I’m still not quite into my stride yet in Malaga – half way down the rabbit hole tumbling towards I do not know what –  which means that the quirks of this city still seem somewhat sinister rather than endearing; one thing that really freaks me out is the fact that the bins are collected at midnight – obviously the bin men here do not have the same fear of being accosted by an old lady in a nightgown with a candle in one hand and a sawn-off blunderbuss in the other and so go about their business at a time which suits them ( in the middle of the night) which means pneumatic noises and mumbled Bolivian accents at the strangest of times.

Another thing which gets to me is the (to borrow a turn of phrase from Boris Johnson) bendy buses, which in terms of crowdedness make me feel half way between being on one of these trains you see in the Asian sub-continent with people clinging to the roof and sides, and being about to have my four wings and three breasts chopped off and made into KFC burgers.

My final quick gripe is with the shops which ‘buy gold’ and all claim to give customers the best price for the massive stashes of gold which apparently exist in the third most recession hit country in the EU – which at worst is a mass money laundering scheme and at best means that the city is sitting on some kind of Gold mine of which I am not getting a piece (run by the fish people?***SEVERE DELUSIONS OF FANTASTICAL CONSPIRACIES ARE A SIGN OF SCHIZOPHRENIA***).

It has also been raining. This is not a complaint, I think the only environment related complaint which is acceptable this week on planet Earth would be “my entire neighbourhood was swept away by a wall of water”, so we just get on with the rain.

On the one day nice enough for a stroll to the beach I did manage to make a total pillock of myself on the way back, as only I can. In my defence, “Always the sun” by ‘The Stranglers’ came on my ipod just as the real sun came out from behind a cloud which struck a sentimental musical chord and distracted me long enough almost to be run over by a scooter – of which I had to dive out the way as the angry driver came to a stop just in time for his scooter to keel over and shake his fist angrily at me, at which point I realised I had dived straight into a puddle of wet cement, wearing flip-flops. Understandably the builders to whom the cement belonged were not too thrilled about this and joined angry scooter man in their pursuit of the sandy, cementy reprobate, who only shook them off by diving round a corner, removing my flip-flops and gassing it back to my flat barefoot.

My guilt about the amount of partying I have been doing subsided somewhat this week as I witnessed the mother of all abdications of responsibility – and for this I must thank Charlie Sheen. His interview with ABC news allow me to describe my Friday night thusly: after watching ‘Two and a Half Men’ for an hour, I was feeling a lot of passion and decided (because I have a different constitution to everyone else) to drink a lot of alcohol. Because my brain is so swimming with awesome thoughts that if you were plugged into it for even five minutes you’d be like ‘dude I can’t handle this’ and your face would melt into a pile of soggy porridge, this alcohol (imbibed for the above reasons) caused me to act in a way that may not be accepted in this particular terrestrial realm…and then I woke up on Saturday afternoon satisfied that I had done absolutely nothing wrong. The night actually consisted of a drum and bass/dubstep party in a warehouse at which they played a songs ‘Nero’ and ‘Deadmau5’ meaning that, wait for it, I am actually part of the cutting edge in Spain (SHOCKER).

On Saturday the party we were going to was so good that the neighbours invited the police to it – meaning we had to sample some of the more obscure clubs from Malaga city centre – firstly one called ‘El Lado Oscuro’ (The dark side) which is painted all purple on the outside, is run by a man I shal hereafter refer to as ‘Jabba the Hippie’ and had an extensive menu of special shots, but was so crowded that it was almost impossible to move, let alone dance to the Spanish pop music. What followed this was a visit to Malaga’s ‘premier rock club’ -although I feel I have been spoiled by round the clock access to the greatest rock club on Earth (‘Opium’ on Edinburgh’s Cowgate) and struggled to get into the idea that ‘the Scissor Sisters’ counts as rock this far South…I have a sneaking suspicion the fat bearded biker in the ‘Children of Bodom’ t-shirt agreed with me.

Partying over with, Sunday was time for serious business: the Calcutta Cup, which was a good game although very much the big boy versus the little boy when one considers that England’s four substitutes included two world cup winners and two 2009 British and Irish Lions. As proud as I was to watch my country improve so much, I still want to punch Brian Moore in his stupid face.

Before this I had to do part of a group report for my theatre class; of which the girl who was elected group leader used nearly nothing for the presentation, but I expected nothing less given that my Spanish still is not up to much (although were I more of a bitter person I may have taken consolation in the slating she got from the teacher [YOU WEE BITCH CUBIE!]) In any case, my attention was grabbed by an interesting new addition to the class; a very rare bird indeed known as the ‘Hot Spanish Ginger’  (it is said that ninety-nine percent of them were wiped out by Franco)…but enough of ornithology.

I hope this is a bit more edifying (wildly inappropriate) than the last couple of weeks. More next Tuesday after my trip to bloody BARCELONA!

Laters,

Gregor