It didn’t, but the phrase could have come from Barcelona, where authochthonous prostitutes gradually drift down off the hill as they get older and retire when they hit the murderous African and Ukrainian competition in the port and the old town.

Sez Lucio Vicente López in Recuerdos de viaje (1881). This is apparently in part due to the Normans having invaded without women, thus enabling the maintenance of The Saxon Character. I think he’s wrong: Winchester is suspiciously continental, while Romsey had Ethelflaeda, who sang psalms while skinny-dipping in the Test.

No way I’m doing this: isn’t anyone else embarrassed about still owning physical books?

I rather enjoyed this bang site and was disturbed to find out that “splog” is now generally taken to mean “spam blog” instead of “Spanish blog”, as it does here.

Someone told me the other night that Barcelona is the world capital of mullet. The Danish allegedly call it Bundesliga-hår, but I don’t think there’s an equivalent term in Catalan or Spanish.
(Mollet is a small town near here best known for its police school and its Islamic fundamentalists. None of them are big mulletmen, [...]

The incompetent nutters who run Barcelona in the daytime say that the drunks and thieves who run it at night are products of globalisation, leading Jordi Orwell to infer that it’s all Bush’s fault. I’m still blaming Charles III.