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As an academic, normally every seventh year can be taken off as a sabbatical. In the spring and summer of 1993, I was on a sabbatical leave in Spain at the Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad

Autonoma de Madrid, accompanied by my wife, Marianne. Spanish life suited me – the longer evenings, the passion in their culture, I was even intrigued by the way they swallowed their words.

One thing I very much disliked was the traffic. There was a straight connection between the Plaza del Felipe Segundo, where we lived in the Goya district centre, and the University in a

suburb. To my surprise it was a proper motorway, the M40: an orbital one nowadays, corresponding to London’s M25, but at the time it had only one straight bit ready, the one I needed.

Driving on the Madrid motorway was challenging, to say the least. Spanish drivers had an incomparable style. They observed no rules. (I am not sure that there were any). It was everybody

against everybody. There might have been a speed limit but nobody had the slightest inclination to keep to it. In the first week, out of habit, I did not exceed 70 miles per hour. I was

constantly being overtaken. Cars swarmed from both left and right. When I arrived at the University I needed to close my eyes and sit quietly in my office for half an hour to recover. After

a week I realised that if I were to keep on using that motorway driving as if I was in the UK, I would never see Oxford again. The alternative was to adopt the Spanish style: When in Madrid,

do as the Madrilenos do. Fortunately our car had good acceleration and could easily do 90 miles an hour, the average speed on the M40. After a couple of weeks I felt triumphant when I

overtook my first Spaniard. In another week I was ready to challenge the last taboo: not to brake when reaching the giant roundabout at the end of the motorway. I got used to driving fast.

In fact, I started to enjoy it. To do the 15 miles to the Autonoma took the same time as cycling from Cumnor Hill, near Oxford, to the Department of Engineering. On my return to Oxford, I

was asked by a French don what it was like to drive in Madrid. I just repeated the words of Abbé Sièyes when asked what he did during the Revolution: J’ai survecu. (“I survived.”) Before I

leave the subject of driving, let me mention one more scene I saw on this motorway. I was just doing my usual 90 when a convertible racing car overtook me going at something like 130 or 140

miles per hour. What was remarkable was not the speed. (Many a driver loved to drive faster than the average.) The remarkable thing was that the driver of the racing car was a young lady in

her mid-twenties and there were two boys aged maybe four and six standing behind her seat, egging her on to drive faster and waving condescendingly to me as they passed. Their facial

expression said: “Bye-bye, slow-coach”, or whatever the nursery school equivalent for Spaniards might have been. It took a while, but by the summer, I was entirely comfortable travelling

around by car. We therefore decided to discover a little of Spain and once again we found the same (admittedly stereotypical) characteristics shining through – aggression, bravery, pride,

foolhardiness maybe. Our main interest was the historic sites of the Civil War, a conflict (1936-39) that I had followed in great detail in the Hungarian press as a child. Maybe precisely

because I had been a child, the story of the fortress of Alcazar in Toledo had affected me deeply. That was our first port of call. Oddly enough, nearly 20 years after Franco’s death, the

tale was still that of a group of around 800 Nationalists holding out for two months against the Republican assault of 8,000. The Republicans had taken the son of José Moscardo Itiarte , the

Nationalists’ leader, hostage. Brutally they issued their demand over the phone: “Surrender or we kill your son.” The commander asked to speak to his son. He picked up the receiver: “Die

like a patriot,“ he said. The son agreed. They shot him. Another Nationalist shrine, full of pomp, was Franco’s Mausoleum in the Valle de los Caidos (the Valley of the Fallen, pictured

above) built by the slave labour of Republican prisoners of war. The only indication of Franco’s demise I could find in Madrid was that the Avenida del Generalisimo (Madrid’s Champs Élysées)

reverted to Paseo de Castellano. We also found a memory of the Falangist past in the name of a small street called Calle de la Division Azul. It was to remember the Spanish Blue Division,

which fought on the Eastern Front in the Second World War (the name I believe was recently changed). After attending theatres of the Civil War, we decided to follow the tourists’ trail,

staying mainly in paradors which in their earlier life were fortresses, castles or monasteries. We visited universities like Salamanca, ancient cities like Avila, places of Moorish heritage

like Cordoba, Sevilla and Grenada, which also house Spanish universities founded after the Reconquista. Think of Spanish history, though, and for most, it is not generally the Civil War that

comes to mind, but the power of the church. Extremadura is the part of the country near to the Portuguese border that is probably the least prosperous part of Spain (extremely hard as the

Spanish call it). In the centre of that region we found Caceres: a nice little city with plenty of old churches. We drove in on the main road. We stopped at one of these places of worship,

probably the one that they regard as a co-cathedral. We saw a long queue, maybe as many as 80-100 people. We could not guess what they were queueing for. Marianne asked a little boy in

English. He responded in Spanish: “Besar el manto del obispo”. We did not know what obispo meant. Manto we could guess corresponds to mantle but that was the only word that made good sense.

We wanted to find out what all those people were queuing for. We were intrigued. There was a little back door through which we could enter the church. It looked much bigger from the inside

than from the outside. However, after a few steps our progress was barred by three men who looked uncannily like those unfortunates who stood in front of a French execution squad in Goya’s

dos Mayo. One of them addressed us in Spanish in a tone that was anything but friendly. Our attempts to communicate in English eventually bore fruit. Another person appeared who spoke some

pidgin English. He told us in no uncertain terms that attempts to jump the queue are frowned upon in his country. If we want to kiss the bishop’s mantle, we should go back to the queue and

wait our turn. So much for the spirit of the holy shrine. We thought it was time to take our leave. We uttered a few words of apology, lo siento, lo siento, turned our backs and left the

church by the door where we had entered. We found our car where we had left it, took our seats and drove on to Bajadoz, and back to Madrid next day. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the

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