• Left for Madrid at 5am on Monday morning after about 3-5 hrs sleep due to a poorly littlest kid. Lizzy was left to fend for herself for four nights while I jetted off to Spain for a week of 1-1’s with my lovely team.
• This time staying in a recently-modernised “apartment” complex near Cuzco. Code entries and dull white biege scandi-minimal style furnishings. Comfortable, but also had that smell of “we did this in a rush and we didn’t work out how to keep the mould out of the bathroom”. But you can’t see the smell on the booking.com pictures.
• Madrid is funny, I’ve said this previously, but it feels safe. People walk around on video calls, people run round the inside of the park on pitch black dark mornings. The overall crime index is at around 28 compared to London’s 70 (though 3.5mil population compared to 9mil). I don’t know what that necessarily means, but when I was jogging around the Retiro at 6.30 am I wasn’t scared.
• In many ways a superior city to London because of this, but not sure I could deal with the 40dgree heat in summer.
• Spent one evening going to some spanish culture, a free museum late which included watching Picassos Guernica. Less “funny picture” and more brutal in real life, large format. We also saw some Dali’s which still make me feel ill. After went to a classic restaurant where we ate tuna cheek, pigs trotters and sweet breads.
• Storm Eowyn rocked our Ryanair.
• We went as a family to a burns ‘night’ céilidh in hackney and it was excellent to see the kids get fully involved in the chaos. The eldest plus a good friend dancing with loads of other random people and laughing like only a pair of bookwise 8year olds can.
• I was wanting to write a bit about a theme of mushrooms this issue as I bought a book about mushrooms and the economy, and we had some incredibly tasty morel mushrooms served with pancreas in Madrid. But I couldn’t quite think of what to write. For more endearingly indecisive writing, tune in next week!