For Catalans, bullfighting is a barbaric and alien tradition. Their region’s decision to ban it is less about animal rights than a gesture of anti-Spanish defiance

The banning of bull-fighting in Catalonia by the regional parliament on Wednesday satisfies a deep need in the Catalan soul. Killing off bullfighting offers Catalans a lovely and easy revenge for various humiliations heaped on them by Madrid in recent times; it also fulfils their deep anxiety to be understood and appreciated throughout the world as a separate nation, a place with a different identity and a different sensibility from the rest of Spain. Most Catalans loathe bullfighting, they view it as part of a strange, dark, foreign, Iberian spirit which has sought to encroach upon the modern, European spirit to which they feel allegiance.

When I came to Barcelona first in 1975, I found that Catalans would wince at the very word bullfighting and seemed genuinely upset that such a cruel sport took place in their city. For them, the corrida belonged to a world foisted on Catalonia by Franco at the end of a civil war. This was a world which also included a police force and an army which no Catalan would join, and forms of dancing, singing and religiosity which were utterly alien to Catalans, who pride themselves on working hard, remaining anti-clerical and enjoying classical music.

It was only when I came to write a book about Barcelona that I thought I should go one summer Sunday and attend a bullfight. I remember I didn’t last long. I knew nothing about the rules and intricacies of the sport so all I saw were crowds of well-fed, well-dressed people baying for blood, roaring and cheering at the sight of pain and demanding more of it as picadors on horses and a matador in a brilliant costume ritually tormented and tortured a bull. What was interesting was how present and real the bull felt to me, how close the animal’s pain and puzzlement was. Indeed, the bull, simply because of what it was going through, the ferocious rage and hurt it exuded, filled the ring with its aura much more than any of its killers did. So when it lay down and died and got dragged away, the scene was genuinely dramatic and powerful.

The crowd loved it. It was a useful experience learning that people in groups, without laws or limits set to govern their appetites, will have a great time watching some dumb and beautiful animal, who has no chance of escape, being cut open with swords and other sharp instruments. They can call it sport, they can call it tradition, they can write about its beauty, its poetry and its intricacy, they can invoke Hemingway and write about skill and ritual; for me that day the bullfight was a celebration of cruelty, of mob rule, of death, of picking on something weaker then you and amusing yourself at its expense. It was vile and it was disturbing.

I remember leaving early and walking back down through Barcelona. It was late afternoon. I chanced to pass through the Placa de Sant Jaume, one of the main squares of the city, and there in the corner were groups of Catalans dancing sardanes, the national dance. There was a group of musicians playing for them. I stood and watched. The dance is done by forming a circle and joining hands, the music rises and the steps change almost imperceptibly. At the beginning little energy is expended; this means that very old people can join. Then gradually it lifts, and there is a beautiful, elegant edge to the way the dancers operate, as well as a subtle and discreet restraint. Led by one among them, they slowly let the steps rise and the spirit lift.

That day I was grateful to them for releasing such gentle and graceful energy. There was something so light and easy and civilised about how they gathered and related to each other. I was proud of the years I had spent in Catalonia and content, too, that I now joined the Catalans in feeling utter revulsion for bullfighting, knowing that its cultural significance had nothing to do with me.

Then friends who loved bullfighting assured me that I was a fool and had made a mistake. Going to a bullfight in Barcelona was, I was told, like listening to Irish traditional music in a London wine bar. I would have to go south for the real thing. Since I was writing a book about Catholic Europe, I found myself in Seville during Easter week. The city is beautiful, I loved the bars and I was intrigued by the zeal with which people carted their statues of the virgin around the streets. I enjoyed the resurrection, as far as I remember, and then on Easter Sunday I went to a bullfight.

I felt the same revulsion, the same hatred for the crowd, but this time it wasn’t so simple. The religious ceremonies and the bullfight in Seville that Easter seemed to belong to an intact culture, one that I could not fully penetrate, but which everyone in the city took for granted, knew and loved. There was no point in telling people in Seville that you didn’t like bullfighting, they would merely shrug and tell you that you didn’t understand it and maybe you should think of going back home.

There are two ways of understanding this. The first is that Spain is a country filled with variety, and this is part of its pleasure for the outsider. The lack of sameness, the ways in which weather, food, architecture and language in, say, Galicia, are so far from the same things in Seville makes it a great country to travel in. The Basque country, Madrid, the villages of Asturias, are all like independent republics and this makes the country fascinating and intriguing.

The second way is how Catalans view things. They see Madrid not as different as much as dominating. They wonder why the first AVE (Spain’s fast train), for example, was built to go from Madrid to Seville in 1992, but there is still no AVE from Barcelona to France, which is the direction Catalans want to go. They notice the gradual downgrading of Barcelona airport. They notice that, since Catalonia is one of the richest parts of Spain, their taxes are used to build up infrastructure elsewhere rather than in Catalonia. They cannot legislate on matters such as immigration, which affects them deeply. They feel discriminated against in many ways, both small and large.

Nonetheless, since the death of Franco in 1975 a great deal has been gained and consolidated in Catalonia. The language, which Franco had banned the public use of, has now become, to a large extent, the normal first language. The street names in Barcelona, for example, are in Catalan only. There are radio and television stations in Catalan. Education is conducted through Catalan. The survival of the language has been helped by the fact that it is spoken by the middle classes in the towns and cities as a first language. Although Catalans are fiercely proud of their identity and their heritage, anyone who comes to live in Catalonia can more or less be included in the nation by learning the language. This has happened to the children of immigrants who came from Spain’s poorer regions. The current president of Catalonia, for example, was born in Córdoba in the south of Spain, and came to Catalonia at 16, and yet he has been absorbed into Catalan national life and is considered Catalan, even though, since there was a free vote, he actually voted against the ban on bullfighting on Wednesday.

One of the reasons why it has been easy to ban bullfighting is that tourists who come to Barcelona no longer want to see a bull being massacred. In a way, since the early 1990s a new sort of tourism in Spain has been invented by the Catalans. Tourists who come to Barcelona now don’t go home with a bad sangria hangover, a fluency in roaring “olé!” and vicious sunburn. Instead, they visit the city’s Gaudí buildings, they go to the Picasso museum and the Miro Foundation; they love the cool nightclubs and the wonderful restaurants. They walk the city and get to know its streets.

If you come from Madrid or Seville to the city, however, you feel sightly different. You notice that the Catalans, even though they are bilingual, don’t like speaking Spanish to you. You watch how they have made it impossible to get a state job without fluency in Catalan. You watch with deep irritation their resentment against Madrid, their insistence that they are a nation rather than a region, their emphasising that they feel culturally closer to France, or Switzerland, or northern Italy than to Spain.

I have yet to meet someone from Madrid who does not shake their head in dislike, mild to wild, at the way in which Catalans conduct themselves.

Just as Catalans believe in hard work and sobriety, they have a real skill at making pacts and increasing the terms of their political autonomy incrementally. Unlike the Basques, they do not have a terrorist army, and there is a deep revulsion among Catalans for what Eta has done. They are pro-European and have also shown some flair in how their politicians deal with Madrid. The Catalan Socialist party, one of the two main parties in Catalonia, is allied to PSOE, the Spanish socialists, and this has given them a good deal of leeway and influence.

It was these connections that caused them, then, to seek a new estatut, or constitutional arrangement with Spain, which would give them greater power over matters such as taxation, language policy and the creation of infrastructure. For rightwing voters and politicians, the idea that Catalans wanted greater autonomy than other regions of Spain was an affront to the unity of Spain, a core belief for them. Thus the right wing sent the estatut to the highest constitutional court for consideration.

The court, in a long and detailed judgment earlier this month, ruled against the Catalans, and managed to add insult to injury by stating that there was only one nation in Spain, and that was the Spanish nation, and that Catalonia, as a historical entity, had only come into being as a result of the Spanish constitution of 1978.

This drove people crazy. When more than a million people marched through Barcelona on 10 July to protest against the court’s decision, most of the flags being waved were Catalan independence flags; the decision has meant that even larger numbers of Catalans see complete independence from Spain as the only long-term solution. The Catalan general sense of grievance was not helped the next day when Spain won the World Cup, since the core players in the Spanish team were Catalans who played for Barça, the Barcelona football club, which Catalans feel represents the Catalan spirit in the world.

As I watched the game on television in the Catalan Pyrenees, there were Catalans in the room who wanted Spain to lose, who could not bear the idea of Spanish flags being waved in jubilation and the general Spanish triumphalism.

It was noted with some glee in the following weeks that certain members of the constitutional court who had ruled against Catalonia had been photographed attending bullfights, which are a normal part of life in many Spanish cities and are covered by the main Spanish newspaper El País as important cultural events. Banning bullfights on Catalan territory from the beginning of 2012 would be the beginning of Catalonia’s sweet revenge. While the ban may have something to do with animal rights, it is seen here as a way of proclaiming national rights.

The ban was, of course, opposed by the rightwing parties. The newspapers on Thursday were deeply divided. The far rightwing La Gaceta on a front page editorial heaped insults on the politicians who had voted for the ban, singling out the man who is likely to become the next Catalan president as “a separatist who hates everything Spanish”. The Catalan-language Avui, on the other hand, ran a headline proclaiming: “Goodbye Black Spain”. El País on its editorial page showed a cartoon of a Spanish bull saying to a Catalan donkey, “Muchas gracias” and the donkey replying, in Catalan “De res“, Catalan for “Not at all”. At least someone, besides the Catalans, is happy: the bulls. If they were to join forces, perhaps they would get us a fast train line to France.

For Catalans, bullfighting is a barbaric and alien tradition. Their region’s decision to ban it is less about animal rights than a gesture of anti-Spanish defiance

The banning of bull-fighting in Catalonia by the regional parliament on Wednesday satisfies a deep need in the Catalan soul. Killing off bullfighting offers Catalans a lovely and easy revenge for various humiliations heaped on them by Madrid in recent times; it also fulfils their deep anxiety to be understood and appreciated throughout the world as a separate nation, a place with a different identity and a different sensibility from the rest of Spain. Most Catalans loathe bullfighting, they view it as part of a strange, dark, foreign, Iberian spirit which has sought to encroach upon the modern, European spirit to which they feel allegiance.

When I came to Barcelona first in 1975, I found that Catalans would wince at the very word bullfighting and seemed genuinely upset that such a cruel sport took place in their city. For them, the corrida belonged to a world foisted on Catalonia by Franco at the end of a civil war. This was a world which also included a police force and an army which no Catalan would join, and forms of dancing, singing and religiosity which were utterly alien to Catalans, who pride themselves on working hard, remaining anti-clerical and enjoying classical music.

It was only when I came to write a book about Barcelona that I thought I should go one summer Sunday and attend a bullfight. I remember I didn’t last long. I knew nothing about the rules and intricacies of the sport so all I saw were crowds of well-fed, well-dressed people baying for blood, roaring and cheering at the sight of pain and demanding more of it as picadors on horses and a matador in a brilliant costume ritually tormented and tortured a bull. What was interesting was how present and real the bull felt to me, how close the animal’s pain and puzzlement was. Indeed, the bull, simply because of what it was going through, the ferocious rage and hurt it exuded, filled the ring with its aura much more than any of its killers did. So when it lay down and died and got dragged away, the scene was genuinely dramatic and powerful.

The crowd loved it. It was a useful experience learning that people in groups, without laws or limits set to govern their appetites, will have a great time watching some dumb and beautiful animal, who has no chance of escape, being cut open with swords and other sharp instruments. They can call it sport, they can call it tradition, they can write about its beauty, its poetry and its intricacy, they can invoke Hemingway and write about skill and ritual; for me that day the bullfight was a celebration of cruelty, of mob rule, of death, of picking on something weaker then you and amusing yourself at its expense. It was vile and it was disturbing.

I remember leaving early and walking back down through Barcelona. It was late afternoon. I chanced to pass through the Placa de Sant Jaume, one of the main squares of the city, and there in the corner were groups of Catalans dancing sardanes, the national dance. There was a group of musicians playing for them. I stood and watched. The dance is done by forming a circle and joining hands, the music rises and the steps change almost imperceptibly. At the beginning little energy is expended; this means that very old people can join. Then gradually it lifts, and there is a beautiful, elegant edge to the way the dancers operate, as well as a subtle and discreet restraint. Led by one among them, they slowly let the steps rise and the spirit lift.

That day I was grateful to them for releasing such gentle and graceful energy. There was something so light and easy and civilised about how they gathered and related to each other. I was proud of the years I had spent in Catalonia and content, too, that I now joined the Catalans in feeling utter revulsion for bullfighting, knowing that its cultural significance had nothing to do with me.

Then friends who loved bullfighting assured me that I was a fool and had made a mistake. Going to a bullfight in Barcelona was, I was told, like listening to Irish traditional music in a London wine bar. I would have to go south for the real thing. Since I was writing a book about Catholic Europe, I found myself in Seville during Easter week. The city is beautiful, I loved the bars and I was intrigued by the zeal with which people carted their statues of the virgin around the streets. I enjoyed the resurrection, as far as I remember, and then on Easter Sunday I went to a bullfight.

I felt the same revulsion, the same hatred for the crowd, but this time it wasn’t so simple. The religious ceremonies and the bullfight in Seville that Easter seemed to belong to an intact culture, one that I could not fully penetrate, but which everyone in the city took for granted, knew and loved. There was no point in telling people in Seville that you didn’t like bullfighting, they would merely shrug and tell you that you didn’t understand it and maybe you should think of going back home.

There are two ways of understanding this. The first is that Spain is a country filled with variety, and this is part of its pleasure for the outsider. The lack of sameness, the ways in which weather, food, architecture and language in, say, Galicia, are so far from the same things in Seville makes it a great country to travel in. The Basque country, Madrid, the villages of Asturias, are all like independent republics and this makes the country fascinating and intriguing.

The second way is how Catalans view things. They see Madrid not as different as much as dominating. They wonder why the first AVE (Spain’s fast train), for example, was built to go from Madrid to Seville in 1992, but there is still no AVE from Barcelona to France, which is the direction Catalans want to go. They notice the gradual downgrading of Barcelona airport. They notice that, since Catalonia is one of the richest parts of Spain, their taxes are used to build up infrastructure elsewhere rather than in Catalonia. They cannot legislate on matters such as immigration, which affects them deeply. They feel discriminated against in many ways, both small and large.

Nonetheless, since the death of Franco in 1975 a great deal has been gained and consolidated in Catalonia. The language, which Franco had banned the public use of, has now become, to a large extent, the normal first language. The street names in Barcelona, for example, are in Catalan only. There are radio and television stations in Catalan. Education is conducted through Catalan. The survival of the language has been helped by the fact that it is spoken by the middle classes in the towns and cities as a first language. Although Catalans are fiercely proud of their identity and their heritage, anyone who comes to live in Catalonia can more or less be included in the nation by learning the language. This has happened to the children of immigrants who came from Spain’s poorer regions. The current president of Catalonia, for example, was born in Córdoba in the south of Spain, and came to Catalonia at 16, and yet he has been absorbed into Catalan national life and is considered Catalan, even though, since there was a free vote, he actually voted against the ban on bullfighting on Wednesday.

One of the reasons why it has been easy to ban bullfighting is that tourists who come to Barcelona no longer want to see a bull being massacred. In a way, since the early 1990s a new sort of tourism in Spain has been invented by the Catalans. Tourists who come to Barcelona now don’t go home with a bad sangria hangover, a fluency in roaring “olé!” and vicious sunburn. Instead, they visit the city’s Gaudí buildings, they go to the Picasso museum and the Miro Foundation; they love the cool nightclubs and the wonderful restaurants. They walk the city and get to know its streets.

If you come from Madrid or Seville to the city, however, you feel sightly different. You notice that the Catalans, even though they are bilingual, don’t like speaking Spanish to you. You watch how they have made it impossible to get a state job without fluency in Catalan. You watch with deep irritation their resentment against Madrid, their insistence that they are a nation rather than a region, their emphasising that they feel culturally closer to France, or Switzerland, or northern Italy than to Spain.

I have yet to meet someone from Madrid who does not shake their head in dislike, mild to wild, at the way in which Catalans conduct themselves.

Just as Catalans believe in hard work and sobriety, they have a real skill at making pacts and increasing the terms of their political autonomy incrementally. Unlike the Basques, they do not have a terrorist army, and there is a deep revulsion among Catalans for what Eta has done. They are pro-European and have also shown some flair in how their politicians deal with Madrid. The Catalan Socialist party, one of the two main parties in Catalonia, is allied to PSOE, the Spanish socialists, and this has given them a good deal of leeway and influence.

It was these connections that caused them, then, to seek a new estatut, or constitutional arrangement with Spain, which would give them greater power over matters such as taxation, language policy and the creation of infrastructure. For rightwing voters and politicians, the idea that Catalans wanted greater autonomy than other regions of Spain was an affront to the unity of Spain, a core belief for them. Thus the right wing sent the estatut to the highest constitutional court for consideration.

The court, in a long and detailed judgment earlier this month, ruled against the Catalans, and managed to add insult to injury by stating that there was only one nation in Spain, and that was the Spanish nation, and that Catalonia, as a historical entity, had only come into being as a result of the Spanish constitution of 1978.

This drove people crazy. When more than a million people marched through Barcelona on 10 July to protest against the court’s decision, most of the flags being waved were Catalan independence flags; the decision has meant that even larger numbers of Catalans see complete independence from Spain as the only long-term solution. The Catalan general sense of grievance was not helped the next day when Spain won the World Cup, since the core players in the Spanish team were Catalans who played for Barça, the Barcelona football club, which Catalans feel represents the Catalan spirit in the world.

As I watched the game on television in the Catalan Pyrenees, there were Catalans in the room who wanted Spain to lose, who could not bear the idea of Spanish flags being waved in jubilation and the general Spanish triumphalism.

It was noted with some glee in the following weeks that certain members of the constitutional court who had ruled against Catalonia had been photographed attending bullfights, which are a normal part of life in many Spanish cities and are covered by the main Spanish newspaper El País as important cultural events. Banning bullfights on Catalan territory from the beginning of 2012 would be the beginning of Catalonia’s sweet revenge. While the ban may have something to do with animal rights, it is seen here as a way of proclaiming national rights.

The ban was, of course, opposed by the rightwing parties. The newspapers on Thursday were deeply divided. The far rightwing La Gaceta on a front page editorial heaped insults on the politicians who had voted for the ban, singling out the man who is likely to become the next Catalan president as “a separatist who hates everything Spanish”. The Catalan-language Avui, on the other hand, ran a headline proclaiming: “Goodbye Black Spain”. El País on its editorial page showed a cartoon of a Spanish bull saying to a Catalan donkey, “Muchas gracias” and the donkey replying, in Catalan “De res“, Catalan for “Not at all”. At least someone, besides the Catalans, is happy: the bulls. If they were to join forces, perhaps they would get us a fast train line to France.

The launch of Sunsail’s first flotilla holiday in the UK shows just how much fun you can have in a force 8 gale, with all your wet-weather clothes on

It took less than five days to transform me from landlubber to salty sea dog. But I knew I had made it when, struggling to keep the yacht upright in a force 8 gale, I uttered no more than the mildest of sailor’s curses as a freezing wave crashed over the bow and into my face.

The yacht had heeled over at 30 degrees, but I merely wiped the icy water from my eyes as best I could and jammed my foot even more firmly against the side of the cockpit. As water dripped from every inch of me, the memory of having tripped gaily into the Port Solent marina in Portsmouth a few days earlier, with dry hair, a dainty summer dress and pretty strappy sandals, seemed like an image from another era.

As a teenager, I sailed fairly frequently, spending wet weekends tacking up and down a grey and choppy Thames with my parents in our small Mirror dinghy.

Since reaching adulthood, however, I have largely stayed on shore. The shipping forecast became a comforting blur of words to fall asleep to. The artistry of knots, the language of clouds and the gradations of gales were just something out of Swallows and Amazons.

I had always quite fancied setting sail again, though, and now, thanks to a new venture by Sunsail, there is an easy, and fairly cheap, way to swap city shoes for sea boots. After more than 35 years of running flotilla holidays in warmer waters, the company has launched its first UK flotilla break, in the Solent, with trips running through the summer into October.

Largely designed for those with some sailing experience (20 days on a yacht or a Royal Yaching Association skipper qualification is required) but not the confidence to head out on their own, flotillas allow nervous and rusty sailors to experiment with independent skippering and free sailing, with time for exploring on land, too.

You sail from port to port with the other yachts in the flotilla and a lead vessel, with a Sunsail crew, is always close at hand. For extra reassurance, you can also engage your own on-board skipper.

The most striking thing about sailing in a flotilla is the support and enthusiasm of the crew on the other boats. Sailing etiquette is nothing if not inclusive: woe betide the helmsman who passes another at sea without exchanging a wave and a cheery greeting. The same applies in the flotilla – just more so. With everyone at a different level, hollered words of encouragement from the other yachts are both useful and uplifting, while the advice and yarns exchanged during communal suppers in restaurants and pubs along the route are invaluable.

Such enforced mingling with strangers could, it is worth adding, be a mixed blessing. The week before my friends and I arrived, the group was apparently bubbling over with young couples and lively groups. Our crowd of four yachts, however, was a quieter affair, predominantly composed of older couples and young families. My friends and I had a skipper on our boat to teach us, but most yachts in flotillas are hired out to families or groups of friends, without a skipper.

As we sailed between Port Solent, the lovely Osborne Bay (where Queen Victoria liked to bathe), chic Poole, hectic Southampton, Lymington and, finally, Cowes – the spiritual home of sailing – our confidence increased.

And our fascination with sea lore blossomed. We spent our evenings at restaurants and pubs around the Solent, ranging from trendy to cosy – with some, like the Folly Inn on the Medina river, accessible only by sea (it runs a waterbus to bring those without their own keel up the river from Cowes) – perfecting our knot-tying skills on ropes spun out of paper napkins. As the wine flowed, we could be found reciting the different gale categories. By the time puddings arrived, we would be testing each other on weather patterns and how best to trim the sails depending on the direction of wind.

It seems amazing, given how rusty I was when I stepped onto the deck on my first day, but by the time I reached shore at the end of the week, the evenings spent reciting crewmanship lessons and days spent scampering over the boat putting them into practice had worked their magic.

Having excavated my teenage bent and enthusiasm for sailing, I am now confident that I could be a genuinely useful crew member to any skipper brave enough to take me out to sea. Even more thrillingly, with my RYA competent crew certificate under my belt, I am now half-way to achieving the day skipper qualification, which will enable me to hire a yacht, both here and abroad, without a skipper.

And for a girl who just a few short days earlier hadn’t known her hitch from her bowline, let alone how to read the dark patches on the sea or work out where a low front was coming from, that’s an achievement.

• Flotilla holidays depart Port Solent on 7, 14, 21 August and 23 October. A yacht with berths for eight people costs £1,699 for a week in August, £1,499 in October; but Guardian readers who quote GFLOT when booking can claim a reduced rate of £1,499 in August. Double berths are also available on the lead boat – phone for details (0844 463 6578, sunsail.co.uk). It will cost you £175 a day to have a skipper on board.

Another quarter, another roaring success for British Airways. It may have
tested its passengers’ faith with 23 strike days. But the Wildlife Trust can
spot a winner when it sees one.

Where are the new London cycle hire docking locations? See a map, get a list and download the whole lot as a spreadsheet
• Get the map and data

Up to 5,000 bikes at 300 “docking stations” have been made available for hire today for the launch of Boris Johnson’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.

Interestingly, there are already apps out there for finding the closest dock location to you:
• cyclehireapp.com/
• m.layar.com/open/tflcyclehire
• and another one
• londoncycleapp.com/

There are lots of mixed reviews of the bikes themselves – see Helen Pidd’s above. But if you want to know where they are, this is the place to go.

Here’s a Google Map of the dock locations, this one from Time Out. The number represents the bike docks at each station.

The data has been provided by TfL via the London Datastore. Some of you may recall that the original data had to be obtained by a freedom of information request. With the current list, TfL are asking for registration – worth taking a look as it’s not simple to download the data. We asked for access so we could publish the whole lot via Google spreadsheets – and the full data, with co-ordinates, is below. Plus a list, so you can find them simply.

What can you do with the data?

• DATA: download the full list as a spreadsheet

Can you do something with this data?

Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk

World government data

• Search the world’s government datasets

• More environment data
• Get the A-Z of data
• More at the Datastore directory
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Data summary

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Travel management company Egencia has released a new travel tool to help clients monitor the cost of flights.

read more

Follow Benji Lanyado’s big train adventure across Europe on our interactive map

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The Business Travel and Meetings Show (BTMS) today (July 29) announced it had signed an exclusive deal with the UK and Ireland Institute of Travel and Meetings (ITM).

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Everybody’s favourite Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs, has suffered a sharp sense of humour failure about a worker in its graphics department leading tourists on credit crunch-themed walks around Manhattan’s financial district.

For a Guardian story on financial crisis tourism back in May, I reported on a tour led by Tom Comerford, who offered visitors an anecdote-heavy wander around Wall Street hotspots such as AIG’s building, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank and Standard & Poor’s.

Comerford was working in Goldman’s document production division by evening, while running tours for a firm called The Wall Street Experience during the daytime. But he’s since quit the bank after being told to choose between Goldman and his tours.

Comerford tells me that after The Guardian’s coverage of his tours, he was summoned by Goldman’s compliance department. The bank initially demanded whether he was using confidential material – zeroing in on an CDO document that he brandished to tourists as an example of a real, life toxic asset.

“They thought I was taking documents from the office which, to me, is ridiculous – I could go to jail for that,” says Comerford, who says the document in question was actually a Deutsche Bank derivatives that had long been in the public domain.

Although he was able to satisfy Goldman that he wasn’t stealing anything, Comerford was then told to choose between his job at the bank or his tour guiding activities – an ultimatum that he feels was “very unfair”. After ten years, he quit his job.

“I looked at it as an acting gig – and I’d done acting gigs before while working at Goldman, without any problem. But they were very concerned at the tone of it,” says Comerford. “They thought that if anybody could possibly, in any way, shape or form, interpret the tour negatively, I couldn’t do it.”

It’s worth pointing out that Comerford’s tour wasn’t particularly harsh or judgemental on Wall Street – it was a whistlestop guide to how, and where, the credit crunch began. The Wall Street Experience is run by Andrew Luan, a former Deutsche Bank trader who has a relatively sympathetic view towards the “entrepreneurial” stories of successful financial institutions.

Goldman’s chief spokesman, Lucas van Praag, points out that Comerford didn’t work directly for the bank, but was employed through a contractor. Nevertheless, the bank confirms that it told him to choose between tour guiding or working at Goldman.

“He was told that given the nature of the tours he was giving, we’d like him not to do it,” says Van Praag. “Being very deprecating about the industry while claiming to be an employee of one of the organisations within it seemed to be inconsistent.”

Goldman apparently took exception to Comerford’s description, which I reported, of subprime mortgage securities as “crap”. Van Praag said: “Here he is, advertising himself as a Goldman employee and talking about producing subprime mortgage securities as ‘crap’.”

Strangely enough, though, we’ve heard similar sentiments expressed before at Goldman – by a young banker named Fabrice Tourre, who described his own CDOs as “monstrosities” and compared them to creations of Frankenstein. Tourre, who is at the centre of Goldman’s recently settled brush with regulators for fraud, remains employed by the bank on fully paid leave.

What Michelle Obama should know about her her holiday choice of Marbella

It is a place of questionable taste, and unquestioning sleaze. But the Costa del Sol’s glitziest resort of Marbella is the surprise holiday choice of Michelle Obama and at least one of her daughters, Sasha, who are due to arrive on 4 August. Locals hope that Barack Obama, who celebrates his 49th birthday on the first day of their stay, might make a last-minute appearance.

Marbella, home of graft, tack and ostentation, is everything the Spanish costas should not be. Overbuilt and brashly flaunting its wealth, it epitomises the wanton destruction of Spain’s coastline. So what else can America’s first family expect?

Hotels The Obamas will enjoy the luxury of the Villa Padierna on the outskirts of town. With its Tuscan palace architecture, spa complex, views across the Mediterranean and reputation as one of the world’s best resort hotels, a price of up to €3,600 (£3,000) a night keeps the riff-raff away.

Food If the Obamas venture out, will it be for fried fish, sangria and paella at a restaurant on the beach? Or will they go for the more sophisticated international delights of Olivia Valere’s Babilonia Palace restaurant and discotheque?

Places to avoid Once a home of smart yachts and fast cars, the neighbouring Puerto Banus marina is not what it used to be. Think lap-dancing clubs and British soccer shirts. It should only be used for stepping on to large motor cruisers and going out to sea. Discreet wealth has moved down the coast to the resort of Sotogrande.

People-watching The likes of Princess Diana and Sean Connery once came here. Now Russian, British, Irish and Italian drug-runners and mafia crooks have made it their base – though they should remain invisible to the Obama eye. Perhaps, however, the first family may spot a well-known Englishman. Spanish newspapers report that David Cameron and family will be holidaying in Marbella at the same time.

Attractions If Michelle plays golf or tennis, then she will find plenty to do. Culturally, however, the town remains a desert. Sasha, one hopes, will not mind. Marbella still has sand and sea. Just bring a bucket and spade.