Sunday noon at Barcelona airport. Nuno and I are coming back from a weekend with his son Francisco and his Catalan wife Mati. We have checked in online but they have large bags. There are tons of people everywhere. Heavily armed policemen patrol the airport – supposedly security is even tighter because of the recent Munich attacks. While we wait for them to check in we hear a child cry in rage. It’s a girl – around five – who …
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He was born in 1914, the year of the beginning of the Great World War. His parents had both come to Mozambique from Madeira island – first his father and some years later his mother, who had joined her brother. They met and soon they were married. He was the elder son, being followed by three sisters. His father was a successful businessman. When he was six the whole family took a ship to go on a long holiday to …
My life has always been inextricably linked to the beach, the sea – one way or another. I’m a true “Beach baby” like the song by First Class I heard back in the seventies. I was born in a city by the Indian sea, and I have photos of my first years where I am dipping my toes into the sea water with a look of delight in my face… years later, when I was twelve, I remember another day …
She is dozing in her chair. In the twilight zone – that area between worlds where everything is possible – she is young again and she is looking at the big, expressive green eyes of the love of her life. She had met him in Lisbon in the late fifties. She had been living in Lisbon for some time as she had insisted on coming to University to Lisbon and not to South Africa, as her parents wanted – after …
Last month I read two very interesting books that I later discovered were somehow related to each other. They were “The lost teachings of the Cathars – their beliefs and practices”, by Andrew Philip Smith and “Hello Again – a memoir of souls reconnecting over many lifetimes”, by Kathy Gibbons. At first I read the book on the Cathars – yet again, I was trying to learn more. This book had seemed very informative as I had looked it up on …
The 10th of July will be remembered as the day when the Portuguese national team won the European football championship. One might add – against all odds. I don’t like football but I love a good story – and this one I find incredible. I think it all began twelve years ago, when the European cup took place in Portugal and the coach then – Felipe Scolari, a Brazilian – asked every Portuguese to put a flag in his or …
When the famous song by the Boomtown Rats came out in 1979 everyone sympathised and we sang it with all our hearts “Tell me why, I don’t like Mondays…I want to shoot…the whole day down!”. It’s a general feeling – even on the radio, on Monday mornings the presenters will wish us courage to face the day and the week that will follow… But if Mondays are the harsh truth of another week, then Sunday afternoons are the most nostalgic …
Love and hate are extreme emotions and one may easily follow the other. Usually, the latter follows the former – the inverse is rare. He knows it because he has seen it in his parents. During his childhood he recalls they were a loving, happy couple. He was the eldest, followed four years later by his brother and almost immediately their sister was born. Their parents were dedicated to them, their mother more present in their daily life, as their …
Where else could it be but Scotland? Land of castles, misty lochs, fierce clans and relentless fighters for freedom. The land of Mary Stuart and William Wallace, of Robert the Bruce and Rob Roy…of the Loch Ness Monster and bagpipes and ghost stories… All of this and much more had made this trip one much desired, much planned for. Miguel and I had wished to go there for years and, as I read more about Scottish history, I was more …
I’ve always said that after I’m dead I don’t care about what happens – after all I believe that my soul, that essence that determines what I am, will have flown to another dimension. But then of course the people in my life will stay on, and I sometimes I think what words I would like to leave them, along with the memory of what I have meant to them in this world. To my mother I would say …