Miles Kington: Identity crisis in a land without borders

The Catalan flag flew everywhere. Driving into Spain, theoretically we were not crossing any frontier

Collioure, where my wife and I were last week, is just short of the Spanish border on the Med. Over the years we have worked out that there are two main ways of getting there from England. One is to drive all the way, which takes two or three days, the other is to fly for an hour or so to Perpignan airport, hire a car and spend another two or three days trying to find a way through Perpignan. I don't know why Perpignan is so badly signposted or why they haven't built a ring road. All I know is that every time we have tried to get across town we have ended up, like Alice, heading in totally the wrong direction.

Collioure, where my wife and I were last week, is just short of the Spanish border on the Med. Over the years we have worked out that there are two main ways of getting there from England. One is to drive all the way, which takes two or three days, the other is to fly for an hour or so to Perpignan airport, hire a car and spend another two or three days trying to find a way through Perpignan. I don't know why Perpignan is so badly signposted or why they haven't built a ring road. All I know is that every time we have tried to get across town we have ended up, like Alice, heading in totally the wrong direction.

Anyway, this time we finally emerged on the right side and set off to Collioure. Just in time, as it turned out. In the next day's newspaper, the local L'Independant, there were headlines saying: "Night of Rioting in Perpignan: One killed, Many wounded". I read on to find that shops had been smashed and looted, cars overturned and set on fire, passers by attacked...

My first assumption was that it was caused by the screaming frustration of having to drive round Perpignan every day, but it turned out to be a sectarian thing. There is a large Arab community in Perpignan, mostly Moroccan. There is also a large, ancient Gitan community. Two men of Arab origin had recently been murdered. The Gitans had been blamed. Spontaneous anger had led to spontaneous violence. "Don't do it!", the Independant reporter had heard one elderly Moroccan say to a youth with a paving stone in his hand, poised over a windscreen. "Don't break things! It will only get us a bad name!" In vain, I am afraid.

"Oui, c'est très grave," the lady in our favourite Collioure café told me when I asked her about it. "The Arabs and the Gitans are always at each other, and we French get the flak and have to clear up the mess."

Oddly enough, however French she was, the name of the café was the Délices Catalanes, and it flew the Catalan flag and sold Catalan specialities. (Have you ever had a bougnette? It's a thin, broad pastry disc, crisp like a poppadom but sweet and slightly lemony. Quite moreish. Or, possibly, Moorish.) You always think of Catalan nationalism as belonging to Spain, but it is strong in France as well, and the red and yellow Catalan flag flew everywhere, so when we drove down into Spain to see the Salvador Dali Museum at Figueras and get it over with, we were theoretically not crossing any border but going from one part of Catalonia to another.

Not that we ever did show a passport to anyone. Going into Spain along a twisty B road, we saw only a disused Cambio/ Wechsel/ Bureau de Change, and coming back up the main road through Le Perthus, the only border thing we saw was a huge shopping mall.

"Oh, yes," said the lady in our café. "Fags and booze in Spain are so cheap, we go to Le Perthus for our supplies. I haven't bought a cigarette in France for years." And to think we go to Calais because it seems so cheap in France...

But local identities exist everywhere. One day in Collioure I bumped into a street band. There were near a dozen of them, making a funky, jazzy, brassy noise, exciting if sometimes inaccurate, and wearing T-shirts on which was written "Bristol Ambling Band".

"What brings you down here?" I asked the trombonist.

"Oh, we were invited down to a marching band Festival at Perpignan, but it's been cancelled because of the riots. So we are out on the streets. Which, luckily, is the best place for a marching band to be."

"Sounds really nice," I said. "Bit ragged just yet, though."

"Every apparent mistake in our music is meticulously planned and put there for a reason," he said, reprovingly. "Where are you from?"

"Bath," I said, naming Bristol's toffee-nosed rival city.

"Oh, yeah?" he said. "Come to escape the Bath Festival, have you? The Bath Chronicle used a photo of us on the front of their Bath Festival supplement this year. Never named us. Never credited us. And the photo was two years old. People in the photo left the group years ago."

"Every mistake in The Bath Chronicle," I said proudly, "is meticulously planned and put there for a reason."

That shut him up, I can tell you.