I've been pondering and agonizing over what to write this time because Madrid is so slow these days it makes me feel sluggish and visionary (I can easily IMAGINE where else I'd like to be now). The end of the summer is near, temperatures are no longer hitting mercurial records and the falling of the days encompass the prelude of the death of the butterfly.

During the month of August ordinary errands such as purchasing stamps, finding an open pharmacy, buying bread, or getting the newspaper, turn into savvy heroics. It's ridiculous, EVERYONE has left Madrid to go on holiday. Offices close at 3:00pm and companies are totally understaffed, so why bother making a call if you have a vital enquiry? "The person that takes care of it is not around now until ... I don't know about this ... Could you wait a *few* weeks ... Hold the line ... (FOREVER ...)?"

When you get into a shop, breaking into the staff's private conversations leads to an embarrassing time with the person that is silently forced by his/her colleagues' gazes to get rid of you as soon as possible. Rudeness, minimalist answers, yawns and short attention spans constitute the backbone of your interaction with the shop attendant.

The world has simply stopped spinning.

At times like these only pastime fantasies and non-thinking activities seem to be appropriate. Say, sunbathing, buying records, buying clothes, buying anything you ever desired to buy (indulge in a purchasing craze!), listening to the radio, watching other people's holiday pictures

My mum lures me and my sister Gloria into going out. Only in the car I get an answer to my question: "Where are we going?"

To a Terraza to chill and drink Coca-Cola, perhaps? Or shall we check the latest painting exhibition? (My Mum is in love with painting and Madrid offers on art are excellently varied).

"Well ... I have to do some shopping and that, so let's go to *El Corte Ingles*, shall we, dear?"

*El Corte Ingles*...?

Again?

My blood froze and I felt like turning into a car seat and remaining there forever. Oh, pleeeaaze! Thanks but no thanks! For Lord's sake, how many times can this family go to that place in *one* week?*El Corte Ingles* is the most profitable business in Spain, moving billions of *pesetas* of yearly company turnover around its [country]-wide retail network without blushing.

Its branches are massive buildings, usually sky high, propped inside with everything a household could demand: records, books, house appliances, clothes, food ... you name it, they have it.

It might have been the troglodyte view of chauvinism driving the Republican Party in the US Senate to block the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or India's collective political - unerringly reflecting its cultural - genius for doing very little with almost self-destructive elaborateness, or even the wonderfully apposite Clinton joke about bar-room drunks which gloriously ignored Ulster's suffocating humourlessness (let us ignore the unremarked unhistorical observation which cited religious strife more than a century before Martin Luther) but what actually hit home this week was a massive rail disaster and a tiny jewel of an aphorism.

The rail disaster included the involvement of one company fined on a previous occasion for a terrible crash exactly half of what its head of safety raked in as the proceeds of his part in a private management buy-out from the public service; the aphorism, as valuable in its way as the 45 seconds of Beethoven's Allegretto in B Minor found in Cornwall, was unearthed by Francis Wheen in the course of writing an estimable biography of Karl Marx who said:

"Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong but always by the strength of the weak."

The central point is obvious and stunningly overlooked; the miserable flotsam of our society that can hardly organise itself to get out of bed in the morning and lives a precarious existence from hand to mouth, needle to vein, ends up behind bars whereas shareholders and corporate executives on their behalf who cut corners resulting in mass murder are fined nugatory amounts for their lack of trouble.

For just as legislators, charmingly imprisoned by the rich, impose inestimably nastier imprisonment on the poor, so the great powers march over Kosovo and East Timor but eat thousand-year-old quails' eggs in the Great Hall of the People.

Marx, perhaps more misunderstood than any other major writer for not having been read by his detractors, has been reviled for many things done after his death in his name by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest but historians can rightly observe that his central thesis about how the revolution would overthrow capitalism was hopelessly optimistic, though it was no more a miscalculation than the mindlessly celebrated Fukuyama.

On the other hand, on the general theory of labour and what would happen if capitalism proceeded unckecked, Marx was prescient to such a degree that his humanity could hardly have withstood the tragedy. As kleptocracy, dressed in the self-important intellectual fripperies of Hayek, has been practiced on a methodical and global scale which makes the Mafia look like a gang of downtown windscreen cleaners, liberalism in all other matters is being equally methodically eroded. There never has been a convincing case for economic liberalism in tandem with social repression; to maintain the right to kick an unemployed labourer in the economic groin and then punish him for starting the fight is simply advancing a sham, made respectable by the suffix of an "ism" to justify greed...