By Katya Adler, Madrid stringer, 7 September 2004

It’s 4.30am and I’m wide awake. The reason? Two old men are standing in my street shouting at each other about the pros and cons of the extension to the Madrid underground system.

They’re not raising their voices because they are angry, you understand.

This is Spain. Here people talk loudly even when they are right in front of one another, especially after a drink. Here people chat for hours on street corners, at whatever time of night.

Here people honk their car horns repeatedly even if they’re stuck in a traffic jam and there’s nothing to be done about it – particularly, it seems, if it’s in the early hours of the morning.

Here you don’t sleep much. I give up trying and instead stumble drowsily to my computer.

Numerous colourful stories

This is the danger of working from home. A correspondent’s day is open-ended as it is, but when the office is your living room, the temptation is never to stop; to tell yourself there’s just one more thing you have to do.

Being the BBC correspondent – actually stringer – in Spain is an opportunity to perfect the art of multi-tasking. In a country as large as this, and with so many colourful tv, radio and online stories around, the phone is constantly ringing.

Yet there’s no producer, no researcher/assistant, no office.

This year Madrid has seemed to be repeatedly in chaos, with the train bombings and aftermath, a controversial general election and the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq.

Each time I’ve stopped to take a breath, the next piece of breaking news has hit.

Again and again I have found myself called out of the shower or bed, then struggling into my clothes at the same time as doing two-ways over the ISDN, so as to be able to run out of the door as soon as possible (portable radio pressed to my ear to hear the latest) to where the live position has been organised.

Four days that turned Spain upside down

I moved to Madrid in September 2003 and I’ve grown fond of it. The Madrilenos are, for the most part, big-hearted bonviveurs.

As an ordinary citizen, I was appalled by the bombings in March. But the journalist in me experienced that time differently.

I once read John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World about the Russian Revolution. March 11-14 felt like four days that turned Spain upside down, with the train bombs, anti-terrorism protests and an upset at the general election.

On the night before the election some of those who blamed the government for the attacks surrounded its party HQ.

People received anonymous text messages urging them to hang out of their flat or car windows to bang pots and pans as a sign of disgust. The scenes at polling stations were incredible with people arguing over who to vote for. I even saw it come to blows.

Now, six months later, life has returned more or less to normal. It’s once again the loud conversations and car horns rather than politicised pots and pans that keep me awake at night.

And I’m as likely to be asked for a tv or radio package on drunken tourism as for something on the terrorism investigation.

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