Before and after ...

Maxi, the WonderDog, has been sporting uncharacteristically long hair recently. Given his Easter trip up to the snowy mountains of Andorra I didn't have the heart to trim his furry pyjamas in case he caught a chill, so he's been looking like a bit of a hippy.

Love locks ...

I'm not sure where, or when, this craze started. The first I became aware of it was when the newspapers reported that the Pont des Arts in Paris was in danger of collapsing under the weight of love locks that had been attached to it by starstruck lovers. They'd come to the bridge - literally hundreds of thousands of them - bearing padlocks on which they'd had their first names engraved. They then attached these padlocks to the metal structure of the bridge and threw the key into the Seine in a grandiloquent gesture intended to symbolise their unbreakable bond/ never-ending love for one another. Parts of the bridge collapsed in 2014 under the weight of all this sentimental nonsense, and during 2015 it was estimated that over a million further padlocks were attached to the bridge adding an extra 45 tonnes to its load, and threatening to make it collapse into the Seine.

In a roundabout sort of way ...

Our local airport, here on the sunny Costa Brava, is Girona-Costa Brava Airport. It opened in 1965, but only had modest numbers of passengers until a certain Tony Ryan decided to use it as one of his airline's major European hubs. Well, after that, it was boom time for the Aeropuerto de Girona-Costa Brava, and they've never looked back since.

It's still got a fairly rural feel to it as international airports go. The rush hour is often held back by the odd tractor or combine harvester, depending on the time of the year. Recently there's been a rush of civic pride in the local villages as they seek to announce their specialities to the visiting tourists. And they've taken a rather quaint and very unique way of doing this.

On the big roundabout, on the approach to the airport, at Cassà de la Selva they've got some rather large Cava corks, which seem to suggest that they've got a rather splendid drink to quench your thirst after all that travelling. Well in fact it's not so much the drink as the corks that they're wanting to tell us about. The village is surrounded by cork trees, and back in the day it was one of the major centres where they made corks for wine bottles. Nifty, eh?

Cassà de la Selva, Girona

Feeling hungry in La Boqueria, Barcelona ...

The other day I had to go down to Barcelona for a meeting. As luck would have it the venue was just beside Barcelona's totally sensational La Boqueria market. Afterwards I needed somewhere to stop off for lunch with Emi and Mr B, who had driven me down. It would have seemed churlish not to pop into this wonderful foodie's paradise for sustenance, so this is where we ended up.

Mercat de Sant Josep de la Boqueria,

Spring is springing ...

Here, on the sunny Costa Brava, Spring arrives a little earlier than it does back in London. And there are already lots of signs that things are heading in the right direction. In the evenings, after the day's work is done, there are more and more people taking a stroll across the sand on the village beach.

The South Wind, the Migjorn, has been blowing in from the sea bringing us foggy mornings and sunny afternoons, and carrying with it the promise of warmer summer days to come. Hurrah!