Three weeks ago, I invited you to accompany me on the first three days of our stay in Madrid. You left us recovering on the coach after a half-day trip to Toledo on the Wednesday. I know that some of you have hardly been able to sleep, waiting for the other shoe to drop. So today, as a public service, I bring you another day and a half in the Spanish capital.

Having reached the tranquillity of our hotel room, there was just time to shower and change, and coo over some photos Micha’el had sent of the new baby (who, it now seems almost inconceivable, had, at this stage, no name that we were aware of) before walking again to the kosher hoomusiya (which is actually a level or two above a plain and simple hoomusiya). We arrived a couple of minutes before the restaurant opened and struck up a conversation with an Israeli woman in her thirties who was also waiting for opening time.

She was, at that stage, two months into a trimester in Spain, in connection with her post-doctoral research into the relationship between the Jewish communities of Iberia and the authorities in the period before the Expulsion. She was very much enjoying the wealth of archive material that she was able to study first-hand, while at the same time she was clearly missing speaking Hebrew, being in Israel, and, she had been amazed to discover, cooking. We invited her to eat with us, and spent an enjoyable evening gaining insight into such topics as the Spanish academic work ethic (‘Come in to the office at 9’ is apparently Spanish for ‘Someone else may possibly arrive before 10’) and the local Jewish community (very warm and welcoming).

Having checked how far our hotel was from the synagogue, and having decided that a walk of that length in Shabbat clothes in 43^o heat was out of the question, we had already decided that we would spend Shabbat in the hotel. In fact, since the hotel corridor featured motion-sensitive lighting, we had realised by this stage that we would be trapped in our hotel room for the whole of Shabbat.

To put that into context: we would be confined to a spacious air-conditioned apartment with a kitchen, a sofa and armchair, and a view of the city, and would be completely deprived of walking around in the searing heat, unable to carry with us a bottle of water or to buy one. Since we had by this stage (in the 3 days since landing in Madrid) walked 50,000 steps, we reckoned we would be ready for a relaxing Shabbat by Friday evening.

So, before settling our bill at the end of another delicious meal, we ordered some hummus, felafel and pitot ‘to go’. Armed with these contributions to our Shabbat table, we parted from our unplanned dining companion and set off at a gentle pace for our hotel room, air conditioning, and a comfortable bed.

The following morning (Thursday), after breakfast we walked to the Prado Museum, for which we had booked tickets online. We had actually tried to visit on Tuesday afternoon, after I had discovered that there is free admission for the last two hours of visiting every day. This seemed like a good idea at the time. However, when we arrived at the museum two hours before closing time, we discovered that we were, astonishingly, in the height of summer, at the 13^th most visited museum in the world, not the only cheapskates in town. It took us five minutes to walk to the back of the queue, which snaked round two sides of the museum and around the adjacent park.

After a few minutes waiting in the still fierce sunshine, and having calculated that, since only a limited number of queuers were let in every 15 minutes, we would probably not reach the front of the queue before closing time, we decided to bite the bullet and book a mid-morning timeslot as paying customers. Incidentally, as senior citizens, we enjoyed a healthy discount.

This gave me the time to do my homework online on Tuesday evening, which involved as a first step locating a map of the Prado, which I asked the clerk at reception to print out. (This has long been one of my measures of the quality of a hotel’s service. Over the years, reactions have ranged from ‘Yes, of course!’, through ‘I’m really not sure. I’ll have to check’ to ‘I’m afraid that we have no facility to do that’ to ‘No’.) On this occasion, I was delighted to get a ‘Yes, of course’.

Further online research involved a comparison of a few sites listing the 8/12/15/20 ‘must see’ paintings in the Prado, and the selection of the 12 most frequently cited ones. All I then needed to do was mark on my map the locations of the 12 paintings, plan a route through the museum (taking note, of course, of the location of public toilets) and read up enough about each painting to be able to amaze Bernice with my erudition.

In the event, we hired excellent audio guides, and enjoyed a wonderful and uplifting two-and-a-half hours in the museum. From the moment you begin the ascent of the grand staircase that leads to the entrance, the building’s scale and classical architecture help to put you in the right frame of mind for a stroll past some of the greatest artworks ever created. The measured admissions every 15 minutes ensure that there is never too much of a crowd around any one painting, and walking through the high-ceilinged colonnaded galleries is a pleasure in itself.

As for the artworks, they are for the most part the Royal Spanish collection. Not only does the museum boast, unsurprisingly, the most comprehensive and finest single collection of Spanish art in the world; it also, largely because of Velasquez’ stature and influence among his contemporaries, boasts the finest collection of Italian classical art outside Italy. For me, it was an experience like reading the King James Bible or watching Shakespeare: as we made our way from one of our featured paintings to the next one, we would find ourselves time and again passing at least one masterpiece that we immediately recognised. Like the National Gallery in London, the Prado is full of the pictorial equivalent of famous quotes.

None of the paintings that I had selected disappointed either of us, and several of them were thrilling. The brilliantly intriguing composition of Velazquez’ Las Meninas I found magnificent, especially since, I am ashamed to say, it was not a painting I had previously known other than very sketchily. Here, the audio guide was particularly enlightening. Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, on the other hand, felt like old friends, although, as always, seeing the real thing after so many reproductions and interpretations was a slightly surreal experience.

If you ever visit the Prado, I recommend taking the lift to Gallery 11B. Once you are in the lift, make sure you are standing facing the lift doors, since, as they open, you will be overwhelmed by the painting on the opposite wall: the huge, sumptuous expanse (almost three metres tall and over nine metres(!) wide) of The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Herod’s Banquet by the Silesian artist Bartholomeus Strobel. This glorious feast of composition, with its richness of detail, is a painting whose every mini-grouping vies for your attention.

Your eye is probably drawn first to the dazzlingly lit female figure left of centre near the end of the table, with her elaborately pouffed hairstyle. You may then notice the partly mirroring female figure of Salome right of centre, carrying the tray with the grey head of John the Baptist. From there you may be drawn to the turbaned Herod at the head of the table, shying away from the disembodied head. It will probably be some time before you look to the right of the column that isolates the right-hand edge of the painting; in that corner, the executioner poses, with an ugly grin, over the blood-drained headless corpse.

Wherever you look, there are tiny points of interest: a few of the 80 or so figures portrayed stare straight at you, some in unabashed innocence, others in curiosity, a few in sneering disdain; a lapdog poses on its hind legs; a richly-bearded figure reaches forward to remove a cloth covering the platters of fruit on a side-table. On almost every figure there is an embarrassment of richness of highly-decorated cloth. It is indeed a banquet, not only for Herod, but also for our eyes.

Feeling suitably sated, we left the Prado, and, just outside, caught a tour bus, which took us on a 90-minute circular route with an audio commentary that was clearly controlled by GPS, so that the correct piece of commentary started playing whenever the bus approached a site. Unfortunately, the traffic was, presumably, not quite as heavy as expected, with the unfortunate result that repeatedly a commentary would be cut short and the recording would jump to the next segment. Despite this rather disorientating and disconcerting fact, the tour was informative and enjoyable. (By this stage, anything that involved a seat was automatically enjoyable.)

We then walked back to the hotel. When we had walked this route previously, we had passed the Madrid City Council Debating Chamber, where a television outside broadcast unit was setting up, and a few police vans were parked. On this occasion, we had to make our way through the dispersing crowds from a demonstration outside the chamber.

This was a timely reminder that, however relaxed, fun-loving and 21^st Century Madrid is, it was only in 1977 or 8, a couple of years after Franco’s death, that Spain fully transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy. The CCOO was, unsurprisingly, banned under Franco, and only relegalised after his death. From a brief conversation with our walking-tour guide, I gained the impression that the political activism of madrileños (the citizens of Madrid) is still coloured by the fact that their parents lived their lives under the repression of Franco, and that Madrid is, not far below the surface, a city that likes to confront authority.

On that note, let’s take a rest, and save our last couple of days in Madrid for another time.

Meanwhile, in Penamacor, it’s good to see that Tao was paying attention to all those nursery rhymes we never tired of reciting, and is putting his knowledge to good use.

If you listen carefully, you may notice that Tao, for whom ‘roast beef’ is a meaningless concept, has vegetarianised it. Personally, I prefer my version, but I’m in a minority in this family.