“Mom, I’m starving!” This is something I hear very often, as a mother of a young adult and a teenager. And when they say this, they mean it – boys eat an incredible amount of food, especially when they come home from their training or their matches or from a disco in the early hours of the morning. Today being a public holiday, we all slept through the morning; in my case, because I’m exhausted and have to recover whenever …
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One am. There is a full moon, the most incredible full moon he has ever seen. He tosses and turns on his bed. He feels restless; he can’t really say why. Finally he falls asleep, only to be startled by the sound of his phone. It’s his son from London saying his wife’s waters have broken and they are going to the hospital. The baby – a girl, his first grandchild – is going to be born today. Naturally he …
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 …
News about major changes that Finland will be introducing into their education system, in order to evolve to a much more interrelated learning system than the one they have today – and theirs is considered to be one of the best education systems in the world – has led me to some reflexion about this. I’m certain many of you who are, like me, raising teenagers, have felt at a certain point that they are not motivated to study at …
I’m abroad for a conference and I come down for breakfast. I take a deliciously looking huge croissant and see that someone is frying eggs so I make my way there. Surprisingly, the cook is a very young girl, who slightly resembles my elder son’s ex girlfriend so I immediately feel a wave of empathy towards her. She looks so pretty in her white cap, so concentrated, so busy, cooking several eggs at the same time, some fried, and some scrambled…I …
Breaking up is definitely the worst moment of any love story. It is like the “the end” sign that immediately makes us long for the movie we have just finished watching. When we are young breaking up is hard but we know life is out there waiting for us and it is normal to have many experiences, in fact we want to have them; what teenager would want to live only one love story? Even if it were a …
I am on the morning train to Porto, a city in the North of Portugal. I do this so often – I have many business meetings there – that this train has become very familiar and I even enjoy the trip. Sometimes I take the seven am train and in the winter it’s still dark when I get to the Oriente train station. This station is a beautiful sight – it was designed by famous Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and …
I had arrived the previous evening from a business meeting in Bergen, Norway, tired after two plane trips, but had woken up feeling refreshed and happy. I had many things to do as the following day would be Afonso’s first communion and we’d have a party at our beach house for our family and close friends. Dad and Ilda (my stepmother) had come to Lisbon for the party and had been over for dinner with Miguel and the boys while I …
The world has forgotten me. I am old – well, maybe not so old, but I look old, I feel old. I walk slowly, with difficulty; I am always afraid I might fall, so I take careful, short steps, taking my time – after all, why should I hurry? I have all the time in the world, I have nothing to do, and no one is waiting for me. No one cares about what I do, they are all out …
Children traditionally have two parents, a mother and a father, so ideally they should be raised by both. In the old days this was not even an issue: marriages would last forever, for better or for worse, and parents would raise their children together. But things have changed dramatically in the last decades, and from a situation where the children of divorced parents were “different” (as was my case back in the seventies), having one’s parents together as a couple …