The demented piping of a shoreline wader reminds you to step off the curb. That bird then spots the marauding gull and frantically encourages you to make haste. The rapidly descending counter, the clarion call to get move on. However, a similar rank and file of citizenry are drawn up in full battle array, shoulder to shoulder right across the opposition’s kerb. Strategies. Go wide, aim to outflank. But others have a similar intent. Tactics. Aim for the fur-coated pensioner, she’s bound to be slower. A gap will appear, but she’s got a zimmer-plough and can use it with ruthless intent, cleaving her own personal path.

Mobilise. Do as everybody else does and play coward-chicken. Weave, dodge, barge, right behind the native decoy, the local somebody else.

The crossing clears. No fallen comrades, and the vehicular traffic re-invades. Daunder on along the pavement to the next crossing and find one that comes with an upgrade. Disability dimples, and a long light-up strip mounted into the pavement; a distraction field-of-vision red light to warn the oblivious, vacant, zombie ‘phoners.

It’s a holiday weekend, a ‘fin de semana’ buttressed by the Days of the National Constitution and the Immaculate Conception. For three of those four days the shops will be closed. Every single shop, with the exception of a few select metro markets and the panaderías. When this happens at home as an essential part of the New Year’s festivities, the consternation, the panic, in the Tesco car park is palpable. “What? … It’s closed? Again?” The world endeth as the tumbleweeds blow down the High Street.

Not so Spain.

Three perambulating generations, a dog, and a pram, strung across the trafficless street, moving without intent, but in a vague direction, possibly, perhaps, maybe, into the plaza. Or mayhap not. They’re not alone, for the town and all its visitors are joining in. For me it’s people-watching – on steroids.

It’s what’s missing that’s intriguing. Nobody appears to have the added appendage of a surgically attached ‘coffee to go’ cup, or is emitting vaporous clouds of cloyingly fruity pollutants. Café bars spill their terraces of tables out over the cobbles, so why would you take your coffee for a walk down the road when you can sit in the still sunshine, albeit at 6°C? Vape shops are nonexistent and the food delivery gig economy is stagnant: the offices are closed. But what is most obviously missing is the utter lack of angst, vexation or aggravation. Just consider Edinburgh in its ‘time of festivals’; that mixing of workday locals and gawping visitors, rushing burghers and selfie influencers, to realise the difference. There, it’s a place bifurcated by the schism between the ‘haves’, who are operating in the short-term occupancy property market, identifiable by the key-safes in their door jambs, and the ‘have-nots’, who don’t. Those who are happy to be over-touristified and those who are not.

Tomorrow is Saturday, a day for trading. Perhaps that will dilute the throng, as shops sift out their chosen clientele. It doesn’t; it only attracts even more onto the street. Which is now augmented with tour groups, who drift behind their leaders. Leaders who call a halt, a hesitation that reverberates back down the street; a stopper-stone around which the next group attempts to flow. I’m standing above the street outside the cathedral, a superior gaze down on the crowded cafés, and four tour groups evenly spaced along the narrow passage, being lectured at length. The body language of some screams “bored”.

We’ve watched these groups on several occasions. Usually whilst waiting for an hotel check-in. One of note did his welcome and introduction for fully five minutes beside the plaza fountain, then walked his group five metres left, to lecture them on the first building of note… for a further five minutes. The participants look chilled; why had they not stopped in that patch of warm sunshine? Because yet another group has purloined it.

This is Spanish tourism for Spaniards. And as these historical city centres are high density living, have by perforce come with their own throngs. Places where the sheer weight of pedestrian numbers overwhelms the car. There’s a comfort in these crowds.

We’ve moved city, and we’re now in Salamanca’s old town centre. It’s dark but I know that the ecclesiastical and academic buildings will be illuminated. We set out and slowly become aware that ’a happening’ is underway. A growing multitude are moving purposefully in the same direction; that the direction is the Plaza Mayor seems hopeful. We’re swept up and follow the crowd right into the square to an ever-increasing throng that surrounds the giant tree.

The clock strikes seven and all the lights blink out. A murmur of anticipation spreads through the throng.

Serendipity has served us up a ’luz y sonido’. A light and sound show, entitled ‘La luz que nos uno’, ‘the light that unites us’. A telling of civic history and the Christian Christmas story, of animated StreetArt on a grand scale. Featuring, with others, that creepy gent slinking along the balconies, peering in windows, who then turns to the plaza, the two-dimensional rolling tableau morphing into the third dimension. Grinning manically, he stomps out over the crowd, to the closing anthem ‘Joy to the World’.

“Thank you Santa. Ah… an earworm. Just what I’ve always wanted”.