I’m beginning to suspect that some people come out walking principally for the bizarre drinking opportunities encountered on the way. This morning we were having coffee, shots and doughnuts in an Andalusian bar in Nou Barris (one of the many variations on the Collserola ridge route) when a ridiculously sleek blue car with XXL wheels…
Surprise has been expressed in circles, squares and other pleasingly simple geometrical arrangements of peapoles, that revolutionaries should want to destroy those who, according to Ken Livingstone and other prophets of the New Municipalism, are their nearest and dearest. What folly, my darlings! We creaky reactionaries know that revolutions always destroy society (and often themselves)…
“Fixed book prices are sacrosanct for this government,” said (via David Millán) socialist minister of culture, Carmen Calvo, after a meeting with booksellers, who are pissed off about discounts offered by larger, more efficient operators under legislation introduced by the previous government. Lots of subsidy for the industry gets laundered through the education system, but,…
Gerald Howson’s The Flamencos of Cadiz Bay is a damn good book that stays well clear of the “Andalusia, soul of Spain” myth-making that poisoned much foreign writing from Washington Irving on. Catalonia was for a long time the home of Spanish bull-fighting and I reckon it also houses more of what I in my…
Mariano over at Liberalismo.org has been translating various pertinent texts into Spanish. His latest gem is a chapter entitled Inversión (Investment) taken from Thomas Mackay’s 1891 A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation. As an ex-vintner, Mackay is of more than theoretical relevance to Spain and Catalonia. Here is part of…
Towards the end of part 2 of Quixote, Sancho Panza is hailed by a German pilgrim who turns out to be Ricote, a Morisco from Sancho’s village. Ricote was driven out of Spain by religious persecution and has spent his exile in France, Italy, and Germany, near Augsburg, where I found we might live with…
Here‘s a free translation of a verse sung door-to-door by caramelles in Sant Cugat on Easter Sunday of 1948: “Neither house nor home here for lots of folk./This overcrowding’s getting past a joke.” The Andalusians who arrived here in the 20s built themselves cave and shack homes on the margins of Montjuïc, and many were…
