Capital Letters: Madrid

Is it agonised pleasure? Or is it sweet agony? Whatever it is, as you plan your six weeks with your school-age offspring this summer, spare a thought for the Madrid parent.

School here broke up two weeks ago, the end of term marked by a playground party with a hired band hammering out the sort of "pachanga" music (think La Macarena or the Birdy Song) beloved of village fiestas and Benidorm discotheques.

Our children have not seen the inside of a classroom since. They will not see one again until mid-September. That is a summer holiday that lasts 13 weeks, three months, or a quarter of the whole year.

Children, needless to say, think this a great idea. School is already a distant memory, the return not even worth imagining. But just what are the parents of little Juanito and Carmencita, products of the typical "two-working-parents-plus-almost-two-children" modern Madrid family, to do?

Temperatures in Madrid are touching 40C (104F). Let your kids out at any time between midday and 7pm and they will be heat-blasted by boiling asphalt. Keep them in and, unless you have air conditioning, they will get almost as hot and just as bothered.

One popular solution is to get rid of them. Take the two brothers, aged six and eight, whom I sat beside as they travelled together, but unaccompanied, on a flight to Alicante last week. They sported the shaven-headed look favoured by Spanish parents who fret about the combination of sand, summer sweat and hair. Manuel and Samuel, as I shall call them, were off to stay with their grandparents. They did not expect to see home until September. Papa, they said, had gone to south America to work. Mama was staying at her job in the city.

But while grandparents remain the secret weapon of the young Spanish family - a free, reliable and willing supplier of everything from baby-sitting to Sunday lunches - they cannot always cover the two months of school holidays when parents are working.

Other solutions include sending the kids to Britain or Ireland to learn English, banishing them to country "summer camps" or, as we do, signing them up for morning "urban camps" run by the city council at schools and sports centres - though this only works if you get up at six o'clock to queue for their places on registration day.

When all else fails, the middle-class Madrid family falls back on "la chica", "the girl".

"La chica" is an Ecuadorian, Peruvian or Colombian immigrant who, despite the name, may be aged anywhere between 18 and 60. She is a cleaner, nanny and, sometimes, cook. In posher parts of town, and one apartment in my building, she must wear a maid's uniform.

"La chica" is the key to summer survival. For it is she who takes the kids to the park in the early morning, cooks them their lunch, finds their Gameboys and turns the telly on in the afternoon.

Her occasional replacement is the socorrista, the lifeguard. This muscled, pimply post-adolescent sits beside the communal swimming pool in the new super-blocks of apartments. His job, simply, is to make sure the children do not drown.

Madrid is unlikely to shorten the summer school holidays. There is, I fear, only one solution. The city's parents must take to the streets and demand their rights. I can see the placards already: "Three months summer holiday for parents, ya! [now!]"