Washboard + organ duo

This means I can leave percussion off the organ. But does anyone play the washboard or frottoir in Spain?

Amando de Miguel gets something right about English

Amando de Miguel’s blog contains myriad hoards of fascinating localisms, but, as has been observed in the past, as soon as thought of the English language enters through one ear, reason appears to exit via the other. Re criticisms of the poor Catalan spoken by José Montilla, the Catalan president, de Miguel writes that “ethnic…

Mosaic as de-/reconstruction

Yesterday the state-approved and -subsidised competition to Baldie Galactic was observed claiming that trencadís was yet more proof of the quite extraordinary originality of the Catalan mind, etc etc. Not so: it has been around for centuries, and any connoisseur of English cathedral windows will be familiar with my favourite application of break-it-and-mend-it–the new/non-sense created…