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Centrally, food and drink suddenly became fun, to be associated with humour and laughter as well as with sea and sun and warmth. My aunt and uncle ate well and drank well: my uncle was in the habit of coming home for lunch from the Palafrugell factory dragging crates of beer out of the car - but also crates of Coca Cola and some fizzy orange drink of which I remember the taste but not the name: it may well have been the French Orangina. And these soft drinks and beers would go in a fridge, from where they would emerge as chilled drinks. These things were all total novelties to me.

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Sometimes too we would picnic on the beach or in the countryside, something which was not new to me except, quite importantly, as an activity which could be carried out in comfort and warmth and not in the teeth of a howling gale. I am no longer certain whether the Americans actually barbecued on the beach, or whether they just picnicked - but I'm positive that food on the Costa Brava was cooked and sold by the water's edge. As I already said, some of the memories from those days in the 1950s I believe to be fairly secure, and I am certain that it was in 1956 that I first tasted Mediterranean gambas, cooked with brandy in the open air at twilight on a sandy beach by a glass-still sea: I remember their succulence and their ruddy golden colour with continuing delight. But whether that beach belonged to Palamós or to San Feliu de Guixols, I couldn't tell you with any certainty. On balance, I fancy the latter...

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It was in Palamós too that I began to learn the language - Spanish, not Catalán. I learnt mucho gusto and its response tanto gusto, as well as feo and fea, masculine and feminine expressions of distaste, and guapo and guapa, similarly differentiated expressions of approval. My aunt and uncle being great football fans, fuera soon entered my vocabulary. So too did the shoulder-shrugging expression they used to explain any event that seemed bizarre to English eyes, such as the failure to pay attention to traffic signals or the cultural inability to perform a task on time: Estamos en España... An expression that I never fathomed was one my aunt used, always in English, to describe the practice of sitting at table and tasting food from other people's plates - speaking Spanish.

I knew as well the word pensión: I have the vague feeling that by the time we left Spain in 1958, embarking for the fourth and final time on that lengthy car journey between Catalunya and the north of England, multi-storey hoteles were also beginning to sprout in places along the Costa Brava. That may, however, be false memory at work.

What is clear is that even if the Costa Brava had not yet begun to change, life for me had assumed a totally new dimension.