Bad times in Buenos Aires – Shiva Naipaul Prize, 1996

Miranda France won the Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in 1996. Her winning essay (below) formed the heart of her first, eponymous book. Two years later she wrote her second book, ‘Don Quixote’s Delusions’, which the Sunday Times described as ‘stimulating to the point of intoxication.’

To learn more about the Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing, and how you can enter, click here.

Bad times in Buenos Aires 

ARGENTINES have a word for the way they feel: bronca. An Italo-Spanish fusion, like most Argentines themselves, the word implies a fury so dangerously contained as to end in ulcers. People feel bronca when they wait for an hour to be served at a bank, and then the service is bad because the cashiers have bronca too. Bronca crackles down the crossed telephone lines and stalks the checkout queues in supermarkets with hopeful names like Hawaii and Disco.

You can easily lose an hour in one of these queues on a Friday evening, among women who look like refugees nudging towards a border, their trolleys piled high with items that might have been grabbed in an evacuation.