The evening before Maman died my Mother and I saw what seemed like a porcupine running across the path we were walking on. I was eleven so my memory might well be distorting my notion of distances and dimensions but we saw it cross from right to left, not fifty meters from where we stood, […]

Read more "Sketch: Our Months of Living Dangerously"

On the uphill, right-hand corner of Valencia with Muntaner is a barber’s of this very name. It sits quietly, midway on the chamfer (chaflán in Spanish), elbowing its narrow front for space with a Galician bar hugging it’s right and a boutique wine shop straddling what remains of the space to it’s left. The latter […]

Read more "Sketch: Vivanco"

Magdalena’s end was as unglamorous as it was well deserved. It was the end of June in 2015, not much past eight am. Sebastian was in the bedroom, lying back on his bed reading that week’s obituary in The Economist (the flat they had rented for these days in Florence, on Via del Oche 2, […]

Read more "Sketch: The bitter end"

Magdalena had been a striking woman in her youth. Never beautiful in the classical sense of the term, she was an intelligent woman of immense charm, infectious wit and tremendous magnetism who – being quite self-assured, with that groomed and finely lacquered sense of entitlement which had been her birthright – knew damn well how […]

Read more "Sketch: Bitterness, enough to go around."