Category: Articles

• March 5, 2016

  The Wind-Water Sickness

  [This article was first published under the title “How do you get sick in Japan?” in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2016,]     How do you get sick in Japan?   According to one Japanese teacher that I once talked to, a Mr Shiroi, he caught a cold because the school that we both used…
• February 14, 2016

  Steinbeck, Scuppers and trains

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2016.]     As a child, the great American author John Steinbeck was inspired by a scene with a bird in it: a stork. He cherished a toy ‘Easter looking-egg’ which he loved to peer into through a tiny hole, seeing “a lovely little farm,…
• January 6, 2016

  Lessons from Paris

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2016.]   The recent tragic terrorist murders in Paris (and sadly also elsewhere) can teach us plenty. And if we choose to not learn all that we can from these tragedies then we are as good as inviting further bloodshed and horror.   One of…
• December 27, 2015

  Conversus interruptus

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2015.] Selective semi-listening. Fading in and out of the conversation. Attention-divided syndrome. Texting while talking. Missing the point. Ignorance-bliss. Even not paying attention to your own words when you are the one speaking them. "Is that my mobile ringing?" “Were you just saying saying something…
• November 14, 2015

  Badly chosen words

  [A version of this article (under the tittle "Carefully mischosen words") was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2015.]   I’m a huge fan of the UK’s public broadcaster, the BBC. It still produces some of the best TV anywhere in the world but one thing it does tests my affection for it. Even…
• October 11, 2015

  Refugees in a strange land

  [A version of this article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2015.]     Now even the Daily Mail’s editors have finally accepted that British Prime Minister David Cameron’s "swarms" of refugees need to be helped.   The next question has become one of where Europe’s newest asylum seekers and victims of war…
• September 11, 2015

  Where have all the sad and angry songs gone?

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2015.]   I heard a French song on the radio the other day. It sounded like one of those lovely ballads from around the time of the Second World War and it had a melody and lyrics that were sung with just enough melancholy to…
• July 2, 2015

  Hard to believe

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2015.]   "Remember, little children are not too little to go hell."   These are some of the words that are included in a new picture book published by a Puritan organisation in the United States last month. The book, whose title I choose…
• June 5, 2015

  Balancing Act

   [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2015.]   Here is a blatantly upper middle-class British family. They work together in a pottery-making business and this is the story of what happens to them in an eventful period of change in all of their lives. Joanna Trollope, a former chair of the…
• June 5, 2015

  TTIPing us over the edge

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2015.]   While we are all going about our daily business this month, big business is going about trying to make sure that Europe is run purely in its interest. If agreed to by the European parliament, the new Free Trade Agreement between the…