I always think of my life as divided in three quarters of around 25 years each: the first including my childhood, my teens, and my life as a young adult, my first job, and my wedding. Then the following 25 years: adult life, consolidating my career, having my children, change of jobs, the loss of my dear father, the breakdown of my marriage, a new love, my boys growing from childhood to their early teens. Then the last quarter, the …
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It was our first holiday together. We had been going out for just six months and really wanted to spend a few days by ourselves away from everything and everyone. I can’t remember why, but we decided to go to Marbella, in the South of Spain, for a week. On a sunny September day Miguel (then my future husband) and I set out in my Toyota starlet ( my graduation gift from Dad) towards the Algarve and spent a night …
Your birthday was on the 4th of April. You were born on a distant day of the year 1918, in the city of Lourenço Marques, in Mozambique (nowadays Maputo, a name you hate, I know). You were the third child of Manuel de Freitas and Marie-Agnès Grabowski, what we would call today an “international couple”: he was Portuguese, born and bred on the island of Madeira having emigrated to Mozambique in his early twenties in search of a better life; she …
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 …
Inside a woman’s bag is her whole life. First of all, it’s something very useful – I cannot imagine how men can do without it! It allows us to carry everywhere with us the things we need most. And those we need less, as well… Many times have I seen this question, mostly in interviews with famous women: “What do you carry inside your bag?”, and from their replies I can conclude that there are a few things shared by …
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 …
It’s Father’s day today, and this year I’ll write about a great father. He became a father in his late twenties. His firstborn was a bright child, his inquisitive brown eyes always wanting to know more about life. Then he became a father again, of another lively boy, and from the first moment he was totally involved with his sons, doing all the things that are normal for today’s fathers but were not so usual back then: changing diapers, feeding …
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 …
Those summer holidays of 83 in Madeira were the strangest of them all. I suppose we could say we were obsessed with the esoteric and the occult. On the first of August I arrived, to stay for about 10 days at Luisa’s house. After that my family would come and I would join them at the Savoy. Luisa’s house was a large, old – from the late 19th century – house with the typical Madeira architecture: yellow walls and green …