Category: Catalonia/Spain

• 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…
• October 16, 2022

  It has now come to this

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Oct. 2022.] The following is based on current and factual information… How would you fancy sleeping in a car or a van? Rather than the now antiquated 20th century idea of having your own bed in something as outdated as a house, for the price of…
• September 18, 2022

  Baldwin’s Barcelona

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2022.] The book must always come before the author,” said Nobel Prize winner, VS Naipaul. Unlike another genius such as James Baldwin, Napaul spent his entire brilliant, vicious life seemingly trying to prove himself wrong. For Baldwin, words came first. By becoming a child preacher…
• 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 2, 2022

  Wine and a whine

  (A gripey, grapey piece from me this month…) [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2022.] As a reptile – I like to think of myself as one of those lizards that runs across the hottest desert sands with a high knee action like an Olympic hurdler, though in reality I’m probably more of…
• 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,…
• July 1, 2022

  My Catalonia

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2022.] When I think of Catalonia what immediately comes to mind is the word ‘home’. I see the wide view across rows of vineyards, the mountains of the Penedès in the distance, the tops of Montserrat further away, only able to be seen in winter when the…
• July 1, 2022

  More Borics please

  [This article was first published under the title “Was it sexism?” in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2022.] Was it sexism? It wasn’t widely reported in the English language media but Gabriel Boric, the new leftist President of Chile has a Catalan mother, María Soledad Font Aguilera, who was originally from the working class area of Badalona bordering Barcelona.  Instead, his father’s…
• October 9, 2021

  So, how was your summer?

    [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2021.]   When people ask me this question I’ll be able to say it was unique. I had some novel experiences.    Because the Spanish government doesn’t seem to have the ability to get its Social Security department to pay welfare benefits properly, I…