Flying back into Buenos Aires we were horrified to discover that the entire city has been consumed by a large dense black fug of smoke for the last week, caused by over-enthusiastic farmers slash and burning in the countryside around the capital. Visibility has been compared to the bad old days of the London 'peasoupers'; flights have been cancelled, children and adults taken to hospital suffering from respiratory problems. It's a national disaster, and we are lucky to have missed the worst of it. Our flight was delayed by 3 hours and getting off the plane we can smell, and taste, the burning in the air. Getting back to our apartment it smells as if 20 heavy smokers spent the night there and left without opening the windows.

But it's great to be back! Brian immediately launched himself onto the sofa, stretched out and lovingly fondled his much missed remote control, anxious to catch up with the English scores. As they scroll across the bottom of the television and an excited commentator screams out the ball by ball play of the current local game it's very noticeable that the same excitement isn't being displayed on the screen.Instead all you can see are various groups of spectators, yawning, scratching, texting their mates, looking bored and watching the match. For some reason they are not allowed to show live Argentinean matches here, so instead you get an hour and a half of the scintillating crowd, coupled with the live commentary. Of course what happens is that as the camera pans around people start to realise they are on television, and so they stop munching their sandwich, stroking their beard or picking their nose and leap up and down, nudging their neighbours and waving at the cameras. Sometimes one of them does something a bit different, like climbing an electricity pylon with their teams' flag, and then the camera follows them all the way to the top and you find yourself watching some buffoon in a cagoule drinking beer 20 metres in the air and wondering if he's going to fall off, and whether you'll have to watch it if he does. Most bizarre.

Another channel, Cronica, specialises in 'rolling news'. What this means is that whenever there is an incident or an accident in Buenos Aires they immediately send a crew out to cover it, and they keep filming until something more interesting turns up. So you can have maybe two hours of one car accident, panning shots of the crumpled cars, close ups of the spots of blood, zooming in on the arrival of the ambulance and the carrying off of either the injured parties or the bodies. Neighbours and assorted passers-by are interviewed for any nugget of information they can provide. Startling headlines run at intervals across the bottom of the screen for tardy viewers who have just tuned in - 'espectacular accident', 'choque crash, 5 dead', that sort of informative thing.At last, true car-crash television.

After the crash of the peso in 2001 when the banks went into meltdown and, having devalued the currency by nearly 70%, then closed their doors and refused access to their customers and savers there is not the same trust in the banking culture that we enjoy. As a result, instead of paying bills by direct debits or standing orders, most Argentineans have to go through the laborious and time-consuming chore of paying their bills, in cash, once a month. They seem to be able to do this at the local supermarket or pharmacy, creating these huge queues of people waiting to pay their electricity, phone and electricity bills, usually with a bucket load of small change that then has to be laboriously counted and verified whilst I hover patiently around at the back of the queue trying, vainly, to pay for 2 yogurts and loaf of bread. Tsk.