The drive into Haworth was all uphill, past Peckett Well into Oxenhope, the church of St Mary the Virgin, to our left and Bay Horse pub further up. Then downhill into Haworth. We parked by the station and walked the cobbled Lower Mill Hill Farm Road and across and up into Main Street. It…
Afro-Cubans in Lagos: Hilario Campos & Feliberto Muniz
In Leonardo Padura’s Havana Fever (part of Havana Quartet) the protagonist, Mario Conde has now retired from the Police Force and works as an antique dealer, specialising in books, whilst still investigating crime. Padura's Cuban noir is next to Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy as introduction to Castro’s Havana. In relation to…
Continue reading ➞ Afro-Cubans in Lagos: Hilario Campos & Feliberto Muniz
Lagos: Eko Ile
Mary Kingsley (1862-1900) travelled in West Africa from 1893-95. Her description of the mangrove swamps along the Nigerian coast is definitely the best that I have encountered There is an uniformity in the habits of West African rivers, from the Volta to the Coanza, which is, when you get…
Vienna
The walk from the hotel to the U-bahn took in rows of tenement buildings. In one of them there was a congregation of young men, all white Austrian, some with muzzled dogs – very unpleasant and intimidating. It was one of those situations when I look inwards and studiously avoid eye contact. I felt restrained…
Braga
We drove up to Bom Jesus do Monte after lunch. The road wound up with hairpin bends. I sat with my back to the hills, facing the church as the 3 o’clock bell rang. It was a euphonic display of dash and parry, of clash and feint. All too short, brief and seductive as push…
Lagos
We are in the Algarve. Today, our last day here we caught the free bus from Rocha Brava to Carvoeiro. It stopped at the beach, the Praia. We had lunch: chicken baguette for me, salad for Jan. Then we took the coastal path back. From Carvoeiro you can look back at Lagos. Today Lagos…
Winter Blues: I begin to discern the profile of my death
Oliver Sacks has just revealed that he has terminal cancer. This sad news from the voice of humane medicine put me in mind of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, an account of the last days of a great man, looking back and forwards, in a letter to Marcus Aurelius. The letter opens…
Continue reading ➞ Winter Blues: I begin to discern the profile of my death
Café society
At Caffé Nero, on Thursday mornings, there's a chance to see a slice of the world sit in varying poses, attired in the daytime frocks of winter. Today, two young men with their computers and headphones, a single woman dressed in black sipping her coffee, and a middle aged man reading Girl With a Dragon…
Spittoons of light
Abracadabra, well that’s a word to conjure with! Words are all like that, magical and like charms, conjuring visions and images and sometimes like talisman, fending off demons. Another way of putting this is to say that words are concrete objects, that they have a taste, a texture, a shape that fills the mouth, distorting…
Pirandello and social reality
What is reality? How are we to know what is ‘real’ and what is merely imaginary? Pirandello (1867-1936) dealt with these matters in his drama. In Henry IV, he created a character, Henry IV, who was deluded. He falsely believed that he was Henry IV. His father, Marquis Charles Di Nolli, employed a number of…
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