WHEN my sisters and I were young my parents would shoehorn us into the back of a Vauxhall estate car every summer and set course for Spain. This was the closest country we could find to England which was hot but still had proper milk, as my mother used to call it. She was referring to that which comes from a cow and not from a can and looks like pus.
Earlier summer sorties with a tent to Normandy and Brittany had been abandoned due to rain. One was abandoned due to the near-suicide of my father, who discovered from his newspaper one day that if he had stayed at home and done his usual numbers on the Pools - a combination of family birthdays and anniversaries - he would have won enough to trade in the Vauxhall for a Lear Jet and my mother for Farrah Fawcett.
So Spain it was; a camping ground called Cala-Go-Go, I am embarrassed to record, set on a hillside which tumbled down to the Mediterranean. It was here, from French newspapers, that I learned Elvis Presley had died. It was here that I listened to Radio Luxembourg in my sleeping bag at night. And it was here that I drank local sangria on the quiet and spent the next three days unsure which end I should keep closest to the Portaloo.
These were all formative experiences of my own making. My sisters were absent, hanging around in bars with men who, for my liking, had too much hair on their forearms.
My father was understandably oblivious to everything, smoking Spanish cigars and reading Shane while my mother made paella with tinned vegetables shipped over in the Vauxhall from Sainsbury's. She never did trust any foreign muck. The Dalton family abroad and al fresco was not a pretty sight, but this was Spain, and in the 70s Spain was the place to be. At least it was if you couldn't afford to be anywhere else.
All this came back to me last week as I sat in a hotel room in Manila flicking through 38 channels of cable television.
Those of you wasting good money on it will know that the chief advantage of cable television is that it gives you so much more to switch off; two channels of flight information, Hindi melodramas, the perpetual motion of CNN, and soccer matches of no consequence.
