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Palamós in 1956 was a small village with a sizeable fishing port: it still is a fishing port, although I assume the village must now be a town. The fishing connection is sufficiently important for there to be nowadays a museum in Palamós, although I do not recall there being such a thing in the 1950s. I do, however, recall my day out with members of the local fishing fleet.

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I have no idea how or why it came about (and probably had just as little idea at the time) but a day came when for whatever reason I and quite a crowd of folks I knew, both family and friends, found ourselves on one of the Palamós fishing boats, pulling away from the pier out of the shelter of the bay into the open Mediterranean. I remember what a shock it was to discover that, close up and in spite of the sunshine, the Med could be just as unfriendly as my more familiar North Sea. My uncle was perfectly aware of this apparent contradiction: like almost all members of my family of the wartime generation he had served, and like most of them he had served at sea, in his case with the Royal Navy on Malta.

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The crew fished and we ploughed on: I have never to this day known sea-sickness (touch wood!) and was quite proud as an eight-year old to be able keep my sea-legs as all about me (well, some about me, actually) were going distinctly grey at the gills. The torture can't have lasted long: we had lunch in Aiguablava bay, another place that, after all this time, I easily recognise from online photographs. The water really was blue at Aiguablava - and apparently it still is! And what a lunch we had...I discovered that I could drink from a porón, which the adults thought was cool, and I discovered too that I liked the taste of dry sherry, which the same adults obviously thought was less than cool. We ate fresh fruit which we found ashore and our main course was, inevitably, paella - but what a paella, the fish not even half a day out of the sea, the cooking done by the crew out on the open deck of the moored boat. I have been disappointed by lesser paellas ever since...


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All in all those two holidays added up to an epiphany for food and drink. Here I became conscious of them not simply for their own sakes but because of the ways and the places in which they were consumed. To begin with, of course, the food wasn't English - but nor were most of the people who prepared it and with whom I ate it. So eating out, whether at noon or in the evening, in restaurants or in homes, was already a revelation. In particular I remember eating at Los Caracoles in Barcelona where you could select your fish from the live specimens swimming about in a glass tank. But the homes, of course, belonged to Spaniards (or Catalans) or to Americans or to Brits who had lived abroad: so typically English mores were more honoured in the breach than in the observance.