Low life | 27 July 2017

‘We are always waiting for somebody,’ observed a vexed British journalist. Usually it was me they were waiting for, but this morning I had boarded the tour bus on time and I tutted along with the righteous. While we waited I picked up the driver’s copy of that day’s edition of El Pais. On the front page was an arresting photograph of President Trump going head to head with President Macron, in Paris, their forearms joined and their hands clasped in the arm-wrestling start position. At their first public handshake in Brussels, Macron had crushed Trump’s hand until the Donald’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. Here was the second leg of the contest and the Donald was playing away from home. A steely-eyed Melania was watching closely, as if her husband had been in training and she had placed a hefty bet on him making the frog blink first this time. Indeed President Macron’s glassy eyes suggested that Trump had the upper hand.

I raised the newspaper to invite the other 12 European travel hacks waiting on the bus to comment on the photograph. But I might as well have held up a snap of Heinrich Himmler or Fred West; the US President’s image was greeted with knee-jerk groans and gagging sounds. I lowered the paper and turned to the culture section and made a largely futile attempted to translate into English the bullfight correspondent Antonio Lorca’s report on the final bullfight at the San Fermin festival in Pamplona.

Traditionally, the bulls on the last day are Miuras, a unique, dangerous and beautiful mixture of old fighting bull strains, including Cabrera, which survives only in the Miura, I believe, and which accounts for both their beauty and sapience.