A LONG WAY STILL TO GO
To lighten the hearts of those of a certain age and musical persuasion I will start this month’s column with a quote from the legendary English 70s pop group Hot Chocolate, “It started with a kiss”....
View ArticleSTRUCTURAL TREASURES
Catalonia has no shortage of spectacular buildings and boasts a legacy of groundbreaking architecture going back centuries. With the likes of Sagrada Família, the Agbar Tower, the Sant Pau Modernist...
View ArticleSPEAKING IN TONGUES
Not many people outside Catalonia are talking about or even noticing it, but Spain is undergoing a linguistic revolution. Towards the end of September, Gabriel Rufián, an MP for the pro-independence...
View ArticleSTARDUST
A life like no other... like all the others. That’s you and me on the unfathomable journey. We have a one-in-one certainty of death and yet, roughly speaking, there was a one in four trillion chance...
View ArticleHOME SECURITY
In my first column after the summer break, which now seems so long ago, I mentioned that I had plenty to write about, given that I had spent almost three weeks in Brazil this summer, and the cultural...
View ArticleCARRIED AWAY BY ART
I have to admit I’ve never been a huge fan of art galleries. Not that I’m some boorish philistine; I love a bit of poetry, I’ll happily spend an evening in a posh concert hall, and there was a time...
View ArticleHERE WE GO AGAIN
Like the old chestnut it is, Christmas is busy repeating itself for the umpteenth time: the ads for turrons; for perfumes (together with their quasi-daft names: Invictus, Chloé by Chloé, Good Girl...
View Article20 MILLION TAPS
For years now we have been acutely aware, says he, stating the glaringly obvious, of Catalonia’s water crisis and the climate emergency. Yet how well informed are you? What power do you have? Many...
View ArticleREMAINING VIGILANT
Many Catalans will feel vindicated by the recent speech given by Irish Euro MP Clare Daly to the European Parliament. It feels necessary to reproduce it here: “When I heard that there was a debate on...
View ArticleSEASON’S GREETINGS
After more than two decades living here, my family and I have managed to come to an accommodation with most aspects of English culture in our Catalan lives. With Halloween, for example, my kids were at...
View ArticleWHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM 2024?
In his New Year’s message, the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, stressed that 2023 had been a year of great suffering mainly because of climate change and war, and he urged...
View ArticleBOGEYMEN
At the tail end of last year, my daughter and I decided to watch a rom-com called ’Two Weeks Notice’ (2002), starring Hugh Grant, who played his usual hughgrant role (posh English accent, raised...
View ArticleMONEY TO BURN
Cars once deemed speedy couldn’t keep up with a modern electric scooter. But back then there were still absolute nutters on the road. It may be a trick of the slammed-on brake lights, but they seem to...
View ArticleGRATITUDE
Judging by all the coughing and hawking I’ve witnessed around me this winter, many readers will be able to identify with the topic of this month’s column. As thousands of young doctors walk off the...
View ArticleSENSE OF PLACE
January and February can, in some places, be as bleak as a lifeless funfair on a wet, cold dawn. We should know. We came here from a grey, disunited kingdom where winter can be... um... rather long....
View ArticleTHE AGE OF THE AWARE
One of the problems with living in a modern society is that you need to be aware of everything. We are bombarded with awareness campaigns of all sorts, telling us that we have to be more aware of...
View ArticleIS IT ME?
I’ ve been doing a lot of social media stuff with the help of a firm that specialises in the field. I can afford to do this because of European funding aimed at increasing my presence as a business,...
View ArticleA ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
When, back in the late 70s, the Spanish King (now self-exiled in Abu Dhabi) and the then Spanish prime minister Adolfo Suárez (now dead) decided to grant a measure of autonomy to 17 regions of Spain,...
View ArticleA MATTER OF CHOICE?
One of the best things about our society is that there is a real willingness to right historical wrongs, if necessary with proactive measures that would not be required in an ideal world but that can...
View ArticleJULIAN A
For a long while, Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, had doubts about the Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, suspecting that he was little more than a ‘shady hacker’. The...
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