My dad used to cut us in half wit' bread knife

We were in a bar in Alicante the other day and there were newspapers on sticks. The rods slide along the spine of the newspaper which makes them easy to hang from a wall frame. The frame keeps the papers neat and organised. It also makes it more difficult to sidle out, unnoticed, with a stolen newspaper. It was the first one I've seen for years.

It made me wonder about other things that have largely disappeared since I first started wandering around Spain. It also made me feel very old as the first time I came to Spain was over forty years ago. To be honest lots of the changes are just universal European changes - the disappearance of things like fax machines, floppy discs, dial telephones and typewriters. Some though are much more Spanish.

The first thing that came to mind, and where else but in a bar, was the floor sized waste bin. Bars were places for men. Women wouldn't be idling around in a bar, instead they'd be at home wearing one of those wrap around aprons getting the lentejas (lentil stew) ready. Plenty of bars didn't have bar stools so it was normal to see lots of men leaning against the bar snacking on something as they drank beer or wine. They would use those completely useless serviettes made out of some sort of liquid repellent paper and throw them on the floor along with their fag ends, nut shells, olive pits and shrimp peelings. Every now and then a waiter wearing a yellowed, bri-nylon, sweat stained armpit, once white shirt would push a broom along the floor to snow plough away the detritus. There were very few women servers in bars in the 80s.

In bigger towns there were street corner tables, card tables or upturned orange boxes, selling small, cheap, everyday items. I used to use them to buy single cigars but they were good for things like shoe laces, matches and tissues too. This was long before people needed a plastic bottle of water to survive leaving the house. There were far more pavement kiosks too selling a multitude of small things.

There wasn't a vehicle in Spain without a dent. Once, in Valencia, I was sitting outside a bar when a biggish van found that it couldn't get past because a badly parked car. The van driver got out of his van, looked at the gap, looked at the width of his van and started to boot in the corner of the offending car. The instant bodywork remodelling gave the van driver the extra few centimetres he needed to get by. When the car owner came back he glanced, and I mean glanced, at the dented in bodywork, got in his car and drove away. Oh, and it was a national sport to break into cars if there was anything of value on show. As a preventative measure people used to walk around with their car radios hanging, like handbags, from their wrists.

Puddings were another thing. Menús, not menu as in a list of things to eat in a café or restaurant, but menú, as in a set meal, had a very limited range of options but the puddings were even less varied. Flan (a table creeper), natillas (vanilla custard), ice cream and fruit of the day. Never anything else. Oh, and the wine was always so rough that it came with Casera (sugared, fizzy water). And of course everyone everywhere smoked. Between courses, in the doctor's and as you queued at a train station ticket office. Even as late as 2005, when I finally moved here, there were chain smoking people behind the desks in places like the Traffic Office.

All our local knowledge perished when we left the UK. We needed lots of things for our new house but finding them was hard. If we wanted a locksmith or a plumber or an exotic masseuse we couldn't ask on the Pinoso Community Facebook page because there wasn't one. Our British solution at the time would be Yellow Pages but the Spanish version was useless. It drove me to distraction. Everything was "organised" into towns. That meant we had to trawl through locksmiths in Pinoso, none, locksmiths in Monóvar, none, locksmiths in Petrer etc. Once I'd found a number and plucked up the courage to ring, phone calls in a foreign language are tortuous, most of the numbers were incorrect anyway.

There were so many things. Women dressed in black as a sign of mourning for their dead husbands. Women shuffling, on their knees, towards the altar in church as some sort of penance. Hotel rooms with washbasins and clean sheets on the bed but otherwise almost bare. Just two television channels with the national anthem sounding over the fluttering flag at midnight until 1990 when the commercial channels began regular broadcasts. In Galicia in the 1990s donkeys and carts were still common and because not everyone had access to a car you could catch buses from anywhere to anywhere. Oh, and a train journey from one place to another could take ages. I remember a trip between Seville and Alicante with a compartment load of drunken squaddies, just released from compulsory military service, that took around 12 hours.

And, of course, you could ride into town on the tram, buy a fish supper for your girl, get a bag of sherbet on the way home and still have change from a farthing. And if you told young people that today they wouldn't believe you!