Nothing to me screams 'summer' like the smell of sardines over charcoal. In fact in some ways I owe my life in Spain, or rather outside Britain, to grilled sardines.

It was on a family holiday to France at the age of 10 or 11 that we were invited to a meal at our host family's neighbours' place. I'd never encountered a sardine other than from a tin, bathed in tomato sauce.

That night, eating spicy, shirt-staining merguez sausages and those exotic grilled sardines, with heads and tails and guts and everything, playing out on the street way past my British bedtime in a balmy Mediterranean glow, that I realised the world held so much more than was confined within the narrow shores of my little island home.

My destiny as an emigrant was written there and then, I feel.