that Michelle is 20 and lives in Madrid and Helen is 19 and lives in Derbyshire in the UK. Both of them appear to have little money to spend on clothes. So, given their ages, I assume they’re students.

Which reminds me . . . 1. There’s a leaflet here in the university library which I guess is aimed at male students, as the headline is If you pay, you are complicit. And 2. The El País pictures of public sex in Barcelona and the media articles that have followed it have at least led to the beginnings of a public debate about prostitution here. The majority view seems to be that it should be ‘regulated’ but not prohibited. A minor political party of the Left has proposed a ban on the explicit ads that fill pages and pages of the national and regional papers but the media seems remarkably antipathetic towards this measure. My guess it it’s the most that will actually happen. Eventually.

Despite the fact they usually come with two decimal points, it’s essential to be circumspect with numbers and statistics in Spain. When I joined the autovía for Cáceres this morning, it was signposted as being 201 km away. After another kilometre, this had risen to 206. And over the next two hours it varied from 193 to 205, or a spread of 12km. Likewise Plasencia came in with a min of 116 and a max of 123. Now, as the object of travelling is to enjoy oneself rather than to cover the ground in the smallest amount of time possible, this lack of consistency may not be much to worry about. This is certainly the attitude taken by me, who does have a lot of time, and by most Spaniards. Who think they have a lot of time because they regard it as elastic. On the one hand, I admire this pragmatic Spanish attitude and feel the lack of precision and accuracy doesn’t really matter very much. But, on the other hand, can you imagine there being a German export industry for high quality goods if this was the attitude there? And doesn’t Spain need to export its way out of its current mire?