Last week I snapped a Scandinavian blonde Maria in Vilafranca del Penedès. Joan Amades (El pessebre (1959)) tells us that, in Catalan nativity scenes, the Mother of God was always represented by a young, very white girl with hyper-perfect features, and that her whiteness is both traditional and proverbial (“white as a Mother of God”).…
MG Cole writes from a farmstead on Bala Lake: I am disappointed that you, a Welshman, don’t publish more stories of interest to dope-crazed New Age pillocks and consumer goods purchasers like myself. Here then is an authentic photo of Hungarian stag-princess, Violant, on her way from the Lands of the Morning to her wedding…
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…
OK, Pere (who has starting writing most of this blog) has got me to do The Election Test. The green dot is what I think I am and the red dot is what I apparently really am: an ideological moderate with a strong Spanish nationalist streak who should be voting (if I had a vote,…
Jullie hebben mij niet geholpen en het beest heeft z’n lekkere lijffie op een erg ongeschikt moment laten zien. Ipv met hem tweezaam thuis te blijven, ga ik morgen op m’n Hollandse opafiets naar de Ordesa nationale park om bezoek te brengen aan een vrouw die zich teruggetrokken heeft met drie monstermoggies in een goed…
Elections are still taken too seriously in Spain and Spain is still too monocultural for there to have arisen a tradition of mock-millenialist non-conformist participants such as Holland’s Rapaille Partij and Britain’s Monster Raving Loonies. And this probably isn’t going to change anytime soon: judging by its mistakes, this Sant Cugat election poster (click it!)…
