For the three people who have visited this bog roll of blog posts since its creation many moons ago, it will be perfectly evident I have been AWOL on the spread trading news front.
The sole mitigating factor is my lust for travel. I´m in Spain´s biggest little city of Málaga, soaking up the last embers of sunshine that soaked up the river prior to my arrival.
Drier than a towel in a furnace, this metropolis is fascinatingly distracted from modern life by traditional Hispanic ways.
Liberated from the shackles of Western European conformity, Spain and its southern poster child have reinvigorated my fascination with anthropology. Which explains why the spread trading has temporarily assumed back seat status.
I´ll explain why I´m spellbound by the Spanish race.
In the UK a little while ago, there was an administrative uprising against the ´curse´, as the politicos would have it, of cheap booze in supermarkets. It was destroying the hopes and dreams of the young and sending the moderately older into a spiral of decay and susceptibility to cirrhosis.
I´m in Spain where I can – quite legally, and without the frowns of my elders or faceless bureaucrats – buy a can of Special Brew (called something altogether different but I know a strong, crap lager when I see one) for 34 cents. In a brightly lit supermarket, not a den of iniquity or speakeasy!
But here we don´t have the problems of yobs coursing through the streets like bulls in Pamplona. We have three harmless weapons:
- Community
- Family support
- Moderation
Collectively they make Spain one of the most caring, responsible and respectable assembly of people in the world. A lot of this civility has to do with love, religion (so unusual these days to praise religion for affecting benevolently the human race) and common sense.
Families dan un paseo every week; they stride out in their millions, discussing the events of the day at a microscopic level. It´s a charming spectacle, the equivalent quality time to the now-mythical Sunday roast where Brits would gather round a table to – shriek – talk and listen.
Maybe I disseminated in the wrong direction. Maybe this Hispanic sense of community is down to a good old lie-in. At 8am this morning the streets were swept clean of Halloween´s nocturnal excesses and, largely, the people inhabiting this sweet conurbation.
Which makes this whole idea of mañana seem a little far-fetched. A mañana to many is as fictional as a sit-down family meal in England…
Incidentally, if you´re interested in the fortunes of this Spanish city, take a look at my other never-ending electronic script, Word And Mouth, for a glimpse into the success story of Kay Farrell, owner of Malaga Bike Tours.
More stock trading elementaries soon!
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