Spain Magazine – July 2006
While most holidaymakers and settlers head for the costas, short trippers and culture vultures flock in increasing numbers to the cities, and thirst for books about these is on the rise. The subtitle of Parfitt’s tome, An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid, makes you fear the worst. But it is the perfect antidote to all those books about living in the countryside. It is a hilarious account of him finding his feet in one of the most bewildering, chaotic and fun-loving cities on earth. It could do for Madrid what Driving over Lemons has done for Andalucía.

 OK! Magazine – 25 July 2006

In the late 80s, Tim Parfitt worked for publishers Condé Nast when he was asked to head over to Madrid for a six-week stint to help launch the Spanish Vogue. But six weeks became nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Tim has a pretty vivid yet affectionate picture to paint of a country and city he grew strangely attached to, even though he admits he wasn’t always quite sure what the heck people were on about. An Englishman in Madrid – fascinating, escapist stuff.

The Daily Mirror – 21 July 2006

Discomfort was not something Tim Parfitt ever had to endure during his 10-year stay in Madrid. A Load of Bull is more a love letter to the city than a guide, and entertainingly charts an ex-pat’s experience of the glamorous side of the city. As an employee of Spanish Vogue, Parfitt moved in a glittering social scene, rubbing shoulders with everyone from Pedro Almodovar to Penelope Cruz. He brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place, where five hour lunches are the norm and sleep was something you only ever did at work. And then there were the women!

The Sunday Times – 23 July 2006
‘Looking for action’ – review by Anthony Sattin.
Tim Parfitt’s A Load of Bull is presented as “an Englishman’s adventures in Madrid”, but he is no ordinary Englishman. Or rather, he has his ordinary side and, like most young men alone in the capital, he drinks too much, sleeps too little and is obsessed about getting laid. But his job is unusual, for he is a star of Condé Nast publishing, sent from London for six weeks to help launch Spanish Vogue; nine years on he is still there, as managing director of Condé Nast Spain.

Parfitt tells his story with a light touch and his neat line in self-deprecating humour helps him over any indulgences and perfectly suits his tales of long lunches and leggy models, soirées with Madrid’s beau monde, and long nights in search of a bed mate. But this lad’s tales of growing up is of interest because it takes place against the backdrop of liberality that was sweeping through the Spanish capital when he arrived in the late 1980s, epitomised by the films of Pedro Almodovar (who has a walk-on role).

As Parfitt revels in the fun, scarcely able to believe his luck at being in that place at that time, he nods gently at the seismic cultural changes taking place around him, noting that Spanish Vogue was being launched only 13 years after Franco’s death, and recognising the plight of pijos, Spanish “Sloanes”, who were ‘frustrated that someone like Franco was not still around, yet also frustrated and embarrassed that he once was’. Parfitt’s story fails to live up to its title, but does provide am entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.

The Daily Express – 7 July 2006

“Taking magazines, Madrileños and bulls by the horn” by Peter Burton.<

 Aged 18, Tim Parfitt strolled into the London offices of magazine publishers Condé Nast (Vogue, Tatler, House & Garden) and asked for a job. His cheek won over the personnel director and he was employed. Evidently he proved a success. Almost a decade later he was dispatched to Madrid to help launch Vogue España. He had been invited for six weeks, he stayed for nine years and in his hugely entertaining memoir, A Load of Bull, he relates the story of those outrageous years.

 There are three main themes running through Parfitt’s account of his life in Spain. Firstly, this is the story of an Englishman’s love affair with the country in general and Madrid in particular. Secondly, it is an account of the author’s mostly hapless attempts to find romance or, at they very least, a woman to share his bed. Finally, the book details the launch and success of a high-profile glossy magazine.

 Like many an Englishman abroad before him, Tim Parfitt appears to be both bumbling and ineffectual. However, the very fact that he stayed with SpanishVogue for so long, steadily rising up the corporate ladder, suggests that his buffoonishness was but a pose.  He clearly knew what he was doing. The English have always been drawn to southern cultures and that attraction has produced some classic travel books (Gerald Brenan’s South toGranada and Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria are two memorable examples). Parfitt’s book has a lighter touch than these but it has in common that passions which overtakes men (and women) from more austere climes and makes them forever exiles in their own lands.

 Most appealingly, Parfitt has a laddish sense of humour which makes A Load of Bull frequently laugh-out-loud funny. A night out in a swelteringly hot Latino nightclub on yet another quest for a compliant señorita ends in hysterical disaster when he accidently demolishes the men’s toilets. And a siesta, more-or-less innocently shared with two young women, takes a comic turn when one of them answers his telephone to discover that the caller is Parfitt’s jealous and possessive ex.

 Tim Parfitt writes particularly well about his move into an alien – albeit welcoming – culture. He has to get to used to working hours and working practices unlike anything he has known before. Lunch hours stretch until five in the afternoon. Meals consist of waist-expanding quantities of food and mind-numbing quantities of alcohol. He even takes up support of the bullfight with enthusiasm.

A Load of Bull is a highly diverting tale about a curiously English kind of insouciance in which good humour invariably wins the day. This book proves Parfitt to be the most agreeable of companions.

In Madrid Magazine – July 2006

Billed as more driving over San Miguel than Driving Over Lemons, less Duende than Donde?, this book tells the story of Tim Parfitt, who, in the early 80s blagged his way into what was supposed to be a six-week job at Condé Nast in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Like so many other ex-pats in Madrid, he ended up staying slightly longer. During the nine years that he made the city his home, he drooled helplessly at the stunning (and stunningly unavailable) women who paraded around the Vogue offices; partook in regular five-hour lunches that invariably involved a plate of bull’s testicles; and frothed at the mouth trying to cope with a language that makes the uninitiated dribble. If you liked Toby Young’s How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, and you can relate to any of the above, then this is the load of bull for you.