Madrid - Evening Standard 2005

"Madrid is a strange place," wrote Ernest Hemingway. "I do not believe anyone likes it much when he first goes there." The old man had a point. Most European capitals provide at least the odd remarkable building or stirring monument to commit to Camcorder, but Madrid has no Eiffel Tower, no Guggenheim museum, no Alhambra or Big Ben. The food is often bland and the weather simply demented: as cold as Aberdeen in winter, the Spanish capital becomes so hot in August that you could sear a steak on the roof of the Prado. The city can be bureaucratic, racist, conservative and stuffy. Why then, after living there for three years, do I miss it so much?

Perhaps London is to blame. I am writing this article from a so-called "Spanish tapas" bar in Bayswater where all the staff are Ukrainian and the olives taste of cement. It is raining with a Biblical ferocity and my bill for a triangle of dried-up tortilla and some Jurassic-era jamon has come to more than twenty pounds. Three weeks ago, by contrast, I was standing at the bar of Bocaito on Calle Libertad, Pedro Almodovar's favourite restaurant in Madrid, talking to an afficionado of the bullfights as we enjoyed the house speciality of sautéed mushrooms cooked in olive oil and garlic. There was a constant clatter and sizzle from the kitchen and a sense - so particular to Madrid - that there was nothing more pressing going on than the ingredients of the next canapé, the next draught lager. It was a wonderful evening.

Looking back, it strikes me that Madrid is a mood as much as a city. Unlike London, where life is lived at such a frenetic pace, it doesn't matter what car you drive, what trainers you wear, what bar you're seen drinking in. The accent is on friendship and good times. The important thing, always, is to enjoy yourself.

Nowhere is this easygoing, unpretentious mood more in evidence than at Café Commercial, the finest and certainly most famous of Madrid's many cafés, a vast and splendidly shabby building situated at the southern end of Glorieta de Bilbao. Most evenings I would wile away a couple of hours reading a book or newspaper, ordering café con leche from the Commercial's famously grumpy, white-jacketed waiters, and occasionally venturing upstairs to join the old men playing chess on the first floor.

Better a coffee in the early evening than pint after pint of lager at the tourist-trap tables lining Plaza Mayor. The great square in the centre of the old city, just to the west of Puerta del Sol, was always rammed on spring and summer evenings with pot-roasted Brits who had passed out at six o'clock in a haze of sunshine and booze. Spaniards drink, but in moderation. After all, Madrid is a city where you sit down for dinner at ten o'clock. Nightclubs open at three in the morning. It's not unusual, walking home at 5am, to encounter a traffic jam on Gran Via. So you have to pace yourself. You have to take it easy.

Nevertheless, with the exception of the wonderful paintings at the Prado and the Museo Thyssen - where a new wing has recently opened up to the public - most people come to Madrid either to watch the football or to sample the nightlife. One of my favourite restaurants, on Calle Conde Duque, was Toma, a tiny, five-table bistro run by an American, Paul, who used to look like Charles Manson until he shaved off his beard. Eating out in Madrid can be a tedious and repetitive experience. Sauces barely exist. Vegetables are largely unheard of. A salad consists of some iceberg lettuce, a raw onion and - if you're lucky - some grey, tinned tuna. Paul has sought to educate the Madrileñian palate, to risk serving rare yellow-fin tuna or rack of lamb. Encouragingly, in a city so resistant to change, his restaurant has become one of the most popular spots in town.

Whenever friends came to stay, I always took them to Toma, made sure they paid the bill of course, and then walked up into Malasaña, the neighbourhood - or barrio - immediately north of my apartment. We would sit out in Plaza de Comendadores on summer evenings, listen to live music at Café Palma, then move on to El Perro, a cavernous basement nightclub opposite the old church on Calle Cruz Roja, just a stone's throw from another of Madrid's best bars, Café Ina.

Then Goldenballs arrived, and everything changed. David Beckham was photographed sitting next to Rebecca Loos at the Ananda nightclub, and suddenly everybody who flew out for the weekend wanted to go there in the hope of spotting 'El Becks'. Ananda is certainly the club that everyone talks about in Madrid at this time of year. Situated beside Atocha station, it's an outdoor terraza with a queue on busy nights which seems to stretch all the way to Valencia. The clientele are uniformly gorgeous: girls with narrow, supple waists and guys with windsurfer's biceps and mega-tsunamis of sculpted hair. Out on the dancefloor, it's like an audition for Fame Academy.

The next day, come two o'clock in the afternoon, these same dancers can be seen recovering in Plaza Paca at the delicious Delic, the sort of cafe where the waiters wear sandals and they play a lot of Sting. I always preferred Sunday brunch at Bluefish, just to the north of Plaza Dos de Mayo on Calle San Andrés, or at the little-known Viuda Blanca, hidden away on the left of Calle Campomanes as you head downhill towards Opera.

And now it's all over. No more evenings at the Bernabeu watching Zidane and Raul; no more lazy lunches overlooking the lake at Casa de Campo; no walks in the hills around Miraflores or strolls in the Parque Retiro. Instead, there is London to look forward to. But I did not know what it was to love a city until I lived in Madrid.