When my schoolmates and I were sixth-formers in the late 50s at a boarding school in central Manchester, we eagerly offered ourselves for a regular nocturnal duty. This mission was popular for several reasons. There was the chance of sneaking into a pub for a pint of Boddingtons or Wilsons compulsory school blazers hidden in bags. Forever hungry, we could buy hot meat and potato pies from the stalls in Piccadilly Gardens β much to the ballistic fury of my mother who swore I would be fatally poisoned.
None of us had the wickedness to take up their come-ons; not even their cheapest offers of hand relief for 10 shillings. From Manchester to Montpellier and La Jonquera. How times have changed! In at least some cases, their parents will probably approve or turn a blind eye. In some ways I envied my friend: he had far fewer hangups about sex at that time than I did.
Fortunately, however, I managed to catch up in the end! Sixth-formers are not, of course, the only customers at the bordels of La Jonquera. Men from all over the Languedoc-Roussillon, and from much further afield β even from as far away as Nancy, some kilometres to the north β make the return journey. Le Paradise, having opened as recently as 21st October, , and having been closed down by the police in for a variety of charges β ED is already according to its manager Nico welcoming up to clients a night between 5.
Quite simply it is a boom frontier town built on low-duty Spanish goods, where brothels have been legal, as they have throughout Spanish Catalonia, for the last 8 years. Between and , 5, vehicles passed through La Jonquera every day, 2, of them making a halt. In the throughput figure had nearly doubled to 9, vehicles, with 3, of them stopping. The size of the town doubled in the s.
Whereas once La Jonquera was a little village with ochre coloured houses, it has become a vast commercial zone. At a recent count there were 16 supermarkets, stores, 46 restaurants and 16 service stations. And, of course, there are also the brothels. Legal, that is, as long as those who run them take no direct cut from the women who sell their bodies. Pimping of any kind remains illegal. Hypermarket sex at La Jonquera, he argues, is an inevitable and totally logical consequence of the laws of supply and demand in our globalised consumer society with its economies of scale.
