Sue and I met in Cologne for Christmas to be with our friends Thomas and Nicole and their son (and my godson) Joshi. We have been spending Christmas with them on and off since we first met in 2002, when we were cruising through France having given up our jobs and sold our house in the UK. It was, as ever, a traditional German affair with goose and red cabbage and a tree with real candles. The Christmas atmosphere was accentuated by very cold weather and frozen snow carpeting the landscape. Getting there was hard work, especially for Sue, who worked until the 22nd and then set off from Cordoba the next day, catching a train to Malaga and then a plane to Germany, arriving at 3.00am on the 24th after a gruelling bus ride from the airport. I had an easier time travelling from Italy, but still when I got to my first train station in Cologne I felt like an old and confused man as a ticket machine eat four precious euros in change which I had scraped together to get to the stop nearest t...

It was one of those “perfect” days. The kind of day one starts in a good mood and during which good things happen. We drove to Cadiz down a long sandy spit with a big Atlantic sea pounding the beach. It was grey and misty, but the sunlight down here in Southern Spain is so strong that the clouds were still bright and luminous and every now and then a shaft of silver light would break through and flash off some distant windows. Cadiz is almost an island and as it grew on the shipping trade from the Mediterranean and the Indies it had nowhere to go but up. A typical dwelling has a warehouse at the bottom, apartments on the middle floors and a tower above from which the ocean could be scanned for the returning fleets. Looking up at one of these towers I could imagine an anxious merchant willing a galleon to coalesce out of the haze. Now although Cadiz is still a busy port with ferries coming and going to North Africa, it feels like a tourist city, with guided walks everywhere and lab...