"Madrid is a strange place for a journalist: you start your day at the Ritz, arrive at the Intercontinental by midday and finish the evening at the Palace and yet - of course- you're still just one of the people." Welcome to life as a young political correspondent in Madrid - lived between bars and newsrooms, books and girlfriends - it can prompt a picaresque or a stoic attitude, but is also the best education for a journalist who wants to be a writer. Featuring lucid observation without a drop of cynicism and with a misanthropic vein tempered by the author's happy nature, this diary is a journey, as literary as it is enjoyable, to that point between youth and adulthood when life begins to get serious.