One Massive Horrendous Game of Philosophical Dominoes

I have always assumed, when thinking about the new-found sparkly visibility of the gender non-conformist community, that those living in the Romance language countries must have it so much harder. Here in the U.K, using pronouns ze or they in place of he/she, is a concept that has relatively recently entered into the public consciousness. Which of course is radical enough for the majority who, brought up on clear rail-tracks of he and she as far as the eye can see, have rarely known a spark to fly out and wink between the two, even for a moment. 

So imagine the overhaul required in Spanish, where the entire ordeal is grammatically gendered. Every item of clothing you are wearing, every adjective used to describe you, has the appropriate ending to match your perceived gender. To neutralise this involves a completely new grammatical ending, not to mention the fact that some of the male/female versions of the same word in Spanish don't even mean the same thing. My all time favourite example of this is the public man and the public woman– 

el hombre publico y la mujer pública

The public man is a politician, whereas the public woman is a prostitute! Despite the problematic (albeit quite comical) idea of a female politician having to choose between being called a male politician, or a prostitute (arguably, how different are they really?) there is the question of what would happen if you somehow neutralised these phrases to a genderless state. Which definition would the gender-neutral meaning fall onto? It becomes then a problem of association of meaning in gender, a problem ultimately in ways of thinking.

This monkey-chain of musings, mused in a park on a particularly polluted day, brought me back full circle to considering the English language. It isn't a particularly acute observation to note that we too have gender associative ways of thinking, despite not having grammatical gender. But what about binary modes of thinking? Ideas built on the structure of couples, of opposites, ideas built on the idea that opposites even exist. Once I began looking for binary concepts, they came surging out at me from all angles, like school kids on the first day of summer. We are obsessed with opposites. Some examples for you  – 

Active/passive

Dominant/submissive

Strong/weak

Logical/emotional 

Stable/unstable

Sane/mad 

These pairs of words are opposites. Why? They just are. Our language says they are, so we except this as a cosy, furry fact – these are opposites, because they just are, great – done. But influencing this societal agreement that these words are opposites, there is a more murkily hidden agent at work, and that agent is hierarchy. If you look back at the examples, you will notice that the first words possess the higher social status, the second the lesser. Classical philosophy is built on this structure of opposites, a hierarchical structure of two options; more or less agency.

If you're an honest person, you might admit to yourself that you would naturally associate the first column of words with ideas of masculinity, and the second with femininity. It is in this way that gendered language riddles English despite having no grammatical gender. In expressing ideas of philosophy and psychology through the lens of opposites, coupled with deep rooted gender association, a secondary gendered language is created. It is extremely difficult to neutralise. And so we find ourselves again between the prostitute and the Spanish politician… as no doubt so many before us have found themselves caught. 

The problem with structures of thinking that identify opposites, is that ideas can become associated that needn't be, purely through being lined up with other opposites. It's essentially one massive horrendous game of philosophical dominoes. A good example of this is the internalised ideas in society on mental health. Traditionally, binary ideas of mental health fell unfavourably on women, usually categorised on the –

 /emotional /unstable /mad - side of - logical/ stable/ sane/ 

However now it is the very problem of being on the masculine side of binary thinking, because this is hierarchically superior, that is causing such difficulties in male psychological health. If you identify with being on the masculine side of the masculine/feminine binary system, then through association of definitions, you are supposed to be as strong, logical, and stable as you are masculine. To admit to feeling weak, emotional or unstable, is to voluntarily align oneself with the feminine side of binary, which hierarchically, is the lesser in this strange domino world of opposites. This is, in part, why suicide is the highest killer in men from 18 to 25, but not in women. The hierarchical binary society creates a culture where a person who identifies as masculine, would in some cases rather take their life, than admit to perceived weaknesses that align them with the feminine, and the social scorn that this might unleash. This is my interpretation of ‘toxic masculinity’: a learnt need to define yourself by the upper-hierarchical side of every binary mode of thought, regardless of its damaging and polarising qualities, to in fact not even be able to see the ways in which it is damaging and polarising, because we have been raised on a life philosophy built on the structure of opposites. Including the “opposite” of all opposites; man and woman. 

To end this I’ll leave you with some questions that relate back to our reoccurring comic pair, the prostitute and the politician. How might homophobia be lessened if gay and straight weren't considered opposites; eternally cursing one to be defined by the other, and not in and of themselves? How might political discussion be freed if the expression of ideas wasn't locked into the opposing structures of left and right? Above all, think of how different discussion and decision making in your life could be, if it wasn't for the bonds of the biggest binary myth of them all: right and wrong. 

This Is Not About Hiccups

A hiccup is an involuntary spasm which usually causes an equally involuntary squeak. The seemingly sporadic nature of a hiccup means that scientists have not yet been able to say, for sure, why or how they come about. They are uncertain. But I can tell you with unwavering certainty that for me, hiccups follow hysterical laughter. Proper, unabashed, explosive laughter always gives me the hiccups; I go from one type of involuntary convulsion to another, and they egg each other on. 

When I was nineteen and travelling with my first love, I hiccuped my way round Eastern Europe. I hiccuped in Warsaw and in Krakow, in the Tatras mountains in Slovakia and in Bratislava, I hiccuped in Budapest (on both sides of the river) and in Prague. Although here I am suddenly reminded of an essay by the Czech writer Milan Kundera, who points out that despite it being politically appropriate to call these countries Eastern Europe, culturally it is not. ‘Central Europe’ is geographically correct, and kindly permits these nations a symbolic shift away from their recent history with the East, and closer to their cultural ties with the West.*

However regardless of the profound impact on expression of identity that this may have, it does not impact the fact that, Eastern, Central, or Western, I hiccuped my way round it and through it. Having laughed hysterically first, and then squeaked involuntarily but merrily afterwards.

But this is not a post about hiccups.

After I graduated I ran away to Madrid to learn Spanish, with a romantic idea that the voice in my head chanting, ‘what now? What now?’ on repeat, would sound less urgent in a second language. (If you're wondering if this is true or not, please refer to previous post Alice's Mushrooms)

The first thing that struck me about my bedroom when I arrived there, was the one, statement, royal purple wall. The plaster had been left rough, and running my hand along that satisfying texture, in the bare room, completely alone, in a new country, I had one of those strange feelings where a relatively insignificant moment suddenly seems to signify everything. The colour purple instantly became more important to me than it had ever been before. Purple became the fledgling fear that had chased me there, mingled with the excitement of freedom; satisfying but rough, like it felt on my fingertips. Purple became the language barrier. It became the ethereal glee of not understanding a word that was being spoken around me, of existing outside that familiar anxiety to constantly translate thoughts into sounds, in order to express, and express, and express, and express. It also became the searing madness of failing to translate my thoughts into sounds, in moments when all I wanted to do was express, and express, and express, and express. 

The colour purple then, like the hiccups, has come to represent something more specific in my life. Like a shiny cookie-cutter that is pressed softly into the dough, the gooey nature of life is cut into distinctive shapes. Thereby making it possible that hiccups can come to represent nomadic laughter, and that purple can become the colour of my unattainable expression. 

Although of course I did learn to speak in Madrid, eventually. 

*Milan Kundera, The Tragedy of Central Europe, 1984 

Ms Cerelle

I had a conversation with a friend recently that left me totally gobsmacked. I'm still swirling about in a kind of ponderthon of unanswerable questions from it. If I ask you these questions, and present you with my half answers, then I suspect I will manage to get a blog-post out of it. 

This conversation was about a friend of her’s who started her periods late, got a boyfriend shortly afterwards, and went straight on the pill. She was telling me about this while we were sat in a velvet-strewn, underground café, listening to Etta James; while a nearby couple were listening to us, although both pretending to be reading. I realise that this seems normal enough, and not something which should trigger a deluge of unanswerable questions, but bare with me. This friend of her’s was put onto the Cerelle pill (the new and current medical preference) which contains no oestrogen and only progesterone, and stops periods all together. Which means that this friend, my friends friend, has only ever had one period in her entire life. 

Let that sink in for a second.

Only one. The very first. That bewildering, intoxicating, underoverwhelming catapult into perceived womanhood. She had that one, and then she stopped.

It is a logical step then (judging by the number of my female friends on the pill) to presume that a huge proportion of this generation of adolescent women are living life free from menstruation. And that many of those who follow, will also. This is what has sent me swirling and wondering. Although I am not of the Hippocrates school of thought: that if a young woman does not menstruate then her blood will collect and fill her lungs and heart and she will be the unfortunate victim of the dreaded but prevalent female hysteria and turn mad and fling herself violently about the room… I do think that this development will have implications, of a social and psychological impact. Herein follows the unanswerable questions, and their undulating half-answers.  

Question 1: how will this affect the way in which women interact with the passing of time?

Quite literally just a picture of a butternut squash.

Having never been a man, I cannot know for sure, but I imagine that NOT having a squidgy, butternut squash shaped lunanome, spitting out the months for decades of your life, probably means you have a different experience of the passing of time. Unlike most women, or J.M Barrie’s crocodile who swallowed the ticking clock, men have never experienced an internal, physical reminder of the passing weeks. This must be an influential factor in a person’s perception of time’s markers, or at least the importance they place on them. In this sense, either our perception of the passing of time, or our social construction around the passing of time, is gendered. Or both, of course. Zadie Smith’s observation in NW that women ‘bring time with them’, has always seemed completely right to me, although I couldn't pin-point exactly why. 

More specifically what I wonder is… will a woman who has not experienced years of menstruation (as those who came before her did) have an altered perception of the passing of time, or is it the social scaffolding that we have built around her which has the greater influence? It's a question of the butternut squash vs society, and although one has certainly influenced the other, and the other has used the one as an excuse for oppression within the other, we undoubtable have ourselves a chicken and the egg conundrum. 

Question 2: do a man’s physical and emotional world’s feel more separate than mine?

I am very used to associating changes in my body with changing emotions, it's a melting, rolling, circulating ordeal. More than just directly feeling an emotion physically, a huge shift in my body coincides with a huge shift in my perception of the world, and emotional interaction with it. Hormonal maturity has taught me how drastically external reality can vary depending on your own internal one. Essentially… if one moment the sound of someone breathing makes you want to punch them in the face, but the next you are weeping sweet ovarian tears at a photo of a baby in a sloth costume, reality as a form of objective experience becomes a fragile concept. Or a smash-able one, depending on your cycle. And so how might a woman’s learning experience of subjectivity change, in the absence of years of menstruation? 

Another way in which a period has the ability to bridge the physical and emotional worlds, is that the pain, discomfort, and bleeding, provides a physical release from emotional tension. One which men can only find by actively seeking it out. There is no doubt that the emotional release periods bring to women, is a factor in the way that men and women’s mental health experiences differ. In which case, should we be expecting, and preparing for, a change in the mental health requirements of this next generation of women?

Question 3: how will this development interact with a culture that is ever obsessed with hairless, symmetrical, porn-perfect genitals? 

I think we can all agree that sex should mostly be about how it feels, not about how it looks. Despite men having a brain which is more visually stimulated sexually, we can agree on the fact that it is an all-round sensory experience for whichever gender. In which case, an over-emphasis in the way genitals look, causes a problematic shift. It causes a shift in focus from the sensual to the visual, and the genuine to the self-conscious. Of course this has been a struggle for humankind since Adam and Eve first realised they were starkers. But even they weren't fretting about Eve’s uneven, floppy labia, or wondering when the tiny, many bobbled heads of shaving rash would pop up and say g’day.

It is nothing radical to suggest that this shift away from the sensual, by which I mean towards visual and away from feeling and function, is an influential factor in the low-self esteem, eating-disorder epidemic that sweeps the West. I worry that opting out of periods (although in many senses a medical victory) takes women further still from their body as a functioning and sensual self, and soon we’ll all have a hairless, fluid-less, symmetrical, thigh-gap where a grown woman’s vagina used to be. 

In Annie Leclerc’s rather fabulous ‘70s book about female sensuality, she describes the feeling of menstruating as ‘that dark milk, that warm syrupy blood-flow, the pain with the scalding taste of happiness’ and I can't help feeling that that would be quite a sad thing to lose.

But perhaps I’m just being too emotional. 

Alice's Mushrooms

If I'm going to cry, it tends to be in the evening or at night. Which makes sense because usually it’s about events of the day, a symptom of exhaustion, or from a more general reflection on life at a late and more reflective hour. What makes less sense, is to cry in the morning, before anything has happened. If a person finds themselves crying in the morning, before they’ve even started the day, then I suspect there is something more complicated, more all-encompassing that is troubling them. It's from something they have carried over from one day to the next; it is too heavy for their subconscious to keep to itself, and so it passes it on to the conscious mind which, probably unprepared, does not have a handle on the situation. 

This is what I found happened to me, on a park bench at 9.30am, in the centre of Madrid, on a Tuesday. And I cried my eyes out. I don't know if you have ever found yourself crying on a park bench early in the morning, but if you have you will know what happens. Firstly, all of the dogs who are being walked, bound up to you. They sense you are upset and, as chief cheerer-uppers of the globe, see this as their duty and their moment to shine! And you pat their quivering little zig-zagging backs appreciatively, and for a moment it's really, really, lovely… until the owners arrive. The owners arrive and, not being a chief cheerer-upper of the globe, they aren’t quite sure what to do. Mostly they approach hesitantly, side-stepping and side-smiling, in an awkward, apologetic sand-dance towards you, pick their bemused little canine up and then trot off sideways again. You give them your best watery humble smile, and watch their eyes dart about your appearance, looking for clues, wondering why.

Which, incidentally, is also what I was wondering. If one of them had actually asked me why, I would have had nothing to say. I didn't have a bloody clue what I was doing and what had happened or why I was crying.

Everything had been going so well. In the previous couple of days, I had successfully secured employment with six new English students, ready for when I finished Spanish lessons and started the next phase of life in Madrid. (You know, the phase where I would earn my own money; live in the centre, spend my free time writing in cutesy cafés, and partying in a stylishly uncouth manner; aesthetically somewhere half-way between prohibition glam and heroine chíc.)

I had been making my way to Spanish school, enjoying the haphazard experience of listening to my iPod on shuffle, trying to avoid making eye contact with that waiter who seems to think I fancy him, when, out of nowhere, it happened. An overwhelming feeling of impending doom billowed out from the clouds and surged down towards me, and at the same time the earth I was walking on dislodged itself and disloyally raced up to meet it. Feeling like a wavering computer glitch, or how Alice probably did when she ate those mushroom: except I was throbbing between the big Alice and the little Alice and then back to the big Alice again, I veered off towards the park. 

And thus I found myself where we started – weeping on a park bench, friendly dogs, sand-dancing owners ...etc. This was very perplexing. I couldn't decipher what it was that this emotional response was interacting with. Everything was going to well, wasn't it? Apparently not.

That impending-doom, billowing, Alice’s mushrooms thing, could probably also be called a panic-attack. It's textbook; feelings of entrapment and death, volatile and uncontrollable in nature, an intense emotional spasm seemingly disconnected from its trigger. But what isn't in the textbook, is the positive result I gained from it. It forced me to properly observe the details of my situation and, like a dense lump of icing being squeezed through the pin-hole of a piping bag, I came out the other end lighter and under control, my life feeling like nice pink squiggles, instead of an indistinguishable, heavy lump. I realised (with some hindsight)  that what I need at the moment, post-graduation, is to feel tangible progress. I need to see evidence that I am beginning to build the future I want for myself; and that future is not in Madrid.

The next day I booked a flight back to London. 

Of course for many people there is no positive result of a panic-attack. Clinical, perpetual panic-attacks are debilitating, and suggesting that they should simply find the deeper meaning, would be ridiculous, offensive. However I suspect there are many people who, like me, do not suffer from a panic disorder, but do experience the occasional one in times of stress or confusion. In which case, it’s a fantastic thing that your sub-conscious forced you through the piping bag, when your conscious mind was stubbornly lugging your indistinguishable lump-life around. Thank god I had a melt-down in a park, or else I'd be struggling on with the plan that looked so good on paper, trying to suppress my discontent. 

And so next time I feel Alice hovering ominously with those magic mushrooms of hers, rest assured, I’ll be grabbing that trip by its furry rabbit ears. 

Me, My Six Year Old Self, And Our Time-Warp Sisterhood

 It has long been an opinion of mine that the cross-section of society who most have their shit together, out of  everyone, are the six year olds.

I certainly was not zip-mouthed.
(Working that crop-top denim shirt
combo)

Think about it. Think about you at age six, or any six year old you have the delight of knowing. A six year old isn't going to put up with somebody hogging the sand-pit, and they sure as hell aren't going to invite you to their party if you didn't invite them to yours. I don't think I have ever been as self-assured, determined or unapologetically genuine as I was at age six. Six year olds don't compromise unless you make them. Nothing comes between a six year old and what they want other than you, and perhaps their disproportionate love of ice cream. And Toys R Us (is that still a thing?)

It therefore always makes me wonder, if six year old me had her shit together the most out of all of the me's, if six year old me was the most unapologetically genuine and the least compromising, then what would she think of me now? I desperately want her approval. If six year old me approved of twenty-two year old me, then I think I'm doing all right. I think I've made it. 

So what was I like at that age? One of my uncles said I was his favourite niece because I was just so angry. All of the time. I was a furious little indignant thing, marching around, cross at the world. I don't think that's changed much, except now my rage is channeled less through climbing into my den and complaining to my teddy bears (I say less) and more through poorly timed feminist rants, and passionate rows with conveniently stupid, imaginary people. 

I still wear this dress now.
But probably with less conviction.

At six I was unwavering in my conviction that I would mother ten babies. Yes, ten. It is worth pointing out here that I thought babies were light as a feather, and clung onto you like muscly little monkeys, allowing you to wander about your business with one or two on each limb, hailing down taxis, giving them what-for at the bank, like some sort of trundling one woman baby farm. I still remember the look of apprehension on my nanny Amanda’s face when she handed me a baby to hold for the first time, fully realising that this would crush my dream. Safe to say, weight/ clinging ability of babies aside, my point is, six year old me fully expected adult me to be an absolute bloody machine of a woman. 

I cant’t say for sure how closely my lifestyle aligns with ‘bloody machine of a woman’, but there are certainly aspects she would admire. The fact that I'm single, for example, six year old Elizabeth would fervently approve of that. She would also be extremely pleased that I have never, even in moments of unreserved love and infatuation, ever walked along the street with my hand in the back pocket of my lover’s jeans, and their hand in the back pocket of my jeans, because she saw that once on a European sight-seeing holiday, and she was not impressed. Not one bit. 

Dreaming of being a grown up.
And a spy.

Where six year old me had a penchant for launching herself down slides head first and upside down, twenty-two year old me gets the same rapture-angst from moving to foreign cities by myself; this year it was Madrid, two years ago it was Prague. I like to think we’d have a moment about this one. I think she'd look at me like I'm one step closer to being the manga-cool spy she envisioned me being and I would feel like the manga-cool spy she envisioned me being, and then we would both go and leap off that ten metre diving board together, like sassy synchronised salmon, JUST TO PROVE THAT WE CAN (and also to show up our brothers). 

This time-warp sisterhood has often got me through seasons of struggle in my life; tapping into that strong sense of who I was when I began, my core self, can help to clear the fog. Me before my eyebrows were bushy and babies were heavy, before bottling it up and long before all of the bollocks (interpret that as you will…) Pretty much everything grown-up is impressive to a six year old, and sometimes it can save you to remember that.

So keep a little globe of never-never-land, for when everything grown-up is nettlesome and bland.

Tragic Elizabeth and The Language of Aloneness

Last week, when in La Latina, one of the hipster areas of Madrid, I inspired such intense pity in the waiting staff of a café that they offered me a job. My Spanish is terrible. I recently, accidentally but with forceful enthusiasm, informed a taxi driver that I’m a fascist , and the majority of my attempts at speech still involve optimistically adding ‘ivo’ onto the end of English words.  Note: fascista and faschionista not to be confused.

So what was it that I was doing? This thing so heart-wrenching and pitiful that these waiters were willing to overlook my bumbling, fascist, Spanish-illiterate ways, and offer me a livelihood? I was eating lunch by myself. I was eating lunch by myself, out in the open, like the crazy bitch that I am. Well OK, I was also wistfully gazing at small children playing in the square, whilst drinking a glass of wine. There’s a strong possibility that you could see my ovaries twinkling in my eyeballs, BUT STILL.

The concerned individuals even used the word ‘shocked’ and asked me, with brow furrowed, ‘but for why?!’ This was difficult for me to answer, because I wanted to ask them the same thing. I was also shocked and wondering why.

Gin and tonic for one please?
Have recently learnt that drinking
alone in Madrid suggests alcoholism.
Ooops...

I looked around me and realised that there was not a single person in the entire square who was, well, single. In fact, I had never seen anyone eating by themselves in the weeks I'd spent in Madrid. But why? In London nobody would bat an eyelid to see someone enjoying a leisurely lunch by themselves, more than that it would be considered an admirable quality to have the self-assurance and independence to do so. Does being independent also make you tragic here?

Once I began to ponder this, one surprising but glaring detail of my Madrid experience struck me: I never feel lonely here. I often do in London. Nothing heartbreaking or debilitating, just that self-indulgent kind of loneliness. Like dipping the tip of your tongue in cinnamon to make it tingle; slightly bitter, slightly sweet, a little addictive. Of course this isn't clinical loneliness, it’s my fetishised, glamorous version. But in consideration of real loneliness, what is the connection between independent people, or individualistic cultures, and loneliness? Is there a connection? 

According to Eric Klinenberg in his 2012 book, ‘Going Solo’, what counts in combatting loneliness is not the quantity of friends we have or socialising we do, but the quality. I read this and thought I'd caught the Madridian’s out. They have mostly superficial friendships! I thought to myself,  fickle friends happy to up and tapas somewhere else at the drop of a tapa! This fitted in neatly with my smug assumption that independence beats sociability, the loner is happier than the cheerleader. Strongly encouraged independence from the moment of umbilical detachment is clearly the only way.

Just after I decided this to be true, I read up on some studies and statistics. Always a bad idea for personal theories that, reading the facts. 

Turns out that the Spanish score the fifth highest in the EU for feeling close to those around them and the third highest on having someone to turn to in a crisis.* It seems that the Spanish do not, in fact, live with fickle friends who are willing to up and tapas somewhere else at the drop of a tapa. They are actually just doing a shit ton of brilliant quality socialising, with huge quantities of people, all the bloody time. Umm… how?!

I had a little chat with my Spanish teacher, Diego, on this matter of aloneness.

My aim was simple: ask him specifically about Spanish language surrounding ideas of alone-time/independence, and conclude some kind of very clever thesis on the way specific language influences thoughts and expression and therefore behaviour and loneliness etc… but every which way I asked him about this, I got the same answer: what is the context? Diego could not confirm whether the equivalent to words like ‘loner’ or ‘individual’ have a positive or negative connotation, unless I gave him context.

It was during this line of questioning that I realised I had misunderstood something vital about the incident in the café. It was not that I was by myself that was so shocking, but more that I was eating by myself. Had I been going for a walk or going to an exhibition that would have been fine, but it was the context of my aloneness that they pitied. 

I am beginning to think that this element of context is an influential factor in feelings of togetherness. Spanish is certainly a more contextual language than English, I have found that even in beginner’s lessons. Does this make it a more dynamic mode of expression and therefore the Spanish people more expressive, more socially dynamic? Samuel Beckett famously switched over from writing in his native English, to French, because he found English words so detached from their actual meaning, so inexpressive in and of themselves. Perhaps the fluidity of the Spanish language leads to people who can better express themselves, that are less trapped by rigidity of definition, and therefore more connected to those around them. Less lonely. 

Having said all that, I would still quite like to be able to lunch by myself without accidentally inspiring a Help Tragic Elizabeth charity campaign. Is that too much to ask?

*The UK traipses in at the second lowest in closeness to those around them, which is not sup rising considering our innate fear of getting stuck chatting to the neighbours. We are the third lowest for having someone to turn to in a crisis, but who needs that anyway when you can handle it yourself?

El Rastro

Americans were panicking, small children were screaming, and everyone was packed in tight with manic eyes. I had a weird inception moment where I just saw sardines eating sardines eating sardines eating sardines. I was bobbing up and down and weaving about, trying to avoid being taken out by the woman dishing out baguettes to her family with the javelin arm of Fatima Whitbread. It was my second day in Madrid. I had come in search of an authentic Madrid experience, and bloody hell had I found it.

I had been told that the two main options for Sunday morning were either to follow the holy and attend Mass, or follow the Masses and go to El Rastro, the holy-grail of flea-markets. Not after anything too intense, I had chosen the latter and, well, clothes.

It had started off well enough. I had journeyed with the hordes on the metro, been swept along the streets merrily amongst them - our footsteps rumbling like the rolling R, feeling quite Spanish and very smug. I had enjoyed the rainbow array of silks and tie-dyes, been amused at the stall with extensive supplies of gas-masks, the grumpy old men with an army of dolls, and the old man with a hundred red screwdrivers. But that was before. Before it began to actually get busy, as the internet had warned me, and before this. Before Bar Santurce.

Bar Santurce: a tapas bar specialising in grilled sardines and beer. Where one gnaws on whole sardines between glugs of beer, and disposes of the bones by throwing them on the floor with wild abandon! You stand (and eat) squished up against a bar, much as you would expect to spend a Friday night in an English pub, except of course it was only noon, and on a Sunday morning. If a Sunday morning tells you anything about a culture, I thought to myself, then the Spanish are fucking nutcases.

Those lazy irritable thoughts had began to shimmy to the surface of my mind though. You know the ones. Is this really worth the hassle? Wouldn't I genuinely rather be sipping on a cup of tea, eating scrambled eggs? But then I bit into my first sardine, and, honestly, I almost had to hold on to the bar it was so bloody good. They were made up of the kind of richness you can taste in your ears.

I began to embrace the frenzy, lose my British inhibitions. I didn't nibble, I devoured, I destroyed, I ravished, I relished the barbaric pleasure of tossing fish bones and dirty napkins willy-nilly about me, amidst Viking gulps of beer - I was - I was interrupted. By that screaming child, now somewhere near my knee.

To be fair to him, I could only imagine the carnage of experience from down at that height: the echoing raucousness of human feeding-time, ricocheting off the swirling, froth-like tiles for as far as his eye could see; greasy napkins snowing down and sardine carcasses falling from the sky all around, brains hanging out, eyes still staring. Christ I was only just about coping, and I had beer. Snapping out of my orgasmic barbaric moment, I suddenly felt a bit sick.

Glitter had turned to smudged mascara, and I couldn't breath for fish-fumes.

I jostled my way out, apologising to the small boy with my eyes, who had now grown rather frantic, and emerged out into the air. Although less pungent with dead animals of the sea, it was absolutely rammed with people, stalls, live animals. I almost tripped over a woman pushing a cat in a trolly cart.

See here's the thing, where stopping for a bite to eat would normally provide respite, at El Rastro it is more of an osmosis. An osmosis of chaos. I couldn't appreciate its beauty anymore, I needed to get out.

I struggled back past the array of fabrics, the tie-dye man in his tie-dye world, the gas-masks, the doll army. Children, grandparents, teenagers, demonstrative lovers, dour sellers, shouting parents.

I eventually succeeded in ejecting myself out of the thing, like a teeny tiny sliver of soap I shot out through a small gap in El Rastro's fingertips. More and more Madridians surged down the side-streets, in all their exclaiming, gesturing glory they marched confidently into the fray. I could only admire them, for a short moment, before continuing on my flapping way up the hill, to a small cafe I had spied behind a flower stall.

As the cappuccino drew bitter squiggles down my throat, I began to relax. From behind some sunflower petals, and at a safe distance, I peeked out at El Rastro monster. It was sensational, really. I looked on at the wonderful, vibrant, colourful, exhilarating fervour of the thing and Jesus Christ, I thought to myself...

Next Sunday I think I'll go to Mass instead.