I’m walking along the road minding my own business, rum and coke in one hand, cigar in the other, as you do. A car screeches to a halt beside me, and out hops Fidel Castro. He wraps me in a bear hug and plants a kiss on my cheek.

“¡Compadre! What’s up? It’s been such a long time — but I thought you were dead!”

The encounter is neither fiction nor fever dream. I’m in a small town by the charming name of Cariño on the north coast of Galicia, famed locally for its carnival celebrations. It ain’t Rio, or even Cádiz, but it’s the place to be in this neck of the woods, so my colleagues tell me. That would be Snow White, Don Quijote, the Wicked Witch of the East and Zorro.

Me, I’m Che Guevara. Hence Fidel’s greeting. We exchange brief pleasantries, in character, and with a “¡Viva la Revolución!”, he hops back into his car and heads off to find a parking space.

“It was so surreal” is a much overused phrase. And in the context of Carnival, when everyone’s in fancy dress and normal rules have not applied since the days of the Roman Saturnalia, it seems particularly inappropriate. But that chance meeting was… unexpected, certainly. Memorable. Magical, I’m tempted to say.

I have no idea why Fidel had chosen to be Fidel that night. My Che outfit did have a logical if tangential explanation. As a lightly bearded glasses-wearer, I needed a character to match. The beard I could shave off and regrow. Lasik eye surgery would have proven a little trickier to arrange in the run-up to Carnival. And I didn’t want to be blind even before I got blind drunk.

My go-to fancy dress in my student days had been Indiana Jones, as I had a leather Stetson I’d picked up in a Moroccan souk, an old fossil-collecting bag, a brown leather jacket, and a friend who, for reasons best known to herself, had a bullwhip she was willing to lend me.

Crucially, though, I wore contact lenses back then. Once I ditched the lenses after waking up hungover on a random sofa one morning, my eyelids gummed shut with decomposing plastic, that outfit bit the dust too. The academic Dr Henry Jones may wear specs back at the faculty, but buccaneering Indy most certainly does not.

After fumbling for a plausibly bespectacled but still heroically cool look — and this was some years before the geeks inherited the earth — I broadened the search to sunglasses as well. And my mind soon alighted on El Che. Lightly bearded? Check. Iconically cool? Check. Tropically shaded? Check.

Fatigues were easily obtained from an army surplus shop. All I needed was the beret. Luckily, I was in the right place.

In our English-speaking iconography, we all identify the beret with France, along with stripy jumpers, bicycles and strings of onions. But in my experience, you are far more likely to see (old) men actually wearing a boina in its other spiritual homeland of Northern Spain, especially Galicia and the Basque Country.

So much so that A Coruña, an hour’s bus ride from my temporary home in Ferrol, had a whole shop dedicated to nothing but berets: a boinería. Now, a two-hour round-trip to buy a single element of a fancy dress outfit for a street party that would last just one night may seem excessive. But I was young and footloose, with no pressing calls on my time.

And I had this tingling prescience that it was worth it. That my boina and Che and I had an adventure to share.

A faith which was amply repaid by that meeting with an ersatz Fidel on a street in Cariño. My beret definitely had a touch of magic to it.

After a couple of years in Galicia, my headgear and I returned to the UK. I didn’t have much use for it in my homeland. To be honest, I didn’t have much use for my homeland itself. We soon mutually decided to part ways, and I headed off to Trieste, in Italy. I had no great expectations of Carnival celebrations, or at least silly fancy dress versions — that region was all about those refined Venetian masks, wasn’t it? — but I took my trusty beret and fatigues all the same.

Sure enough, my magical headgear came good again. It turned out that while Trieste wasn’t much of a Carnival city, the little town of Muggia just around the bay went mad for the event. As colleagues rushed to cobble together some kind of passable costume, I simply unpacked El Che from my rucksack, dusted off my boina, and popped down to the Sali e Tabacchi store on the corner to buy myself a pack of cheroots.

Fidel didn’t turn up to join in the festivities this time — which would perhaps have been asking a little much in an Italian-speaking country — but the partying went on longer and more riotously than in Cariño, even.

¡Viva la Revolución!

Like Che Guevara himself, with his restless odysseys around Africa and Latin America, my beret still had the urge to travel, eventually accompanying me back closer to its own homeland: not Galicia, but Catalonia. Barretina rather than boina country, but I still found room in my single rucksack to pack my trusty outfit.

Girona proved more of a challenge in terms of finding some Carnival action. Not a samba school in sight amid the freezing February fog. But having made a few friends in a local bar, I managed to spur enough enthusiasm to dress up and try our luck on a late night bar crawl of the city’s livelier and more festive establishments. Juan Pablo, from Mexico, was always up for a party, and knew a few more folk who would come along as well.

El Che would ride again, this time in the company of a latter-day Emiliano Zapata!

There was just one potential snag, I realised, as I pinned the red star through the black felt, and slid into my combat trousers.

“Oye, Juan Pablo,” I asked, as we got ready to meet up with the others. “That friend of yours you mentioned, the one you reckoned would be a great match for me. Where was she from again?”

“Cuba. Why?”

“Errm. You don’t know anything about her political views do you?”

“Nah. I never talk about politics — you know that.”

“Right, yeah. Never mind…”

It had just dawned on me that my light-hearted Che Guevara outfit, the mainstay of so many happy Carnival memories, might not exactly be the most tactful calling card when meeting this Cuban woman JP was trying to fix me up with.

What if half her family had been slaughtered in the Revolution? Even without such a melodramatic back story, the fact that she was here in Spain did kind of suggest she probably wasn’t a massive Castro fan.

¡Mierda! Far too late to change outfit now. Still, it probably would have come to nothing anyway.

We made it to the meeting point in the old town, attracting some strange looks along the way. Girona was definitely not geared up for a massive street party. A bunch of familiar faces were waiting there, along with some other folks I’d never met. Some had made more of an effort with their fancy dress than others, it had to be said.

One of the young women was decked out in a floral costume, painstakingly hand-sewn with flowers, and particularly caught my eye.

Juan Pablo nudged me in the ribs. “That’s her, I’ll introduce you.”

The moment of truth. Would she be mortally offended by my revolutionary get-up, find it a tasteless afront to her personal and national dignity?

Apparently not. Or if she was, she’s kept it very quiet during the twenty years we’ve been together.

I should have known El Che’s magical beret wouldn’t let me down, and would somehow find its way back to Cuba.

Pop quiz, hotshots: what’s the capital of France?

Easy-peasy, huh? Despite centuries of needle and outright hostility, Britain’s closest neighbour on the European mainland makes it easy for us to write the name of its capital city, even if that guttural ‘r’ might have us coughing up phlegm when we try to say it properly.

How about Italy? ‘Rome’, you reply, quick as a speeding Vespa.

No problems there either. Why not ‘Roma’, though? How come we anglicise the written form for some places but not others? ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do, except for the actual name of the bloody city’, would seem to be the slightly perverse rule.

As so often with English spelling, there are in fact no rules. Some placenames have been left intact (Bologna), while others have been modified a little (Bretagne -> Brittany).

A lot of it has to do with the wars, alliances and dalliances of the past — the extent to which overseas cities and regions had a prominent place in Britain’s historical record, and so ended up having their funny foreign bits smoothed off to suit the English tongue and ear.

Even then, the rules-that-aren’t-rules shift over time. During the Peninsular War (which in Spanish is the Guerra de la Independencia, but for Britain was simply one part of the broader Napoleonic Wars), La Coruña was ‘Corunna’, and Zaragoza was ‘Saragossa’. You may still find those forms in a Baedekers travel guide from the early 20th century, but they are not standard usage these days.

Seville, on the other hand, retains the same anglicised form as it had back when Lord Byron was waxing lyrical about its oranges and women in his epic poem Don Juan. Unless you’re talking about the football club, Sevilla FC (see also AS Roma, but not Bayern Munich, who are seldom referred to by their native ‘München’).

It’s complicated.

But where there are institutional style guides, there must be rules of a sort to steer confused writers and readers.

The Guardian newspaper in Britain has a reliable (and, believe it or not, entertainingly witty1) style guide, which in general adopts an inclusive approach, respectful of other cultures. It offers a reasonable indication of how to handle foreign words in modern English, in particular, as regards my adopted homeland of Spain, with reference to accents:

Accents

Include the accents and other diacritics, where possible… but not in anglicised words and names such as cafe, smorgasbord, raison d’etre and Zurich… (see ‘Foreign Placenames’)…

Foreign Placenames

We opt for locally used names, with these main exceptions (the list is not exhaustive, apply common sense): Archangel, Basel, Berne, Brittany, Catalonia… Seville, Sicily, Syracuse… Zurich.

Every road ends at Zurich/Zürich, it would seem, rather than Roma/Rome.

So far so good. Apart from the whole business of ‘main exceptions’, ‘not exhaustive’ and ‘common sense’, which all suggest not so much ‘rules’ as ‘make-it-up-as-you-go-along freeform improv’.

One placename omitted from that list is Spain’s most populous and culturally archetypal region of Andalusia. That is how it is traditionally named in English, reflecting the pronunciation we normally give it when speaking in English, with no accent on the ‘í’.

According to The Guardian, though, we should ‘opt for the locally used name’, i.e. Andalucía, with a ‘c’ and an accented ‘í’. Fair enough — perfectly reasonable and understandable, except that it also raises the issue of pronunciation.

Now that we have adopted the ‘c’ from Spanish, how should we pronounce it? Like a local, of course, according to our inclusive, culturally sensitive style guide. But how does a local pronounce it? Like the ‘th’ in ‘thin’, or the ‘s’ in ‘sin’?

Again — it’s complicated…

As that map shows, the predominant pronunciation varies across the provinces of Andalusia, and between urban and rural areas. The poor old Guardian style guide has created more problems than it has solved.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Once we have a placename, or ‘toponym’, we also need a name to refer to the people who live there: the ‘demonym’. Using our old-fashioned English form of Andalusia that again offers no difficulty: we add an ‘-n’ to give us ‘Andalusian’.

But what should we do with ‘Andalucía’? The correct ‘local’ form in Spanish would be ‘andaluz’ (no capital ‘A’), and ‘andaluces’ in the plural. But that would then begin to make a sentence written in English unintelligible:

“There are differences in pronunciation across the andaluces provinces.” Huh?

And so The Guardian continues digging the linguistic hole it has got itself into and invents the demonym ‘Andalucían’, with an authentic ‘cí’, but an utterly inauthentic ‘A’ and ‘-n’, and no plural inflection.

It is, to my mind, a Frankenstein’s monster which butchers two languages at once, in the supposed interests of cultural sensitivity. But at least this is an easily avoidable stumbling block: use either Andalucía or Andalusia for the place, and Andalusian for the people.

No one will be offended.

Which is more than can be said for some other Spanish placenames.

‘The locally used name’ is not as straightforward a concept as The Guardian seems to think. Of Spain’s 17 ‘autonomous communities’, as its regions are known, four have two languages with equal official status (Galicia, Basque Country, Navarre, Valencia), one has three (Catalonia: Spanish, Catalan, Aranese), while another two have unofficial languages which co-exist with Spanish (Asturias, Aragon).

So what is ‘the locally used name’? The town next to mine is officially (in Valencian) L’Alfàs del Pi, but Alfaz del Pi in Spanish. The same pattern is repeated across half of the country. By choosing one or the other, you will inevitably upset someone. Refer to Girona by its Spanish name of Gerona, and the locals will look (if not actually draw) daggers at you.

The question is fraught enough that in Galicia, locals will often fudge the issue altogether, and refer to the region’s largest city simply as ‘Coruña’, to avoid opting for the Spanish ‘La’ or Galician ‘A’ definite article.

Maybe they could end up borrowing the antiquated English form ‘Corunna’ from Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore and his Peninsular War troops.

Whatever The Guardian might try to insist, there is no right answer. Except that ‘Andalucían’ will always be an abomination. The wonderful andaluces deserve better than that.

I’m an Englishman living in Spain who has also worked in both Germany and Japan, commuting by train every day. Experiences which I feel give me a certain perspective on the relative prevalence and priority of punctuality in different cultures around the globe.

As a self-employed work-from-homer since decades before the pandemic, I have very few professional appointments — the morning school run is the closest I come to having in-person deadlines to meet. A while back, though, I was asked by a recruitment agency client to conduct telephone interviews with their selection candidates to ascertain their level of spoken English. The chance to dust off my ESL teacher’s hat appealed, and I agreed.

So every couple of weeks I am sent a brief text written by the hopefuls, and they arrange a time to phone me for an oral level assessment. In most cases, they are applying for positions at middle management level, and their English tends also to be somewhere around the intermediate or upper intermediate band. A B1 or B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

Or ‘I can get by pretty well’ level, in lay terms.

What varies more is their punctuality in making the call. The worst offender thus far also had the best excuse — he was a mining engineer who was dealing with an emergency at the bottom of a mineshaft, somewhat limiting both his availability and phone signal.

In more run-of-the-mill cases, it’s harder to justify any lateness, in my book. This is, after all, a job interview process.

No, it’s not in-person and on-site. But I am being paid for my time interviewing them and writing up the evaluation. If I break off from my translation work at 10:25 to ready myself mentally, open up their written text file, prepare my notebook, and the phone then doesn’t ring at 10:30 as agreed, they are messing up my working day. That should be obvious, I would have thought.

I haven’t been asked to include any such observations in my reports and don’t see it as my role. The main interviewer has the task of appraising their personal qualities — I’m just the lingo guy. But a recent experience had me wondering whether I really ought to, appraising punctuality as an intrinsic element of their capacity to communicate in an English-speaking environment. In this case UK/Ireland/USA/Scandinavia for the most part.

In other words, acquiring and respecting the cultural aspects that accompany skills in any language has a fundamental impact on your efficacy as a communicator, above all in a professional context. Anyone who has worked in the Far East, for example, knows that while what you say may matter, how and when you say it matters as much, or sometimes more.

The chances of a salesperson closing a deal with an American or British client expecting their call at 10:30 will surely begin to tail off steeply with every minute that passes after a quarter to eleven if the phone hasn’t rung. You could speak near-native C2 English, but if your more halting B1 competitor made their rival call on the dot at half past ten, your company may well miss out on the sale.

I acknowledge that the importance I give to punctuality is out of step with the country where I now live. And in fact, it is probably excessive, neurotic, obsessive, and detrimental to my mental health. But it is part of who I am, precisely because it is a trait emphasised in my cultural upbringing. And as such, it should perhaps also be a valid factor for inclusion in a fully comprehensive English language skills assessment.

Language is about enabling effective communication, a process that relies on far more than just words. And as many learners and teaching service providers shift towards apps like Duolingo or AI-powered online chatbots, it becomes more important to check that students and workers have found a way to master the sociocultural foundations of the language that such non-human interfaces would struggle to convey.

As it happens, the unpunctual candidate was by far the most accomplished I had yet interviewed, linguistically speaking. A clear C2 in both written and oral skills — the highest level of proficiency. But she phoned me an hour and a half late to be interviewed for a marketing position. That’s a beginner-level A1 for punctuality, civility, and responsibility, isn’t it? Not exactly what I’d be looking for in a marketeer.

There was another aspect of this that bothered me. It was clear — as she confirmed — that her English skills came from having attended a private international school in Barcelona, staffed by native teachers. She also mentioned in her text that she was a keen sailor. Add those two together, and you’re talking serious family wealth.

I found this aspect doubly off-putting. Not only had she been granted a far better opportunity than most to assimilate the cultural norms of the formal Anglo-Saxon world over many years, at great expense, but she had also chosen to disregard those norms. Which I inevitably ascribed in part to a sense of entitlement.

Punctuality was, perhaps, for little people who have to punch cards at a factory, not for privately educated yacht girls.

There is almost certainly a degree of inverse snobbery and armchair psychology in that appraisal. As I say, it is not, in any event, my job to reach such conclusions as to how good a fit she might be for the company in question. But I may suggest to the recruitment agency that I add an extra column to the evaluation form for ‘punctuality’, or perhaps the softer-edged concept of ‘cultural awareness’.

And if the final decision were left to me, I’d pick the recently arrived migrant from Argentina who I had spoken to the previous day. Her English wasn’t nearly as good, but she called bang on time.

There is a car that often parks at the end of my road, and always makes me smile when I pass. A dinkily elegant two-seater with cheeky little headlights, tricked out in sporting green livery, lovingly buffed with a chammy leather by its doting owner, one imagines.

It is the epitome of Sixties style. Of a more joyous, innocent era.

I am no automotive aficionado — four wheels, A to B, big boot for a family’s worth of clutter are my only requirements — but I know this particular model by sight. An MGB roadster — the ‘people’s sportscar’, as it was known. Designed and mass-manufactured to bring a little James Bond glamour to the suburban semis of baby boom Britain1.

The nostalgia triggered by that little old MG is about more than the dynamic style and optimism of an era. It also has to do with a sense of place and tradition. Unlike the modern age, when cities and countries vie to tempt global car manufacturers to relocate production with sweetheart tax breaks and inward investment grants, throughout the MGB’s history up until its discontinuation in 1980, it was made in the place where its manufacturer was first founded.

Not in one of Britain’s traditionally industrial cities, such as Birmingham, but in rural Oxfordshire, at Cowley and Abingdon.

It is that Oxford connection which ties the car and company in to an even longer heritage. ‘MG’ stands for ‘Morris Garages’, the workshop on Longwall Street in the city itself where William Morris started out making and repairing bicycles at the start of the twentieth century, before venturing into motorbikes and cars.

That red brick building still stands on the same spot — or at least its façade does, preserved as a heritage site with black-and-white photos and explanatory panels in the window display that would once have featured the latest vehicles. The land behind was acquired years ago by neighbouring New College, which built a new residential block to accommodate some of its students. From 1990 to 91, one of them was me.

It was a strange feeling, to be sitting at a desk in the same space that nearly a hundred years earlier had been full of the tapping of dollies and smell of engine oil heralding the birth of an industry, and had then been subsumed into an institution dating back to 1379, part of a university founded nearly three hundred years before that. A sense of history not so much marching on, as swirling and looping around. William Morris himself used the fortune he made in the motor industry to found another Oxford college: Nuffield.

Little of that heritage and history seemed to be particularly alive as we entered the 21st century, though. The Morris brand died out as Britain’s struggling car industry merged and consolidated. MG stopped making sports cars, and its subsequent parent company MG Rover’s bankruptcy in 2005 was the final nail in the coffin of the UK-owned mass-production motor industry.

There would be no more MGs to continue that quintessentially British historical lineage linking the dreaming spires of Oxford to the factories of what was once “the Workshop of the World”.

And so I was delighted a couple of years ago to spot a number of new cars on local streets sporting the classic MG badge. Not as characterful or loveable as the old roadster, it was true — these were inevitably identikit modern SUVs — but they were MGs, and they were electric. Someone must have revived the Oxfordshire plant and reinvented the marque for the EV era. As I was thinking of switching to an electric car, I did some research.

MG had indeed been revived, in the sense that the Chinese auto behemoth SAIC had bought up the brand in the MG Rover fire sale and was now using it as part of its European sales strategy. The cars themselves were rolling off production lines not in Abingdon, but in Fujian.

I felt a sense of disappointment, betrayal almost. And also a hint of dread. Because if the tradition, history and even emotions encapsulated in that simple, octagonal logo could be bought up and whisked away to the other side of the world, as just one small part of a seismic shift in economic power, where did that leave me and my continent? Nothing like the dread experienced by those on the receiving end of British imperialism back in that golden (for some) “Workshop of the World” age, but nonetheless a symbolic expression of 21st-century unease.

My decision to buy an MG4 was scotched by the discovery.

Did it matter, though? Did it make sense for me to feel any lesser affinity for the MG brand because its parent company was now headquartered in one place, not another? Did it in any event make sense for me to feel any affinity at all for a modern electric vehicle simply because it shared nothing more than a badge with a car that brought back warm, fuzzy memories.

It would, after all, do the same job of getting me from A to B with a boot full of clutter as any other industrialised battery and motor on four wheels. It seemed absurd to feel that a part of my past had somehow been purloined. Especially since after growing up and studying in Britain, I have spent most of my adult life in Spain.

The story of the car industry here is to an extent similar to that of Britain, albeit repeated a generation or so later. Many people are surprised to learn that Spain is the second-biggest car manufacturer in Europe, behind only the überpetrolhead Germans, and way ahead of France and Italy.

But Spain’s flagship carmaker, SEAT, was subsumed into the Volkswagen VAG Group forty years ago, and almost all those 2,500,000 vehicles per year carry foreign-owned marques: Mercedes, Peugeot, Fiat, Citroën, Toyota, Ford…

The last of these has a major plant not far from where I live in the Valencia region, which means that despite being a US brand, it feels ‘local’ to those in the vicinity of Almussafes, and you see more Fords on the road around here than elsewhere in Spain.

It makes sense — plenty of people around here will know someone who works at the plant or in its supply chain. When I was a kid my family always drove a Ford too (rather than an MG, unfortunately), because my grandad worked at the factory in Halewood, just outside Liverpool.

What does local really mean anyway?

As it happens, it looks like the convoluted history of MG might now be coming full circle and following me home. Chinese parent company SAIC has announced they are likely to set up their next European factory here in Spain, specifically to build MG cars for the continental market so as to satisfy EU trade rules, just as its conglomerate compatriot Chery does in Barcelona, having raised the historic Ebro marque from the grave.

So maybe I will buy that electric MG4 in a couple of years, as a direct continuation of the tradition I learned of while sleeping amid the ghosts of the old Morris Garages back in my student days. Except that the model and design will have changed. And the propulsion. And the British classic will in fact be Chinese, and made in Spain.

But there will be two identical MG badges on my road, and I will be driving along soundlessly in an electric Ship of Theseus. Or as they would probably have said in the Morris Garages, riding on Trigger’s broom.

Flags have recently become a problem in the UK. Or rather Britain. Or rather England. Flags, and the performative flying of flags. Their relationship with that awkward and historically confrontational layering of three national entities in one. Their talismanic, tribal meaning.

For those unfamiliar with the English flag issue, since the upsurge in anti-immigrant, white nativist sentiment in England above all, of the four countries that make up the UK as a state, a vocal and active faction have been filling the nation’s high streets with crosses of St George, either zip-tied to lamp posts or daubed on roundabouts and pavements.

Their aim is to “reclaim their flag and country” to make a statement of national identity, and mark out the territory where they belong – and others don’t.

This, their actions suggest, is a straightforward, binary issue. You are English or not. You are part of our tribe, or must be repelled as an invader. It is a notion as simplistic as it is outmoded, which is precisely why it appeals to those struggling intellectually with the challenges and complexities of the modern world.

And that oversimplification is also directly at odds with the lived experience of many of the flag-worshippers themselves. Given that in the 21^st century, civilised nations do not set about raising armies to wage arbitrary wars against their fellow states, the aggressive tribalism associated with humanity since ancient times is more often expressed in the modern world through organised sport.

Clashes against other teams, above all those from nearby, or with which a history of animosity or intense rivalry exists, give those same flag-flyers the chance to shout and curse and spit their rage and frustration at ‘the other lot’ for an hour or so at the weekend. All objectivity and civilised discourse is shrouded in red mist for an afternoon of cosplay warfare.

Each form of tribalism – sporting and nationalistic – seemingly maps directly onto the other. In truth, the overlap is riven with contradiction and cognitive dissonance.

Let us imagine Dave, an English supporter of Liverpool FC, watching a match against fierce regional rivals Manchester United. Liverpool midfielder Alexis Mac Allister is bearing down on goal, as Man Utd defender Harry Maguire slides in a tackle to knock the ball into touch and snuff out the goalscoring opportunity. His boot clips his opponent’s ankle, and Mac Allister tumbles to the ground, right on the edge of the penalty area.

The incident could be interpreted in two ways. Did Maguire make clean contact with the ball before touching the player? Or was it a foul? And if so, was it a penalty, inside the area, or did contact take place just outside, meaning a less dangerous free kick? Should Maguire be sent off for deliberately denying a clear goal-scoring opportunity?

Or was it a perfectly fair and safe challenge, a masterfully timed tackle by the Mancunian defender?

“You filthy animal!” screams Dave. “Penalty! Red card! Cheating bloody Mancs!”

He will refuse any evidence or argument to the contrary, and rally instinctively to the cause of his tribe against their sworn enemy (though his wife, who supports Liverpool’s city rivals Everton, will see things differently).

Fast forward a couple of months, and England are playing in the World Cup.

Argentinian midfielder Alexis Mac Allister is bearing down on goal, as England defender Harry Maguire slides in a tackle to knock the ball into touch and snuff out the goalscoring opportunity. His boot clips his opponent’s ankle, and Mac Allister tumbles to the ground, right on the edge of the penalty area…

“What. A. Tackle! Harry Maguire – what a player!” screams Dave. “Penalty? You must be joking! That was a dive! Cheating bloody Argies!”

Tribal identity, even for those convinced of its importance in defining their lives, is layered. Liverpool, Merseyside, The North, England, Britain… Dave belongs to all these groups at once, but struggles to see it. He can fly only one flag at a time in his mind’s eye.

One of the main reasons for the skewed and near-sighted affinity with the English and British flags and their display lies in the fact that historically, the British establishment, in the form of public buildings such as town halls, ministries, schools, fire stations and the like, have tended not to fly any flags at all.

This comes as a surprise to visitors from most countries, where a flag pole hung with the national emblem is standard practice in such contexts. In Britain, its absence has to do not only with the inherent messiness of a country officially named The United Kingdon of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but also a combined and conflicting sense of post-colonial guilt and exceptionalist arrogance.

We don’t need to fly our flag – everyone knows who we are. And actually, maybe we shouldn’t anyway, given our past mistakes. It’s complicated…

That abandonment has allowed the concept of the flag to be appropriated by one faction, and for one purpose: exclusion.

It may now be too late to add greater balance and nuance to the use and interpretation of flags in Britain, but Spain, where I now live, offers an example of how it can be done.

Spain has a relatively recent and still partly unaddressed history of internecine conflict. Its civil war ended less than a century ago, and it is under 50 years since the ensuing Catholic-nationalist dictatorship gave way to democracy. That process of transition forced the country to address and codify the tiered connections between national, regional and local government, in a structure acknowledging the identity and significance of each.

One of the consequences in everyday life is that each administrative stratum sets its own public holidays. There are national days (the majority), such as New Year and Constitution Day, but also regional and provincial days to mark historical or religious dates of significance at that geographical level. And each municipality gets to set two days off to coincide with whatever fiesta matters to its townspeople.

That is the structure reflected in the photo above of my local town hall. Like all public buildings in the town, it displays, with equal prominence, the flag of the municipality, of the region (in this case the Comunitat Valenciana), of the country, and also of the European Union.

A recognition that one can ‘belong’ to a local and regional community, at the same time as being a citizen of a nation – for practical and emotional purposes – and also feel a sense of membership, even allegiance and gratitude, to a supranational entity and its ideals.

They are all layers of an individual’s identity and their position in the world, mutually and harmoniously inclusive. Those four flags belong to everyone here, and exemplify the understanding that our ‘tribe’ might be made up of 15,000 people in one sense, but reaches outwards to embrace 450,000,000 at the broadest tier represented by the EU’s circle of golden stars.

And by extension, there is always an implied fifth flag that we share with all humanity.

That might sound like a huge symbolic weight to suspend from the façade of a little town hall in rural Spain. But it’s what I see when I look at those flags, and wish that others could also.

I first went abroad on holiday at the age of ten, to France. Anticipating perpetual heat and sunshine, my mum bought me my first pair of flip-flops as the ideal beachside option. Not something I’d ever worn in gloomy, drizzly England, but I had my first stamp in my first passport, my first bout of sea sickness on the cross-Channel ferry — a footwear first seemed in keeping with the spirit of overseas adventure.

We were right about the heat and sunshine — like nothing I’d experienced before. Magnificent, but overwhelming. As for the suitability of the flip-flops, we couldn’t have been more wrong. The specific sequencing of my toes, with too wide a gap between ‘big’ and ‘the one that’s supposed to be right next to ‘big’, to hold the plastic thong securely in place’ meant that they slipped and slid where they should have flipped and flopped.

And every time they slipped and slid, they scraped an abrasive slurry of sand and seawater around the delicate, hitherto unexposed furrow of skin between my tootsies. I don’t recall what colour the offending flip-flops were, but my toes were most definitely red raw by day two. Replacement shoreline footwear was called for with some urgency.

A search online for “chaussures pour la plage” these days will bring up all manner of practical neoprene and rubber designs, like the ones my kids had for their beach holidays a generation later. But back in the early 80s, all the shop had to offer, except for more flip-flop toe-torturers, were rope-soled, stitched canvas, slip-on shoes in navy blue.

These, I was told, were espadrilles, a word I’d never heard before, despite it being the adopted term in English as well. I learned a lot on that holiday, such as that sardines did not necessarily live in a tin, swimming headless in tomato sauce.

And I learned to love my espadrilles. The loose fabric upper generously accommodated my overly wide feet, the tightly coiled rope sole was so utterly nautical that I felt like an extra from the Swiss Family Robinson. You could wear them at the beach. You could wear them to stroll along the promenade, like you were walking straight off your yacht. You could even wear them to the fancy seafood restaurants of La Rochelle to dine on mussels and spider crab.

They were the most versatile and complete item of cordwainery ever devised, and I was never going to wear anything else in my life!

Two weeks later, and my magnificent espadrilles faced their first encounter with the British weather. Reader, they came off second best. And the very same toes they had saved in La Belle France became collateral damage in the clash with la pluie anglaise. Soaked from above and below via the rapidly disintegrating and wholly permeable rope and canvas, my feet were left chapped and chilblained.

The espadrilles were consigned to the bin, and never thought of again.

Until I moved to Spain years later, and that first summer came across a vibrantly coloured shoe shop. Except it wasn’t just a ‘shoe shop’. It was an alpargatería. A whole establishment dedicated to the rope and canvas footwear of my first foray into mainland Europe. There were navy blue ones with white stitching, of course. But every other colour under the sun as well. They had flats and wedges, straps and laces; cheap and cheerful or posh and pricey.

I was now in the spiritual home of summer shoemaking. They weren’t by right espadrilles at all — they were alpargatas. The Spanish in fact love them so much that they are given two different words. Esparteña (or espardenya in Catalan) is cognate with the French term, and refers to the dried esparto grass widely used in basketmaking around the Mediterranean, and specifically for their rope soles.

But the standard name instead indicates more ancient and exotic origins. Most words in Spanish beginning with the prefix ‘al-’ will be from the Arabic spoken by the Moors who ruled Iberia for half a millennium from the 8th century onwards, and typically refer to novel goods that they brought with them. Such hitherto unknown household luxuries as rugs (alfombra), apricots (albaricoque) and basil (albahaca).

So these Spanish alpargatas also arrived with the Moorish colonisers. In fact the Arabic al-bargat is reckoned to be the direct descendant of the Egyptian rope sandals that were in turn adopted by the Romans. They are the unquestioned OG of Mediterranean footwear.

More than worthy of their own designated shop. I made a beeline for the traditional navy blue. A timeless design classic equally at home on a farm or at a yacht club.

And as soon as I slipped them onto my bare feet — one no more wears socks with alpargatas than with sandals — I was transported to that first foreign holiday, and to an all-embracing sense of summeriness. You might be walking down a dusty high street, but you feel like you are on the seafront at Cadaqués or Capri. Or even Cape Cod, where JFK was never without a pair on his presidential trotters.

There is something about the way the coiled and hand-stitched rope presses its imprint into your sole — into your very soul — that conveys you to a simpler time, connects you to traditions dating back millennia. Above all on the shoreline of the Mare Nostrum.

Sit anywhere on the Mediterranean coast, wrinkling your toes within the permissive confines of your alpargatas, while eating bread drizzled with olive oil and watching the fishing boats file back into harbour like a line of ducklings. You will be whisked away not merely to childhood sandcastle memories, but to the very dawn of Western civilisation.

Alpargatas are a cross between seven-league boots and a time machine. A magical device traversing continents and centuries, yet made of the most basic materials. That was the discovery my adult self belatedly made on being reunited with the beach shoes of my youth.

I wore those alpargatas all summer long. To the beach, to the bar, to the ends of the earth, determined to make the most of the feeling of fresh air and freedom they inspire. And that has been my totemic habit ever since, a reminder of the importance of making the most of every moment of free time, and switching your mind off from the stresses of life at every available opportunity.

Have alpargatas — will chill.

So now it is time once again to prepare myself mentally for the summer season on the Costa Blanca by picking up this year’s pair. It may seem like an indulgence to replace them annually, but it’s typically a necessity. Make proper use of them and they will be sea-splashed, sun-baked and rockpool-ripped to within an inch of their useful life by the time September comes around.

Which is fine — made from just cotton and esparto or jute, they are wholly biodegradable, unlike plastic flip-flops and sandals — and cost little more than a round of beachfront ice creams. I’m sure they could last beyond the summer. But only if you dosed their usage, and I just don’t want to do that. I want my feet to enjoy their warm embrace every single day until autumn comes around.

That lingering ‘adios’ to the tattered alpargatas is also a ‘sayonara’ to the subsiding summer. And a promise to resume the romance once spring is in full swing the following year.

When Spanish-speakers say the word ‘dólar’, they tend to think they are using a loanword from American English, adapted to fit in with Spanish rules of spelling and phonetics. In fact, it’s the other way around.

The original currency was the Spanish silver coin known as the dólar1, dating from the era just after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, as the newly united Spain expanded its New World empire, and plundered vast quantities of silver from the mines of Potosí in modern-day Bolivia, and elsewhere.

It was of such reliable weight and purity that it became the world’s first international currency, accepted in different countries, and serving as the standard for the original US dollar, three centuries later as the United States in turn began its ascendancy as a free nation.

And so it was the single-l Spanish version that was adapted to English by gaining an extra consonant more suited to the short first vowel. Thus the global reserve currency of future centuries first came into being.

But in truth the name wasn’t coined — so to speak — in Spain. The dólar was itself an adaptation of the Bohemian coin known in German as the Joachimsthaler (for the valley, or Thal, where the silver was mined), shortened to Thaler, which became tálero in Spanish, and then dólar.

And those dollar sign$$$$$ so beloved of avaricious cartoon ducks and bling-festooned rappers?

They’re Spanish as well. Observe the Pillars of Hercules on the reverse of this dólar minted in the reign of Emperor Charles III, draped in sashes proclaiming the royal motto of ‘Plus Ultra’, in other words ‘that stuff out there beyond the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, is mine’.

That is where the vertical bar with a snakey ‘S’ around it comes from, which otherwise would make little sense, given that there’s no ‘s’ in ‘dollar’.

Spain, meanwhile, before switching to the euro along with all the civilised parts of the continent (just kidding), had pesetas rather than táleros, dólares, reales de a ocho or anything else.

A word which might strike students of Spanish as slightly strange. If Mexico and other Latin American countries have pesos (‘weights’), and the Spanish currency is presumably a diminutive of that, you’d expect it to be a ‘pesito’, with an ‘i’ and an ‘o’, not a ‘peseta’.

It’s the wrong suffix. Because it isn’t Spanish at all.

The peseta is a term of Catalan origin, from peceta, the diminutive of peça, or ‘piece’. A small coin first minted in Barcelona in the early 19th century, which then became the currency of the whole of Spain in 1868, right up until it was succeeded in 2002 by the euro.

Which is ultimately named after the Phoenician princess Europa, carried off by Zeus to the Greek island of Crete. All as jumbled up and cosmopolitan as the booty in a pirate’s treasure chest.

Cake is what Marie Antoinette is best known for. That and being guillotined in the French Revolution. But maybe the guillotining would never have happened if it weren’t for the alleged cake incident.

For those unfamiliar with the bakery-related brouhaha of revolutionary France, the story goes that on being told that the common people were starving and had no bread to eat, she sarcastically replied, “Then let them eat cake!”, thus cementing her reputation as a heartless despot, and enraging popular sentiment.

“Heads must roll!” the common folk cried out. And roll they did.

There are a few problems with this legendary snippet of history, however. First of all, she almost certainly never said those words. The phrase originated some years later in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions, ascribed to an unnamed ‘princess’, not specifically Marie Antoinette, nor in the context of the Revolution.

The Queen Consort, though, was an unpopular figure, and it was easy in the post-event mythologising of the 1789 Revolution and the execution of the French monarchs in 1792, to ascribe the words to her. It was just the kind of thing a horrid, arrogant, out-of-touch aristocrat would have said, and so it became the accepted truth.

The other issue with the famous quote, aside from its misattribution, is that it in fact makes no mention of cake.

The line pilfered from Rousseau and shoved into Marie Antoinette’s cakehole was, in the original French,

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!”

Now, brioche is made by bakers, and is sweeter than bread. You might even have a slice with your afternoon tea or coffee. But it is not cake.

The problem is that it is very specifically French, and not something other cultures were familiar with until it became trendy for upmarket burger buns a couple of years ago. There’s a reason why we have no word for it in English.

Bread is universal. Directly translatable and understandable in almost any language of the world. But what do you do with brioche? You turn it into what seems to be the closest cultural equivalent, because you’re translating a snappy, impactful, potentially epoch-changing phrase. There’s no room for asterisks and footnotes and explanatory asides.

Cake it is, then.

But that in itself changes the meaning quite significantly, doesn’t it? Cake, being sweeter, fancier, far less of an everyday comestible than brioche (in France, at least), makes Marie Antoinette seem even more distant and insouciant. She ends up getting a worse deal in English (and other languages — the standard version in Spanish is similarly “¡Que coman pasteles!”) than in her native French.

Except that it wasn’t ‘her native French’, and she wasn’t really called Marie Antoinette: Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna was born into the Austrian royal family.

To add to the injustice — though perhaps this is a minor consideration when you’re on your way to a final rendezvous with Madame La Guillotine — the lost-in-translation reference to ‘brioche’ could in fact imply the very opposite of the haughty disdain implied by “Let them eat cake”.

Back in 18th-century France, the law was that any baker who had no regular bread left at the government-set price must sell the more expensive brioche for the same price, to dissuade bakers from deliberately making less of the potentially loss-making baguettes, and using their flour for more profitable products, denying the working class access to their dietary staple.

If Marie Antoinette had in fact said “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, she might have meant “Make the bakers give them brioche for the same price”, as a way of alleviating their hunger and poverty.

TL;DR — the French queen Marie Antoinette, who wasn’t French or called Marie Antoinette, never said the words she is most famous for, suggesting that the French people should eat cake, which wasn’t cake, and even if she had, it would probably have been helpful rather than hurtful.

Other than that, the story’s completely true. Maybe.

Is it too much to suggest that it is the mistranslation, the substantial implications added to and removed from the original phrase, that lie behind Marie Antoinette’s place in history, and her role as the villain of the piece, rather than her husband Louis XVI?

John the Baptist’s selfless fervour, for example, is heightened by the fact that we know he was prepared to live in the wilderness eating locusts. Saintly devotion indeed!

Except they weren’t locusts at all, but the ‘fruit of the locust tree’, another name for carob, the aromatic seed pods used to make the pretend chocolate for doggie treats. A slight simplification or misunderstanding by an Elizabethan scholar, and all of a sudden John is much more of a heroic survivalist.

One of the problems with translating foods is that they are such familiar and specific aspects of our individual cultures. We may all eat cake, but what it means to us and how we envisage it changes radically from one culture to the next.

And never are cakes so stuffed with significance as during the upcoming festive season. Yule logs, panettones (which should be panettoni), Stollen, the roscón de Reyes where I now live in Spain… For me, though, the true king remains the traditional centrepiece of the dinner table in my native Britain: doused in flaming brandy, topped with white sauce, rotund protagonist of countless greetings cards: the Christmas pudding.

Another challenge for the translator. Pudin actually exists in Spanish, but is a completely different beast — eggy and made from leftover bread (or brioche, I suppose…), so pudin de Navidad would give a rather misleading impression.

The French — not noted for their enthusiastic borrowings from British cuisine — also use the term pudding for the same bready dessert. A boudin, meanwhile, is a blood sausage. Right colour, wrong concept altogether. An English black pudding would be the equivalent. But that’s the other, savoury meaning of pudding.

It would be tempting just to go down the Marie Antoinette route and call it a cake. But that would be laden with misconceptions as well, as my Anglo-Hispano-Cuban family discovered a few years ago.

My wife had really enjoyed the Christmas pudding we had when spending the festive season back in Britain, and the next year, as my parents were coming out to Spain, asked my mum to bring one of those lovely ‘Christmas cakes’ out.

“No problem,” came the reply. “I’ll make one specially.”

She had understood exactly what was required, or so she believed. Except that a Christmas cake is a completely different beast altogether: a fruit cake, covered with icing and served cold.

It was duly unveiled on Christmas Day, to confusion and consternation all round. No heads rolled, though I think it was decided in the end that it was all my fault as the family’s official interpreter for not having checked that everyone was on the same page of the festive recipe book.

The set piece equivalent here in Spain doesn’t make its grand entrance until January 6th, in the Southern European tradition. Sticklers for religious observance — if only once a year — Spaniards and Italians wait for their presents until the Three Kings have actually made their belated arrival. They turned up late, remember, a few days after the nativity itself, and so the main event is held back in their honour, and rounded off in these parts with the Roscón de Reyes.

So what is a roscón? Well, it’s a big rosca (‘-ón’ is the standard augmentative suffix in Spanish), so a big ‘ring’ or ‘twist’ literally. It looks like a giant doughnut, split and stuffed with cream or confectioner’s custard, garishly garnished with bright red and green candied peel, and concealing within a figurine of a king (good luck — you get to wear the special paper crown!) and a dried bean (bad luck — you have to pay for next year’s feast!).

A whole event within an event, that is instantly conjured up in the mind of any Spaniard just by that one word: roscón.

So how would you set about translating that?

Shall we just call it a cake? Wikipedia reckons so: ‘King Cake’, it says. Does that mean anything to you? It doesn’t to me. I’d be more inclined to call it an Epiphany Cake.

But then who celebrates Epiphany in the English-speaking world, or even knows what it means? We all sing the Twelve Days of Christmas with the lords-a-leaping, without thinking much about when they leapt. Or why. Or what kind of cake/pudding they ate after their partridge and French hens.

Translating a piece of cake, it seems, is anything but a piece of cake.

Maybe this year I’ll eat brioche instead.

The stage manager peeks through a gap in the curtains to survey tonight’s audience.

‘¡Bah!’ they mutter in annoyance, ‘Solo hay cuatro gatos.’

‘There are just four cats’. Not literally, of course. What they mean is that ‘there are very few people, and quite possibly not enough to make a go of it’. The absolute number doesn’t matter — it’s a relative thing. In a very small neighbourhood theatre it might literally be four. If a million people vote in a referendum out of a population of eight million, they might also be ‘just four cats’.

So the four is simply ‘a small number’, similar to ‘just a couple of’ in English, which again doesn’t mean two, but ‘really not very many at all’. In Spanish, though, it has to be combined, or collocated in linguistic terms, with ‘gatos’.

Why cats?

For the answer to that, as with much else of Spain’s language and symbolism, we have to go back a thousand years to the days of the Reconquest, the process lasting a staggering seven and a half centuries during which the tiny Christian holdout of King Pelayo in the northern region of Asturias gradually spread across the whole peninsula, driving out the Moors who had taken over Hispania from the Visigoths who had in turn succeeded the Romans.

And specifically go back to 1085, when King Alfonso VI of Castile was laying siege to Madrid. Not the capital, or even a major city, back then, but Moorish Maǧrīţ was a strategic location worth capturing. The problem lay in its fortifications: a wall measuring twelve metres in height.

An agile young soldier from Alfonso’s army, so the legend goes, was given the task of scaling the ramparts to secure a rope and allow the rest of the troops to sneak inside.

‘See how he climbs with such skill! Like a cat!’ the impressed Alfonso cried out. The wall was scaled, the rope secured, and the town was taken. And ever since, true-born citizens of Madrid have been affectionately known as ‘gatos’.

But why just four of them, if Madrid is the biggest city in Spain, the country’s political nerve centre since 1562 (with certain interruptions), and the second most populous in the EU, after Berlin? The answer to that lies specifically in its status as capital.

To be a true ‘gato’, they say, you must be able to trace your family tree back four generations, all born within the city boundaries. And given the constant influx of people from all round the country and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, there are very few who can claim such heritage.

Head out onto the Gran Vía or Plaza del Sol in Madrid, and among the thronging crowd you will be lucky to find even four whose great-grandparents were born there.

Sólo hay cuatro gatos.

Surprisingly, for an expression so firmly rooted in the history of Madrid and Castile, the four cats are more globally familiar these days in the Catalan form of ‘quatre gats’, and with reference to that region’s capital of Barcelona.

And for the reason why Els Quatre Gats are now more famous than Madrid’s ‘cuatro gatos’, we need to turn to one of the city’s most distinguished figures, the architect Antoni Gaudí, and Spain’s most universal artist: Pablo Picasso.

At the start of the 20th century, when Barcelona was home to a burgeoning artistic and literary movement, local restaurateur Pere Romeu wanted to set up a venue that would provide a meeting point and watering hole for the bohemian crowd of writers, painters and aesthetes. His model for the venture was the Parisian cabaret Le Chat Noir, the black cat.

A lonely, mysterious symbol of the shadowy demimonde, which Romeu chose to reflect in the name Els Quatre Gats. A place for the minority outsiders, not the mass of the bourgeoisie. It soon became the focal point for precisely the arty set he had hoped to attract, spawning its own avant-garde magazine of the same name and providing the venue for the young Picasso’s first individual exhibition, in February 1900.

While Picasso is linked to many different places around Europe, from his native Malaga to Paris to Antibes, Gaudí is very much synonymous with Barcelona, and his links to the bar have secured its place on the tourist trail. Several scenes of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona were also filmed there.

If you step through the door today, you will likely find it not struggling to pull in a few patrons, but packed with a mix of locals and sightseers.

The cuatro gatos have come a long way since that lonely, dizzying, death-defying climb up the city walls of Madrid a thousand years ago.

From the Río Grande down to Tierra del Fuego, pretty much all of the continental mainland speaks Spanish. With one massive exception — the largest country of them all, home to a third of the entire population of Latin America: Brazil.

Why is that?

The obvious assumption would just be that when the European maritime powers set off exploring the globe for new conquests and trading opportunities in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal happened to establish the first colony there, while Spain land-grabbed all the rest.

The historical reality, though, is rather more complex and surprising, and was ultimately decided in a small town near Valladolid, and the papal palace in Rome.

The origins of the story lie over a decade before Columbus had even set sail on his voyage of discovery. Spain and Portugal were the two major maritime rivals of the day, and had been at war over claims to each other’s thrones and territories. They made their peace in the Treaty of Alcáçovas, agreeing that Portugal would retain the Azores and Madeira, Spain would have the Canaries, and Portugal would have the right to everything further south in the Atlantic.

What no one knew at the time was that twelve years later, Columbus would make landfall on the Bahamian island that he named San Salvador — and which turned out to be south of the Canaries.

“Aha!” shouted King John II of Portugal. “That means it’s mine!” (Despite the fact that John had initially refused to back Columbus’ voyage, which was why he was sailing under the Spanish flag anyway.)

“No fair!” screamed back Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. “The treaty was all about the coast and islands of Africa. This changes everything — we need a new treaty.”

As the loyal, God-fearing Catholics they were, they referred the dispute to Pope Alexander VI in Rome. Who just happened to be Spanish. He decreed by papal bull that Spain should have all land beyond a line 100 leagues west of the Azores, while Portugal was entitled to any discoveries to the east, in other words along the coast of Africa.

The Portuguese were rather miffed at this settlement, even though their main interest lay in Africa and the eastward route via the Cape of Good Hope. But they moaned and threatened enough to renegotiate the deal, pushing the dividing line another 200 leagues westwards to claim a larger chunk of the Atlantic just in case, and that was the agreement signed in the Treaty of Tordesillas, now a largely forgotten village of under 10,000 people in rural Castile.

All the lands discovered in the New World up to this point had been far to the west of the 300-league boundary, so the distribution seemed to clearly mean ‘America for Spain, Africa for Portugal’. And nothing at all for the people who actually lived there, of course, except for disease, enslavement and despoliation.

John II, though, had an ace up his scheming royal sleeve. Five years after the ink had dried on the territorial treaty, the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral just happened to be pushed a little off course and ended up making landfall in what is now Brazil. Which bulged so far eastwards from South America as to lie on Portugal’s side.

“Gotcha!” cried King John II in triumph. “I’ll have this bit, thank you very much.”

The strong suspicion among historians is that John and his navigators already knew of — or at least suspected — the existence of the landmass of South America, and deliberately renegotiated the terms of the original papal decree to make sure they could lay claim to what proved to be the hugely profitable resources of Amazonia. The name Brazil in fact comes from the Portuguese term for the pau-brasil tree so plentiful there, a valuable source of timber and red dye.

From their coastal enclave, the Portuguese then pressed further and further inland to establish their most important colony, and what remains the largest Latin American country.

We will never know whether it was chance, or cunning on the part of the Portuguese navigators and negotiators, that allowed them to turn the tables on Spain in the race for transatlantic colonial expansion.

But that is the story of why Brazil is Brazil, and why the country speaks Portuguese, instead of Spanish.

It’s quite unusual to find inspiration in the corporate blurb on the back of a yogurt pot. But La Fageda yogurts are nothing if not unusual.

They taste a little creamier and richer than the less fancy alternative sitting alongside in the supermarket chiller cabinet. They cost a fair bit more. But it is the reason behind those minor differences that goes to the heart of what our world so often gets wrong, and what we could so easily put right by following such examples.

So what is La Fageda?

It’s a successful but relatively small-scale dairy farm and yogurt factory in the grassy mountains of inland Catalonia. It’s a social enterprise founded to provide work for people with mental disorders and intellectual disabilities. It’s a minor miracle.

Beginnings

The whole venture was started in 1982 by the clinical psychologist Cristóbal Colón. He had tried occupational therapy with his hospitalised patients, but was frustrated at the lack of purpose to these handicraft projects.

“I realised that it didn’t have the same meaning as a real job. And that was the sense that the patients had as well: this isn’t real. And so I came to the conclusion that we had to set up an enterprise where ‘I, with my intellectual disability or mental disorder, am a fellow stakeholder. Taking on responsibilities, rights and duties’.”

This became possible with Spain’s Law 13/1982 on the Social Integration of the Disabled. The new legislation decreed that all companies with a workforce over 50 had to set aside 2% of jobs for workers with a disability or subcontract the proportional value from a ‘Special Employment Centre’ which provided job opportunities for this segment of the population. The public funding available for such outsourced workshops allowed La Fageda to be established.

Although as their website proclaims, for every euro in subsidies they now receive, they put nine euros back into the public coffers through taxes and other contributions.

After two years of outsourced processing tasks, the opportunity arose to buy the Mas El Casals dairy farm in the La Fageda district of Catalonia, and the brand which still thrives today was born.

They didn’t start out making yogurts, though. Initially, the milk was simply sold to the multinational behemoth Nestlé, until a crisis in the dairy industry collapsed prices and threatened to destroy their business. The only way to survive was to add value to their product — by making premium desserts.

Which is how a psychologist from Zaragoza ended up becoming a Catalan yogurt-maker, in what he always describes as a ‘crazy venture’.

“If we’d known back then the slightest thing about the business world, we wouldn’t even have tried — La Fageda was a lunatic idea. We did it because we didn’t even realise it was impossible.”

It wasn’t impossible, though, as it turned out. With vision, determination, charisma, and a lot of knocking on doors at public institutions and supermarket chains, not taking ‘no’ for an answer, La Fageda was able to compete with such giant conglomerates as Danone and Nestlé. Despite, or because of, being a small, local venture.

“The big multinationals have it all: the money, the technology, beautiful models to pose with their products on TV… Everything except cows. They don’t have a single cow.

But cows are one of the few things we have at La Fageda. We’re farmers. We look after our cows and make healthy, traditional, delicious yogurt.”

And they also look after their 350 employees, who have a stake in a successful and hugely respected brand and have meaning, support and stability in their lives.

The whole story goes to show what can be achieved through an innovative, daring vision, combined with the ability to seize opportunities, learn from missteps, change course, and grow in strength. These are traditionally seen as the inherent talents of go-getting entrepreneurship.

But they can equally be applied to not fleecing your fellow humans for a quick buck, and nurturing them instead. Inspiration in a yogurt pot.

There are several aspects of the way La Fageda is set up that seem to be fundamental to its success as a cohesive entity. They all serve in psychological terms as the vital planks of the framework that its members need because of their particular personal and social challenges.

But these are also values that we all need in our social and professional lives. The points that should be the priorities for every organisation and government, of any size, above all in a society of ever-increasing fragmentation, isolation, confusion, and uncertainty.

Purpose

This is where the whole initiative begins. The need to feel there is a meaning to what we do, not simply making paper doilies that will adorn no mantelpiece, be sold at no craft fair. But in the era of bullshit jobs, how many of us feel our employment is genuinely ‘gainful’?

How many millions of cold-callers does it take to persuade us to switch our brand of lightbulb, then switch it back again with a 10% introductory offer if we sign up by the end of the month?

Rootedness

La Fageda is all about the town and region where it was founded. It is a genuine corporate citizen of Olot, La Garrotxa, and Catalonia, relying on that sense of tradition and sincerity as a brand. This generates the trust and affection it enjoys, allowing it to charge shoppers a little more, and to be first choice when restocking school canteens.

Something that a conventional, growth-at-all-costs business would have forsaken by now. Expanding abroad, relocating its corporate HQ to a state with lower tax rates. Once you do that, you lose your identity, your soul. And if an organisation doesn’t know where it comes from, can it know where it’s going, or convince anyone to stick with it on the journey?

Small is beautiful, as E.F. Schumacher wrote 50 years ago.

Ownership

La Fageda was set up as a cooperative. Because of changes to its structure and the specifics of Spanish cooperative legislation, most operations have since been transferred to a foundation, but this point remains essential. The workers have a direct and genuine stake in the organisation. Not a stock option carrot, but a lifelong sense of engagement.

How much better would any employer feel to its workers if it shifted from corporate to cooperative? Given how much better cooperatives are at protecting employment in economic downturns, and reinvesting locally, shouldn’t governments be actively facilitating that shift, through taxation and procurement policy?

Belonging

This is the hardest sense of all to bring about. In the case of La Fageda, its members will inevitably tend to feel they are part of a family that they depend on and are bonded to. They know the meaning of panicked isolation, a door slammed in their face.

I think all of us, if we unplugged our headphones and snapped out of the debilitating individualism that modern corporations and governments are so keen to instil, could be coaxed by the previous three factors into slipping back into the warm, comfy coat of community.

Anyone wishing to learn a little more about the history and daily reality of the project could do worse than watch the video about La Fageda, with subtitles in English, released in 2019 when the project won the Arbinger Institute’s ‘Turn the World Outward’ award.

A corporate promo film about how an organisation values its people, is socially committed and environmentally responsible, but that isn’t complete bullshit?

It doesn’t get much more unusual than that.

References

Most of the direct quotes, facts and figures in this article are sourced from the official La Fageda website and this study of the enterprise by the IESE business school.

Full disclosure before we kick off: I don’t actually have a ‘food miles budget’ as such. I just try to limit myself as far as I can to stuff that has been grown as locally as possible. And secondly, I should also own up to the privilege of living in Spain, which obviously makes the first part a damned sight easier. Fruit and veg, wine and olive oil, even rice and pasta can all be sourced from within a couple of hundred kilometres. Or in the case of a lot of stuff at the local market, a few kilometres.

Yes, I’m lucky in that respect. But it’s also a conscious decision that I took. Not in the sense of ‘I must live in a country where my food import mileage will be minimised — let me open a spreadsheet’, but rather ‘I want to live in a country where food and drink are seen as the very bedrock of family and society, and where the sun shines brightly’. The sustainability and food security are an inevitable consequence of those two factors.

So far so good. I can get pretty much all my food shopping without needing to look at the label, because I know it’s come from a local or at least domestic supplier. Sometimes that means waiting until it’s in season. I don’t buy tomatoes from November to April, not so much because I don’t approve of them being forced in polytunnels or imported by truck from Dutch industrial greenhouses, but because they taste appalling. Once you’ve eaten local, seasonal, sun-ripened tomatoes from the Mediterranean basin, there’s no going back.

My tastebuds still recall the first real tomato I ever ate, 37 years ago in Turkey.

Avocados grow here too, I was slightly surprised to discover, and I know a couple of people in the village who sell the produce from their little family plot. You might buy them when they’re still hard as bullets, and imagine they would simply rot to black mush within their skins before ever ripening, as a supermarket avo would. But having been picked by hand and never seen so much as a packing crate, never mind the back of a truck or hold of an aeroplane, you can just leave them be, and in a couple of weeks they’ll be just perfect. Enjoy them while you can — a couple of months and they’ll be off the menu till next year.

With enough patience and forward planning I don’t need to buy any imported food, in truth. But every now and then I get a craving for some particular taste that makes me feel it’s worth breaking my vows.

These are my personal weaknesses:

Cheese

Don’t get me wrong. Spain makes some great cheeses, and mostly they will do me just fine. If I’m supermarket shopping, Flor de Esgueva matured ewe’s milk would be my go-to. Cabrales is an outstanding blue well worth looking for if you’ve never tried it. But my motto is ‘give me cheese or give me death’ (I suspect from my rising cholesterol count it might turn out to be (c) Both the above…). And sometimes I just feel myself being tugged off the straight and narrow by these particular culprits:

Feta

I’m an absolute sucker for this. On its own, or ideally in a salad when the tomatoes are in season. Yes, I could get a Spanish-produced ersatz product that, thanks to European PDO protection, will simply be billed as ‘salad cheese’ in a cheesy (appropriately enough) Greek-style font with the Es erroneously swapped for uppercase sigmas. But as I once read in a memorable comment by a Greek-based expat:

‘that fake feta they churn out in factories abroad has the taste and texture of congealed Dulux emulsion’.

Aside from the taste, there is also the ethical factor. I’ve found myself buying feta more often since the global financial crisis, when the Greek economy had the thumbscrews so viciously applied by the troika of the EC, ECB and IMF. I feel I should do my bit to support the cheesemakers and culinary culture of a fellow European nation. Sometimes that seems to matter more than just the figures on a putative food miles spreadsheet.

Cheddar

A tangy, crumbly, crystal-crunchy farmhouse cheddar is truly special. I can get a pretty decent Barber’s at a small supermarket that specialises in foods for the various expat communities round here, which is quite an eye-opener in itself, with all manner of exotica brought in for the good burghers of Scandinavia, Benelux and Germany in particular. Plus Colman’s mustard and cans of John Smith’s for the Brits.

But again, here I find politics shapes my choices, and since Brexit I tend to go for an inferior but decent enough Irish cheddar, out of a sense of European solidarity. The Mercadona supermarket chain is still stocking an English farmhouse cheddar carrying the EU PDO mark with the yellow stars, fully nine years after the country decided to tear up its membership card. How the hell does that work? Irish cheddar it is, then.

Gorgonzola

The last of my creamery triumvirate. Which to be honest I tend to use in cooking, melted onto or into something, be that gnocchi, pasta, risotto, some puff pastry creation. So it shouldn’t really matter so very much that it’s actually gorgonzola from actual Gorgonzola, should it? Yet nothing else seems to offer the same creamy unctuousness, the balance between smooth and sharp. Once in a blue-veined moon, it simply has to be gorgonzola.

Which by association leads me on to the most perplexing and infuriating item on the list:

Walnuts

There is literally a walnut tree in the overgrown garden of an abandoned house four doors down the road from me. Walnuts are cultivated in Spain, in this very region, even. 17,000 tonnes of them every year. Which works out at something like 1.5 billion walnuts. But where the hell are they? Every time I shop for walnuts, it turns out they’re from California. Whose former governor was coincidentally described by the late Clive James as having arms like condoms stuffed with walnuts.

Maybe that’s it. The Californians have Terminated the opposition and cornered the global market. I’m sure I could track down Spanish walnuts if I dedicated enough time and effort, but I have thus far largely failed in the endeavour. Which is a shame, as I love them. Even if they have to come all the way from Arnie’s condom.

And last, but by no means least, on my list of smuggled stowaways, my desert island luxuries:

Whisky

No ‘e’ for me. Scotch. A salty, smoky Talisker ideally. I could kid myself that this too is born of a desire to stick two fingers up at the Leave voters and support one of Scotland’s iconic export industries come what may. But the fact is that there is simply nothing to match the peaty burn of a single malt, on a winter’s evening with a few logs crackling in the hearth and the wind whistling round the chimney pot. A Christmas treat from me to me. Flown in Santa’s sleigh (reindeer propulsion is carbon-free, right?) a thousand miles from the land of the Proclaimers.

And hey, they even have an ocean conservation scheme to assuage some of my guilt. Besides, the premier Spanish whisky brand goes by the name of DYC, pronounced ‘dick’. I think I’ll stick to what I know, thanks very much.

Those are my guilty food mile pleasures, then. What tempts you to break the ecological bank?

As anyone from Valencia will tell you, especially the many cafés and companies serving and producing the region’s signature beverage, horchata (orxata in the local language, Valencian) has a colourful etymology. Legend has it that on arriving in the region on his crusade of reconquest against the Moors, King Jaume I of Aragon was served a chilled and nourishing glass of the local drink by a young peasant woman, to revive him after his arduous journey on horseback.

Delighted by the sweet, creamy, refreshing brew, he enthusiastically proclaimed in his native Catalan (which his troops incidentally brought to the region to evolve into modern-day Valencian):

¡Això es or, xata! (That is pure gold, my girl!)

And the drink was thus royally baptised.

It’s a nice story, which unfortunately lacks any basis in historical fact. The mundane truth is that it is derived from the Latin hordeata, or barley milk, and shares its name in other Spanish-speaking countries and regions with a variety of alternatives made from other grains and nuts: almond horchata from Murcia and Almeria further south, rice horchata from Mexico and Central America, sesame seed and coconut versions…

But horchata de chufa, to give it its full name, is made from the tubers of Cyperus esculentus, a plant first introduced to Spain, like so many other features of the country’s agriculture, language and architecture, during the centuries of Moorish occupation prior to the reconquest by Jaume I, Ferdinand and Isabella, Charlton Heston and all the rest of them.

And if you say ‘horchata’ in Spain these days, everyone knows you mean ‘horchata de chufa’, and everyone knows that the good stuff comes from Valencia, or more specifically the little town of Alboraya that sits on the regional capital’s northern border, just a stone’s throw away across the ring road.

What is Cyperus esculentus, then, and how does it get transformed into this wonderful drink? (Which for many years was my go-to hangover cure, after I discovered its restorative properties many miles away in Seville — it is very much a national phenomenon.) Chufa in Spanish, xufa or xufla in Valencian and Catalan, it goes by the more exotic name of tiger nut in English, and so could potentially be the origin of the Belle and Sebastian album title Tigermilk.

It is grown extensively in the market gardens around Valencia, which are themselves an astonishing sight — acre upon acre of agricultural land, criss-crossed by an elaborate system of irrigation channels dating back to the Moorish era, with sluice gates controlling the flow to different sectors on different days, and even their own ancient arbitration system to settle water disputes. The Tribunal de les Aigües de Valencia, or Valencia Water Tribunal has met every Thursday since medieval times, and has UNESCO World Heritage status.

And that water is used to grow pumpkins, courgettes, aubergines, artichokes, tomatoes, cardoons, chard… but above all chufa. It’s not much to look at, resembling a tallish grass or small reed, in rows neatly laid out on small plots still occasionally tilled by horse-drawn ploughs, within sight of a bustling, modern metropolis of a million people. This is living culinary and agricultural heritage in its purest form.

The tubers are harvested in the month before Christmas, washed and soaked, crushed and pressed, mixed with water and sugar, and the horchata is ready to be enjoyed. Cafés in the region will often specialise in the drink, and are known as horchaterías. You can have your horchata líquida (just the straight tiger nut milk), granizada (as an icy slush — watch out for freezehead!), or mixta (half and half, which in my time in Alboraya was very much the first choice of the locals).

And don’t forget to order some fartons (stop sniggering at the back of the class). A long, thin, sugar-glazed sponge cake, specifically invented in Alboraya by the Polo bakery back in the 1960s to be dunked into the tall glasses that horchata is traditionally served in, and still made there to this day in a little factory surrounded by chufa fields.

Horchata itself is a wonderful enough drink at any time of the year, and above all in summer in granizada or mixta format. But there is something about the whole enduring tradition surrounding it that makes for an even more special experience in my eyes.

It really is pure gold, whatever the dry etymologists might try to tell you.

The town where I live in Spain is a pretty quiet backwater, which makes it something of an oddity for the area.

Just five miles down the road is Benidorm, the country’s first and brashest megaresort city, packed in the summer with half a million riotous seekers of sun, sea, sand, sangría and a spot of et cetera if they get lucky.

Five miles the other way is the village of Altea, quintessentially cobbled and quaint, with its whitewashed walls and bijou boutiques. An unmissable fixture on countless bus tours and day trips for a more genteel type of tourist.

Alicante airport is 40 minutes away. Spain’s fifth busiest, handling 15 million passengers a year, most of them holidaymakers. Very few of them make it to my adopted hometown, and I get the impression that suits the locals just fine.

As the summer season gets into full swing, there are almost nightly reports on the TV news about anti-tourism campaigns and protests in Barcelona, Málaga, the Canary Islands. Horror stories from Ibiza about waiters and lifeguards sleeping six to a rented room, or on the backseat of their cars, because the tourists they are there to service have priced them out of the housing market.

All the golden eggs have been placed in one basket — tourism provides an eye-watering 84% of Ibiza’s GDP — and the wickerwork is creaking.

“There, but for the grace of God, go we,” thinks much of the rest of Spain.

Even without such dire warnings from the hotspots that have simmered over into dysfunction, it’s hard to imagine such numbers ever swarming to my neck of the woods. We don’t have a beach, for starters. Those five miles that separate us from the golden sand of Benidorm and picturesque pebbles of Altea, may as well be five hundred. We are not, as the Spanish real estate phrase has it, en primera línea.

La Nucía might be expected to remain quiet for some years to come.

Except ‘quiet’ isn’t really the right word, at least not in summer. Once the warm weather makes all-night outdoor revelry a viable option, the fiesta season begins.

Any excuse, saintly or profane, is enough for the local penyes, or neighbourhood groupings, to pull some chairs onto the street outside their clubhouses in the old town, set up an impromptu bar serving beer and, er, more beer, and make merry until the early hours.

Quite aside from the fact that the church bell strikes every hour all through the night. And every quarter, half and three-quarters. In Benidorm, they have signs asking tourists to keep the noise down so as not to wake the locals. Here in La Nucía it would be the other way around.

For as long as such a racket was tolerated, anyway. And I wonder how long that would be.

Inthe neighbouring town, Alfaz del Pi, a smidgeon closer to the coast, and with a strip of land that actually stretches down to the beach, there are a couple of boutique hotels near the church. Their bells used to chime from dusk till dawn as well. No longer.

The tyranny of Tripadvisor has seemingly taken hold.

“Lovely town, great hotel — but we couldn’t sleep a wink!! Bloody church bells ringing all bloody night!!!! Do NOT stay here !!!!!! 1/5”

It only takes a few of those negative reviews and comments to nibble away at the bottom line of the municipal economy before action is taken. The local priest can threaten the mayor with excommunication for all he likes. But the church doesn’t pay business taxes.

First the church bells fall silent. Then the local fiestas are discreetly relocated from the streets of the old town to a scrap of scrubland on the outskirts. The prettified pensiones and cutesy cafeterías proliferate, the tills ring with a resounding ker-ching, and everyone’s happy.

Right?

After all, we’re not going to see the kind of rampant overdevelopment that happened in the 1970s on the Costas and the Islas, and that is now slowly throttling the goose that laid the golden egg, crowding out both visitors and seasonal staff.

But Spain’s tourist appeal doesn’t lie solely in its endless beaches and seafront promenades. The country is also home to 50 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, more than all the historic temples of Greece and Japan combined.

Again, they might not seem to be threatened by the more subtle cultural encroachment I foresee in my vicinity. No one’s going to knock down an aqueduct or amphitheatre to put up a parking lot with a pink hotel and a swinging hot spot, whatever Joni Mitchell may warn. That’s what UNESCO listed status is for in the first place.

Heritage, though, is not fossilised in stones alone. UNESCO has also for the last 16 years drawn up yearly lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage, with 25 entries for Spain already, including fiestas, drumming and even bell-ringing. Sure, there’s nothing in La Nucía or Alfaz del Pi that would make it onto those lists. But the premier events cannot exist without the grassroots.

No fiesta is an island, entire of itself — each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main, as John Donne might have written, had he run the bulls at Pamplona with Hemingway.

Without the spirit that beats at the heart of every single Spanish village, the dedicated preparations for their local saint’s day, the commemoration of some ancient battle of independence, the lifeblood of such famed spectacles as the Cádiz Carnival or Las Fallas in Valencia ebbs away.

People have to believe that these cyclical celebrations and their associated cultural trappings matter. That they matter more than any tourists who might pop into town to observe for a moment, snap a selfie and depart. And more than any money those tourists might or might not leave behind in their whistlestop wake.

Without that sense of pre-eminence on the local calendar, they become neutered, Disneyfied. And die.

Sowhat lies in wait in my adopted hometown? A few houses in the old town have been converted into holiday lets in the last couple of years. The property next door to me is being done up, and the builders are oddly cagey — in what is a very gossip-driven little community — about who is going to live there.

I suspect it may also be intended for the incipient tourist market. If so, the paying guests will get a rude awakening from the church bells. Every bloody fifteen minutes.

For the moment, the mayor is a big supporter of village tradition. He’s always out there, pressing the flesh, knocking back a few beers, plausibly playing the ‘jovial man of the people’ role every time a festivity comes around.

But he’s also ambitious, for himself and for the town. We already have a massive sports centre which has hosted national athletics championships, a temporarily homeless first division football club, and training camps for England’s international team.

Now they are building an outdoor artificial surfing pool, the only of its kind in the country. That sure as hell isn’t meant just for the resident population of under 20,000.

And the mayor, his family and friends own plenty of land around town. They have a vested interest in the economic success of whatever development happens. Success which is unlikely to be enhanced by a series of bad reviews, complaints and demands for refunds because the visitors were kept awake by live music until 6 a.m. Followed two hours later by firecrackers being let off in the street for the Despertà, marking the start of the next day’s revelry.

Something’s gotta give once the next phase of the town’s makeover is complete. And I believe the bells will go the way of Alfaz del Pi down the road, followed shortly after by the fiestas in the old town.

In one way, I’d be delighted not to have to check the festive calendar to know which weekends in spring and summer I will actually be able to get more than an hour or two of shuteye.

But I also appreciate that as an outsider, it’s my choice to be here, and my responsibility to adapt. I have that long-term commitment to this community, and am prepared to live with the disrupted sleep and bleary eyes, for the sake of maintaining the cultural heritage that makes this country the place I loved enough to settle down in after a decade of nomadic wanderings.

No, it’s not going to become Benidorm or Ibiza overnight, or even in a decade. But the insidious chipping away at tradition for the convenience of capricious fair-weather tourists still represents a creeping danger, and one that will more easily go unnoticed until it’s too late.

The closing scene of Marek Kanievska’s Another Country: a heavily made-up and talcum-haired Rupert Everett plays fictional British defector Guy Bennett, spending his final days in a cramped apartment in Soviet-era Moscow. He can never return to the forsaken sceptred isle of his birth.

Is there nothing, the US journalist interviewing him asks, that he misses about England? He hesitates, reflects, turns to her and croaks the answer: “I… I miss the cricket.”

When I first saw the film as a teenager, back in 1984, I already knew that I, too, would end up abandoning my homeland. Even then, I anticipated myself, as in Max Beerbohm’s cartoon of Lord Byron, “shaking the dust of England from my shoes”. But I would, I imagined, also “miss the cricket”.

The first part of my prediction came to pass quite straightforwardly. I studied Modern Languages, moved to Spain, and that was that (albeit with Germany, Venezuela, Italy and Japan as staging posts along the way).

The second element — the cricket — followed a rather different trajectory. But why should I have expected it to accompany me at all? What gives the sport such a talismanic spiritual connection with the land that Guy Bennet and myself left behind?

Cricket inevitably, even at the simplest level, means something very different for the English and for every other nation that plays the sport (total population: around two billion). England likes to imagine that it ‘gave’ the sport to the world, while the truth of the matter, so clearly visible at least to those other countries, from the Tasman Sea to the Caribbean via the Indian Ocean, is that it was imposed as part and parcel of Great Britain’s colonial invasion of their lands.

A sport they grew to love — sometimes more, especially in the case of India, than the colonisers who brought it with them in their gunboats — and which then gave them the chance to exact some figurative revenge against their erstwhile oppressors. The finest book about the sport, Beyond a Boundary by the great Trinidadian scholar CLR James, explores the sociocultural and political significance of cricket in the Caribbean, and by extension the rest of the former British Empire.

But I am English. My concept of cricket, and in particular international cricket, is inevitably tainted by that intergenerational guilt, or at least discomfort, concerning the process by which Sri Lankans and South Africans, Barbadians and Bangladeshis, ended up playing the sport in the first place. Yet that conflicted history is paradoxically what makes the sport and its rituals so appealing.

The whole world of cricket represents a fantasy version of nostalgia for a land and time that never existed. A place of sun-kissed summers (rather than the rainy reality), where everyone is polite and genteel, generously respectful of others no matter how fierce the battle on the field.

It’s a fiction, a suspension of disbelief, and our cherished memories of our homeland and our youth are always just that. Cricket, with its whole theatre¹ of social nicety, of measured harmony, beguiles us into believing that such a world might once have existed, or might again.

“Heaven on earth?” Guy Bennett skeptically questions his politically idealistic friend Tommy Judd.

“Earth on earth. A just earth,” Tommy replies, admittedly with weapons-grade naivety, since the ‘just earth’ he is referring to is Stalin’s Soviet Union…

Cricket, though, is not forced to deal with the crude harshness of realpolitik. It exists outside time, in a land of teapots and cucumber sandwiches, of fair play and sporting spirit. That is why we miss it — precisely because it never truly existed beyond the proscenium arch of the members’ pavilion.

In one dimension, however, cricket does still in practical terms offer a genuine redout against the oppressive realities of real life. The fourth dimension: time!

An international ‘test’ match, the highest level of the game, is played over five days, from 11 am to 6 pm or later, with variations to account for sunrise and sunset at different latitudes and longitudes. Not even cricket can hold back the movement of planetary bodies, after all.

And it is that defiance against our permanently rushed, productivity-crazed, instant-gratification world which makes this specific form of the game so appealing. Because of the on-field drama CLR James noted, rising slowly to a height over the course of five daily acts, but also the stubborn refusal to get the whole thing finished and dash off to the next fixture.

No, cricket takes its own sweet time, and forces us to do likewise, an antidote that becomes more pressingly needed with each fresh ‘advance’ of our technologically feverish society and economy.

A reminder of a past that did indeed exist not so long ago, of weekends uninterrupted by a ceaseless flurry of reminders and alerts. Of days spent relishing each calm interlude of what Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki refers to by the beautifully minimal Japanese word ma. Emptiness.

The pause that allows the narrative to settle and move on, the “space between the notes” that Claude Debussy defined as the essence of music.

That is what we miss, when we miss cricket. That is what the mythologised England of yore created, and what we spent our summers soaking up.

Some time after I exiled myself from Britain, though, I stopped watching, following, or eventually even caring. Not because I had physically relocated to a land where the sport is largely unknown, or typically confused with croquet and/or baseball, but because access to those summer test matches was cut off in 2005.

Sports coverage in the UK is specifically regulated by the Broadcasting Act, which assigns protected status to certain major events, or ‘crown jewels’ as they are known in the trade. This means that they must be made available free-to-air on terrestrial TV, to ensure the whole nation enjoys fair access to a list of sporting fixtures deemed “of major importance to society”.

A list including Wimbledon, the Olympics, the World Cup and FA Cup in football… and the summer test cricket series against whichever country was touring England.

Until 1998, that is, when international cricket was removed from the list, and the TV rights put up for open auction². By the 2006 season, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV had outbid all other broadcasters for exclusive rights, meaning that only paying subscribers could watch test cricket in England, and so it has remained for the last two decades.

In the early years of my exile, a trip back to the UK in the summer meant I would briefly catch up with the sport, while watching TV at my parents’ house, or enjoying a pint in the pub. Cricket remained a visible, and hence psychological, presence in my life, albeit in minimal doses. Enough to maintain a degree of familiarity with its hypnotic rhythm and pacing. And with a VPN I could even have continued to follow the game once the streaming era began.

But by then it was already confined to subscription TV and press reports. For as long as they still featured familiar player names, I continued to follow the match reports, but once the team and coaches I knew had left the stage, it all became too abstract and irrelevant to care about. I was left like Guy Bennet, trapped in an eternal moment of hesitation as to whether that summer game of my youth even really existed, or mattered.

Two things then happened to revive my interest in the game, in all its understated but pulsating dramatic spectacle, and metaphorical power as a reflection of society and history.

The first was a change of coach and captain, and with them a radical overhaul of the philosophical and psychological approach of the England team. Cricket, a game in which at any given moment one individual is under intense scrutiny as the lone champion of their team’s fortunes — much as in baseball, but for many more instants, repeated over a punishingly long period — has always taken a psychological toll on those playing it at the highest level.

Mental health issues are common, and some great careers — Marcus Trescothick and Jonathan Trott spring to mind — have been ended by the pressure.

Pressure that had always been further exacerbated by the aloof, callous attitude of coaches and selectors, who would discard players after a couple of poor results, using fear of failure as their only motivational tool. Unsurprisingly, this approach proved rather unsuccessful. Despite a relatively large player base and the England Cricket Board’s ample resources — buoyed by that TV rights contract money — the national team had delivered only fitfully on the world stage.

The new regime under coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes set about upending that whole mentality. Players were shown trust and support, their mental health taken seriously, rather than being the subject of snide criticism or open hostility from stuffed shirts whose only tough decision was to choose between the Dundee fruit cake and Victoria sponge at teatime in the pavilion.

Above all, they were told simply to go out, play the game with the carefree passion they had felt as youngsters, and trust in their own skill and judgement.

It worked.

Not only did player after player express how much happier, more secure and understood they felt under the new management, but their performances were both more entertaining for the crowd — freed from a negative, defensive, self-questioning mindset — and more successful in terms of results.

A very different societal lesson, and one I would never have imagined emanating from the England team’s hidebound, though elegant, headquarters at the Marylebone Cricket Club.

Finally, English cricket did have a genuine gift to offer the world, and not only other cricketing nations, or sports in general. This management philosophy is one that is universally applicable to some degree, and would help release some of the workplace pressure that makes us flee into the timeless fantasy realm of cricket in the first place.

A recent newspaper article about this change in philosophy and fortunes prior to the current England-India series of matches, ended by voicing what I have been thinking since the new era took hold: “In short, wouldn’t we all be better off if we had McCullum and Stokes as our bosses?”

I found myself starting to feel a connection with cricket once again, but there was still one problem. I had no way of watching the matches.

And then a chance comment on an online match report revealed an entirely unexpected geographical loophole. It turned out that although Sky TV had the monopoly on cricket broadcasting in the UK, meaning those back ‘home’ in England couldn’t watch the games without paying through the nose, in countries where there was no commercial interest in the rights, the same coverage was available for free — without even the infuriating interstitial adverts — via the website of the International Cricket Council.

Paradoxically, by moving to the cricketing vacuum of Spain, I had ultimately made the sport more accessible to myself, rather than less. And what a time to make the discovery! The England-India series is proving to be a cracker: tense, competitive, the ascendancy constantly seesawing between the two teams from one hour to the next over the course of each of those marathon blocks of five days.

The most recent match at Lord’s — the heart of the sport’s pomp and circumstance — was one of the most thrilling I have seen. All of a sudden, I’m a cricket fan again. And what makes it all the sweeter is that I get to follow my revived passion by freeloading off Rupert Murdoch’s expensively plundered³ TV coverage, without my eyeballs even giving him a cent of ad revenue.

So no, I don’t miss the cricket anymore — I’m enjoying every minute of the nostalgic pageantry, of the sport, and especially the atmosphere and spirit it’s being played in. If only poor old Guy Bennet could have had an Internet connection installed in 1970s Moscow.

There are some time-travel tricks, though, that even the magic of cricket can’t pull off.

Footnotes

1. For CLR James, “Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera, and the dance.”

2. A more detailed explanation of how cricket was lost to free-to-air TV in the UK can be found in this article.

3. It is also, to be fair, quite excellent.

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Friday evening, 7 o’clock. I head out of my door onto Calle Mayor, the old main street, and it’s bustling. Small independent traders selling bread, honey, freshly made sandwiches. Bags, belts and berets. Neighbourhood commerce is thriving.

I know that if I venture out this time tomorrow it will be the same story. Sunday as well. In a world of out-of-town megastores and ecommerce, rising rents and dwindling footfall, it sounds too good to be true.

Wait until Monday comes around, and you’ll soon see that it is.

Spain’s small towns are big on community spirit and services, which means that local stores are holding out better than their counterparts in the UK or USA, but however gradual the erosion of traditional shopping might be, it is equally relentless.

Why was Calle Mayor such a hive of activity last Friday? Because the summer craft fair was in town.

It’s a lovely little annual event, with a medieval theme enthusiastically embodied by the artisans who set up their stalls. And rather than being located just outside the town, as the weekly fruit and veg market is, the local authority decided they should line what used to be the central streets of the old town.

Calle Mayor — the main one — with Calle de Arriba (Upper Street) running parallel a few metres up the hill. In between the two? Calle del Medio: Middle Street. Names that hark back to simpler, more predictable times.

The medieval craft fair serves as a communal time machine, transporting us back to an era when the village smithy would stand just opposite your front door — and the village smith would start hammering away at his anvil just after dawn each day. In a way, I’m glad it’s just a bit of fun for a weekend.

There’s also a sadder side to that journey back in time, though. Not to the middle ages — when life was nasty, brutish and short, and almost certainly didn’t involve multicoloured candy floss on a stick — but to just a couple of decades ago, when those three streets were indeed home to a thriving baker’s, fishmonger’s, hardware store and all the rest.

You can conjure up that sense of commercial vibrancy and relevance for a weekend, but ultimately it melts to nothing, like a confectioner’s spun sugar. A bittersweet reminder of what once was, and might still have been had we not chosen one-stop convenience over community engagement.

The local authority here are no fools, though. The mayor is in fact a very canny operator indeed, with fingers in plenty of pies, and no end of schemes to keep the electorate on side, as his four successive ballot box victories attest.

So he has also come up with another initiative which, though temporary, strikes me as having greater potential to breathe more lasting life into the town’s surviving small businesses: a voucher scheme.

Several times a year — the dates have varied since I moved here a few years back, but it seems to happen at least two or three times — a fund is set up for a month or so. You go along to the town hall, or simply download the app, and buy vouchers in denominations of €10, up to a total value of €100 per resident. And the local authority matches the amount, euro for euro.

Effectively it means a 50% discount on up to €200 of shopping per person for the following month. On anything: groceries, clothes, restaurant meals, phone repair services... Free money! What’s not to like?

The sole catch is this: only independent traders within the municipal boundaries are eligible to take part. There are several chain supermarkets in the centre, but they are off limits. Starbucks — if we had one, which we don’t — would likewise be excluded.

But the little watch repair shop, the mom-and-pop pizzeria, the café-bakery-general store? All half price. You could even get a tattoo or two at DC Studio.

Does it work? It seems to. My local corner shop does decent enough trade all year round, thanks partly to its own brand of convenience: open till late and on Sundays for those little essentials you forgot at the out-of-town Carrefour hypermarket.

But when voucher season is in town, the place is packed, as the only decent-sized grocery retailer that qualifies as independent.

The extra money ringing through these local traders’ cash registers may well be a make-or-break difference for some of them. And unlike the craft fair, once the allotted time is up, there is still a lingering after-effect.

People are reminded for a month of not just the convenience of being able to shop just around the corner, but the value of those little interactions with staff and fellow customers, who are, after all, their neighbours . The whole community side that Carrefour can’t ever offer, much less Amazon or DoorDash.

It will be another year until the jugglers and jewellers of the craft fair light up Calle Mayor again, but the vouchers should be coming around in September, neatly timed to help local shops through the post-summer slump, and to lend families a helping hand with all the back-to-school expenses of books, stationery and clothes.

‘Helicopter money’ is what economists would call it, and while it is free for us as local residents, it clearly does have a number of practical and ethical strings attached. For one thing, it ultimately benefits those who have the resources to make the most of it. A family of four would need €400 cash available to get their full allowance, which is clearly not feasible for the neediest families. A means-tested allocation would help there, potentially drawn from the unused budget.

The money also has to come from somewhere, in this case a provincial government fund for ‘local economic development projects’. Is it the wisest, most targeted use of those resources? Ultimately, in a democracy it is perhaps down to those voters themselves to decide. If they like the mayor’s scheme, they’ll keep on voting for him, and he’ll keep on implementing it.

The greatest objections — above all if the programme were extended more widely — would be raised by those big chains: the Carrefours, Starbucks, Amazons and DoorDashes, who would cry foul and send their Armani-suited lawyers off to berate the National Markets and Competition Commission.

Perhaps, then, this approach has to remain local and small-scale in order for the helicopters to fly below the radar. And perhaps that is how any such scheme is best administered, by local communities who know better than central government planners and theoretical economists what their practical needs are.

It certainly seems popular and effective here. And I am sharing the idea with an invitation to readers to propose a similar venture to their local government if they feel it could help revive the fortunes of their own neighbourhood retail sector.

Failing that, a sooty-aproned blacksmith outside your front door and a motley-clad minstrel selling cotton candy at the end of the road also livens things up for a little while.

Not something you see every day (Photo credit: awesomnesslol666; CC BY 2.0)

Braniff Airlines C-Suite, early July 1987.
“Hey, Jeff! We need to translate this slogan for our new luxury business class seats for the LatAm market. You did Spanish at high school, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So how do you say ‘Fly in leather’?”
“Erm… That’d be ‘Vuela en cuero’.”
“Great — send it off to the printers.”

Braniff Airlines Check-in Desk, Mexico City, late July 1987.
“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t check in unless you put some clothes on — we aren’t a nudist airline, you know!”
“But it said so in the adverts: ‘Vuela en cuero’. I demand my naked flight! This is outrageous!”

OK, maybe the scene didn’t play out quite that way.

But the episode is one of the classic examples of the need to get someone who knows what they’re doing when translating advertising copy and brand identity. Someone familiar with all the cultural nuances, double meanings and near-homophones that could derail a product before it even hits the stores.

A transcreator, as our industry jargon has it. Skimping on our services could prove both embarrassing and costly.

Another story often repeated in a similar context is the Chevrolet Nova. One of the marque’s top sellers in the US, but for some reason the dealerships just couldn’t shift them south of the border.

What could the problem be, the suits back in Detroit wondered? This time they asked someone on the ground for their insight.

Nova. No-va. ‘No va’. ‘It doesn’t go’.

Not an inspiring name for an automobile. Chevrolet realised too late, and sheepishly withdrew the model from the Spanish-speaking market.

It’s the textbook tale of failing to localise your big-ticket branding. It’s also a completely spurious urban myth.

The Nova in fact sold perfectly well in Latin America. There was no reason why it shouldn’t. The morpheme ‘nova’ has the same connotation as in English: ‘new’. ‘Innovate’ is ‘innovar’, ‘renovate’, ‘renovar’. ‘News’ or ‘novelty’ is ‘novedad’.

And as a language almost entirely derived from Latin, with a strictly phonetic spelling system, Spanish has very few homophones compared with English. You don’t get ‘bare bears’ or ‘some sums’.

Consequently, punning is a much more uncommon form of wordplay — people don’t go looking for humorous coincidences in the sounds of words, because there are so few raw materials to work with.

When the Brazilian footballer Kaká was at Real Madrid, you would have expected opposing fans to have a field day with the fact that his name sounds just like ‘caca’, meaning ‘poo’. But they didn’t. The stress is on a different syllable — to a Spanish ear it seems completely unrelated.

Nothing to hear here, so to speak.

Sure, you can manipulate ‘Nova’ into seeming like ‘no va’, but the same applies — it really doesn’t feel or sound at all similar.

It’s odd that the ‘Nova’ myth has become so firmly rooted — even prompting apologies on National Public Radio in the USA for repeating the baseless slander — as there are genuine examples of cross-border automotive naming issues, that also have the advantage of a touch more of the salaciousness offered by Braniff’s ‘in the buff’ campaign.

Mitsubishi clearly thought that ‘Pajero’ sounded like a rough ’n’ tough ranchero kind of name for their off-roader. And the image worked fine, everywhere except for its presumed linguistic homeland of Latin America and Spain, where it unfortunately means, in biblical terms, ‘onanist’ in some forms of slang.

A swift rebadging to the ‘Montero’ was called for.

SEAT’s discontinued Málaga never made it onto the Greek market under that name. Deemed too similar to μαλάκας (‘malakas’) — the Greeks’ own onanistic insult — it became the more seemly SEAT Gredos for Hellenic customers.

Is there perhaps some reason why those given the task of naming cars inadvertently seem to end up gripping their gearsticks too enthusiastically?

On the other side of the gender divide, don’t go into a Hyundai dealership in Portugal asking to take their Kona for a test drive. Swap the ‘k’ for a phonetically identical ‘c’, and you have a very rude anatomical term indeed, which English-speakers can probably guess.

Propriety and pragmatics decreed a rebaptism as the Kauai.

For every Nova false alarm, there are plenty of genuine Kona pratfalls awaiting the unwary international marketeer.

Which finally brings us to the guy with the green toenail. It is not, as you might suspect by now, the product of a diseased foot, but a car. And Italy’s Alfa Romeo is the seemingly unsuspecting culprit this time.

Tonale sounds kind of cool in Italian. It comes in some jazzy colours, it’s stylish, it’s tonal. To-na-le. The concept works just as well here in Spain, with the same phonetic structure.

In the English-speaking world, though, it’s just too hard to get past the idea that maybe you’re meant to say ‘toe-nale’.

That was my mischievous first thought, and searching online for reviews, as we’re in the market for a new EV, I found that several journalists had come to the same conclusion.

It’s silly. It’s born of the same slightly childish, punning mindset that dreamt up the Nova myth. But once you’ve thought it, you can’t unthink it. It’s like the rabbit and the duck.

And the fact that this lurid, shimmering green is one of the keynote colours of the range just makes it worse. Does that look to you like a legit car colour? Or a transgressive shade of statement nail polish? And/or a zombie’s diseased tootsie.

You have to wonder how far the snickering ‘toe nail’ gag has to spread among the anglophone car-buying public before the manufacturer is forced to trim their toe nails and get a pedicure makeover.

Alfa Romeo have been here before — back in the 1970s, in an attempt to kickstart some industrial regeneration in southern Italy, the state-controlled company set up a factory in Campania to make a newly designed model. In honour of its home region, they called it the ‘Alfa Sud’, or ‘Alfa South’.

The concept of ‘suds’ maybe makes sense halfway through the Sunday car-washing ritual, before rinsing off with a bucket of water, but really doesn’t scream Italian bella figura, does it?

What’s a motor industry marketing pro to do? Sure, you can hire a specialist in localisation and transcreation for every single market to come up with a name and slogan that sound just right. But you need something consistent for those global campaigns.

The reductive and unimaginative solution may simply be to follow the Audi approach to christening your range: A1, A2, A3, A4…

Though given the way they drive — and park — I actually think that Audi owners are more suited than anyone to sitting behind the wheel of a Pajero, Malakas or Kona.

I need to hire a Spanish-English translator for a new project, and I’ve got two CVs in front of me.

One of them is a recently qualified Oxford graduate, which sounds quite impressive, right? He must know his stuff after four years studying amid those [checks catechism of cliché…] dreaming spires, in one-to-one tutorials with some of the finest professors in global academia. Tempting.

The other guy is self-taught. Twenty years’ experience, it says here. Commercial and legal translations for end clients including half the companies on the blue-chip Ibex 35. Cultural and academic texts for leading public institutions. Which also ticks the right boxes. Not the same academic credentials, but the nous and stamina of the corporate coalface.

Who to pick?

The unsurprising plot twist: they’re both the same person. They’re both me. But which me is the valuable one in professional, practical terms? No one ever needs to answer that question, as they will always see the whole package, which seems (I hope) neatly balanced.

But what if I were two separate people: one with a fancy degree from a prestigious seat of scholarship, and another who had learned the trade on the job? Which would a recruitment manager find more appealing? And would they be right in their judgment?

In my own case, looking at myself the graduate and myself the grizzled pro, I know the answer. Oxford gave me none of the skills I use in my daily job. The Modern Languages department had no interest in teaching students about the techniques required to deal with the kind of texts that clients actually pay money to have translated in the real world, nor the software and online skills needed to resolve the problems that come up, or to optimise your workflow.

Even if they had wanted to do so (quod non, as they might say, with a haughty sniff, and a snifter of port), those skills and tools didn’t even exist in my day. Although the poorly photocopied and archaically phrased deeds and contracts, and interminably circumlocutious high court judgments, would have been more familiar and available, if a ‘Commercial Translation’ option had been on offer.

In truth, what I bring to the table, as I would tell my interviewer (while gagging just a little), is what I have learnt the hard way, from being confronted time and again with texts that had me scratching my head and tearing my hair out. By now – famous last words – I’ve seen it all. It’s the self-taught guy that gets the job done. Sure, formal qualifications are still important. ISO quality certification requires that there be a stamped and countersigned piece of paper issued by an authoritative institution to vouch for the story I tell on my CV.

And self-taught me has that as well: a Diploma in Translation from the Chartered Institute of Linguists in London. But there is a huge difference between that and my degree. To take the Diploma exam, you simply register, turn up, and get the job done to the required standard. No admissions process or structured course. So in practical terms it’s both easier to obtain, and more useful.

My suspicion, though, is that when a potential employer or client looks at my application, they are swayed more by the Oxford degree than the CIOL diploma. And I know they’re wrong. I could do the job – and satisfy the ISO 9001 requirements – without the former, but not without the latter.

As I say, they get both anyway, so are able to hedge their bets as to which best vouches for my competency, and in any event, those decisions as to paths in life are in the past for me.

But not for my kids. They are now at the age when they need to decide whether to opt for an academic or vocational course, or simply to plunge into the world of employment and work their way up from the shopfloor. What should they do on the current occupational landscape? Or rather, what is the best bet, crystal ball firmly in hand, as to what they will want to have done five years down the line, in a world that will undoubtedly have changed even more radically than it has over the past half-decade?

The inability of an academic institution to prepare them for their future workplace is now a given. University curriculums and exam content are devised and approved years in advance, and can’t easily be adjusted on the fly. What today’s first-year students are covering will have been decided maybe a decade ago, but even if it had just been comprehensively rejigged in light of recent technological developments, by the time they graduate in another three years.

In the case of Oxford, it was a conscious decision not to venture into the modern world or address such humdrum matters as the everyday use of language for global communication and commerce, and that was the reality they sold and we bought. For any university today, it’s an inevitable fact of life that their system can’t move fast enough to keep up with the disrupters and breakers of things that swarm like midnight-snacking gremlins across every aspect of our culture and society.

So is it even worth getting a university degree?

Those same tech disruptors are increasingly saying “maybe not”, and including the phrase “or equivalent practical experience” in their Silicon Valley job offers (after all, they call their workplaces ‘campuses’), rather than insisting on the graduate status that, after all, neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg ended up attaining.

As with any decision in life it’s a trade-off, and one that our liquid world with its shifting demands, and the rise in the cost of higher education versus the decline in graduate job security and conditions, would seem to be pushing very much against the value of a degree. In purely economic terms, at least.

When it comes to prestige, it will remain far harder to judge the extent to which - all other factors being equal – that embossed sheet of parchment from an alma mater might prove. The change is likely to be generational, at least – for as long as the manager heading a department has, and was expected on first being hired to have, a degree, they will be prejudiced towards those in the same club.

Here in Spain, the scales hang rather differently from in the UK and US. University education here is relatively inexpensive, around €4,000 for a four-year degree, less with means-tested grants. Two-year vocational courses, meanwhile, which are gaining in social acceptance as being practically equivalent, are free of charge.

Young people are not being priced out of an education, and to an extent are still being pushed by a traditionally minded and qualifications-obsessed culture into signing up for a course of study. When you move to a new town in Spain, you have to register on the municipal census roll, a process known as empadronamiento.

One of the few questions they ask, aside from name and ID document number, is ‘level of education’, with boxes for ‘Secondary’, ‘Bachelor’s degree’, ‘Master’s/Doctorate’. There is no practical purpose to this, other than that Spanish society sees it as very important to keep tabs on an individual’s formal academic attainments.

So what is my advice to my own children, and why? (Whether they choose to pay the blindest bit of notice is another matter.) I say “Go for it!” Choose a subject that inspires you, and study that for a few years, while you are young and societal constructs willingly encourage that option.

Not to get the piece of paper that comes with it. Not to impress the clerk at the Ayuntamiento when you check your box. Not even in case the job you choose to do makes it a precondition ten years down the line.

Do it to give yourself time to hang out with like-minded people, free of the constraints of the workplace. Do it to explore ideas, society, the world. To explore and discover yourself.

That is the value I placed on my own university education, rather than what it might teach me in vocational terms. And that is the value I might still place on it if I were looking at a job candidate’s CV, because that relative freedom from outside pressure for a precious few years as you become an adult (18-year-old me is furiously rolling his eyes at the idea he isn’t an adult already, but what would he know?) is your best chance to make increasingly informed decisions about what you do and don’t want to do, who you do and don’t want to be.

And only once you’ve done that can you set about getting the experience and skills you will really need in life.

I’m in a karaoke bar in trashy Torremolinos, one of the Spanish coastal resorts catering mainly to sun, sea, sex and sangria-seeking British tourists. For reasons that can be explained only by an excess of alcohol, my name is down on the list, and my number’s up.

This particular cultural soirée involves a random selection from the compère’s disc of Karaoke Klassix (we are back in the late 1990s, before the gratuitous use of ‘k’ and ‘x’ as signifiers of krazy fun, fun, fun was deprecated by the gods of typographical style).

So what eternally butchered work of the songsmith’s art awaits me and my expectant audience?

I look up at the gaudy screen, a riot of illegally vibrant RGB combinations, magenta the prime offender against all that is visually good and holy.

Rupert Holmes (huh?) — Escape (double huh!?)

And then the parentheses that forge the whole thing into shape: (The Piña Colada Song).

Of course! Getting’ caught in the rain, makin’ love at midnight in the dunes on the cape, the feel of the ocean — a perfectly tacky Torremolinos karaoke number.

I like to think I gave it my best shot. Or shots. Of Cacique rum, DYC whisky, or whatever I was inadvisably drinking that night. But however unreliable my vocal rendition and mental recall of the event might be, I have one thing clear: the emphasis I placed on the correct pronunciation of piña colada.

“I’ll ‘ave a peena cull-arda!” the riff-raff around those parts would say. But I was not of their number. I was passing through while travelling Spain in the footsteps of the revered writer Laurie Lee, penning a travel book. I was of a different social and intellectual class. I knew how to pronounce the eñe properly, and was damned sure everyone was going to know about it.

I was a conceited idiot. A realisation that grew on me over the years, but should have become apparent that very night.

Pop quiz, hot shots: how many alcoholic drinks of non-English-language origin are mentioned in the lyrics to Rupert Holmes’ Escape? Clue: the answer’s more than the parenthetically eponymous piña colada.

Aside from the national cocktail of Puerto Rico — invented, according to the least plausible but most appealing of its various origin stories, by the Robin Hood-esque pirate Roberto Cofresí — Rupert and his new potential fellow eloper are also into “the taste of champagne”.

And how is that pronounced in the affluent middle-class circles where it is de rigueur at celebrations? Do we insist on French vowel sounds and the same /ny/ as in piña, which French transcribes as ‘gn’, rather than the uniquely Spanish ‘ñ’?

We do not.

We order ‘sham-paine’, without batting an eyelid, and without for a moment considering ourselves to be desperately uncouth, ignorant or plebeian. Quite the opposite.

The anglicisation of that and countless other terms is perfectly understandable, even inevitable. Each language has its particular sounds and rhythms, that in many cases only imperfectly overlap, and are often almost impossible to adopt for vocal cords and epiglottises shaped speaking another tongue (the term itself an indication of the physical structures that shape the sounds we utter).

And so on being imported into the English-speaking world, champagne first has its natural stress pattern shifted slightly, as French is a syllable-timed language so the word doesn’t natively have the heavily differentiated da-DUM iambic pattern imposed by English. But we also change both the vowel sounds, despite the fact that closer equivalents are available in English, and disregard the /ny/ sound of the ‘-gne’.

Yet in doing so we consider ourselves to be perfectly cultured and correct.

So how come missing the effect of the tilde off the ñ in piña is seen as being such a faux pas? (With a silent ‘x’ and ‘s’, if you puh-lease!)

Words get passed around between languages the whole time, and undergo varying degrees of adaptation to fit into the prevailing sounds, and avoid our mouths having to pause mid-flight to contort themselves into the different arrangement required for genuinely authentic phonetics.

We all do it, even if we’re bilingual. It’s only sometimes that we choose for reasons of social distinction to make a big deal out of it, to turn a syllable into a shibboleth.

Wannabe wine snobs, for example, are likely to get all high and mighty about the silent ‘t’ in Cabernet (while probably going with the average Joe flow when it comes to champagne…). But how confident would they be when confronted with grape varieties from beyond their linguistic comfort zone?

Xarel·lo, anyone? What even is that raised dot in the middle of the double ‘l’?

Pedro Ximénez? What phonetic flavour is that ‘x’?

Or how about a Tinta Cão, or Müller-Thurgau?

Perhaps the secret to it all is to indulge in a few too many of whichever of those options most takes your fancy. Not only will your vowels and consonants slur into a mush that makes any variant seem plausible enough, but you might stop worrying about whether you — or anyone else — is saying it right.

And what your perception of that might say about them — or more likely you.

I’ll ‘ave a peena cullarda, please!

With a couple of schwas on a cocktail stick.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

A tourist in Andalusia pops into a local restaurant for lunch, and pauses to peruse the meats on display in the chiller cabinet. He’s intrigued by some large ovaloid hunks, like fleshy ostrich eggs, and asks the waiter what cut that is.

“The testículos of the bull, señor,” comes the reply, the waiter gesturing with his head towards the plaza de toros across the street. “A delicacy!”

Our tourist is intrigued by the idea, but can’t quite pluck up the courage to order them.

Every day during the fiestas he goes back to the same place, tempted, but still too reticent.

On the last day he decides he simply has to pluck up the courage and give it a go.

“What will it be, señor? The steak?”

“No, no, I’ll have those, erm, testículos, did you say?”

“Splendid, señor.”

The dish arrives, and he is greeted by two shrivelled lumps the size of olives.

“But they were much bigger than this the other days, weren’t they?”

“Ah, but you see, señor,” the waiter replies, “sometimes the bull wins!”

The bull never wins, of course. But it’s a long game. Little by little, the world is seeing sense, and meat — with all its ethical and ecological externalities — is being downsized in our diets.

In Spain as well? Hmm… Maybe not so much. Visitors to Spain may sometimes find vegetarian options a little limited. Especially considering this is the fruit and veg basket of Europe.

For those of a potentially flexitarian disposition who don’t mind a bit of fish or seafood now and then, Spain is certainly a good place to play that card and extend your possibilities. And when it comes to jamón serrano and especially chorizo, a little goes a very long way, so they will often be used in small quantities with egg or vegetable dishes.

If you can live with that, fine. If not — always best to check! Spanish chefs do still sometimes tend to think of a little diced ham or chorizo as a kind of condiment rather than actual meat, so it’s best to preempt the ‘WTF?!’ moment when the broad beans or scrambled eggs arrive.

One final point about eggs — of little use to vegans, I’m afraid — is that pretty much any eatery in Spain, from a bus station café upwards, will be perfectly happy to rustle up a plain omelette, with or within bread, even if it’s not remotely featured on the menu.

Spanish food culture does not take itself too seriously nor stand on ceremony, unlike neighbouring France, for example. Despite San Sebastian having more Michelin stars per square metre than any other city on earth, cooking here is straightforward and down-to-earth by nature.

Which takes us to an old favourite of mine, L’Argadà in Girona, where I used to live. In the city, that is, rather than the restaurant, though it was a close-run thing. A no-nonsense chargrilled meat kind of place, with a small, open kitchen wedged between two cosily rustic dining rooms seating maybe 20 or 30 apiece.

Chunks of holm oak blazing away in the fireplace, shovelled on demand across to the grill once they had broken and burned down to the required size and intensity for cooking.

Not, at first glance, a great place to go for anything but meat, meat and more meat. They actually did a great grilled provolone (not very Spanish, or Catalan, but typical of Argentina and Uruguay thanks to the Italian influence), and a mean French onion soup, borrowed culinarily from a few kilometres over the border.

But the best thing of all? Toast. Great slabs of pa de pagès, grilled over the embers, served with a little earthenware dish containing a head of garlic and a couple of tomàquets de penjar, a small, pinkish red and long-lived local variety of tomato grown to be hung in the pantry — like plaits of garlic — and rubbed on bread, long after the season has ended.

Crush a clove of garlic between thumb and forefinger, leaving the skin on to minimise the resulting stinkfinger. Take your toasted pa de pagès, and rub the rough surface of the garlic on the bread — you’ll be surprised just how garlicky this will make it. Slice (or tear) a tomato in two, and rub that over the toast, squishing it down to leave practically all the soft flesh adhering to the bread.

Drizzle with local Arbequina olive oil, sprinkle with coarse sea salt, and you have a dish as fit for a king as for a beggar. Accompany that with the exquisite homemade allioli, and you’re in heaven, with nary a pig in sight.

A final point about allioli: many people (and menu translators) think it’s just ‘garlic mayonnaise’. It ain’t. The clue is in the Catalan name: all (garlic) i (and) oli (oil). That’s it. Just as mayonnaise is properly an emulsion (claimed by the town of Mahón in Menorca, hence mahonesa in one spelling) of egg yolk and oil, so allioli is simply crushed garlic and olive oil, alchemically transformed into an unctuous cream.

Made properly, it is the very essence of the glory of simplicity that reigns supreme in Spain. And is also extremely potent — you may be consuming about half a clove of raw garlic with every spoonful. You and your fellow diners have been warned!

So veggies in Spain have to survive their whole fortnight on holiday eating toast, like a bunch of impoverished students in a grotty houseshare? Not at all. There are plenty of classic dishes you may expect to find at tapas bars to piece together a decent repast without attending a matanza (literally, ‘slaughter’ — the traditional killing of the family pig, every cubic centimetre of which would then be used for stewing, salting, sausage-making or preserving in some manner).

Here are a few of my personal favourites, but bear in mind that Spanish cuisine is highly regional, and while some recipes have become popular nationwide, you may not find all of these in any one place.

Berenjenas fritas con miel de caña

Fried aubergines (OK, eggplants for you weird Yankees) with golden sugarcane syrup. Sometimes served with honey instead, which is less authentic but just as good.

Traditional to Andalusia, but the combo of creamily melty aubergine inside crispy batter, contrasting with the sticky sweetness of the dressing, has won over much of the rest of the country as well.

Order two tapas to save the hassle of finishing the first and craving more. Or three.

Berenjenas de Almagro

More aubergines, and these actually do look like ‘egg-plants’! The variety grown in Almagro, Castile is harvested young, parboiled then pickled in oil, vinegar and paprika. Really unusual and well worth trying if you see them. They look kind of like giant olives on stalks, or… see the joke above.

Pimientos de Padrón

Again, a specific local variety, this time of green pepper. Tiny little things, cooked whole in a smoking hot pan, searing and blistering the skin, then served with coarse sea salt sprinkled over. Couldn’t be simpler.

You will find them everywhere in their native Galicia (see photo above), but they are also a safe bet nationwide these days. Warning: traditionally, a few of them will be quite fiery. Not habanero hot by any means, but enough to give the unprepared a bit of a shock. Though the varieties cultivated these days tend to have fewer firecrackers in the barrel, if any.

Pimientos del Piquillo rellenos

Double-dipping on the peppers as well, this time red and pointy like gnomes’ or wizards’ hats, larger than the Padrón variety, but much smaller than a bell pepper. The skin will be charred off, leaving the soft, sweet flesh as the delicious container for… normally salt cod or minced meat, to be honest. But you may get lucky and find them stuffed with setas (mushrooms), probably incorporated into a béchamel sauce.

Speaking of which…

Croquetas

An absolute Spanish classic. If a bar has just three tapas on offer, one will be croquetas. Again, ham is by far the most common type, followed by chicken or salt cod. But the best I ever had, in Luarca, Asturias (a gorgeous region that should be on everyone’s bucket list) were made with the local blue cheese: queso de Cabrales.

Oh. My. God. This was about 25 years ago, and I can still taste their creamy, crunchy piquancy.

Again, setas are another not uncommon veggie option, but you won’t find vegan versions. Visitors often expect croquetas to be based on mashed potato, but in Spain they are instead made with a very thick béchamel sauce, chilled, formed into rough cylinders, floured, egged, crumbed, deep-fried. And savoured.

Patatas Bravas

If there is any bar snack more ubiquitous in Spain than croquetas, it is patatas (or papas) bravas. Normally referred to simply as ‘bravas’. Often criminally disappointing, it has to be said. Reheated stodgy chunks of greasy potato smeared with tinned tomate frito (kind of halfway between passata and ketchup).

But properly, freshly made? A thing of beauty. The best I have sampled were in an unassuming place in Alboraya, near Valencia. They did a great paella (veggie versions of which are increasingly common, and another good option for a heartier meal), but their bravas were heavenly.

Fried twice, to make then perfectly crisp on the outside, fluffily soft within, and served with homemade allioli and a pretty fiery sauce made from tomatoes and chillies grown on the premises.

Accept no substitutes! Unfortunately you will probably have to, but with bravas it’s always worth snooping around to see if any of the other tables have ordered them, and giving them the once over. If they look reheated/store-bought, don’t bother. If they seem like the real deal, piping hot, properly crispy, and with a glistening, freshly made allioli, fill yer boots!

And last, but by no means least, the humble king of cold soups:

Gazpacho

Nothing could be more evocative of a Mediterranean summer than this glorious creation. Nothing more indicative of Spanish cuisine as a whole: take a few elements of the local produce, blessed by the sun, and merge them into simple satisfaction.

Tomato, cucumber, peppers, from the trellised canes in the kitchen garden. Onion and garlic from the fertile soil. Oil from the olive tree that has stood guard over the farmhouse for centuries. Vinegar from last year’s wine harvest. Oh, and that hunk of stale bread on the kitchen table — waste not, want not!

Pound it all together in a mortar the size of a pudding bowl with a pestle the length of your forearm, and there you have it.

There is simply nothing to rival it on the hot summer’s days in which Spain specialises. Think of it not as a cold soup, but as a liquid salad, a salve for your hellishly hot soul.

¡Buen provecho!