Maybe it was the box. Maybe it was that lunch, or perhaps both. Something clicked inside me, and it’s definitely not making me feel better. A gift and lunch Arriving at my office after the holidays I saw the colourful Christmas package of my favourite Portuguese porcelain shop and wondered who had left it there. After all, it was Christmas, a time for gifts. I looked for a card but found none. There was only my name …
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She turns it again and again inside her head and for the thousandth time she is unable to reach a conclusion. Rather, she feels unable to decide. Her life hangs in the balance and she has no clue about what she will do next. She knows what she wants to do, what she would like to do, but then she thinks of the unsurmountable obstacles and she falters. She cannot do it. But how can she not do it, and …
Six am and the alarm clock rings. It’s been some time since I’m awake. Today my son Afonso is being operated on and we have to be at the hospital for check in at 7.30. I get up and do my ten-minute morning meditation. Need it more than ever. When it is over, I am calmer, I have a feeling all will go well. I get dressed and when I’m having breakfast, I hear someone coming out of his …
I have written many times about love, but I really believe passion is what makes the world go round. Be it passion in the positive way, that is often related to love, or the opposite, passion fuelled by anger, turning into hatred. As the year ends, I think of stories of passion unravelling before my eyes. With passion, sooner or later, there comes a companion, and that is pain, heartbreak. For when passion hits is it is so strong …
It had been a stormy day, with havoc all over – flight and train cancellations, rain, wind…as in the previous days. I thought the rugby match of last Friday night would be cancelled – if not for other reasons, because the green grass field would have turned into mud; but no, it was on, and my son Afonso left for the club with his usual long, confident, strides, the exhilaration of the forthcoming game all around him like a magnetic …
Tomorrow it will be precisely twenty-one years that I received the most precious Christmas gift of all: my son Pedro, “the most beautiful baby she had ever seen” in the words of his proud Grandma, who naturally had already forgotten saying the very same words almost four years before, when my son Afonso was born, on a sunny February day that felt like an early Spring. Christmas baby Little Pedro was born on a grey December day, but he …
During the Christmas season I enjoy watching the somewhat corny and oh-so-predictable Christmas movies that show up on TV, and they are inevitably about a girl who’s had her heart broken and a boy with good intentions who will heal her heart, after some obstacles are won, of course. I do enjoy watching them over a cup of tea on those dark grey Sunday afternoons, and for some moments believe in romance and fairy tales. After, all, these movies are …
In moments like this I ask myself why we go on believing in fairy tales, even in our mature years. I suppose the problem resides in all those damningly romantic books we read in our youth, and sometimes throughout our lives – as is my case – that insidiously convince us there is, somewhere in our life, a true love waiting for us, and it will one day arrive, no matter how late it may be. No to mention …
As a declared fan of the Netflix series “The Crown” and a great admirer of Queen Elizabeth II, I could not wait for the 3rd series to begin and have already watched a few episodes. On one of them, the Queen’s character (brilliantly played by Olivia Colman in her mature years) says something that deeply impressed me, and it has dwelt on my mind ever since. The Queen’s outburst In the scene she is talking to a lifelong …
It’s a Saturday morning of an Autumn that has suddenly turned cold but sunny! The sky is blue, and it’s so good to walk on the street and feel the cold, and the sun, on our faces. I’m walking side by side with my son Pedro; we are having lunch at a restaurant where I used to go often with Dad and Ilda (my stepmother) in the good old days of my youth, and I’m telling Pedro old stories about …
