“It’s not like the time he said ‘the truth of the pudding’”

IT’S 8.30pm, and the inaugural visit to our daughter in Barcelona is under way. My husband and I have walked around the city for seven hours straight.

This morning, we took in breakfast, the Sagrada Familia, a picnic in Park Guell, and an unremitting two-hour search for the perfect pair of ladies capri-pants: black, tapering neatly to ankle, kind to both back and front bottoms. (Trousers which I can now tell you do not exist, even in Barcelona.)

This afternoon encompassed a pitstop at a ticket-booth, where my husband bought a ticket to watch Messi and Neymar play at Camp Nou, a six-stop detour in the wrong direction on the Metro, some colonic-looking tapas and two glasses of sangria (each).