When I grew up tattoos were bad news. "Don't get a tattoo," my dad would tell me, "you'll never get a job," and so I believed it. And so I didn't. Some years later as I passed into Europe via Thailand I was astonished to discover that I was possibly the only person on Ko Penang beach without a single trace of body ink. How would the world's economies cope with all these jobless fiends I wondered. But sure enough, times change. Nowadays tattoos are like thespian aunties. We all know someone who's got one. What do tales of tattoos and foreign lands have to do with Barcelona you might quite rightly ask? Have I sent this piece to the wrong publication? Indeed I have not. For this brings me to the tattoo's younger cousin which so defines Barcelona's seedy underbelly, and in many cases, it's not so seedy upper torso.

For when I was emerging from my sheltered youth, wide-eyed and moody, graffiti, like tattoos, was lumped into the bad stuff basket. It was a thing carried out by petty crims, kids with nothing better to do, thugs with no respect who scrawled obscenities and loopy swear words on the backs of places they shouldn't. They wore hooded tops to conceal their heinous features and jostled past little old ladies, kicked cats and picked their noses in public before flicking the contents at shop windows. You know the sort. But like tattoos, graffiti has enjoyed a renaissance of late, elevated to the category "Unlikely to give your granny the spooks". I suppose this is because it has evolved somewhat from the sort of stuff I saw in my teens. In those days, often nothing more sophisticated than "Sid waz here" or "James sux" could be found, which, you'll understand is hardly the stuff to inspire grants from the local arts council. But, as in so many other ways, when it comes to graffiti, Barcelona takes the flan.

So many of Barcelona's streets are adorned with the new breed of artistic graffiti, the sort which makes one say aloud "Man, I thought graffiti was something young punks with nothing better to do with their time did but now I appreciate it as an independent and viable expression of art." I live on one of Barcelona's hottest graffiti streets. The little known Passatge de Bori in Poble Nou. My personal favourite is a life-sized six-breasted alien.

Why is this such a hot topic at the moment? Because in what can only have been part of the kill and destroy @22 project currently sweeping its way through Poble Nou, the other evening I spied a BCNeta van rolling loudly down our Passatge. "Hello," I thought to myself. "What's going on here?" Suddenly it stopped. Wrong address I thought. In the year or so that I have lived at this exclusive address I have not once witnessed our Passatge being cleaned by the men and women in green. Suddenly I spied paint and rollers and a distinct look in their eyes which might have said "Oh man, no one said this Passatge was so bloody long, let's have an ice cream before we get going." And so they did. I kid you not. I swear I saw them get back in their van, pull out a corneto and chomp away. Mildly amused but at the same time depressed I returned inside, unable to witness the imminent gentrification of my Passatge.

But fear not for this tale of woe and paint does indeed have a happy ending. Later that night, well after their departure, I looked upon their progress and took some comfort in the fact that they had only managed to brown-wash over half of the street's murals. One more night to gaze in splendour at the six breasted space thingy and her friends, I thought. Progress is progress, I told myself wearily. There will be other Passatges. But like snow blocking the roads on a school day, the morning brought with it fresh resistance. As I stood outside yawning in the early morning breeze I spied below me the handy work of some fine vigilante. Under the sombre of night, possibly wearing a hood, he or she or they had shaken their cans and let rip with a tirade of new scrawl all over the freshly manicured canvas. Granted their work was rushed and somewhere in the level of sophistication as the aforementioned "Sid waz here" but as a great man might have said, "a little resistance can have a whopper of an effect." Just ask the school bully. The hermanos helados have not returned and for now at least our Passatge is safe.