Breakfast is served without any words being exchanged between myself and the waiter, beyond a brisk ‘buenos días’. He knows my order. It appears automatically, the clanking, bashing, steaming and sizzling of coffee machine and plancha, the hot plate used for frying and toasting, starting as soon as I am spotted walking through the door. This can be a complex business. How do you keep your fingers clean when the toasted roll you have been given has a large pool of olive oil washing over its crusty banks? And, once the oil is on your fingers, how do you stop it sticking the pages of your newspaper together? The little, square, tissue serviettes, grabbed from the plastic container on my table, pile up in front of me. When it comes to sex surveys, I am used to turning to Cosmopolitan magazine or its glossy equivalents. Spain, however, has the august Instituto Nacional de Estadística, the state-run National Statistics Institute. So it is that, between sips of café con leche from a small glass that burns my finger-tips, I am informed that the instituto has discovered the following: more than one in four Spanish men under forty-nine have had sex with a prostitute during their lives, while one in seventeen have done so over the past year.
