When you are ill, feeling a bit peaky or pachucha as it's known here, the last thing you want bellowing down the phone at you as you try to make an appointment is a woman who starts her sentences with the word Que? The only way I can describe it is if someone constantly addressed you as 'boyo'. I haven't got it in for the Welsh or the Aragonese per se but I'm sure I've mentioned  the similarity here with say our cousins in Merthyr Tidsville, another obsession of mine. One of the few differences being the women of Merthyr might chin you to get to the bar whereas here they definately would elbow you in a cake shop. Anyway, said woman kept bellowing Que? at me before I'd opened a sentence and that's how I found myself at urgencias this afternoon with my ongoing faringitis and anginas. the doctor who saw me didn't exactly have what you might call a bedside manner either and like my dentist a few months back, was heard to mutter 'Dios mio' as he put stethoscope to chest. I could have told him that and added that he should just give me the prescription for the stuff needed that I refuse to buy over the counter so I can go back to work to keep me in the drugs I have become accustomed to, namely drink.

Getting back to the accent , the Aragonese will tell you with great joy that other Spaniards tell them that when they speak it sounds as though they are singing. It doesn't. Up close it isn't too bad, in fact I would say that Aragon is quite a good place to come and learn Spanish and there are many voices the equivalent of Richard Burton's. The problem is when someone starts 'having a chat upstairs about nothing, probably'. It sounds like a cross between a ticking off from the news reader Huw Edwards crossed with a drowning yodeller. If this is bad enough, wait till you hear the Jota...