Four bitches

One of my excuses - and there are many - for spending so much time at café tables is that it's an ideal setting for practising Spanish. Seated under a sun umbrella and wafted by a gentle sea breeze, we take out the e-reader and set to work.

The methodology is this: reading a Spanish novel, I translate a sentence aloud into English which J then attempts to translate back into Spanish. After a page or two, we swap roles. It's entertaining for us and even more entertaining for any locals within earshot.

Now and again we might stumble over an unfamiliar word or phrase that the dictionary doesn't know about either, in which case we are surrounded by expert Spanish speakers to turn to for help.

The other day, for example, I came across the phrase un vestidito de cuatro perras. Translated literally this means 'a little dress of four female dogs', which doesn't make a lot of sense.

Nothing helpful in the dictionary. So I try going online, to a famous multilingual translation website, which comes up with 'a dress four bitches' which makes even less sense.

We call for help to Susana, the café waitress, who has no trouble sorting things out for us. This phrase simply means 'a cheap dress', she explains (in Spanish). Cuatro perras is a very small sum of money.

We've captured her interest now, though. 'I think,' she says, 'a perra was a couple of céntimos. A two-céntimo coin.' (A céntimo was a hundredth of a peseta.) Wanting to be sure about this she grabs a passing Gomeran, a senior citizen with a flat cap and a stick who might remember such things: 'Una perra. Was that a two-céntimo coin, when we still used the peseta?'

He rubs his chin. 'I think it was five,' he says. 'A five-céntimo coin. We're talking about a long time ago, though. They stopped making them, the perra was almost nothing, wouldn't buy you the foam on top of that beer glass.'

Another pensioner seated at a nearby table looks up from his newspaper. 'Ten céntimos. The perra was ten céntimos.'

For any self-respecting Spaniard, being contradicted is the surest way to transform a half-formed opinion into rock-solid certainty. 'No, no, you're wrong, it was five,' insists the man with the flat cap.

He turns for support to the beer delivery man who has just arrived and probably has no idea how much a perra was but provides cautious backing: 'Could have been five. Either that or ten.'

The discussion spreads to the other tables, two more passers-by, the postman and the deputy mayor on his way back to the office. Impassioned argument is an essential part of the Spanish way of life and everyone is entitled to wade in.

On this occasion the resolution is particularly harmonious because it turns out that both combatants are right. Everybody's right! There were two different varieties of perra! A little one, the perra chica, which was the five-céntimo coin and the perra gorda, literally the 'fat bitch', which was ten céntimos.

Offering thanks all round, we return to our e-reader.

'Then, of course,' muses the ten-céntimo man with the newspaper, 'there was the duro. You remember the duro?' He nods at the guy in the flat cap, who is hanging about in the hope of more excitement.

'Five pesetas,' he responds. Disappointingly, nobody challenges this, it's correct, there was only one duro and it was the five-peseta coin. Even I know this, an ignorant foreigner, because shopkeepers and waiters used to tease visitors by demanding veinte duros, twenty duros, instead of a hundred pesetas, which was the price of a beer, coffee or bottle of water in those days.

No more duros now, of course. We have only the euro. I love the euro, especially the fact that the coins circulating here are not only Spanish but also Irish, German, French, Dutch and others of more mysterious origin, bearing portraits of distant royals or presidents. But as far as I know, nobody has invented colourful nicknames for the euro menagerie.

Unless you count the diminutive eurito, a little euro, which is a perfectly normal euro but softened by the -ito ending. It's a way of charging you a euro while indicating that a euro is nothing very much at all. But there we're into a whole new topic, which I think I'd better leave for another time.