A friend has written “The book of the corporate jungle: the ten commandments of survival” (sorry, only available in Portuguese) and she has just sent me a copy. This week’s newspaper “Expresso” features a very complete report on the forthcoming season of “Game of Thrones” that will go on air on the 15th of April for the absolute delight of its millions of fans – in which I am of course included, as well as my sons- and I cannot help …
Blog Posts
Just the other day I was thinking about 1979 and how it was a year of major changes in my life, when I realized it was forty years ago. I simply couldn’t believe it! A decisive year First of all, it was a year of learning. I learned about love but also about disappointment and grief. New people came into my life that were very important for quite some years: I gained a new love, who would mean …
Some people you have never met somehow touch your life in a very special way – it is as if you really know them. In fact you do, because they reach to you through their words, or their work; in one way or another they change your life and you feel truly grateful to them. They become special to you. Mercedes was one of such persons, and last week I was sad to learn about her passing, for she …
Madrid, on a cold January morning. I come out of my hotel, superbly located in the fashionable Salamanca quarter. I cross the street and enter the coffee shop. Sitting at table in a corner I see my friend Bea and her husband, Arturo Fuentes the writer, whom I’m meeting today for the first time even if I’m already his reader and follower on Facebook. An unexpected writer Bea and I have been friends for years. We met professionally but …
Saturday morning and it’s still early. I wake up and rejoice in the fact that I can stay longer in bed. Then I remember the boys going out last night; I get up and silently open my bedroom door and look at the corridor to see two closed doors. I smile and walk back to bed to enjoy the weekend laziness. Open It all begins with doors wide open. Well, not exactly – when you bring them home, tiny …
My son Afonso turns twenty-four today. As a storyteller, I have decided to write him a story for his birthday. … Once upon a time there was a boy, who was much loved by his family and had good friends, but even so he was shy; his father thought sports would do him good; after an unsuccessful attempt at basketball he enrolled him in rugby, not too popular at the time in Portugal. He had been told rugby, as a …
An avid reader all my life, at this point I’m quite selective about what I read – I mostly enjoy historical books or novels, some thrillers and the occasional biography or autobiography, in which case I enjoy reading stories of prominent women. One of my favourites was Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography that she wrote a few years before her tragic death. I was already a fan and became even more so – suffice to say that Benazir was the first woman …
Some lessons are learned early in life, the hard way, never to be forgotten. As I was coming out of childhood there was a major upheaval in my life. I saw my family lose almost everything: our properties, our money, and our way of living but most of all our beloved homeland Mozambique. My grandfather, who was a self-made man, lost everything he had worked so hard for during his whole life, and he was devastated as were so …
This is a Spanish expression with no literal translation into English. We have it in Portuguese and we use it when we don’t really want to say goodbye to someone, when we know it’s not likely we’ll see each other again but still we want to leave that door open; it means maybe one day we’ll be together again. It is something we say when we lose someone we love and the thought of a new meeting somewhere in …
I have read so much about Mary Queen of Scots over the years but it seems I never have enough, so when I saw the latest movie about her (directed by Josie Rourke) was coming to Lisbon last week I texted my usual Saturday-night- dinner-and-movies group and suggested we go and see it. Everyone agreed with alacrity. Knowing my passion for Scottish history my friend Beli asked me to do a brief introduction to Mary Stuart’s life during dinner, …