It seems that each day brings with it a new source of anxiety, as much as you want to keep a cool head. A pleasant dinner and a cancelled picnic Yesterday a friend called inviting me to dinner with him and his girlfriend, something we had agreed to do when they next came to Lisbon. They have been living in a small city up North with no virus detected cases yet and travelled by car. I bluntly told him …
Tag: Portugal
What do you do, when you are stuck at home, in a half-self-imposed sort of quarantine, and you are going through something you never thought you would experience, not in your wildest – and more pessimistic – dreams? Well, since you are privileged to be a writer, or at least to think you are one, you do one of the things you love the most – you write. You write about this experience, what you are going through, what is …
This is a story of a love so powerful and strong that it was destined to last forever. At first sight they were as different as two people could be: he was Portuguese, from a traditional Catholic family, a man who had lived mostly in his country, a successful lawyer turned politician; she came from the cold lands of the North, was widely travelled and all but conventional. Where he had dark hair she was blonde, where he had …
In Portugal we have a beautiful, tragic, romantic story that equals that of Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde…but certainly has an advantage, because this story is part of history, even if over the years it has become inextricably linked with legend. Pedro was a prince, the son and heir of King Afonso IV of Portugal. As was usual in the early 14th century, his father arranged for his marriage with an infanta of Castile, Constança, and she came …