Category: Europe

January 3, 2024

Barcelona’s cannibal restaurant and murderous barber

Legend has it that a certain inn was known for the quality and cheapness of its meat dishes. (Please note: No AI was used in my translation of this article.) There are two old mansions on a Barcelona street named Pou de la Figuera. They seem to stand somewhat isolated among the many modern buildings…
September 30, 2023

90 seconds exactly

(My translation from the Catalan original “Tot just noranta segons” with the author, Antoni Cardona) When Nadia was running downstairs from the 6th floor, doing up her dressing gown, cursing the wind and her mistake she came across the boy from door 4, floor 4 the one who never says good morning She put the…
January 18, 2023

Christmessi

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2023.] Is the legend now complete? Is it a case of all praise to The Great One, Lionel Messi, the Messiah of Argentina, Saviour of Rosario and FIFA-family favourite? On the whole it seems so, but like so many public figures, this 35 year old…
November 12, 2022

Greater than skaters

Climate change, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, ocean plastics, food insecurity and the list goes on. What can one person do? That’s a question that John French has been asking himself for nearly four decades. He moved to Spain over 10 years ago and says he has found an answer that came from a most…
July 30, 2022

Summer at its widest

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today, July 2022.] 15 summers ago (my first full one here) the CCCB, or Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona showed French-Jewish filmaker Claude Lanzmann’s “extraordinary diptych of the Holocaust.” Coming after the critically acclaimed, monumental 9 and a half hour documentary, Holocaust [or “Shoah”] of 1985, the…
July 18, 2022

Fires and Heatwave in Spain: Talking to ABC TV News (Aust.)
July 1, 2022

Hands on

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2022.] On a crisp but sunny early afternoon last month, I took myself to (lower) Sant Gervasi-Galvany, part of Barcelona city. I had volunteered to be interviewed for a documentary and before stepping through the door of the rented film studio on the building’s 8th floor,…
September 20, 2019

‘Jokerman’ (On Boris Johnson and Brexit)

[Photo: EFE] [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2019.] Unlike this summer’s extreme weather, which came to Europe then went, extreme conservative governments have also recently come but unfortunately don’t seem to be going. In the UK, the latest incarnation of this threat to the average person…
March 11, 2019

Brexit blues

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2019.] My wife and I are just a few weeks away from being what amounts to illegals in a country (in fact, an entire continent) where we have lived for the last 4,600 days. Both of us having a British parent has meant that we’ve been…
March 4, 2018

Nothing temporary about work

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2018.] The good times are back and we don’t need Prozac! The conservatives who run Spain and most of Europe would have us believe this is because the economic growth figures and employment statistics are apparently rising at a faster rate than they have…