Category: Articles

• February 1, 2015

  Why go the public way? (Part one)

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2015.]    If tomorrow the government for some reason disappeared and we were all left without a system of state would it in fact be such a bad thing? There are people across the planet (and especially in the USA) who say that anarchy or…
• January 15, 2015

  What Have We?

       [An extract of this poem was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2014.] There’s the vacant look of history’s books Slave labour and murder thy neighbour Innocents torture and screw your own daughter This is the past we still have We see human remains and bullet-trains Product wars and useless laws Greed…
• January 11, 2015

  Blue Black Friday

    [A version of this article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2015.]   Just last month we witnessed the latest craze from the USA arrive here. Without doubt, the Black Friday sales will now be an annual event and will certainly grow in intensity each year. If anything accurately represents pure, raw…
• January 1, 2015

  An Englishman in Madrid

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2015.] "Look, I’ll tell you how things really are," says one of the author’s characters (speaking in 1936,) "whatever they say, this is not a poor country. This is a country of poor people." And it is the elements of social class, poverty and…
• December 8, 2014

  To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2014.]   Paul O’Rourke is certainly the first dentist as a contemporary anti-hero in literature that I know of. He’s that species of character that from the opening pages of his narrating, in turn I thought was the kind of brilliant, insightful observer of life…
• December 6, 2014

  The best of times?

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2014.]   Has there ever been a better time to be alive in the history of our tortured, super-intelligent species?   At the press of a few buttons we have virtually all the accumulated knowledge of the last several hundred (or is it thousand?) years…
• November 2, 2014

  When government is sport

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2014.]   I don’t often think about Australia. I was born there, grew up there and, until 15 years ago, I lived there. It’s almost become a (very) foreign country to me but recently it has crept into my thoughts again. This remaining ember…
• November 1, 2014

  The Son

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2014.]   Some books don’t really start until half way through. For me, this was one of those. Once it finally did get going (after about two hundred and fifty pages) it asked some intelligent questions of the reader and started to put flesh…
• October 17, 2014

  The Blazing World

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2014.] By it’s nature every book is unique but The Blazing World is not at all like any other work of fiction I have read before. The author has published as many non-fiction titles as she has fiction and her journalist-like ability as a…
• October 4, 2014

  Poor doors

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2014.]    When I was a kid and just starting to try and understand the adult world I used to hear my parents and other grown-ups make what seemed to be jokes about the “tradesman’s entrance.” I eventually learned that these words were a kind…