We are joined by the poet Katrina Porteous and the writer and editor Patrick Galbraith to discuss Norman Lewis’s account of the of the three summers he spent working in Farol, a remote fishing village on the Costa Brava in the late 1940s. His book records the intricacies of life in a small community whose rhythms are based on the shoals of sardines and tuna, and whose beliefs and rituals have remained unchanged for a thousand years. But change does arrive in the shape of a black marketeer who buys up two-thirds of the village and opens a garish tourist hotel. Within a year, the ancient Spain that Lewis loves begins to sink beneath the tidal wave of greed, commercialism and liberal attitudes that package holidays and unfettered tourism unleash.

Lewis wrote his book thirty-five years after he’d lived in Farol. We are now 40 years on from its publication in 1984. Do his stories still resonate? We discuss why his sharply observed and artfully written books aren’t better known today, and put his writing in the context of the travel writing boom of the 1980s. Katrina also brings a fresh perspective to Lewis’ experience– she has lived in the fishing village of Beadnell on the Northumbrian cost for the past thirty years, where similar erosion of culture., language and tradition has taken place.

Books mentioned
Norman Lewis - Voices of the Old Sea; Naples ‘44; Jackdaw Cake; A Dragon Apparent and Golden Earth
Katrina Porteous - The Lost Music; Two Countries; Edge; Rhizodont
Patrick Galbraith - In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s Disappearing Birds and the People Trying to Save Them; Uncommon Ground: Rethinking our Relationship with the Countryside 
Julian Evans - Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis

Other links
The Poetry of Fishing (Katrina) - https://katrinaporteousdotcodotuk.wordpress.com/2021/02/17/the-poetry-of-fishing/
Don McCullin on Norman Lewis (BBC Radio 4) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09111hc
BBC Naples ‘44 (television documentary)
The Time Traveller 1966 (television documentary)