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 …
Tag: man
I first met him more than ten years ago when he came to help me with some IT problem. He was a fat, somewhat dishevelled young man. While he fixed my pc he told me he was married and had a little daughter, and we talked about our respective children as parents often do. As we got to know each other better – I always needed his help as I changed equipments – I understood the reason why he …
Pygmalion is a figure from Greek mythology, a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved, which then came to life. It is also the title of a play by George Bernard Shaw, first presented on the stage in 1913, that tells the story of a professor who takes upon himself the task of “carving” his own creation, by educating a Cockney working class girl and transform her in such a way that she might pass as …
We were having dinner at my place and I asked her to tell me about her love story – definitely the most special love story of her life. And she told me. …. He was one of the most handsome men in the small country town by the beach where she used to spend her holidays. He belonged to a family of the local gentry and was widely known as ladies’ man; he was some five years older than her …
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 …
“Blue Eyes, Baby’s got blue eyes, Like a deep blue sea, On a blue blue day” – so goes the beautiful song by Elton John that always makes me think of my elder son. My own Blue Eyes was a much desired, much longed for baby. On the very happy day that he was born I looked at him and told everyone “this baby will have blue eyes” – everyone said no, it’s just the “milk” (supposedly all newborn babies …
