I spot some graffiti.

The little cultural peccadilloes in an alien country are always quite fascinating. There’s graffiti everywhere in Argentina making allusions to people you don’t know and events you’ve never heard of, and cod graffiti philosophy like that painted on a rock miles into the desert saying ‘anarchy = freedom’.

Be that as it may, you can’t really turn the thing round. It just seems like a sort of self-evident statement masquerading as the profound. In my experience you can’t have a conversation of depth with a young Spanish speaker in the same way you can a German or a Swede.

It’s like they never grow out of that phase that 20-year-olds go through when they’re obsessed with objectionable philosophy and never wrong. That said, you’ve got to admire the effort involved in making your way into the middle of the Argentine wilderness to defile a rock.

Maybe anarchy does equal freedom, but doing a five-hour roundtrip with a can of spray paint is not perhaps the most exciting way to demonstrate it. The clearest example of this particular axiom in action is the traffic in Buenos Aires, which I wrote about the other day. The traffic in Buenos Aires is anarchic, but it doesn’t feel free. Freedom is not driving in Buenos Aires. QED and that.