I needed a rag to check the oil on my old banger, so I was looking under the kitchen sink for a discarded tee-shirt.
There’s a pile of them down there, maybe my wife thought slinging them under the sink was easier than chucking them in the washing machine. Especially the sillier ones which I appear to have collected over the years.
This one was from some restaurant and had a large black diagonal stripe on it, looking like – if one was driving – a seatbelt. A treasure from back in 1975 when the new law came in.
I took it down to the restaurant to tease them, but it fell apart in my hands. After a mere half a century of neglect plus the work of a few moths: I call it poor quality.
Since I was there, I stayed for lunch.
Had a few drinks with the owner, Juan, and a couple of others.
Driving home (yes, yes, with my seatbelt fastened), I thought I’d take the secret back-route that only I (and a handful of local boozers) are familiar with. It’s a bit bumpy some of it, and I know I need to slow down on a particularly nasty stretch, but I got home safely, while my friend Ángel who took the main road got charged by the cops while driving with his eyes crossed.
In Spain, the legal limit is 0.5mg of alcohol per ml of blood (they want to drop it to 0.2mg). To compare, in the UK the limit is 0.8mg. I know, they claim Spain is a tourist paradise. Poor Ángel: five hundred euros, (250 if he pays up sharpish) and four points docked from his driving licence.
He’s a changed man these days…
Indeed, we sometimes call him up to be the designated driver. These days, he sits there in the corner while twitching and playing with his mobile phone.
Up in the Smoke, the traffic-tzar is an old blue-stocking who has been tightening the screws on all aspects of driving for several decades. Right now, as far as he’s concerned, a capful of una clara (beer with lemonade) will pretty much do the trick.
It’s all right for him though – he has a chauffeur. He can loll around in the back singing some popular number from Manolo Escobar (perhaps the catchy 'somebody's stolen my donkey and his cart') while the driver grinds his teeth and negotiates the M-30 during the rush-hour.
Mind you, and to make a point – you don’t need to drive ‘under the influence’ or indeed even completely sober for that matter if you live in Madrid or any other city in Spain. They have buses, taxis, trams and metros. You don’t even need to own a car.
And besides, there’s always a bar downstairs. Just use the lift (it's free) to get home.
No, it’s us country-folk that have to take our lives in our hands every time we go out shopping or to have lunch with a friend… and answer me this – how are the country-restaurants, with their reduced number of clients and their high social security outgoings, expected to make a dollar on their cheap menu del día and a glass of water?
So before you go drinking, always remember to plan ahead for your trip home.
......
My daughter, who is a lawyer, tells me I must put a postscript here to say that I made the whole above story out of the cloth of fiction and that I don’t associate with drinkers and indeed I haven’t myself had a drop since the English last won the World Cup: an admission which (except for the bit about the diagonal tee-shirt) I am happy to do.