Queuing at the bank...
You know you are back in Spain when you go into a bar and the barmaid hands you a cold beer out of the fridge and a hot glass straight out of the dishwasher to put it in. Franco replaced modernism and thinking for yourself with suspicion and inefficient bureaucracy. Thirty years after his death, his legacy lives on. I went to the bank today. The Spanish Olympic queuing team are practicing at my branch for Beijing 2008. I queued up in line to make a deposit and in only enough to to shave, read Martin Chuzzlewit, finish The Times crossword and shave again, I had arrived at the counter. I slammed a wad of notes down on to the counter loud enough to break the peaceful slumber of the bank clerk and while waiting for her computer to crash, reboot and crash I pondered the difference in attitudes to waiting.

In the UK and the US making you wait for a service that costs you money is considered equivalent to stealing life.

"Excuse me but the usable bit of my existence has been reduced by 30 minutes since I arrived at this bank, if you added up all the time I've wasted here since I opened my account I have probably lost 6 or 7 days of my life you vampirical bastards!"

Spanish people think of queuing with a nostalgic romance, viewing it as an opportunity to chat with the other people in line, make friends and perhaps get invited around to dinner. Which it possibly is in the rural branches. However there are old men queued up in Spanish banks that hadn't reached puberty when they walked in and I don't like it!

To pay a bill at a bank here you must go in on a Tuesday or a Thursday, between 8:30 and 9:30, between the 10th and 20th of the month. Although I am prone to exaggeration for comic effect, this is in fact unadorned truth. The adorned truth requires much sobbing, a decease in the family and a flashing neon Santa Maria statuette.

The deposit complete, I asked the clerk to change my address. The clerk told me I needed to go and join the line of people waiting in front of a desk on the other side of the building where a three toed sloth ponders Rene' Descartes and occasionally deals with customer issues.


Please may I take the opportunity to apologise to those offended by my gratuitous defamation of a religious icon, it was thoughtless and quite possibly blasphemous. But I rather like it.