"Did you have a good time?" I asked a Spanish friend who'd just got back from sus vacaciones. "Yes. It was sunny," came the reply.
Now there are some personas, of course, who think that a holiday is only a holiday si vuelves a casa with third degree sunburn, but those people no suelen ser españoles. Anyway, I'd got Juan marked down as more the nocturnal type, so I stopped to think about su respuesta and realised that - not for the first time - we were at cross purposes.
In English we've heard it said often enough that time is money. En español, sin embargo, time is weather. (Except, of course, in the contexts where time is hour - as in "¿qué hora es?" or vez - as in ¿cuántas veces te lo tengo que decir?")
Juan had heard the word "time" and interpreted my question as "¿has tenido buen tiempo?" rather than what I really meant, which was ¿Te lo has pasado bien? or ¿te has divertido?
His English is usually quite good, so perhaps it was the cliché of the Brits always talking about the weather that made him misinterpret la pregunta. Or perhaps he'd been speaking only Spanish on holiday and he'd got a bit rusty. I certainly used to find my Spanish was worse on Mondays and that was simply after el fin de semana con los amigos británicos, not the whole four week intensive of a Spanish summer which is enough to fry anyone's brain.
Brought up to a system where you take a long weekend here, maybe a week there, and a maximum of a fortnight in summer, I find the idea of un mes de vacaciones altogether too much. Still, I tried something like it this year, with una quincena en Inglaterra and then visitors in the pueblo for ten days immediately afterwards. Tenía razón: so much relax was exhausting and I've spent most of September trying to recover.
Back to the weather, though, and, as usual, the quantity of rain is headline material: despite this August being el más lluvioso de los últimos cinco años, with a rainfall of 36% above average, we are assured that the sequía continues. Casi veinte años en España, and I still don't know what the real weather pattern is like.
Even after twenty years, it's hard to break habits learned en la infancia, and I'll admit that I still rely on el tiempo as a basic fallback topic for conversation. A friend in the UK recently got her first computer at the age of 83, and every email so far exchanged has included an update on the local condiciones climáticas.
We've just been discussing the arrival of Autumn, after I read a newspaper report on the Sunday 16th of September claiming it was "el último fin de semana del verano".
Autumnal Days
The Spanish seem to go by the book - or perhaps the calendar - when it comes to the seasons, whereas I've always just gone by what the weather is doing. This year, for example, I would have said that el otoño ya había llegado; at least I thought I recognised it in the icy-cold early morning dew on the grass in the pueblo the previous weekend, even if it wasn't so apparent once the sun got higher. (Now there's a thought: if I didn't get up tan temprano, autumn might start más tarde.)
I wonder if it's different here because the Spanish seem to have una fecha for everything. I suppose it would be confusing for a Saint's day to be celebrated in summer one year and then in autumn the next just because el tiempo didn't oblige. But surely no more confusing than it was for me to find that my early June birthday - which I had always thought heralded the start of summer - was in fact still firmly a spring event. June, roses, strawberries: all vinculados con el verano in my mind. Only here, las rosas florecen all year, las fresas arrive in time for Christmas, and summer itself doesn't start till nearly July.
Of course, as with so many cultural beliefs, it's a matter of perspective, of what you learn as a child. I thought that as a Gemini - an air sign - I was associated with los nítidos cielos azules of summer, and got quite a shock when I realised that a South American friend who is also geminis felt far more affinity for the drizzly autumn air.
There are other problems which arise with the astronomical procession of the seasons. If summer starts on el veintiuno de junio, how can we explain Midsummer's Day falling on the 24th? I know British summers are short, but that's ridiculous. Similarly, if Christmas is supposed to have been adapted from the midwinter feast, how come it's only a couple of days después de empezar el invierno?
Anyway, arriving back in Madrid after the summer holidays, even if not yet after the summer, I was greeted by news of a number of weddings among friends. Most of these bodas were very quiet affairs just getting the papers in order now that the law allows civil contracts between parejas gay.
I do think they're very brave, considering that in the first quarter of 2007 "se divorciaron o separaron 6.285 parejas" - I'm not sure that's the figure for the whole country or just la Comunidad de Madrid, third highest in the Spanish rankings. According to the newspaper report - ironically I read it in 20 Minutos - that works out at three every hour. The same reportaje claims that now many young people get divorced: jóvenes "con menos de tres meses de casados y con bebés." I'm quoting directly there, and something strikes me as very odd about being married three months and already having babies.
Bueno, while my friends have been busy tying the knot, apparently the rest of the country has been off in cramped seaside flats, discovering that living in close quarters with their spouse is something they no longer want to do. The result: en septiembre se tramitan el 30% de divorcios. It seems even good weather isn't enough to save some marriages.
