Rainy day. During breakfast, I acquaint myself with the rules established for the State of Emergency. They allow you to go out in some cases, like going to pharmacies, supermarkets or to buy food, walk your dogs, go for a walk in empty spaces (alone), so I decided that was it – I was going to go down to the newspaper kiosk and get my HOLA magazine. Going out feels like an adventure I took the opportunity to take …
Category: Impressions
Father’s Day. A sad day for me as it has been for fifteen years, since my father passed away; then, two years later, I also lost my grandfather, who was like a father to me. So, from having two special persons to celebrate with on Father’s Day, I was left with none. Like a dear friend who recently and very unexpectedly lost her father; today she dedicated such beautiful words to him that she moved me to tears. It’s her …
I opened the window and looked out. My son Afonso was getting in the car and his friend was putting the helmet and they both took the road. Pedro had already left. I was worried about their motorcycles being in the parking downstairs. Although it’s inside the building, there have been some thefts and with the State of Emergency about to be declared who knows what might happen. They decided to come and get them but left straight away. No …
Yesterday I concluded I had a flat tire. My car had been issuing warnings about low pressure on tires and it was always the same one so I had promised myself the next time I would have to fix it. It was yesterday! Not really a good time to have a problem in your car so I had to fix it straight away. Fortunately, I was told to go to a place where they repaired it in half an hour, …
Today it’s cloudy, with a few timid rays of sun appearing from time to time, and it’s windy – unpleasantly windy, as if to tell everyone “stay at home”. A strange silence I could not. In the late morning I had to pass by the office to get some documents that I could not print at home. As I drove there, I found there were more people on the streets than I had anticipated. Don’t mistake me: the city …
It seems that each day brings with it a new source of anxiety, as much as you want to keep a cool head. A pleasant dinner and a cancelled picnic Yesterday a friend called inviting me to dinner with him and his girlfriend, something we had agreed to do when they next came to Lisbon. They have been living in a small city up North with no virus detected cases yet and travelled by car. I bluntly told him …
What do you do, when you are stuck at home, in a half-self-imposed sort of quarantine, and you are going through something you never thought you would experience, not in your wildest – and more pessimistic – dreams? Well, since you are privileged to be a writer, or at least to think you are one, you do one of the things you love the most – you write. You write about this experience, what you are going through, what is …
During the Christmas season I enjoy watching the somewhat corny and oh-so-predictable Christmas movies that show up on TV, and they are inevitably about a girl who’s had her heart broken and a boy with good intentions who will heal her heart, after some obstacles are won, of course. I do enjoy watching them over a cup of tea on those dark grey Sunday afternoons, and for some moments believe in romance and fairy tales. After, all, these movies are …
Lately I have come across two stories about pandemics: one in the highly interesting TV series “The Hot Zone” on National Geographic channel, that tells the story of the Ebola virus and how it was discovered in Africa in the seventies; the other, the new, unputdownable third book in Arturo Fuentes’ saga (so far only published in Spanish También los demonios ocultan secretos, meaning “Demons also hide secrets” in English), where an unknown, highly virulent disease comes back from the …
For years it was occasionally mentioned in conversations but suddenly the word “Chernobyl” began ringing in everyone’s ears because of the HBO series. Friends kept insisting “It’s incredible, shocking, terrifying… you simply have to watch it!”. We all remembered the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine back in April 1986. In Portugal we saw it as a terrible tragedy in distant, impenetrable USSR (Soviet Union), so far away it would never reach us. Little did we know then how it …