You know you are getting more Spanish when the first heat of summer arrive with a bang, and you immediately start using ‘low blood pressure’ as an excuse to lie on the sofa all evening, avoiding the housework.

The key phrase to use here is ‘he tenido una bajada de tensión’, or for even more dramatic effect, una super-bajada de tensión, ‘bajadas de tensión’ (blood pressure collapse) being common amongst just about everyone in Spain when it’s hot, including it now appears, me as well!

Bajadas de tensión can be cured by various means, including: a) Rapid ingestion of Coca Cola/Sugary food, b) Doing nothing when there is lots to be done c) Telling everyone about your bajada, repeatedly d) all of the above. I’m getting good at this, and there have only been three days of heat so far!

On another note, as soon as the sun came out a few days ago, the Retiro park filled with people with bajadas de tensión stripped down to their underwear. Strapping young men in nothing but tattoos and tight boxers, women in bras and tangas (g-strings) – does this happen in your part of the world?

I’m sure it’s a more pronounced phenomenon than this time last year – am I just getting old?!

Apologies for the lack of illustrative photos to accompany this point – just think ‘slightly grungy lingerie ad with trees’, and you get the picture! Instead, here’s a favourite old photo of mine from 1998, of a man in the park selling chistes (jokes):

Anyway, that’s enough for today, I feel another super-bajada de tensión coming on, and I may barely make it back to the sofa…

Hola, anyone still here? I’ve been away for a while, working, learning, travelling… Here are my latest Notes from Spain…

1. Only in Spain do the lesser mountain chains look as good as this….

That’s a corner of the Gredos mountains. We spent a weekend recently in Avila, from where we made the hour journey up to the Gredos range, starting with a coffee in the Parador de Gredos, and taking the lovely circular walk through the pine forest below. At reception they’ll give you details of picnic spots up the road by sparkling streams, and directions up to the snow-bound Plataforma de Gredos where walkers head up to tackle the nearby peaks. You’ll need a car.

2. Only in Spain can you go on retreat in tiny valleys lost deep at the end of dirt tracks in magical pine-covered national parks, as far off the grid as you can get…

Only in Spain do you discover that when you walk up the hill behind the house, you get hell of a surprise when you finally get to look over the ridge at the top: a hundred-mile view you never imagined could be there, of a million olive trees rolling across the plains of Jaen below…

This was, ‘El Camino Natural’, a very special place If you are a yoga-meditation-retreat kind of a person.

3. Only in Spain, as we discovered to our wide-eyed horror, might the owner of a very rural guest house investigate the smell of gas (i.e. possible gas leak!) in your room by running a lit match along the rubber pipe connecting the gas ‘butano’ bottle to the boiler on the wall…

4. Only in Spain do you find stacks of crisps piled up against shop windows…