Pop goes another historic week back home while I have been in Spain watching snatches of the BBC coverage and generally sitting around like an IDIOT firmly outside the loop.

My gammy ankle has prevented me from my usual glut of rugby training although I did, after a stressful day doing the square route of bugger all, go to the gym next to the rugby club on Tuesday where I, thanks in no small part to said gammy ankle and the fact that our equipment looks like someone has stolen the stirrups they use to keep open a lady’s lady-parts before she gives birth, managed to pull off the ultimate feat of embarrassment and drop one of the Olympic bars as I was trying to take the weights off it, this caused no little mirth for the extremely muscular lady with the nose ring across from me (upon whose sexual orientation I will cast no aspersions).

I then thought it would be manners to go and visit my rugby coach as he was spending some quality time on his favourite hobby; making libidinous comments about the female rugby team while he is meant to be taking training. Though this kind of misogyny is not uncommon in the rugby community, it is particularly funny in this case because my coach is, to put it kindly, a big man. To put it less kindly he looks as though he has just given birth to someone of about my size by way of a botched cesarean section. Juxtapose this with the fact that some of the female rugby players in Spain are quite good looking, unlike in Scotland where the team photo looks like a competition to find a new cast member on ‘Bo-selecta’ without having to spend money on a mask and you have a highly amusing situation. Anyway, my coach, being a stand-out lad, decided it was time to educate me on the finer points of the Spanish language; chat up lines, not letting me leave until I had shouted ‘no sabía que las flores andan’ (too cringeworthy to translate) at some poor girl passing by. And so continues my formative Spanish training/life coaching.

Keen to soak up some genuine Spanish atmosphere for ‘El Clasico’ on Tuesday night, we went to one of the Irish pubs to find it largely in favour of Barcelona and so in too good a collective mood to relapse into their sorry habit of casting aspersions on the sexuality of Christiano Ronaldo (which, as I discussed before, I would never do anyway because I am too nice. I would never suggest that the baby he had was a Michael Jackson-esque ruse to make him seem like a heterosexual.)

Anyway after nearly five-hundred words of me just being unpleasant to try and mask the fact that I did nowt all week, we come to Friday morning and the fourth election of the devolved Scottish parliament and with it, the continuation of my feeling of existential isolation from the rest of Scotland; everybody was well on top of everything happening in the election except me, the other Erasmus students and that die-hard nationalist/ tax-exile in the Caribbean Sean Connery. The result did not even make the front page of the BBC website (top billing going to the Rangers takeover deal), so the chances of it popping up on the Spanish news were too slim for it even to be worth checking. It also failed to capture the interest of the skynetmatrix (facebook) community – on which I have become ever more reliant as a source of information – in the same way as the Royal Wedding or Osamarama last week and therefore, deprived of a dance remix of Alex Salmond’s victory speech, I had to delve into the murky depths of the BBC’s Scotland page to find out what I had missed.

Having been home a couple of weeks ago, I gleaned that the SNP were gaining a bit of momentum due to their slick campaign, mildly workable economic policy and an opponent in Iain Gray, who has all the personality of Gordon Brown’s glass eye. This momentum appeared to have snowballed into a landslide victory which I was kind of surprised about until I found out that two of the four voters in my house had voted SNP along with like fifty percent of the country.

Similarly, I had no idea what people were thinking on AV so, having fallen in love with the idea of a French model in which every executive is an all-party coalition that reflects the make-up of parliament, it was a bit of a kick in the balls to find out that we were sticking with fptp. Tentative predictions as what feels like an outsider looking in; Cameron to be re-elected (Grrr), the Lib-Dems to split in two and have to respawn a la ’88, independence referendum to fail (thanks to my good friend facebook which shows, at last count, 60ish% against independence) but the Scottish parliament to receive the ‘financial teeth’ Salmond has been craving. All in all it would have been fun to be there and it was one of the few days this year when I wished I was at home.

The weekend after that was fairly standard; went to a club on Friday in which the taps in the toilet were parcel-taped to the sink, then stayed out until seven o’clock on Sunday morning in an epic night which involve two pizza-breaks.

Until next week then my pretties,

Gregor.