The Needs of the Few
People in supermarkets who finish packing their shopping before even thinking about looking for their purse or wallet. Theatregoers who arrive at a performance and seem completely baffled by the concept of numbered seating. Odd numbers on this side, evens over there; the first row is, surprisingly, row 1. See the pattern? And then there are the latecomers who arrive after the film has started and stand in the aisle discussing where everyone is supposed to sit. Often they have torches.
Of course, we Brits can be just as bad (or worse), so moaning about annoying habits doesn't really fit the blog's purpose of being about my experiences of life in Spain. In fact, these things are individual actions, personal foibles rather than anything especially Spanish. Nonetheless, as I pondered the things that get my goat, I wondered if there wasn't something I could pin down as a ‘national characteristic’ – something that was as true (or not) as saying that Germans have no sense of humour and that Britons are ironic.
I have a theory that we Britons are rather more preoccupied with having a drink than Spaniards. I don't necessarily mean ten-pint binges in Benidorm or even booze in general. We Brits seem to need a drink on the go much of the time. Come home, put the kettle on. Sit down to watch the telly, put the kettle on (or pour a wine). Go into a café and, if we stay for half an hour, quite possibly have two coffees. Spaniards, by contrast, seem quite happy to order a coffee, drink it and then sit chatting for another hour without feeling the need to order anything else. Drinking, for us, is almost an activity in itself; for the home team, it seems more often to be an accompaniment to whatever else they're doing.
I wonder whether that difference in approach extends to something quite different: the way people handle the shared physical environment. Where Northern Europeans view public space as a transit zone, a set of channels designed for getting from A to B as efficiently as possible, Spaniards seem to view it as an open-air living room. And in your living room, why wouldn't you stop dead in the middle of the floor to talk about the weather?
Some of the habits that annoy me stem from this exact clash: personal convenience winning out over the flow of public space. Take creative parking. Rather than use a perfectly good space 50 metres away, some Spanish drivers will double-park on urban roads (leaving you trapped behind their hazard flashers), park in the gap in the parked cars conveniently provided by a zebra crossing, or drive their cars and vans onto the pavement. I have no problem with someone bending the rules to pop into the estanco for twenty Bensons, but that's not the same as blocking the pavement and forcing pram pushers and wheelchair users into fast-flowing traffic, or leaving visually impaired pedestrians to bump into parked cars lured there by the tactile paving.
Spanish pedestrians show the same casual territorial capture, lacking the classic ‘Oops, sorry!’ shuffle that I (maybe jingoistically) perceive as the British way. Acquaintances freeze in the doorway of a bank or café, or form an immovable huddle on the pavement. Inside the supermarket, shoppers park their trolleys side by side across the aisle to catch up on local gossip. Your journey to the tinned tomatoes has to change.
A group of four walking abreast at a pace below that habitual for most snails forms an impenetrable human shield. Overtaking them can be frustrating – hemmed in by parked vehicles, fast traffic and street furniture. Coughing loudly never does the trick. And then there are those who step onto zebra crossings without a glance at approaching traffic, performing some sort of time-consuming reverse moonwalk across the road, apparently unconcerned by the cars they've brought to a halt.
There is even institutionalised acceptance of this behaviour. You arrive on time and wait for the walk, the talk or the function to begin. Then someone from the organisers announces that, because more people are expected, the event will be delayed by ‘a few minutes of courtesy’. Minutos de cortesía to whom, exactly? Not, apparently, to those who made the effort to arrive on time. It's a strange inversion: the punctual are asked to wait, while the tardy are rewarded.
Even the terraces outside bars have changed character over the years. Where they once occupied whatever pavement space was available, they now spill onto the roadway, gobbling up parking spaces, or spread across the pavement so passers-by have to thread their way through a maze of tapas plates and chair legs. And don't get me started on cyclists who ride three abreast on a main road inside double white lines, one hand resting nonchalantly on their hip as they turn to have a natter with their companions, entirely unbothered by the trail of traffic behind them.
So, am I just following my natural grumpy old man bent, or does the theory hold up? Perhaps Spanish behaviour isn't necessarily malicious or deliberately bad-mannered. Maybe it reflects a different set of priorities, in which social interaction takes precedence over the smooth running of shared public space. If you're talking to friends, maybe that conversation deserves your attention more than the people brought to a temporary standstill. The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many, to paraphrase Mr Spock. It's not that people are deliberately trying to upset you; it's simply that they're engaged in something more pressing.
There is, I suppose, something rather appealing about a society that doesn't feel obliged to organise every minute of the day around efficiency and punctuality. In a world increasingly obsessed with schedules, deadlines and making every second count, perhaps we could all do with slowing down a little. But there's a difference between taking time to enjoy life or using a conversation to stake your place in a local community and imposing that philosophy on others.
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