Just back from a holiday in southern Spain, and what an education. Sitting on the plane home, I found myself marvelling at how little effect the experience of mass tourism and EU membership has had. And how, beneath a people's superficially modernised exterior, can lurk dark undercurrents of passion and cruelty and lust, unchanged since the middle ages.
I'm not talking about the Spanish here. I'm talking about the people on the plane, most of who seemed to be 17year-old Dubliners on their first trip to Torremolinos. Indeed, Spain seemed to have had a civilising effect on them, to judge by the return flight. They were noticeably more subdued on the way home and their faces wore those expressions of resignation and serenity which any parent of teenage boys will tell you are the tell-tale signs of sleep.
How different it was on the way out, when Malaga airport felt like a Trappist monastery after the plane journey. For once, it was almost a pleasure to hang around in the baggage reclaim area until the conveyor belt finally trundled into life, carrying the 17-year-old Dubliners and some of our luggage.
The airport was an education in itself. There must have been 10,000 people there, and they split neatly into two broad categories: those boarding charter buses that would take them directly to the resorts of the Costa del Sol (9,998); and those intent on making their own way to inland Spain and trying to get information at the airport's tourism office where they didn't speak English because they weren't used to dealing with tourists (2).
The second category in turn broke down into two camps - one which kept saying: "I knew this was a bad idea, we should have gone to Greece", and the other which favoured the view that: "Yeah! Like you'd have got us a cheap flight to Athens, I suppose."
One of the striking things about inland Spain in summer is that there are no tourists there. Another striking thing is that there are hardly any Spaniards either, because these are all in Dublin (on your bus, probably). But in order to survive you have to learn some Spanish - and quickly.
Luckily, this can be an amusing experience, because Spain has elevated the speech defect to an art form. Take the word cerveza (as I often did): this is pronounced something like "thirrrrrbetha," which you have to agree is a much more expressive word for beer. I became quickly proficient in the use of it and other crucial phrases and by the second week could stride confidently into any premises and demand "dos thirrrrrbethas, por favor" (which attracted funny looks in the post office, but was great fun).
Of course, you can't discuss Spain and the Spanish without addressing controversial issues, especially concerning certain of the country's "cultural" activities which fill other Europeans with horror and disgust.
I'm thinking in particular of the practice of eating chocolate and churros for breakfast. Churros, in case you don't know, are kinds of doughnut, made from an ancient Spanish recipe which blends the two main ingredients - fat and more fat - into just the right taste and texture so that, despite what preconceptions they might have, foreigners who bite into a churro for the first time find themselves thinking "yeuch".
Spaniards eat plate-loads of this stuff for breakfast, dipping it in chocolate so that the gaps in between the fat molecules get filled in. This is one of the reasons that many figure-conscious young Spaniards come to Ireland in the summer: so they can trim down on healthy breakfasts of sausages and black pudding and fried bread.
And this is why those left behind in Spain invented bull-running. Few weight-reduction activities are more successful than running through narrow, cobbled streets with a posse of snorting toros on your tail. And the nearer they get, the more successful: recent medical research in Spain suggests that the proximity of bulls' horns can cause your buttocks to reduce spontaneously by up to 50 per cent.
Of course, churros are only part of the local diet, which is mostly fish. The demand for fish products in Spain is insatiable, and to spend time there is to sympathise with those aggressive Spanish trawlermen who are constantly tempted into Irish territorial waters, such as the upper Shannon, in search of catch.
Compared with Spain, Irish consumption of seafood is negligible and largely confined to the three species of cod, plaice, and the sub-group known broadly as "fisherman's pie". The Spanish, on the other hand, will eat anything their fishermen can catch, and the fish dish par excellence is paella.
A good paella should taste of the very sea itself. As well as rice, it can contain shrimps, prawns, clams, scallops, squid, octopus, platypus, those little rubber seals from washing-machine valves, bits of old decommissioned trawlers, transatlantic telephone cable, the chef's false teeth, and whatever is available locally at a given time.
Of course, there is much more to travelling in Spain than mere food and drink. No serious writer can fail to mention the effects of the civil war, which was won by Franco (who made the bulls run on time). Nor of the massive liberation which has swept the country since 1975, when it finally won points in the Eurovision Song Contest.
And, above all, there is the bullfight. Many eminent writers, most notably Ernest Hemingway, have debated the ethics of bullfighting. Defenders argue that you simply cannot apply human emotions to a big, dumb brute who is 100 per cent testosterone and whose every instinct tells him to put his head down and charge and worry about the consequences later, after they've given him the Nobel prize for literature . . .
Anyway, I didn't manage to see an actual bullfight in Spain, except for bits on television. And what struck me more than anything else was how great an influence bullfighting was on the stage act of the late Freddie Mercury.
The same cropped jackets and tight trousers, the same exaggerated strutting movements, not to mention similar high-pitched noises when the bull's horn explores the inner lining of the matadors' dress. And on top of all this, I learned that one of the leading bullfighters of the current era is a man called Enrique Ponce. Is that a funny coincidence, or what?