I lived in London for 30 years, but last August my wife and I moved to Vigo, on the northwest coast of Spain. We had been living in a tiny flat in Ilford, east London, with my son, aged 11. My wife is from Argentina, and her brother-in-law lives in Vigo; we’d been going there twice a year for 12 years. Before he moved there, I’d never heard of it.
My impression of Spain was incredibly limited: egg-and-bacon sandwiches, cheap drugs, house parties and all that malarkey — the only places I knew were Ibiza and Malaga. Vigo is in the Celtic area of Spain, in Galicia, just north of the Portuguese border, but it’s very Spanish here.
When we came to visit I loved
