On obscurantism

I must have had a dram or three one night when I posted some hot-headed remark – all exclamation marks and frothing at the mouth, no doubt – proposing to neutralise institutional religions by my arguments in a forthcoming piece of writing. Of course the mere assumption was arrogant on my part in the extreme […]

La Pérgola

Our two families coincided, I seem to remember, as guests at Sandra’s in Reguengos de Monsaraz sometime in June or July of 1997. I must have told Bernard I had a summer to spare before going off on a course in Florence in September. He owned and ran the Casa Velha, a reputable, excellent restaurant […]

Trauma

When my grandmother was still alive and both she and my grandfather were still together, she would tell us how Unpa would often wake her up in the small hours, limbs flailing about like a maniac to the sound of his ghastly moans and grinding teeth, some times for minutes on end before he came […]

On privacy

So I was in class today with one of my 1° de ESO groups – twelve year olds- when one of the girls turns to me and says: “Do you live on Muntaner?” “…mmm….yeeees….” ‘Well my granny lives just across the street from you. We’ve watched you through the window, standing smoking on the balcony.” […]

On cousins

It was years ago…I think Claudia and I were catching the the connecting flight from Madrid to Barcelona; the last leg back from Santo Domingo. Here’s the punchline: as we ambled onto the plane you would have thought we were walking into a “casting” for a documentary (imagine a young lad from production dressed in […]

On precedence

Twenty, thirty, forty thousand years ago or more; in a world where an adult Homo-sapien – a migrant hunter and collector – might aspire to reach, with luck, the ripe-old age of twenty five, what might he possibly benefit from or be trying to invoke by wasting precious time and resources scrawling images of his […]

On rights and obligations

I’ve brought this subject up before, certainly in conversation amongst some of you who know me better, and it is something that grates me considerably, especially in the light of the situation I am about to describe. I fully appreciate the given notion that as a customer one should expect to receive fair exchange for […]

On blood

I clearly haven’t been changing enough nappies since our daughter, Inês, was born a couple of months ago as I only noticed what I am about to mention a week or ten days ago. Through my mother’s side of the family (the Salvadorian side) many of the women (but not all…it sometimes jumps generations) are […]

Thirteen

It was the Friday before Carnival break, this last February, and on this day the school where I teach permitted the kids to come in to classes out of uniform. As expected, there was a high tide of hoodies, tight jeans, expensive garish trainers and silly-looking headgear worn at self-conscious angles on the part of […]

Tramp and Fiasco

Tramp came into our lives during the summer of 1989 and he cannot have been more than a year or two although there was no way of knowing for certain. The dog sanctuary that had taken him in had rescued him from a miserable life with a family of Roma who by all accounts had […]

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