Ask no questions

I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend just gone in Madrid, ostensibly for a mate's birthday but basically to eat and drink a lot for a couple of days. It led, this morning, to the odd experience of waking up in another country but going to work in London in the afternoon.

Anyway, one of the many pleasures of Spain is the ability to get a decent coffee just about anywhere. In a country that has so many bars and cafés, you don't want to get a rep for making bad coffee. I've therefore had a decent cup everywhere from an underground station to the airport, and pretty much everybody makes real coffee at home - I've never been offered instant coffee in a Spaniard's house.

I was pretty unpleasantly surprised, then, to find that the only place I could get a coffee at Madrid's Barajas Airport this morning, once I'd gone through security at least, was a branch of Starbuck's. Now Barajas is a long airport. I walked the length of it, twice, but unless I wanted to sit down in a 'proper' restaurant, the only other option was a machine. Hobson's choice, as far as I'm concerned - I don't like Starbucks as a company and I really don't like coffee dispensed from machines.

Starbucks are a company that are not easy to like. They paid Corporation Tax for the first time in four years in the UK in 2013 only after adverse publicity and a drop in sales following the subsequent public backlash.Their branches are absolutely bloody everywhere. By far the worst thing, though, is that I think the coffee's just no bloody good. I simply don't like it and it means the other stuff becomes impossible to forgive.

But, hell. It's got to be better than a machine, right? So, reluctantly, I joined the queue. I do remember liking the cinammon roll thingy they do, so that and a coffee would have to do for a breakfast. Such sweet pastry delights are a rare treat for me these days. One snag, though. As the bloke in front of me ordered his drink, he was asked his name. This was a new, fresh hell that I'd forgotten about with this lot. I absolutely hate this gimmick - I'm there for a coffee, not to make friends with a corporate monolith. Were I a regular at Starbuck's I'd want to give ever-more ridiculous names; Zaphod. Ivanhoe. Jebediah. Moon Unit. Daphne. You get the idea.

Anyway, that was the final straw. I wasn't buying a coffee and going through the idiotic false intimacy of having them call out my name rather than just making sure the right coffee gets to the right person. Other coffee vendors manage this perfectly well without this folly. So I just took the cinnamon thingy, which you can buy without the name crap, and went and bought a coffee for half the price from a machine that wanted nothing more than coinage from me. It was blithely indifferent to my name or anything else as it dispensed what turned out to be a reasonably drinkable cup, for an instant.

And you know what? The bloody cinnamon thingy was dry.

Café con lechery

I've just returned from the usual week-and-a-bit sojourn to the house I'm (extremely) lucky to part-own, with my girlfriend, in the Galician hills. This will go some way to explaining why nothing's been written on here lately. Shall I make another blog entry, or shall I continue to lounge here by the pool and drink beer in the sun? Tough call.

Anyway, spending time at said poolside with a mate who's single has introduced me to the concept of café con lechery, the process of discreetly spotting attractive ladies through one's sunglasses while enjoying a coffee at the bar. Not that I indulged, of course, in such conduct unbecoming an attached individual – I have eyes only for my beloved, and write only to record the process as a matter of anthropological record. Moving swiftly on...

I'm not much of a sun worshipper, preferring the colder months of less sweat and more football, but it was on this occasion a blessed relief, given the wretched weather we've been having in Britain, to have an excuse to actually use the bloody shades for any reason other than to just pretend one is cool by wearing them indoors, for example.

I was struck by the difference in the faces between people here and there when I returned. The Galicians were complaining about having a shit summer because there have been days when cloud has interrupted the usual diet of pure cyan skies and, yikes, even occasional spots of rain! Also, the temperature has dropped into single figures overnight (*gasp*) because the wind has been coming from the north. This is what, for them, constitutes an awful summer. Given how resolutely absent the sun has been from Britain this year, I can only forgive the fact that British faces, by comparison, looked pale, drawn and rather sullen on the Gatwick Express as we headed home.

It's to our credit as a nation, I think, that we put up with this pretty stoically. We are, honestly, world, friendly once the initial reserve is overcome, tolerant, fairly happy and uncomplaining people. But even Brits have to see the sun once in a bloody while. May it shine on us for the remainder of this season, so everybody else gets the chance to indulge in that sunglassed pastime I was introduced to by my mate last week. It's not for me, obviously; I only have eyes for my beloved – did I mention that?