National expression

The young French woman who sat down next to me on a public bench was talking discreetly into her phone. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that she didn't once mention Jean-Paul throwing the ball to Claudette in the garden, or Monsieur Lafayette losing his glasses on the bus, I was unable to use what I'd learned in school to decipher what she was actually saying. Eventually, though, she did exclaim something I understood - 'Oh là là!'. I genuinely hadn't realised that real-life French people used this expression and had, until this very moment, thought it was purely the preserve of 1970s British comedians after some clunkingly unfunny double entendre or other.

There was more. Wending my way home only a couple of hours later, I spotted a well-dressed Spanish chap walking down a main road carrying a humungous pan of paella. He wasn't a waiter or anything, just your average Joe strolling down the street cradling enough rice to feed the best part of Andalucía. Well, this was clearly National Stereotype Day or something and before too long I fully expected to bump into a thigh-slapping German in full Lederhosen, quaffing on a stein of beer the size of Lower Saxony and playfully beating his friend Wolfgang about the head with a couple of Bratwurst sausages. Or maybe an English Morris dancer asking bewildered passers by if they'd seen the cheese he lost recently after rolling it down a hill to pass the time. Alas, neither of these characters was forthcoming but I was left pondering the infinitely rich tapestry of national identities on our weird and wonderful planet. And this was just a small part of Europe.

All of which brings me to the village fair I attended this weekend. It was, by some distance, the most Spanish experience I've ever been party to, greatly enhanced by the fact that I was the only foreign person there and everyone present called me Pedro. No, really, they did.

There were flamenco singers, ham and cheese, flamenco dancers, fireworks and flares, flamenco guitarists, free paella, flamenco piano players, sweet wine, boleros, coplas, children playing everywhere at all hours, church bells, beauty contests (I didn't win), a singer called Antonio Flamenkito, midday mass, sandwiches roughly the size of Malaga cathedral, verdiales (wonderful, ancient village folk songs from Malaga province) and a closing procession involving a throne bearing the image of the patron saint of the village being carried through the streets on young - and not-so-young - men's shoulders to spontaneous and rapturous applause. Phew!

Very late on Sunday night, when it was all over and I was trying to take it all in, watching the last of the fireworks crack and fizz against a blue-black sky, I caught myself whispering under my breath - 'Wow!'. Or, in other words, as nobody called Wolfgang ever said, 'Oh là là!'.

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