Running wild

I’m doing 170 kilometres an hour along the motorway from Barcelona to Pamplona. I pass a sign telling me I am now entering Navarre, and passing from Aragon to the Basque country. It’s a blue sign, about 20 foot square and riddled with holes. Where I live many of our road signs are peppered with shot, done for a laugh. But these are made by some sort of high-calibre rifle. The motorway is like a racetrack, black, cambered, empty, a continuous line of bougainvillaea bushes down the central reservation. I’m driving a Merc worth 20 grand. My own car back home is worth, for insurance purposes, 150 quid. I’m squirting the Merc around the insides of the bends in quiet and comfort. The outside temperature, it says on the dashboard, is 38 degrees. With the air conditioning on full I’m a pleasantly cool 16 degrees. On either side is a wide plain, parched white, and on the low hills in the distance hundreds of windmills, blades stationary.

I’m wearing clean white trousers, a laundered white shirt and the crimson sash and neckerchief commemorating the bloody wounds of St Fermin. In my trouser pocket, a three-inch thick roll of euros, two grammes of amphetamine sulphate and a box of Smints. On the CD player, Sham 69. Another road sign tells me I am 67 kilometres from Pamplona. Beside myself with excitement, I press the toe down.

At Pamplona I nose through the red and white crowds and by a miracle there is a parking space next to the bullring. I park, jump out, wave the key at the car and insinuate myself into a crowded bar. Everyone inside the bar and the majority of those outside on the pavement are dancing, and singing as they dance.