I first came across the wonderful institution of siesta on the other side of the world, in Spain in the old days. I discovered that you could really indulge yourself over a long lunch, because afterwards everyone went home to sleep. Offices and stores closed, so there was nothing else to do. In the evening people, and the town, started to wake up again, full of energy and able to keep going late into the night. People didn’t eat dinner till eleven, which to my young English mind was already deliciously sinful.

Experiencing Siesta in Spain took me back to my kindergarten days in England. Actually we didn’t call it kindergarten then because it was too close to the Second World War and German names were out of fashion. We called it nursery school. As a four-year-old, every afternoon I joined the rest of the class for a “nap” after lunch. Every day I lay down determined to stay awake to spy on the rest of the class and do something naughty whilst they slept. However, every day I was gone within two minutes.

More recently I became a regular visitor to Madrid. As far as business was concerned, siesta had been abolished. People had a light lunch and carried on working. They still stayed up late at night so when they came to work in the morning everyone was half asleep. There was no point in calling meetings early in the morning — people might be physically present but their minds were not. I asked a friend what had happened to their age-old tradition of siesta. “You foreigners don’t understand,” he replied. “It’s you Anglo-Saxons who robbed us of our siesta. You’ve invented a whole workaholic culture and forced the rest of the world to go along with it. Around four every afternoon every sleepy Spaniard curses you.”

Now that I am retired, I have to admit that the siesta is back in my life. Every afternoon, a delicious drowsiness creeps over me and I drift off to sleep. I hope my Spanish friends will now forgive me.

Isn’t it an odd world that we live in?