Apply the breaks?

TENERGRIEF Thousands protest against mass tourism last week

- BY NIGEL THOMPSON TRAVEL EDITOR

n May 1969, a skinny schoolboy from an English market town celebrated his ninth birthday with his parents. Not at home under the big skies of East Anglia, but in Malgrat de Mar, a beach resort near Barcelona.

His Liverpudlian parents had left the city in 1959 with a job move and, 10 years later, they had upgraded the family home from a modest council house to a mortgaged three-bedroom semi. Holidays were getting an upgrade too - from a caravan in Great Yarmouth to joining the first, joyful wave of Brits jetting to the sun-drenched Spanish costas.

Foreign holidays were, literally, taking off in the booming late Sixties and the Apollo Saturn V-obsessed boy with wavy brown hair was beyond excited about his first trip on a plane, a hotel with a swimming pool, a newlyacquired red and white lilo and a seemingly limitless supply of chilled chocolate milk.

His parents opted for chilled drinks that were certainly not chocolate milk.

The boy was me and, with my parents now sadly departed to the Great Sunlounger in the Sky, I cannot verify the price of the holiday or the name of the beachfront hotel. But I am fairly sure it was with the long-defunct Clarksons and we flew from Luton, probably with Court Line.

It was a fabulous week: endless hours on the lilo in the pool, a matador poster birthday present from the holiday rep (a young German woman-Ingrid?) and there was a railway by the beach and I was mesmerised to near Apollo-levels by the expresses hurtling past the sands.

Dad also took me to Barcelona FC's Camp Nou stadium and said it was almost as good as Anfield.

He was a wise man.