FT correspondent’s warm memories of difficult days in Madrid
I arrived in Madrid in December 2012, in time to celebrate the bleakest Christmas the city had seen in a generation. Capital and country were reeling from a series of shocks that had brought Spain to the brink of ruin. Six months earlier, a slow- burning banking crisis had blazed out of control, forcing the government to request billions in rescue aid from its European partners. Spain was in recession and suffering an unemployment crisis that would see the jobless rate peak at 27 per cent a few months after my arrival. Reminders of the nation’s desperation were everywhere. On days when I took my son to kindergarten we would pass a long line of people — not all of them poorly dressed — waiting outside a church- run soup kitchen . Walking to my office in the morning, I would find more and more shops boarded up. Inexplicably, the tiny store that sold and repaired mechanical typewriters held out, defying both the economic downturn and technical obsolescence. Then, one day, I found that ...