A nation of writers

I once worked with someone who was keen on illicit drugs. He came from Huddersfield but we were working near Newcastle and he was having trouble finding a local supplier. He picked up what we used to call a sexually transmitted disease and ended up at the local GUM clinic. He told me later that finding a supplier in the clinic was the work of minutes and he wondered why he'd never thought of it before.

If you want to find Britons in Spain the Post Office would be fertile territory. In the Pinoso office at least we usually outnumber Spaniards. I've been told, by a Spaniard, that this is because, until recently at least, there had not been a big tradition of reading and writing in Spain so the Post Office never became important to ordinary people. I have to say that I thought the analysis lacked academic rigour.

Today I was reading the local news over a lunchtime coffee. There was a piece to say that Pinoso had twenty one restaurants featured on a website called gastroranking.es which is a website that compiles the results from a range of other websites of the TripAdvisor type.

I had a look and I was quite surprised to find that the top rated places in Pinoso included places I would not have instantly thought of. The outright winner is very popular with both Spaniards and Britons but the rest of the top performers included places that I certainly don't care for. Risking the possibility of being ostracised by my own all I can think is that maybe the Post Office literacy comment is more accurate than I suspected. Maybe there really is very little tradition of writing by the home population and that extends to restaurant reviews.