gone mudlarking

(I have a new plan for my blogs, by the way, which is hopefully going to increase their frequency: 
1) Keep the text to around 500 words instead of my usual 2000+ ...
2) Lots of pictures
Let's see if it works ...)

Mudlarking (which is, as the word implies, larking about in mud - or muddy sand, anyway) has a long and colourful history, especially on the banks of great tidal rivers like the Thames. The incomparable Victorian social historian Henry Mayhew writes about them, and I vividly remember reading a book about a young London lad who becomes apprenticed to a tosher (a sewer scavenger) when I was a kid, and finding loads of treasures - though not so vividly that I can recall the title, alas. It was a great book.

... been to Spain, part 1: Tomatina or bust!

Spain! What comes to mind when you think of the place? Burnt-orange villains in villas on the Costa del Crime? The oeuvre of Almodovar? Teens off their tits in idyllic Ibiza? For some the name conjures the interwar Spain of Hemingway and Orwell, a place of parched soil and fertile passions, bullfights and hard-drinking expats: for others, package holidays and Benidorm, girlfights and, well, hard-drinking expats.

"Sand in the goddam ribbon again ..."

I say I've never been to Spain, but this is something of a lie. I have been to Spain before, once, as a small child in the 1980s: an inexplicable family holiday to the La Manga golf resort in Murcia (inexplicable because none of my family plays golf, or ever has). However, as my principal memories of that holiday are thinking a Kawasaki was a kind of camera and losing to a four-year-old in the Fancy Dress competition, I reckon I was justified in thinking that now I'm of a legal age to drink, fornicate and generally open myself to everything Spain has to offer, it was time to visit again: La Tomatina called ...