To market, to market . . .

Contrary to popular belief, women do not, in fact, like shopping. Oh yeah, we grin and bear it and drag our heels to the shops when we have to go out for the essentials - handbags, shoes, earrings etc - but believe it or not, going to the local supermarket fills us with as much dread as it does you men.

But then, you move to Spain and a visit to the supermercado takes on a whole new meaning.

Some things are annoyingly similar to shopping in the UK. No matter which trolley I choose, for example, it’s always the one with that sixth sense of knowing exactly the direction you wish to go in and then choosing to turn its wheels in the opposite. And no matter what time you go, it’s always full - unless, of course, you go on a Sunday, when the shops are closed. Oh yes. Only on the first Sunday of every month can you go to the supermarket. The remaining Sundays, you’re left facing shuttered grills and forced to go to the bar for Sunday lunch. Our first few months of shopping here were fun until we gathered that one out, I can tell you.

But the real excitement comes once you’re inside (having run the gamut of the security people who want to check all your bags to make sure you’re not smuggling in any dangerous items). Give Spaniards any set of wheels and suddenly they undergo a personality transplant, all miraculously becoming Fernando Alonso - and I mean any wheels, shopping trolleys included. While I’m struggling to get mine to move in a straight line, these baby F1s are all under starter’s orders and determined to get best track time around the aisles. Until they see something they want, then the trolley is abandoned in the middle of a busy lane and you find yourself stuck in that most ugly of situations - the supermarket traffic jam. Without horns to blow, these guys are lost as to how they should behave and resort to barging their trolleys past the offending obstacle (metal or human) or pulling their handy little shopping baskets on wheels over whatever gets in its way. And an amazing lack of foresight on behalf of the supermarket planners means the parafarmacia (drugs department) is upstairs, leaving the lamed and crippled forced to hobble their way onto escalators to buy bandages, antisceptic cream and brandy (purely medicinal, of course).

Having suffered the trolley rage, there’s only one place to go to chill out – the fish counter, and not just because it’s covered in ice. Grab a good book, pull up a basket to sit on and get settled because you’re going to be here for a while. Spanish love fish and Madrid has one of the best reputations for fresh fish, even though it’s in the middle of the country and miles from the nearest port. As a result, your ticket number may say you only have five people ahead of you, but these five people obviously never learned from Jesus and instead buy enough fish to really feed the five thousand. And each fish has to be descaled, de-headed, de-backboned, de-everthing (the removed parts are, of course, placed into another bag for when you’ve got the ten hours necessary to make fish stock from them. Amazingly, many of my co-shoppers seem to have this time free - no surprise after the long wait at the fish queue. I, meanwhile, am left to mutter “no, gracias,” head down to avoid the disapproving looks as these tasty morsals are thrown away. An hour later, after you have your fish (“no only two pieces, please. Yes, that’s all”), it’s time to head for the shellfish counter and another long wait - this time enlivened by trying to avoid the escape attempts of the crabs and lobsters which, still alive, start to move towards you. Still, at least the wait gives you time to dash to the meat counter, where a tantalising array of heads, feet, brains and ears have the amazing affect of making you instantly decide on a veggie stir fry for that night’s dinner.

But there is always one source of satisfaction: the foreign food section. Every week, we stop and drool at all the exotic produce on offer - Homepride Cook-in Sauces, Oxo cubes, Chivers orange marmalade and Weetabix. (What, you thought I meant authentic Chinese, Indian or Italian food?) They all cost an arm and a leg to buy (hmmm, perhaps I could get these joints at the meat counter too) and we walk away with heavy hearts and protesting stomachs.

Until last week, when a sudden madness brought on by the wonderful reappearance of the creme de la creme of British food made us throw our Spanish style of life out of the window. That lunchtime, after tussling with the trolleys, freezing at the fish counter, shunning the shellfish and forgoing the feet, we sat down to a real feast: Heinz Baked Beans on toast washed down with Robinson's Orange Barley Water followed by ice cream in proper wafer cones, all eaten out on the terrace, of course. With the sun beaming down and our favourite comfort food inside us, it was just the thing to turn that supermarket weep into a supermarket sweep.