Bullfighting and the Revolt Against Self-Enslavement

In the last few weeks I have been re-learning how to love one of my earliest and most faithful of loves: Spain. Whenever a lecturer mentions a glimmer of Spanish art I get carried away into a fantasy world – I feel like a sixteen-year-old again. And now I have the opportunity to make myself…

3 Poems From the Bullring

Having just returned to Malta from a week in Sevilla, I still can’t get a particular feeling out of my mind.   A lot of things have impressed me about the city, the flower of Andalucia. A city celebrated by poets like Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Juan Anton Jimenez; a city that nourished…

Hunting Duende in Sevilla

    Spain is unique, a country where death is a national spectacle, where death sounds great bugle blasts on the arrival of Spring, and its art is always ruled by a shrewd duende which creates its different and inventive quality. Federico Garcia Lorca     There can only be one reason why an artist…

After the Goring

  “Papa, why are we eating tacos on a bus?” “Have we ever done it before?” “No.” “That’s why.” From the windows of the bus the Puerta del Sol pupated into the Gran Via of Madrid. The line of trees came into view and the whiteness of the buildings gave them their architecture. It was…

The Wayfaring Diaries – A Sample

“Here it is my friend, Argentina’s national drink, Fernet con Coca, 2 parts Fernet to 1 part Coke. Salud.” We drank the Fernets on the balcony and from the corner of my eye I kept my gaze pinned on the woman across the street. But she wasn’t looking at us anymore. She was watching television….

Pool, Bulls and Humanity

What does Mosul and the festival of San Fermin have in common? Humanity. A photograph I saw recently on Twitter (the featured photo above), of a group of Mosul residents, including children, playing pool in a recently liberated district of Mosul where IS previously forbade pool, filled me with that rarest of elements: hope. Hope…

Bombing Bogota

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlfoqbwSa0g   Is this the face of the conservation movement? Is this how this Enlightenment struggle is going to be fought? 31 people injured, 12 of them women, most, presumably, with families, children, their own hopes and ambitions. Should they be the victims of a protest? Should anyone be a victim in the struggle for…