Usually we hit the Iberian Peninsula at either the North West Spanish coast or Portugal above Oprto, to then sail down the coast putting into just about every Portuguese fishing village, until we reached Lisbon.

This time I was with my new wife who was sea-sick even on the Thames, so we went by car ferry, with the intention of driving back through France. Although a large ship with stabilisers rolls far less than a sailing vessel, my wife was still sick..She spent most of the time on deck but it made little difference.

We were visiting a very good Portuguese friend I had shared a flat with in London, Pedro. He was a writer, who had had to leave Portugal because of his left-wing tendencies, and would have been arrested by the secret police, had he stayed.

Salazar was dead but the regime had continued, though not so severe, and one of his brothers had become an army general, so he was allowed back as his parents had become very old.

He was not the only left winger allowed to return however, so I was pleased and surprised to find a whole circle of Portuguese ex-patriots who had regularly visited our flat in Hampstead. They had all fallen fowl of the authorities for their left wing leanings when the dictatorship was at its height. There Carlos and Marco both writers, Pilip a musician, and La Strega,. Of course that was not her real name but nobody knew that. She was a theatre designer who looked like a witch and relished it. She always wore black, and wore make-up that would fear children.

In Lisbon we had many dinner parties, visited Fado clubs, had picnics on the fregatas that sailed us up the Tagus and did a lot of shopping. On one trip to the fish market Pedro persuaded me to try a shellfish I had never seen before. You had to eat it raw like oysters. However as I bit on it, it wriggled. I never tried one again.

We were sitting around Pedro’s flat one evening when news came through that an army unit in the north of the country, fed–up with the pointless and disastrous colonial war in Angola had started to march on Lisbon. There was jubilation amongst our friends, but before the day was out there then was news that they had been persuaded to turn round and go back to Barracks.

There was gloom amongst our friends the next day who came to say goodbye as we set off home. “There will never be a revolution in this country,” they all said.

We got as far as Cognac, where we were to stay a few days when we heard that there had been a glorious revolution in Portugal and nobody had been killed. It had completely passed bye my left wing friends, who had been plotting for years