NO MAKE DO

Christmas looms and mine is already looking Pinteresque. It being spent there rather than here. What else? Well, a certain percentage of Aragonese will, according to the local paper, spend more money this Christmas. Apart from the growing queue of Muslims and gypsies every day opposite our flat I don't see any dramatic effects yet of the current economic situation and last Saturday when we went out to the various tapas bars participating in the tapas competition we had to fight for somewhere to sit down. I have never dived into as many Spaniards graves and am getting quite good at it as the years roll by. Said competition offers a tapa that looks like nouvelle cusine and a 'penalti' beer or a glass of wine. I opted for the wine and Henderson complained about the 'penalti' and gave a torturous look everytime it arrived. If you dont know what a penalti is think what the amount of one large gulpful of beer looks like spat back into a thimble. The only snag of going out before one in the morning is the chance of bumping into your pupils or their parents and by the fourth wine and tapa and glimpses of pupils from 4A and B waving frantically and pulling at their mothers sleeves to say 'look mum! There's my teacher!' I thought I had  better go home or stay for a fifth and start telling the mums 'look! You see what they drive me to!'. At one point one of the mothers came over to say hello and remarked that I looked 'muy guapa' and instead of saying 'thank you' or, 'for a change' I think I said 'I know, it's amazing what a bit of lipstick and half a bottle of Somontano can do these days'. While we were in the first bar, Bar Rugaca, H's favourite and my nemesis or rather the bloke that runs it, I noticed I was finding it all too much what with the local football team Huesca on the tele playing against Elche. I looked up at one point and saw a player headbutt another. At the same time music was playing and a Chinaman had won the entire contents of the one arm bandit or 'tragaperras' as its called here. I often forget this word is feminine and say 'tragaperros' which everyone laughs at as it translates as 'swallowing dogs' but the former surely translates as 'swallowing bitches'.  It was at that point I started to miss the words 'time gentlemen please'.