Category: Articles

• June 17, 2018

  Churnalism

   [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2017.]   I learnt a new word this week after reading an email from a journalist friend. Churnalism is defined in the Collins online dictionary as: "a type of journalism that relies on reusing existing material such as press releases and wire service reports instead…
• May 20, 2018

  Why not Australia?

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2018.]       I spent the first thirty years of my life in Australia and the last twenty trying to stay out of it.   Plenty of local people in this part of the world regularly ask me why we are living so…
• April 9, 2018

  This Boy’s Life

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2018.]   It’s a great relief to read something as authentic as this memoir of Tobias Wolff’s childhood. In 2018, when (even for adults) predictable superhero and action movies are dominating the western world’s popular culture as a form of escapism, my bowels were nicely warmed…
• March 5, 2018

  A very personal reason

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2018.]     If you are a regular reader of this column you might remember several articles I’ve written in support of the public health system over the last few years. This month I have an interest that is particularly close to home because I am…
• 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…
• March 4, 2018

  God-bloggerer

    [Photo: DNA strand. Religion did not give us this.]               [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2018.]     I call myself an atheist because god has not been proven to any clear degree, but like other people I can enjoy certain things that are called…
• December 18, 2017

  Some bad journalism on Spain

  [Photo: Cornelia Kraft] [This article was fisrt published at NewsTrust’s News Hunt for Bad Journalism.] In Jennifer Varela’s piece on a recent anti-abortion march in Madrid, the most important words in this article are: “The bussing in of representatives from more than 40 countries…” So, not all of the supposed 1 million people who attended…
• December 10, 2017

  A ray of hope for Europeans

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2017.]   Ultra-conservatives will always do what their natures demand. Given any opportunity, they strangle democracy while at the same time claiming that it is democracy that they want to breathe life into. The horrifying repression in Catalonia is an extreme illustration of this…
• November 18, 2017

  Evolution’s forgotten man

   [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2017.] This story begins in the late 18th century with a small boy’s limitless curiosity, at first for staring at his marbles and stones, but soon this grows into a thirst for knowing what lies deep under the British countryside around him.   ​William Smith…
• November 8, 2017

  Dangers of the sell-off

  [This article was was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2017.]   A new year has begun but not much has changed apart from the date on the calendar. In Australia, that faraway land that has the reputation of a kind of paradise according to some people here in Catalonia, the national government is…