Category: Articles

• December 21, 2016

  Portrait of an Asturian miner

   [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2016.]     The coal miner’s wife wakes him and he coughs. He shuffles to the small bathroom sink and spits black liquid, washing it away with with the brown tap water. Last night he slept badly, suffering from stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting again.…
• December 8, 2016

  Between Two Fires

      This book is exactly the kind of thing you would hope to find when you are aimlessly looking through the shelves in that slowly dying place called a bookshop.   Focusing mainly on the area around his adopted home town of Frigiliana David Baird has used immaculate research to write in compelling detail…
• November 12, 2016

  Albania’s pain

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2016.]   When I was a curly-haired (and more ignorant) twelve year old in the Cold War years of the early 1980s, one day our History teacher asked the class a general knowledge question: “Who is the world’s longest-serving current dictator?”   Nobody had the…
• October 9, 2016

  “Cohencentric” [On the life and work of Leonard Cohen]

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2016.]     Finishing a long biography of the long, long life of the singer/songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen, something occurred to me the other day.    Here was a man who had toiled away on his work year after year, suffering from regular periods…
• September 7, 2016

  On trust and the grape

   (This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2016.)   People trust each other where I live. I’m not talking about the kind of confidence where no one needs to lock their doors. I mean that where I live you don’t see that look of suspicion in the eyes of a stranger that…
• July 15, 2016

  Times in the balance

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2016.]     Now that summer is here it is easy to ignore the wider world and only take in what we see through the sun’s glare at the beach or from the top of a shady mountain.   Away from the ease of…
• July 11, 2016

  Slow life in Catalonia

    (An edited version of the text above was first published in Catalonia Today magazine in February, 2013.)   Time. It is the one thing that many of us feel like we don’t have enough of. Generally, we move through our lives at a rapid pace with mobile phones permanently on and our attention fixed…
• June 3, 2016

  Review of Nathan Shepherdson’s “Sweeping the Light Back Into the Mirror”

  [A shorter version of this article was first published under the titled “A stretched agony” in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2016.] small children trade the world for distraction deal in statements with the grammar of a road sign they’re happy to put the sun in the top corner of the page count backwards from 9…
• May 8, 2016

  Poor But Sexy

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2016.]   How little we know about the culture of that ‘area of darkness:’ Eastern Europe.  Living within a few hundred kilometres of this region, most of us would be hard pressed to give the names of more than a handful of directors, actors or…
• April 10, 2016

  Reaching out across the centuries (Shakespeare)

   [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2016.]   One of the greatest things about Shakespeare – one of the things I love most about his writing – is his rare ability to have his characters speak for themselves but also somehow show a more universal state of mind. His fiction is…