Like the butcher’s boy’s bicycle trailing a string of sausages from the basket and followed by a hungry dog, I think I acquired a new popularity in Spain last week by leaving a trail of banknotes behind me. At least one €10 note was handed back to me.

Like the butcher’s boy’s bicycle trailing a string of sausages from the basket and followed by a hungry dog, I think I acquired a new popularity in Spain last week by leaving a trail of banknotes behind me. At least one €10 note was handed back to me.

The trouble was my trouser pocket. It wasn’t deep enough. I like to wear a nondescript pair of grey flannels while travelling in Spain. This is not as important as it used to be. Spanish men, as the late poet James Michie pointed out, used to wear trousers that fitted, unlike British men whose waistbands tended to be accommodated below their bulging stomachs. Shorts in Spanish towns were unthinkable, not because no one dared, but for the same reason one is disappointed to find that a bogey has been dangling from one’s nose during an interview – it’s embarrassing.

Now men’s shorts are a matter of indifference. A fat man was wearing some in Zamora while doing the readings at Mass, and no one turned a hair. But I saw something else that day which made me realise how things have changed in the past two generations.

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