Madrid, Spain

Here in this garden of earthly delights there's a few things guaranteed to tickle our senses; good food, great wine, beautiful scenery, fine weather, fabulous conversation, magical music and so on - it's why travel can be so enriching. And of course, then there's shopping.

Coman fancies a big clothes spree while we're here, and dragging him away from shoe shops happens with alarming regularity. So it's a stark choice today - art or catwalks - and I'm not to be swayed! Having been to Madrid a number of times before with work and not visited a single gallery, top of today's agenda is the Prado, one of the finest museums in the world and not a shoe, shirt or suit in sight.

So after a shared pain au chocolat and skinny latte in the local Starbucks (it's all about the free wi-fi) we walk down through the Plaza del Sol and along Calle de Jeronimo to the museum quarter, where many of Madrid's greatest collections are housed in nearby buildings.

First stop is the Prado, but before we even enter we stop to admire the street art on display, taken in by a fabulous painting of a bull in Spanish reds and yellows. €25 later and it's ours, soon to be framed and mounted on our stairs, the perfect complement to the six-piece acrylic of a dancer we bought in Mexico a few months ago.

Safely stowing our new purchase and bags in the Prado's cloakroom we pass through the turnstiles to a world of unparalleled beauty. Truly this is one of the greatest collections of art on the planet, a vast treasure-house of masterpieces that are almost overwhelming in their sheer impact and the visceral emotions they induce.

There are spectacular works collected over centuries by the powerful Spanish monarchy by the likes of Titian, Reubens, Goya, Velaquez, Caravaggio, El Greco and even an alternative version of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, or more probably one of his students.

But the two paintings that really blow us both away are the fantastical triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, 'Garden of Earthly Delights', an amazing example of surrealism five centuries before Dali and his peers, and the huge and macabre 'Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Malaga' by Antonio Gisbert. In fact we're so taken by them that we buy reproductions at the gift shop as we leave. God knows where we'll hang them - I feel a redecoration of the spare room coming on!!

At least we're able to see and appreciate them. The amount of too-cool-for-school Spaniards wearing shades as they walk around, knitwear draped round their shoulders, is highly amusing. Take off your sunglasses, amigos, and you'll see a lot more!

By the time we leave it's gone 1pm and our stomachs are growling audibly so we find a lovely restaurant and have an al fresco lunch in the glorious sunshine. It's properly scorching and I'm thankful we're not here in the height of summer when temperatures soar into the mid-40s. It's a very manageable 28 degrees in the shade, but still roasting as we sit in the direct glare, yesterday's cooling breeze long banished.

A post-lunch perambulation around the genteel tranquility of the nearby Botanical Gardens precedes our next splash of culture at the Museo de Reina Sofia, which by contrast is dedicated to all things modern.

I've been particularly looking forward to seeing many of Dali's greatest works, alongside the likes of Miro, Picasso and Gris, but the buggers have only gone and shoved them all into a temporary exhibition centre for which the queues are enormous, and to compound matters there are no tickets left for today and barely any for tomorrow.

Deciding that there's no point in spending a good 90 minutes lining up on the off chance that we may get a slot for tomorrow evening we skip to the front and find an empty booth marked for disabled access. The cashier pays scant attention to any supposed challenges we may have and accepts our proferred cash, allowing us straight into the museum to see the rest of the exhibits.

Now I'm no philistine, and I love a bit of ludicrously constructed nonsense that someone's decided is abstract art and paid a fortune for, but initial impressions of the museum ain't good. Huge white rooms with an orange square on a distant wall don't exactly scream high culture to me, and the layout of the entire building seems designed to confuse the visitor into wandering around vast rooms containing, in some cases, literally nothing at all. It's almost some situationist joke.

But finally we stumble upon pieces of interest. TV's flicker with grainy loops, black and white films of young men fighting are projected onto walls, various bits of fascist propaganda hang upon walls beside newspaper cuttings and posters, and there are even framed articles about Hackney single mothers in the 1980s with a Daily Mail frontpage alongside.

Eventually we enter galleries of paintings, fascinating, stimulating and challenging, the greatest - or most famous - of these being Picasso's stark and brutal 'Guernica' inspired by the Spanish civil war. Soon after we've ticked this 'must-see' off the list we both realise our aching feet and weary eyes would stop complaining if they were treated to a little rooftop action back at the hotel pool. So within moments we're in a cab racing back to a little bit of indulgent luxury.

I'm sure if there'd been a bit more Salvador to keep us amused we'd have found the strength to plough on, but culture schmulture; suntan lotion and a chilled glass of cava have won the day. Time to stretch out and relax...