Rewinding ...

The first trip to Spain, indeed the first trip off the island of Britain (except the Isle of Wight, which was the local "abroad" for us, growing up quite close to Lymington where the ferry docked )... was from Southampton to Bilbao in 1967 ... following a daring escape from the mind control and enculturation institution where I had been incarcarated since the age of eleven ... Dad was very keen on this process, since he had aspirations to intellectual achievement without the opportunity ... times were hard, his parents' own escape to Canada ended in his father's premature passing and his mother, daughter and son's return to Southampton ... work was hard to find ... his tales of the humiliation of standing daily outside the dock gates begging for work led him to find a trade, create his own work ... create a narrative to fit the life that emerged ... Protestant Work Ethic ... not that he was religious ... but he encouraged his children to study hard to have an easier life ...

All this was at that brief moment between history and herstory, when children expected higher living standards than their parents and women were just preparing to restore their rightful roles ... it takes a while when viewed in 3D time frames ... in this blogger's lifetime big changes have happened ... the Age of Aquarius dawned, dimmed for a while, is now settling in for a time of simpler living, softer values ... though like the butterfly, wrapped in its chrysalis, imagining its new form and feeding off the decaying old one, the process is not always pretty or clear ... and maybe there are choices of emergent possibilities  ... in this scenario to choose the butterfly and note the passing of the caterpillar with compassion but not too much focus is to energise The Beautiful New World Our Hearts Know is Possible of Charles Eisenstein ... not to be confused with The Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, pharmaceutical pioneer and inner space voyager, whose cheerier and final novel, Island, has been much less discussed up to now ... 

After a brief spell building a road (well, someone has to hold the post so the surveyors get the bends in the right places), it was off to Scotland to be a waiter ( a job already practised in Dorset, which is another tale) then enthused by Kenny from Aberfeldy, off to hitch-hike round Spain. Hitching was tricky at the best of times in Franco's Spain and two blokes together is harder still, so we soon parted company and your blogger discovered the joys of solo wandering... wonderful!

Hitching along the coast and over the French border, to easier lifts along the Pyrenees and over to Andorra, then down to Barcelona and across to Majorca ... back via Almeria, Algeciras and the only way to visit Gibraltar - a ferry to Tangier, since the land crossing at La Linea was closed ... a wander down to Marrakesh and back with complete culture shock, a flirtation with kif and a mild temptation to bring some back through Spain (maybe one of those key moments in a life) ... easier communication since my school French was passable and recently polished ... back along the Costa, just beginning to take shape and up to Andorra with a couple of pounds in my pocket and a possible job at El Faisa, an English pub then and a posh restaurant now ...

So, rewinding over four decades and the drug trade is still going, eased a little with the re-opening of the La Linea border perhaps .... Spain is a sophisticated country, notwithstanding the economic difficulties .... and the Costa del Sol has blossomed into the paradise one might expect from its founders and supporters over the years ... the poverty of the peasantry transformed by economic activity and tourism driven development ... the old ones still look a little dazed by it all ...

[insert pic of dazed looking peasant here]