The garlic here is denser than in Southern Europe and harder to slice and crush. I also seem to remember this about France, mind you. The produce available, be it animal or vegetable, is first-grade and looks and tastes nourishing and wholesome. The beef, pork, lamb, and venison are all to die for. Chicken is […]

Read more "Another country: the first six months."

Those of you who still believe that Putin has only been standing up for Russia’s best interests can say goodbye to me for now. He revealed his game plan years ago when he stated that in his opinion the fall of the Soviet Union had been the greatest geo-political disaster of the 20th century and […]

Read more "King Rat"

The building next door is having a face-lift. They started putting up and bolting in the scaffolding just before the Christmas break and they only stopped on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. The drilling and scraping starts at eight am sharp and goes on all day long. It’s particularly tiresome as the vibrations from […]

Read more "Working up high"

Can someone explain to me the need for four hundred Euro trainers? Not limited edition collectibles, not one of a kind prototypes, not highly engineered and specifically manufactured sports shoes for particular disciplines in their top tier, not thirty year old rarities: just swanky shiny trainers, manufactured in China in the tens or hundreds of […]

Read more "On Lolly"

Inês’ latest little giggle is to throw the brake lever on the pram, particularly when we are crossing a busy road, which sends the three of us lurching forwards like a bunch of idiots caught unaware on an escalator when some comedian presses the emergency stop. I’d also find it hilarious if it wasn’t for […]

Read more "Miss Chief"

One of the idiosyncrasies of Hispanic culture is how verbal communication is universally restricted to two levels of volume: one..or eleven. Level one is none of our concern as understandably it is the domain of whispered secrets between lovers, the passing over of a bit of verbal smut between work colleagues or the exchange of […]

Read more "On one to eleven"

Everyone who was old enough to understand seems to remember where they were and what they were doing when JFK was shot. In my generation I thought the date we might remember would be the death of Princess Diana on the 31st of August 1997. I stepped off the train at Santa Maria Novella after […]

Read more "Living in the age of Aquarius"

They make me laugh, these wiry, late-middled aged women sitting on the steps of El Arsenal – an expensive and exclusive gym in our district, priced strategically to ensure the riff-raff keep walking on at a swift pace and on the other side of the street, thank you very much! – as they draw hard […]

Read more "On ageing disgracefully"

For most of my adolescence and much of my adult life I have wasted precious energy searching for a sense of identity to a flag, a tribe, a culture or a purpose, and so on; something that has eluded me artfully, more often than not leading me to dead ends, false leads, rebuttals and in […]

Read more "On allegiance"

Until today, I had been back once to Muntaner 88 since September 2011. Having avoided those coordinates “with extreme prejudice” by a margin of three blocks from any given direction for years, that November day in 2017 I drummed up the balls to walk past it timidly as I hurriedly glanced at the facade from […]

Read more "Slaying a dragon"