Sometimes in your daily life you forge the most unexpected and improbable bonds. The building where I work is huge and toilets are outside the offices in the long corridors. After a certain time we get to know people – women, in this case – that you meet over and over again when you go there. It is also the case of two very nice cleaning ladies that we usually meet there, while they are working – sometimes they have …
Category: Other Stories
It’s dark now. The house is silent and he’s working on a project. He puts on a collection of his favourite music and he concentrates on his work. Then, suddenly, he hears the first, unmistakable notes of “Wish you were here” by Pink Floyd and he’s violently transported back into the past, many years ago, to the happy days when their paths had first crossed. Falling in love His first glimpse of her was at a cafe downtown in his …
Back in 1917, Fátima was a parish in the municipality of Ourém, in the interior of Portugal, that no one had heard about. Today, it is a very well known name, both in Portugal and all over the world. Curiously, the legend goes that Fátima was the name of a Moorish princess of many centuries ago, who fell in love with a Christian knight, converting to Christianity so that they might marry. And the name stayed on. The story of …
1961 was a dark year for Portugal as far as our overseas colonies were concerned. Portugal was the last country in Europe to give independence to its colonies, having lost Goa, Damão and Diu (our possessions in India) to a military operation exactly that year. The other colonies were Cape Verde and S. Tomé islands, Guinea (Guinea- Bissau), Angola and Mozambique in Africa and Macau and Timor in the Far-East. In early 1961 war started in Angola, and from there …
Back in the late seventies, there was a South African band called “The Rabbitt” that I loved to listen to. They had a very nice (and somewhat cynical) song called “Everybody’s cheating”. I hadn’t heard it – or even remembered it – for a long, long time, but as I was going through some old papers the title of the song was there and when I found it on Spotify it was as if I were time travelling…and as I …
Yesterday I took some Brazilian friends to a restaurant where the “fado”, the traditional Portuguese song, is sung. “Fado” literally means “destiny” in Portuguese, in a sort of fatalistic way – the sort of destiny we cannot escape. It is the very essence of our Portuguese soul, nostalgic and sentimental – and no one sang it quite like Amália, the greatest fado singer of all time. Its lyrics may be joyful or sad, light or dark, tell us a joke …
I first read about the Cathars in a book recommended by my Philosophy teacher in the first year of University. The book’s title is “Love in the Western World”, by a French author, Denis de Rougemont, and it tells about the concept of chivalrous love in the western world, including classical legends such as that of Tristan and Iseult, and narrating tales of troubadour love. As the author writes about the 12th century in the Languedoc (South of France) he …
It’s incredible how old stories keep creeping back into our memories. Today we were having New Year’s lunch with my boyfriend Nuno and his family, and his sister in law Cristina remembered that, as a young wife, she had very strong views about men who were abusive and hit their wives. She was laughing as she told us that, back then, when she imagined what she would do if one day her husband hit her, she had decided she would …