One of the idiosyncrasies of Hispanic culture is how verbal communication is universally restricted to two levels of volume: one..or eleven.

Level one is none of our concern as understandably it is the domain of whispered secrets between lovers, the passing over of a bit of verbal smut between work colleagues or the exchange of pin code numbers between a married couple in the supermarket when they’ve found themselves caught short with the first of their credit cards being rejected at the till. 

Level eleven works for everything else. You have no idea how unashamedly loud Hispanics are. Everything else deserves to be shouted about. It can be a casual greeting at the café first thing in the morning, a conversation with someone in the street on their mobile phone or perhaps a request for more soup at the company refectory at lunch. Twenty one years ago in Madrid in August, after an evening of drinking and dining and then more drinking and dancing and then pre-heated passion… after which I passed out, I remember waking up desperate for a pee at about four in the morning and initially alarmed, in our guest house on Calle Huertas, to what sounded like serious social unrest. None of that: it was a Tuesday night  and the idle youth of Madrid were warming up to go on somewhere else.

Here in Barcelona the locals are not quite as boisterous…but not by much. On a Thursday night outside our flat it’s sometime difficult to know if the kids walking past are having a good time or involved in some altercation.

The only other culture I know who shout as much as the Spanish might be the Greeks.