She was a close friend, one of my best. We got together every Saturday for a cup of coffee and we’d talk for hours. She was a bright girl, petite but very spirited. Sometimes she could be peevish, but we laughed and said she was very choosy, both regarding her friends and her lovers. An unwanted choice She always seemed in great spirits but I knew better. She had tragedy in her life. Her overbearing father – and I …
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My friend had told me that the TV series was great and I would love it, as she had told me before about Game of Thrones (of which I am an unconditional fan), and I followed her advice and sat down to watch one or two episodes of the first season. Somehow, I didn’t find them as compelling as she had described, and soon lost interest. As for her, she loved the series and has ben watching every season since, …
After “The Pillars of the Earth” and “World without End”, again I read the almost eight hundred pages of Ken Follett’s latest book, “A Column of Fire” in an incredibly short period of time, considering I’m not on holidays and only read at night and on lazy weekend mornings – whenever I can.skill trilogy begins with the construction of Kingsbridge cathedral in the UK. The first book’s story takes place in the 12th Century; it begins during the reign of …
On Christmas morning they found him in his bed and there was nothing they could do for him. In his fifties, he was not a healthy man, but neither was he gravely ill. He had grown very fat of late, and you could see he did not really care about things; he always seemed distracted, drawn, as if in a world of his own no one was allowed to enter. After his wife had suddenly left him a few years …
When I look back to that New Year’s Eve of thirty five years ago I cannot help thinking it was the best of my life. Because it closed my year of “living dangerously”, a year when I mostly did what I pleased without any attachments or obligations; a year when I felt free, wild, independent; because it was spent in the best place to spend that very special night when you go from one year to another – Madeira; and …
I remember it so well – we didn’t really spend “Christmas” together as we didn’t celebrate Christmas Eve or Christmas Day together, but the moments we spent together at Christmas time were very special, because our love was so new and we were ecstatically happy. One of those moments was precisely on the 23rd of December of some years ago. We had been going out for only a few weeks and our relationship was still a secret; and we wanted …
Every year, as Christmas decorations appear I begin to feel nostalgic about other Christmases, of long ago. If I think about it, it seems I’ve had this feeling during most of my life, as after coming from Mozambique we missed our warm and merry Christmases out there. Only when the boys were small did I recover some of the magic of Christmas and I loved seeing the wonder in their eyes as they looked at the lights, as they expectantly …
After lunch, the old patriarch sat on his reclining chair as he did every day of his nowadays so predictable life. I may be old, he thought, but I still enjoy a good meal. As he closed his eyes, he thought of the coming Christmas with some trepidation – after all this would be the first Christmas with his two great-grandchildren, and at such a lively age, both one year old! The little girl living in London, he didn’t see …
This week we have lost Zé Pedro, the guitar player and one of the founders of Portuguese Rock band Xutos & Pontapés; a charismatic figure. At 61, he still had a boyish charm – tall and slim, you could only tell his age by some silver streaks in his hair, but from a distance you’d think time had stopped as he very much seemed the same young boy who, together with the band had given his first concert in the late …
I find the Tudor period truly fascinating. I believe the first time I read about it was in Jean Plaidy’s novel “Murder most royal“, that told the story of some of the wives of Henry VIII, from Anne Boleyn to Katherine Howard, both of them accused of adultery and consequently beheaded by order of the king their husband. If in Anne Boleyn it all seems to have been a fabrication, it was most probably true in Katherine Howard’s case. As …