Writers on rural affairs – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Preluding the great Spanish wine misselling scandal?

Pass the Don Simón.

Edward Linley Sambourne: Phylloxera, a true gourmet, finds out the best vineyards and attaches itself to the best wines.

Run like a gypsy

With Imanol Arias as El Lute, retired generaliser George Borrow, and walking and running style as social differentiators.

The Turks' gypsy hangman on the point of giving the Greek hero a new walking style in a scene from a Greek shadow puppet play (<a href='http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=3291073&partid=1&fromADBC=ad&toADBC=ad&titleSubject=on&physicalAttribute=on&numpages=10&images=on&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx&currentPage=6'>British Museum</a>). An Ottoman custom? A Barcelona cop tells me that his Algerian colleagues stamp on the ankles of bagsnatchers, making them easier to identify and capture next time.

Solving Africa’s woes with a simple parlour game

Desultory bar philosophising on the socio-economic function of Secret Santa.

Why I’m called Trevor

Or, rather, how my grandfather seems to have been named after a minor railway station.

Can someone work out from this steaming pool of verbal diarrhea if they’re loading the donkey down with GPS recorders etc and then letting it go wherever it wants? Now that would be really interesting. Er, not, actually. [Whatever happened to Deirdre (?) and the donkey and cart with which she made her way from…

The lurch and fall of the Almería coast

Excerpts from Juan Goytisolo and Ramón Fernández Palmeral, with an epitaph from George Orwell.

Mosquitoes, alcohol and violence

A Catalan children’s song remembered by Francesc Candel; early rave culture on Central America’s eastern seaboard.

Category: Writers on rural affairs