Ahhh, beautiful blue skies and the temperature dial hitting 30C and it’s still only 8am. A light haze covers the mountains in the distance and it’s going to be another hot, hot day: a major challenge for any newcomer to Spain. Learning to live with the heat is one of the hardest parts of our new life in Madrid. For a start, there’s the important issue of what to wear. Being British, my wardrobe is the fashion equivalent of the Model T: any colour so long as it’s black.

Now I’ve had to wisen up and buy new, light-coloured clothes, like the Spanish. Not that it helps me to blend in. We are instantly recognised as the new “guiris” (foreigners, as in “dumb foreigners”) in the neighbourhood and our progress around the barrio is keenly watched to see what these “mad Brits” will get up to next. While I’m all for individuality, it can get a bit tiring at times so I was determined to follow Spanish fashion and fit in – checking out the other women in our local bar and taking their lead. They have long hair, so do I – now (well, it’s slightly longer than it was in the UK, a major achievement for this urchin-cut girl); they like little handbags, so do I; they like red trousers . . . ok, some things are beyond the pale. But I can cope with wandering around in cute vest tops with drawstring straps and gypsy skirts.

That was how I was dressed the other morning when I popped into my bakers for our daily bread (a task containing both pleasure and pain – pleasure in that the bread is fantastic, pain in the look on the baker’s face when I try to speak Spanish). Despite it being 25C at only 9am, the baker’s wife looked at me curiously. “Don’t you feel a bit chilly, just wearing that at this time in the morning?” she asked.

The Spanish like discussing the weather almost as much as the British.

I tried to make a joke about it feeling like a baker’s oven outside, but the perplexed look on their faces as I stammered my words made me turn my sentence into a simple “Not really”, and I headed back to the flat, bread in one hand, little handbag in the other.

Waiting at the traffic lights to cross (and feeling chuffed that I’d finally remembered to look the right way – as in the wrong way), I noticed a man wind peering at me from out of his window. “Señora,” he shouted, “It’s very hot. Do you have far to walk?” I shook my head and said I was nearly home. He asked if I was sure I wouldn’t like a lift, then drove off as I walked on, amazed at the kindness I constantly encountered in Madrid and smiling happily to myself as I happily swung my little handbag.

A few days later we visited La Terraza. Finding somewhere close-by to have a coffee or a cana had been important to us, but we’d had trouble locating one. In we would go, perch ourselves at the bar, only to get a look of disdain and a feeling that we were something the dog had dragged in. It took a little time to be welcomed at La Terraza, but finally Ged has been given a free lighter and I can go in by myself to work, read or just people-watch. Santi, the owner, grumpily teases us about having to turn his bar into a Spanglish-speaking one – winking as he says it – and the staff greet us when we bump into them in the street.

It was through Santi that I learned about Paul, a fellow Geordie, who lives in the next calle to us – we can even see his flat from our garden. We chose to live in Ciudad Lineal, a nice, well-to-do area outside the city centre, because it was so Spanish and at first didn’t want to mix with ex-pats, foolishly believing we could immerse ourselves in the Latin life. But after a while you feel the need to talk to someone with whom you share a common culture and language, and Paul quickly turned out to be a good guy.

He was in La Terraza, laughing with Santi, when we popped in and he invited us to join him. Intrigued by the giggling, I asked what the joke was. “Oh, Santi just had one of the girls in asking for a discount on their meals as they eat here so much,” said Paul. “He told them he would give them a discount if they gave him a discount. She wasn’t very happy.” We looked perplexed, and he explained: “You know – the ‘ladies of the night’ who live around the corner. It’s all legal here in Spain. Look, there’s a couple over there – with the small handbags. That’s how you can tell who they are.”

I looked at my tiny bag with horror, while Ged almost fell off his bar stool laughing. It’s since been relegated to the recycling bin and I’ve decided I’m happy being known as the guiri of the neighbourhood.

There’s a lot to be said about individuality, after all.

Elizabeth Ellis is a former journalist now eeking out a living as an English teacher and freelance journalist in Madrid. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and Spain magazine, amongst others. Currently, Elizabeth is working on turning her blog into a book.

Choosing the Right Word 

I am busy engaging in the old must-sharpen-pencils-before-I-can-write strategy. Procrastination, as it is commonly known. But as I write on a laptop, I don’t need the pencils. Perhaps I could check my email — there might be something interesting or urgent waiting for me. Or I could look slightly to the left and stare out the window. Or I could look up the meaning of ‘procrastinate’. May as well know the exact meaning of my current state of mind.

I am, according to the Dictionary.com site, deferring action, and delaying until an opportunity is lost. My 1911 copy of the Oxford English dictionary goes one step further and accuses me of being dilatory. I dilated even further when I dug up my trusty 1952 copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and I discovered that to engage in procrastination could also be described as engaging in Fabian Tactics.

Fabian Tactics?

This could lead to some excellent procrastination. I nipped over to Wikipedia, despite having an ancient set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. To get out of my chair and walk into the living room, pull down the index and find the entry on the Fabian Society, replace the index and find the relevant volume is just too much like hard work, and possibly against the spirit of Fabian Tactics.

The Fabian Society, according to Wikipedia is ‘a British intellectual socialist movement whose purpose is to advance the principles of Social Democracy via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary means’.

So where does the procrastination come in? To be reformist is not deferring action. I was missing something. On reading further I discovered the Fabians to be named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, nicknamed, (beware transposing those letters…) ‘Cunctator,’ meaning The Delayer, whose battle strategy consisted of the guerrilla tactics of harassment rather than direct confrontation on the battlefield.

It is true that I am not approaching my writing task in a confrontational way, but nor am I conducting guerrilla warfare with it. The term Fabian Tactics proved not to be the definition I was after and I returned to Thesaurus where I discovered I was, by procrastinating, indulging in ‘masterly inactivity’, ‘fribbling’ or — thank you Quintus Fabius, ‘cunctating.’

The opportunity to procrastinate is one to savour. But I went one step further back to the old word ‘leisure,’ yesterday and went to bed for the afternoon with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Be not alarmed, jaded reader, I speak of the newly released Penguin edition in the recognisable orange black and white cover. The covers hark back, (clever Penguin marketing people), to a slower time, a time when choosing a book was not an act decided by a visceral attraction to the cover image.

To pry myself away from the screen and re educate myself in reading has become a compelling obsession for me lately. The screen brings anxiety, brings demands, brings urgency. The book allows me to escape.

I am also about to re engage in an old technology — writing a letter with pen and paper. A novel and charming idea. Imagine the freedom, to squiggle and draw, to scrawl when I want and to do perfect modified cursive if I want. To sketch a little picture next to my words and to not have to master thirty computer programs in order to do so. One drawback. Once written, it can’t be changed. No going back and editing, no cut and paste, no second chances. Get it right first time or not at all.

My father spent the second half of his working life in a position that required him to write long, detailed legal decisions. Despite his assistants and staff all using computers, he would write his decisions in longhand. When asked by me, completely bemused by how he did it without Word, he replied, that he thought about each sentence before he wrote it.

I raised my eyebrows and nodded slowly. Simple question, simple answer.

To write and get it right first time is a challenging concept. My father used an A4 notepad and ballpoint pen and worked on a desk free of clutter. He never used correcting fluid and prided himself on the evenness of his handwriting. (You can imagine what our family dinners were like.)

My handwriting lurches from hastily scrawled printing to illegible and all variations in between. And it deteriorates the more I use a keyboard. When I write handwritten notes my hand grips the pen in an unsteady way, like an accident victim learning to walk again.

I have read, where I don’t know, that writers working on computers tend to become more ‘wordy.’ One would expect from that observation that handwriting a book favoured an economy of style, and yet to read a nineteenth century novel is to experience ‘wordy’ sometimes to exasperating excess.

Did Anthony Trollope cunctate when faced with writing Barchester Towers at 200,372* words? To produce a manuscript of 85, 000 words I have written perhaps 200,000. I whittle away, replace, add a bit, cut, cut more, cut another chunk, until I am satisfied, and it is a long process despite the ease computers lend to writing. Whereas Trollope might have had to get it right first time – by gaslight with pen, nib and notebook. And yet I, with all my modern tools, am still dilating and cunctating. But Trollope’s readers had the leisure for his lengthy books, and my readers, like me, can only steal fragments of leisure in between answering phones, emails, social networking messages, twittering, exhaustion and those gorgeous moments where they allow themselves to cunctate.

Phillipa Fioretti is an Australian fiction writer. She was selected for the Hachette Australia/Queensland Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program 2008. Hachette Australia have offered her a two book contract with the first novel – The Book of Love – to be published in April 2010.