Vigorously beat two or three eggs. We get ours from J’s colleague Danny who, like many Flemish householders, keeps his own chickens. Not sure what Danny feeds them, or else we’ve become all too used to the bio supermarket eggs, but those yolks are pretty fluorescent.

Up next, we beat in the usual suspects: a teaspoon of paprika (smoked paprika if you can find it: it’s rare here in Belgium), a bit of cayenne pepper, a few twists of sea salt, a crushed clove of garlic (or not, if you’re romancing), lots of black pepper and a pinch of delectable saffron.

Beat it black and blue to avoid clumping of the spices, add a drop or two of milk to taste and then beat again.

Stick the mix in the fridge and turn on the grill. While that’s heating up, pop on the kettle for some coffee.

Personally, I like single-origin Ethiopian coffees best: Sidamo is really smooth and goes well with Sunday mornings, while Yirgacheffe will do nicely for those crapola wet Mondays before school.

Some of the best I’ve enjoyed here comes fresh from Javana in Brugge but I don’t get up there often these days.

Next heat a knob of butter or a teaspoon of olive oil in a non-stick pan until it thinly covers the bottom.

Dampen the pitta breads on both sides and put them under the grill.

Out comes the orange-red, eggy goodness and into the pan it goes. Leave it a minute so until it starts to flocculate, then turn it slowly from time to time until it firms up nicely.

When the egg’s looking pretty solid in there, turn down the heat and get your pittas out. Carefully slit them open and, if you’re feeling super goloso, butter or drizzle them with oil.

Last of all, stuff those lovely pittas full of egg action. Add a dash of tabasco sauce if you’re feeling brave and maybe a pinch or two of parsley.

Eat and enjoy, preferably with loved one(s).

So I admit it: I was one of those who shed a tear when Penélope Cruz sang Volver in the Almodóvar film. Of course, that voice isn’t the voice of Cruz. It’s the voice of Estrella Morente.

Morente grew up the daughter of flamenco parents near the Andalusian city of Granada whence flamenco originates. I first came across her following the release of her debut album Mi Cante Y Un Poema. She possesses a voice full of geography, passion and experience, yet her biography has it that she’s younger than me.

During her concert at the Ancienne Belgique, the audience was first transfixed, then on its feet within just a few songs. A completely automatic process. Such was the power and goodwill of Morente and her troupe of musicians.

In some parts of the world, such as at Madrid’s Barajas airport, the desert seems to push at the edges of civilisation rather than the inverse. The runways at Barajas are cut right out of the parched earth, their fringes cluttered by the matériel of flight.

The capital itself stands at the centre – not to say dead centre – of this desert. Any satellite photograph will clearly show Madrid as a focal point of Spain’s parched interior, with the thin, greenish vein of the Manzanares river passing by on its way down from the Navacerrada Pass.

Yet just a few kilometres downtown and you wouldn’t know it, except perhaps for the dusty wind and the dry summers. Madrid has plenty of lush green parks and cool fountains. This thirsty city reverberates with the noise of three and a quarter million clattering and breathless tongues.

Paris has the Tour Eiffel, London has Big Ben. New York had the World Trade Center. However, there’s no single structure that symbolises Madrid. All the better, since Madrid does not imprint itself in the mind as a series of landmarks. The city demands to be explored, with its criss-cross of hot boulevards and broad plazas.

See also: Madrid by bike

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Madrid

A trip to Madrid unexpectedly prolonged by strike action, but in a city like this, who's complaining?

Strike

Our trip was affected by strike action, first in Belgium then in Spain, with the effect that our stay was prolonged by two days.

Given that we had completed our planned activities in the allotted time, we decided just to wander about for this bonus period. Eschewing the airport hotel offered by the airline, we returned to the city centre before the shutdown of public transport.

Much of the time remaining until our rescheduled flight we spent in the Barrio Huertas and the Parque del Retiro.

Barrio Huertas

Whilst the latter park is a major landmark, the former is a lesser known grid of narrow, mostly pedestrianised streets around the Calle de las Huertas, downhill from the plazas Ángel and Santa Ana. Numerous independent bars and restaurants are located here.

Having spent the later part of an evening sharing a bar with striking workers and a big television showing the Real Madrid game, we discovered Viva La Vida on the Calle Huertas proper. Open seven days a week until midnight, this vegetarian shop whose centrepiece is a marvellous self-service buffet takeaway was our choice on three occasions. We also enjoyed drinks at Coctelería El Hecho just opposite.

Virgin of the Dry Tree – Petrus Christus / © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

There’s something different and rather appealing about this art museum.

I ask myself: is it because the Thyssen-Bornemisza family has made its large private collection accessible to the public? Or could it be the unusually broad range of works on view?

These are both important facts, but in reality what I like best is the colour of the walls: a warm, sympathetic tone somewhere between pink gypsum and smoked salmon, and it shows off the paintings beautifully.

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is one of Madrid’s three great art musea, along with the Prado and the Reina Sofia. Rather than being reflective of the tastes of the Spanish royal family or dedicated to more modern trends, this collection spans every great period of picture art from byzantine-influenced, pre-Renaissance Italian works right up to hyperrealism and pop.

Having visited not a few great European galleries in the last decade, some of the artists represented here seem almost like old acquaintances: Uccello, Petrus Christus, Baldung Grien, Jan van Eyck, the Bellini brothers, Mondrian, Bonnard and Hopper to name but a very few.

Outer doors of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Prado is one of the world’s great art musea, with almost 8,000 paintings barely 10% of which are exhibited publicly within its impressive buildings.

Much of the collection originates from the Spanish royal family, whose acquisitions throughout the centuries reflect the formidable influence and particular tastes of the monarchs.

The presence of El Greco, Rubens, Velasquez and Goya dominates the halls here, with their large format works occupying considerable wall space.

The austere king Felipe II (1527-1598), who presided over the highpoint of Spanish empire, was a voracious collector of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and today the Prado has the largest Bosch collection in the world, including the painter’s best known work The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-4).

Not being generally interested in 17th and 18th century art – a period of which the Prado collection has many works – I didn’t enjoy this visit quite so much as the Thyssen-Bornemisza. However, the highlights did Romanesque chapel frescoes, an impressive Flemish turnout and a room almost completely full of Bosch paintings.

The Reina Sofia is not immediately obvious to those who approach it from the Atocha metro station at Plaza Carlos V. The complex is set back slightly from the boulevard and observant visitors will note how at distance it seems to peek out from beyond the façade of older buildings, playing a sort of edificial hide-and-seek.

With its hiding place is finally found out, the complex turns out to be both modern and enormous, with a monumental entrance court containing a tall Lichtenstein sculpture.

From this aspect, the museum’s latest development makes even the permanent exhibits feel temporary. The whitewashed displays that enfold visitors tend to suggest that a shopfitting is happening behind, with the actual works of art an advertisement for greater things to come, opening soon.

The Reina Sofia is most famous for a brave and fairly recent effort to acknowledge Spain’s difficult history, now firmly contained behind the fence of last century.

Films are shown of young men joining up for the Republican cause, wiry, smiling bashful and uncertain of how to handle their ageing Lee Enfield rifles. Then the bombings and the barricades. Then the infantry fighting across dry plains, all about which we already know from a single Robert Capa photograph.

The chief witness of this painful testimony is Picasso’s Guernica, surrounded by tourists who form a wide semicircle more or less consciously around the massive work. The jumble of curves and straight lines represents chaos, suffering, agony and anguish.

I have always found it hard to connect with Picasso’s ideas. Here, I’m unable to think myself into the horror, so I try to summon instead my memories of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a prose of disappointment stung by the sudden loss of fragile ideals.

Eventually I realise that my lack of empathy has less to do with Guernica than the setting in which it hangs: a tall, bright and hopeful space full of people, each of whom can expect some share of the future.

Our guide to Madrid on two wheels is Kaspar, a Swiss expat. This probably explains the signed portrait of Toni Rominger in the tiny front office, a Swiss pro cyclist who spent much of his career in Spain. I wonder what Kaspar would have said of his other famous signed portrait, now that only three days later Alberto Contador announced a positive test for clenbuterol.

Anyway, J and I usually pass on organised city tours, preferring to discover things for ourselves, so we’re already out on a limb here. And being somewhat allergic to the sort of loud, brash tour guides that draw attention to the touristic nature of their endeavours, I’m grateful for Kaspar’s doctorly manner. How wonderfully Swiss of him.

Unlike the other tour guests, Americans one and all, J and I had already spent a day or two in the city. Even so, hopping in and out of metro stations like cautious bunnies does not really present a city as a cohesive unit, so this bike tour certainly delivered that. And of course, one can cover a lot of ground and get a bit of insider information to boot.

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Madrid by bike

Getting around Madrid on two wheels can be a lot of fun! Photos by BravoBike.com except where shown.

Bike route

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Our excellent Madrid bike tour was provided by BravoBike.com.

Toledo: Puerta del Reloj

The city retains much of its ancient character, thanks in no small part to its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In common with the other great cities of old al-Andalus Toledo has a long history of coexistence marked by distinct ruling periods.

Muslims were here. Jews were here. Catholics were here. Catholics are still here. Toledo is modern Spain’s capital of Catholicism, a jumble of ancient houses clinging together like prayer boxes on top of a hill carved by a tight meander of the Tajo river.

Crenellated battlements surround the city, a fading, golden girdle that still protects against the breaches of invasion and overdevelopment.

Inside the walls, all is quiet. Starchy food smells escape from ornate, wooden shutters. Unfamiliar liquids escape the heat, running between the paving stones and into odourous drains. A closed knife shop. A closed marzipan shop. Another close knife shop, exactly like the one before.

Inside the cathedral, leaving behind the crass crowds. No cameras, no filming, no smoking, no dogs, no mobile telephones. No common objects in this magnificent edifice built by the sacrifices of common people. The vestments and mitres of generations of bishops, hermetically sealed in chapelled cabinets. Their portraits – some more successful than others – are panel painted in another chapel.

Breathe easier outside. Play hide and seek with the bright sun. Breathe in and slip into the close, narrow alleys. Breathe out in the broad plazas. Coming, ready or not.

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Toledo

A former capital of Spain and now capital of Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo is the city of swords, religion and marzipan.

Walking in Toledo

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Using the train station as a start and finish point, the map covers most of Toledo’s points of interest, some of which are marked for reference.

Jaume I of Aragó was one of Barcelona’s many notable figures. Descended from French and Byzantine nobility, his exotic origins were matched by an illustrious childhood spent in the thick of the Occitan struggles.

The thirteenth was the century in Europe that instigated the beginnings of a consolidation of power from which Jaume would personally profit and which in the long term would synthesise many of the nation states we know today.

During his reign however, Jaume strived hard for independence. His county of Barcelona, for example, which had been endowed four centuries earlier by Charlemagne, he divested properly and finally from France.

He also invaded the Balearics, wresting control from the Moorish taifas, and established a close relationship between the islands and the mainland that endures today. Power gains over the Moors characterised the remainder of Jaume’s reign as he pushed them ever further into Andalusia.

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Barcelona

The Catalonian capital is full of quirks: a city that's noisy, bright and always in a hurry to be somewhere.

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History piled on top of history

Step out of the metro station that carries his name, slip into the streets nearby and perhaps you can imagine how Jaume’s Barcelona appeared…

The tall Roman city walls cast long shadows over the rooftops of markets, workshops and houses jumbled together and scored by narrow alleyways.

There might be the distant chant of Jewish prayer. A synogogue stands taller, its additional height permitted by Jaume. Those who come here are sometimes persecuted yet generally tolerated, though not for much longer.

Meanwhile the masons are working on the lower walls of the new cathedral. As their mallets hammer out time, they’ll be finished – two hundred years hence – right when the Catholic Kings ride into Granada and Columbus discovers the New World.

Every building screens off or builds on some already forgotten landmark. History piled on top of history. Daylight gets in between the cracks for only an hour or two each day, but at least the suffering heat does not.

Eccentrics welcome

Barcelona has had its fair share of eccentrics.

Picasso and Miró were lauded, Dalí was banned and Gaudí lambasted.

And whilst the artists all died famous and respected, the architect went almost unrecognised, run over by a tram before the city suddenly appreciated his genius.

It’s not difficult to understand Barcelona’s earlier allergic reactions. Not only did Gaudí present something completely unprecedented, he often freely mixed it with architectural styles more rigidly defined by time and example.

Sagrada Família perfectly embodies this fervent eclecticism. Still under construction today and planned rather optimistically for completion in 2026 (the centenary of Gaudi’s death), the church remains enigmatically bizarre even to modern tastes. It is nevertheless the very symbol of this city now, released from the strictures of Franco and a degraded regional economy, a time in which aesthetically anything goes.

Knowing me, knowing you

This visit did not reveal the cosy, colourful Barcelona of my imagination. That was the Barcelona of my student years, a kind of Pot Luck meets Together, open and accessible at the other end of a rainbow, by a flight I could never seem to afford – if only because the destination never existed.

Everything there was incense sticks and painted furniture. A quick-tempered latina with whom to fall in and out of love by the hours on a clock. Orwell and Hemingway smoking cigars in an empty lobby. Gossiping starlings and morning laundry, the feverish, silent repose of hot afternoons and all-night festas in a barri I could call my own.

That’s not Barcelona. That studenty, too-good-to-be-true idyll, you break up with it and of course it gets on perfectly fine without you.

The clock strikes midday on your affair with the tempestuous latina of your post-pubescent imagination. And you wake up in the thick heat with a headache and that maddening truth, the one that never comes out right: it’s not you, it’s me…

Such was the headline at the El Pais website this morning.

There can be little doubt that Spain was consistently the best team on the field in Euro 2008, playing their entertaining brand of fútbol total.

In a thrilling climax to a tournament full of surprises – exciting turns from Russia and Croatia, spectacular deadline management from Turkey, Germany actually reaching the final – the crowning Spanish success spelled the end of a forty four year drought of major championship titles.

Perhaps this is also a changing of the guard at the head of European football. Whilst Italy and Germany both looked stale, the Dutch failed to live up to early expectations and France, bof, il vaut mieux ne rien dire.

Better for football, better for Europe.