Bestiaries (i): the zebra

Once upon a time Pere Quart (Joan Oliver to his friends) composed some often wickedly funny verses that were published with drawings by Xavier Nogués under the title Bestiari in Barcelona in 1937. His treatise on the camel and the dromedary is reminiscent of one by Ogden Nash that I blogged into melodious Catalan a…

moving on

You can do night-time walks in some places, but not round Torre Baró (blogged here, walk here). This week it was the turn of a part-time teacher of guitar and sevillanas, murdered next to his car and sleepy girlfriend with a 9 mm Civil War pistol for reasons presumably unrelated to his left-hand technique. Honestly,…

The freeing of Ali Lmrabet

… by Mohammed VI of Morocco is the Maghrebi story making the international headlines today, Reporters Without Borders even going to the ridiculous lengths of expressing gratitude to the king for freeing someone who shouldn’t have been banged up in the first place. What most of the papers miss is that – apart from the…