I'm away until the end of August! Have a good summer =) ((hugs))

:::July::::::::::

Yuste
Joanna the Mad and Phillip the Handsome had a son who was neither. Pig ugly and drop-dead shrewd, little Charles was born in the Netherlands in the numerically tidy year of 1500. He spent his childhood frolicking hither and yon, until he turned up in Spain as its new teenage king, Charles I. These were incredible times, replete with extraordinary characters, one of whom was the incorrigible Henry VIII. Needless to say, Henry and Charles each thought the other a plonker. Henry VIII was, like Charles, a staunch Catholic, and, contrary to popular perception, he fought long and hard against the age-old currents in England that called for the establishment (or to be exact the resurrection) of a separate church, independent from Rome, in that green and pleasant land. But you know the story: Henry wanted an annulment of his 24-year marriage. The Pope was like OMG and Henry was like whatever. The reason why the Pope dragged his heels over this was Charles. Not only was Charles holding the Pope prisoner (you gotta love these guys), but Henry's soon-to-be ex-wife, Catherine of Aragon, was Charles' aunt - and it was abundantly clear that she would suffer terribly if the marriage broke up. Henry, who was slowly losing his mind probably due to a tertiary syphilis infection, declared himself the head of the church in England, providing later monarchs with the freedom to differentiate the English church from the Catholic trunk. Some of the effects of this are self-evident - from Northern Ireland to the Spanish Inquisition (which no one expects hahahaha) to protestant extremism in the United States and all the rest. But other consequences are less obvious. For example, in rejecting Catholicism, the church in England rejected iconography -pictures, basically- nipping the English Renaissance in the bud. What magical murals and frescos and Cathedrals and statues and monuments and other marvels don't stand in England because of this? England turned instead to the written word as a principal means of artistic expression, and excelled. So while, say, nearby Catholic Holland was pumping out a stream of great painters, England was not - producing instead the likes of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, who lived in the times of Henry VIII's daughter, Elisabeth I, is genuinely breathtaking, and his is no doubt the finest literary accomplishment of humanity. And I can't get my head around how or why his plays are as they are, especially as he wrote them for uneducated masses who frequented London's naughty north bank often looking for a bit of hanky-panky in the then disreputable venues of theatre houses. Certainly Catholic Europe did not produce anything equivalent, and even Cervantes or Calderón de la Barca in their most splendid moments do not parallel what Shakespeare cut from the fabric of his mother tongue. As I write this, I'm sitting in the grounds of the Monastery of Yuste, in Caceres, Spain, where Charles retired to live out his last years as a monk. Beside me on this stone bench is a large patch of lichen, which I take to be Rhizocarpon geographicum from its distinctive green colour and black edge. It is about 6 or 7 inches in diameter which, given the glacially slow rate of growth of this symbiosis of fungus and alga, means the plant was certainly alive when Charles lived here. So I wonder if he saw it. I wonder if he touched it. And whether he did or he didn't, I wonder if in his isolated monkish existence he had any dim grasp of the role he had played in shaping the world. My world. You know, if karma were audible I'd have to cover my ears in this place and grimace from the deafening clang that's still ringing out angrily across the world of man. But it's not audible, and all I hear is the soft dry wind drifting through imported maples, undocumented ginkgos and low-cut box-wood hedges. That's the trouble with consequences. Alone, they're silent, muffled by the veneer of now and camouflaged by the feeling that that's just the way it is. Only remembrance can give them voice. Remember that nothing is just the way it is, and yet everything is just the way it has become.

:::May::::::::::

Leaving Denmark
I want these streets to be unhaunted. I want these town-house corners, made of familiar brick whose texture in my hand I can conjure closed-eyed at will, to be again pristine: me empty of them, and them empty of me. I want the path by the canal to be untrodden by me, such that if I saw a new face in it, I would not be bound to ask inwardly of its owner: 'Who are you?' I want the small and sturdy bridge beneath my house to be uncrossed as it was when I first came, and I want my house to be one of any thousand faceless houses in this city, free of my DNA, my scent, my memory, my eclectic clutter of who-I-am-ness, and my aching affection. I want never to have tasted this city's sights of all and every hour and mood, nor know its quarters or its windy recesses, its clubs and arches, brothels and tourist-wrapped monuments, its docks and reservoirs and old meat-factories and stately homes. I want never to have been held here by anyone, nor seen these dapple-trunked sycamores dressed in bright white snow, and I want never to have written this on this greyed bench of rain-soaked and salt-sprayed wood, with deep graffitied carvings of someone's reclaim of someone's love. I want not to have a year's favourite seat in a year's favourite café, nor to prefer the light by one window over that of another, next to the wine-gloss re-re-re-painted front door. I want people not to know me from a black-haired stranger, to have no knowledge or claim of me, nor over me. I want never to have touched the dew-damp grass in this softly-summered land, nor spoken and thus owned the names of its counties. I want to unknow the familiar, air-brush my attendance of my overwintered days. I want to excuse myself from all recollection, and sever all sentiment and witness from me. If I can do this, then I will leave as happily as I came.

:::March::::::::::

Dirty thoughts
I have just come back from a lighting trip to Sweden, and on my return I find my flat looks dirty. Dusty more than dirty. So I'm writing this during a break from the cleaning. Now, people would have you understand that dust is mainly human skin (ew), but this piece of popular wisdom - like its friends the Inuit words for snow and the number of spiders people eat every year - is hogwash. Household dirt is, erm... dirt. Dirt dirt. Soils, mainly; which is to say teeny-weeny baby pebbles minute enough to be airborne. When the still corners of your house fill with dust the process involved is mainly geological, not biological, though biology is never far behind. Just imagine what would happen to our familiar urban settings if all humans simply disappeared in an instant. Our houses would soon fill with unchallenged dust and dirt, and this in turn would create crèches for bacteria, moulds and mites and so forth. Soon larger plants would join the party and a pioneering selection of epifauna and insects would arrive on the scene to take advantage of the new facilities. And so it would go on. There are untold hundreds, perhaps thousands of abandoned villages in my part of the world where no such imagining is necessary. Houses abandoned a hundred years ago and more are not just packaged in flamboyant foliage, but on occasion they are lifted wholesale into the air by arrogant, turn-coat trees that once found welcome shelter in the damp shade of that erstwhile dwelling. The scene reminds me of heads on spikes on some mediaeval bridge. Roots, now grey themselves and full of years, spill over foundation walls, while vines climb high and trip over themselves in the hope of finding higher purchase an inch beyond their blind, stretch-finger reach. But the image I want to draw here is not a negative one. The Buddhists know that the rocks lie until they become men, and the Christians tell of how their deity fashioned the first human from long forgotten clays of the Mesopotamian flood plains. In similar fashion I know that as my house gets dirty, this is the first whisper of nature's attempt at renewal, to breathe life into these few cubic metres that I, on borrowed time, chose to keep artificially barren. The arrival of dirt is the first step in a process that would put hippos back in the Thames and have bears roam the dense, deciduous forests of Manhattan. Think about this next time you clean something, for it's a warm, happy thought. Dirt and dust, you see, is the Earth constantly asking you to give back what is hers. She can have my house. But not quite yet. In fact she can have me. But not quite yet. So for the time being, I guess I'd better get back to the cleaning. Bye for now.

:::January::::::::::

Mise en Bouteille
The Val d'Aran is a remote valley in mountainous northwest Catalonia, and is home to about seven thousand people. The valley is remarkable, not least because it is the only place that the Aranese language is spoken, isolated and protected from the world until the opening of a tunnel in the south back in 1948. More remarkable yet is the fact that it hosts the headwaters of two rivers, only a hundred yards apart, one of which -the Noguera Palleresa- flows south into the Mediterranean, while the other -the Garonne- flows in the opposite direction toward a wholly different destiny in France. In the Val d'Aran the Garonne is a bright and humble stream you can jump across, inhabited by blue-purple dragonflies as large as your hand and little frogs that make a noise like a door closing when they croak. But the nascent river seems to know it is bound for greatness, and it dashes due north, collecting tributaries like the Neste, the Arize and the beautiful Ciron on its journey. By the time it reaches Toulouse it is a fine, rich river, laden with minerals and clays from the highlands it has left behind. The Garonne here is wide enough for boats, and indeed the Annales Bertiniani report that over a thousand years ago in the spring of 844, Viking longboats appeared in Toulouse, to the great shock of the locals, before turning around and heading back out to sea over 200 miles away. Surprisingly, Toulouse was asleep during the Industrial Revolution so the river passes through it largely untamed by canals and docks and weirs, and with this lucky escape on its mind it turns left to head northwest to the Atlantic, culminating in an estuary so wide and deep that ocean-going vessels regularly travel 40 miles inland as far as the impossibly lovely city of Bordeaux. Well, Bordeaux is where I wanted to bring you to, but I have yet to say why. The fact is that I'm in Bordeaux now, and I'm a couple of glasses of wine the merrier after a magical evening with old friends. The local vineyards that cultivated the grape for this wine are arguably the best in the world, set like patchwork across the fertile lands of the Garonne's ancient floodplain, exactly half-way between the equator and the north pole. In fact, red wine from Bordeaux even enjoys its own name in English: claret (pronounced to rhyme with 'carrot', not with 'array'). It's time for me to grab a book and go to bed now, and though I may be excessively romantic at times, I do hope the wine will afford me gentle dreams of the Garonne, and lead me back up past Toulouse where the Vikings went, and into the mountains, which I miss so terribly, with their blue-purple dragonflies and frogs that make a noise like a door closing. See you there? Thanks for reading, and goodnight X

"I can certainly see that you know your wine. Most of the guests who stay here wouldn't know the difference between Bordeaux and Claret."
John Cleese (Basil Fawlty)
Fawlty Towers


Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana
On this very night, exactly 71 years ago, a violent storm rolled in from the Bay of Biscay, making landfall somewhere in the Basque Country to the west of the Pyrenees. Virulent and relentless, as if scripted for the events of the night, it made its way southward up the river valleys toward the high plains of Castile, flooding the terraces of almond groves and cherry orchards as it went, and making tumbling rivulets along the gravel streets of the whitewashed towns and villages below. One of the villages in its path was Poyales del Hoyo in the northern province of Avila. Back in the 1930s, it was little more than a few dozen simple rustic houses and utility buildings encircling a large 'era' or threshing floor, which people had co-opted as a central square. Then as now, a single mud road led in and out of the village, skirting the foothills of the Gredos mountains on its way to other, larger settlements in the east. In the small hours of the night, at the height of the storm, a dark van came lurching through the potholes and puddles, its windscreen wipers hardly up to the job of letting the driver see through the rain. It crunched to a halt on the threshing floor, whereupon somewhere between 5 and 10 men -witness accounts differ- jumped out of the rear and made their way in turn to each of three houses. First they went to Pilar's house. Pilar was 43, and was one of the few people in the village who knew how to read. Some months previously, to her defining misfortune, she had taken out a subscription to the newspaper El Socialista. Next, the men strode over to Virtudes' house. Virtudes was a Protestant, fifty-something, and people say she used to bathe naked in a secluded stream outside the village. Finally they went to Valeriana's house. She was 26, pregnant, and the only known grievance against her was that she once had an affair with a local man before either of the them were married. The men dragged the three women, still in their night clothes, through the torrential winter rain to a large barn where a priest was waiting to hear their confession. No one knows what went on inside. They were then forced into the van with the men and driven to a point a mile down the dirt road. Virtudes and Pilar were shot in the head and Valeriana, the youngest and prettiest was murdered in a way I cannot describe on my general-audience page. The elderly farmer who discovered the bodies the next day dug a shallow grave for them in the spot where they were killed, by the side of the road. And there their bodies lay for two-thirds of a century, until their reburial a few short years ago. The men from the van were Falangistas - supporters of Franco's fascist National Catholicism, the regime that was to rule Spain until the dictator's death in 1975. To my mind, the tragedy of Spain is not in the brutality of the deaths I have described above - they were repeated endless times all over Spain and both sides of the conflict often acted with similar inhumanity. Nor is it in the uncontroversial datum that the Fascists killed twice as many men, women and children as the opposing Communists and Anarchists. Nor even is it in the fact that the Fascists' cruelty was official - pondered, sponsored, planned and meditated for decades. The tragedy - the pain I feel for this pseudo-country, with its several nations cobbled together by bureaucrats, armies and lies to make a political fiction called Spain, comes from the fact that all the Fascists who fell have their bodies lying in cemeteries and in churches, with plaques and honours and monuments, where their families can find them and sit with them, or leave them flowers. The others, like Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana, are still lying in shallow graves by roadsides, stuffed down wells or piled into mass graves in the forests. Still. That means today. There is nothing like this in Western Europe. You see, while Germany and Italy learned to revile their fascist dictators, to punish the guilty and to cleanse their soul, Spain decided to just hush. No witch-hunt, no finger-pointing, no retribution. Don't talk about the bodies in the fields. Don't talk about whether your father killed my father. Turn away and move on. Hushhhhhh. So, since I don't want to hush, this little blog entry is my homage to Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana, and to all the women that were killed in the Spanish Civil War because they were of the wrong religion, because they could read, because they were educated, because they were dissenters, because they were gay, because they were bright, because they didn't like fascism, or because they fell in love with the wrong people. I think your names should be on a monument. That way, I could bring you flowers. X

:::December::::::::::

Dream
So it's March 7th, 322 BC. I'm wearing something skimpy and Greek; bright and white on my olive skin. In the sun it contrasts rebelliously with my black Mediterranean hair, blown forward over my face by a strong sea breeze. My dark blue eyes -a legacy of some Bronze Age merchant who rolled in the hay with an ancestor of mine- look out across the bay from my cliff-top vantage point. Far below is Aristotle, wholly absorbed in thought, as he draws lines in the sand with a stick, describing new geometries never before considered by our species. The Romans are coming up the beach -they're the baddies- and they're grumpy because of Aristotle's role in working out the physics of weaponry. In a panic I rush down to the sand and grab Aristotle's arm to tell him he must come with me immediately. For a moment his eyes meet mine. I know all I have is that one moment to make him understand. And I want my eyes to say, "Look, I am eclipsed by you, I worship you, I know how important this work is, I love you, I'm the only woman that will ever really love you, you don't know me, and I know you know worlds far beyond my reckoning. But now please come or they will kill you." But he shakes free and turns back to his lines in the sand. He dies because I can't shout with my eyes. I've had this dream off and on for as long as I can remember. I just had it and woke up with a start. Weird.

:::November::::::::::

Watch
I love reading old stuff. Really old stuff. I love the way someone's ancient thoughts can be portioned out and stuffed into the tupperware of written words, and then set loose to float along on the patient current of time. Time carries them far into the writer's future, and the journey is free, if dangerous and tremendously uncertain. But sometimes the current brings the words intact to our present, to the time of the writer's dimly-imagined far-off progeny, and we can read the thoughts of years, centuries, millennia ago, defying death and distance, connecting one-on-one with a long gone human. I've always thought it's a shame it's so unidirectional, though - I mean, you can't talk back to the writer. It's like unrequited love, or being a hmmm-only shrink while someone pours their heart out to you. Anyway, the next time you read something way old, at least dating from before the widespread use of artificial lighting, I invite you to look out for something. You'll find it hiding in the scattered written works of Antiquity, and lurking in the lofty tomes of classical times. It's mentioned obliquely in the few desperate scrolls and parchments that remain from the chaotic Dark Ages when the Roman Empire went pear-shaped; and you'll find it scrawled in crumbling margins dating from the church-controlled mediaeval periods that our world is still crawling out of, screaming, etched there in silence by nameless monks with gall-ink pens, damned with barren, loveless, quiet lives. In fact, it only disappears when the electric lights come on. It is as old as mankind, and may even predate us by millions of years. And it has to with sleep. It's called 'watch'. You see, nowadays we think that a single 8 hour stretch of shut-eye is the best, most universal, perhaps the only real way of sleeping - but this is far from true. Other patterns exist, the most famous being the beloved siesta, which comes from the Latin word 'sexta' meaning 'sixth', and referred to the sixth hour of a Roman's day - to be spent contentedly napping. Fragmenting your daily sleep in this fashion was once a most normal state of affairs, and can apparently be taken to the extreme of sleeping for about 15 minutes every 4 hours -a practice worth considering if only for the fact that it provides you with decades more waking hours in your life. But as I said above - what you have to look out for in the old literature is reference to the phenomena of 'first sleep', 'second sleep', and between them the period of wakefulness known as 'watch'. It seems that once, people used to sleep for a few hours, at night, and then get up and go about their business. In the wee hours, they might cook and eat and drink and talk in a sort of glorified ante litteram fridge-raiding fest that is sadly lost to our custom. And then they'd go back to bed, and sleep the remainder of the night. Well, I'm awake right now. It's 4am, and rather than call it insomnia, I call it watch, which makes me feel instantly better, and invites me to put the time to good use, such as writing my blog. I can't sleep and I know it's because I currently seem to have a number of independent misunderstandings with people all around me, and that denies me a restful night's shuteye. Either way, now that I've used my watch to eat and write, I'm almost ready for my 'second sleep'. But you should know that watch isn't just about eating and writing. Old texts tell of how in the Middle Ages the peasants came back from the fields at sundown, exhausted, and simply hit the sack there and then. And in the middle of the night they would wake up and they would make their love. And this, I think, is how love should sometimes be made. Sleepily and beautifully in the dead of night, unfettered by the full light of consciousness. I'm going to bed now to drift off with a very old book, but one day I'll have another use for these hours of vigil. I'm sure of it. Watch.

:::October::::::::::

Voyage
Fourteen ninety-seven, perhaps because of a boldness lent to people by the proximity of a close of century, of a half millennium, was a year of great voyages. Cabot left England for Canada, Vasco de Gama left Portugal for India, and the Jews left Syria for anywhere. Copernicus voyaged vicariously into space with his first astronomical observations, and Amerigo Vespucci set sail for the continents that now bear his name. For me, though, for my green, white, grey-brown, mountainous corner of the Earth, it was the beginning of a slow decadence that is still unfolding, and which has affected me this very week. You see, before 1497, Perpignan -now a smallish city on the Mediterranean coast of France- had been a gleaming jewel of southwest Europe. It was, even if rather bizarrely, the capital city of the distant island kingdom of Majorca, out in the blue sea, at a day's sailing, far beyond the horizon. That year, however, the territory fell to the Spanish crown. Catalonian independence was lost, and a frenzy of to-ing and fro-ing ensued over the following centuries until, eventually, Perpignan and the surrounding region came to rest under French control, as they remain today. In the meantime, the Catalans who lived there -of whom I am a cultural, linguistic and blood descendant- were disinherited, slowly forgetting their language and history in the cities and towns, and eventually calling someone else's past -that of France- their own. As a girl, my parents would take me sometimes in the car, down from the high scattered villages of the eastern Pyrenees, into Perpignan. As we followed the valleys downward I would press my face to the car window in awe at what I saw, since every mile forward was like moving forward in time, into scenes I felt I knew very well, but only from TV. As we drove through the large towns of the foothills, I'd gawk at faces of Arabs who had come from Algeria to work in the vineyards, and as Perpignan itself grew close, I would stare at the black migrant workers, a reminder of France's colonial adventures in Africa. Satellite dishes appeared, cacophonous streets, crowded busses full of people with rich clothes and sometimes haughty Parisian accents. 'Parihhhhhh', they would call the French capital, with a kind of gentle rasp at the end, and I practiced under my breath trying to pronounce it as they did. As we walked through the streets I would talk excitedly to my dad about what I saw. We would go into shops and my father would address the assistants in Catalan, but more often than not they would reply in French, and sometimes they would ask him please to speak in French too. Sadly, I soon internalised the idea that Catalan was a lesser tongue - speaking it was a sign of poverty, of being from the hills, of being inbred, of being stupid, of being a gypsy. Once, while in Perpignan my father asked me, in Catalan as always, if there was anywhere else I wanted to go before leaving. When he asked, I recall very clearly, there was a small group of boys, my age, right next to us, and I found myself answering my dad in French, mortified that the boys would think me some provincial villager. My dad looked at me, but said nothing. I know I disappointed him terribly. It was the first, and I think only time I ever spoke to him in that language, other than for politeness in the presence of monolingual francophone company. And how different this all was with my mother. I speak only English to her, an Irishwoman, and in Perpignan the shop assistants treated us regally -they still do- assuming, perhaps, that we were foreign tourists with lots of money to spill into their premises. English was the language of sophistication, trumping French with its exoticism. When I spoke it, I felt superior, more glamorous. I even felt my skin colour was lighter. And of my Catalan, I was ashamed. And now, from this distance, I am ashamed that I was ashamed, and I hate -and work to redress- the world that abused my childish mind into capturing and operating by such hateful, twisted thoughts. Who did this and why and how dare they? A week ago I had to write to Perpignan for some small matter of administrative paperwork. I wrote to them, of course, in normative Catalan. The reply came back that there was no one in the office who could understand it - could I please write back in French? So you see, 1497 was a year of voyages. The voyage of the Catalan language out of Perpignan started in that year, and is now all but over. There are few speakers left now. Just us. You could fit us all in a couple of football stadiums. We are the poor from the hills, the inbred, the stupid, and the gypsies. Demise is a breath way. It's not just a pity, it's a severance with the past, a passing. In the words of poet Mary Oliver "Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?"


Cracks
Sometimes, in the morning, my eyes flutter open and find the texture on the ceiling above my bed. The cracks and ripples in the paintwork look bigger and more severe than they truly are, with the tiny relief discovered by the low, fresh Scandinavian sun. And I'll lie there, perfectly still, resisting the temptation to rub my face or yawn or stretch. If you saw me, if anyone saw me at that moment, they'd never know I had adenine where God had figured on guanine. You see, there's a typo in my DNA. A faulty manuscript that somehow got printed. Other mornings I'll forget myself and just jump out of bed - or try to. Have you ever had a cold and tried to sing? You aim at one note, and a sound you didn't expect or plan for comes out of your mouth, and you are startled by its incongruity. This is a lot like that. In my mind's eye I'm already half-standing before I realise that my legs, heavy as gold, are still more or less where they were, caught up lazily in the night-twisted bed sheets. So I take stock, sit up slowly and swivel my torso, and place my feet squarely on the warm wooden floor. I prepare to stand, unaided. Like the story of the farmer who raises a calf above his head every day, I know there will come the day when I won't be able to do it any more. But as I breathe in, a scene from a Lord of the Rings movie always appears, annoyingly and uninvited, in my head. Viggo Mortensen is giving a stirring speech to his men before battle, and he rides up and down saying something like 'There may come a day when...' something-or-other, '...but that is not this day'. And so I hear in my head: 'That day is not this day', and I rise. Slowly, and with no stick - such things have no place in the bedroom- I make my way over to the full-length mirror and look at myself. I look at myself in two ways, in turn. First I peer at my upper arms and legs with horrible, critical, disapproving eyes. These eyes would be glad, absolutely overjoyed, to find a visible hint of thinness, any whisper of wasting. The sun is their ally, obliging every dimple and fold in my skin to betray the lie of the muscle below, as I tense and relax my limbs in every possible configuration. And if these eyes find nothing, no sign that it's sooner rather than later that my body -and me with it- will have to just sit all day of every day, then I change to my soft eyes. My soft eyes look at the reflection, and wonder whether it is beautiful. Some days I almost think it is; some days, in truth, I do think it is, but the phrase 'beautiful but not desirable' invades me from where it lives and breeds in my untended psyche and violates or at best colours my search for physical esteem. Behind it, from the same hole, come its children-words, qualifications like 'still' and 'despite'. Occasionally those words drag whole thoughts behind them, and they all sit in my head together in a horrible concerto. I feel a sudden kick of urgent adrenaline in my stomach as I think of how much I have to do and experience physically. In how little time. I must elect beaches for the ever fewer summers -perhaps single figures now- that I can walk well along them. Mountains for the concluding seasons that I can walk uphill any distance from the car and feel that rightness of being alone with Nature. There are so many more cities with streets I need to stroll along in late evenings, ideally hand in hand with someone I think I have still to find - and that someone will be by my side, where I can turn my head and see his or her face, and not behind me, pushing me, while dignity no longer comes free. I close my eyes to refocus on the day. I turn away and I make my way over to my exercise bike and get on. I will be here for at least twenty minutes, so don't distract me. This is not negotiable. Not under any terms, ever. I will spend at least twenty minutes cycling, and if I am too ill to cycle, I will still cycle. Let me make myself more ill, if necessary, but the cycling stays. Some days it is easy, sometimes I think I actually fall back asleep on the bike. Sometimes I read. But some days, if I have exerted myself too much the day before, or if I have the obligation of making up for too little gym time over the previous week, it hurts. One day in maybe ten I cry. But that's really okay. I hear some women cry every day. The cycling done, I shower, usually seated after the exhaustion of the bike, like someone three times my age. And then I make breakfast. If I can I'll see if anyone is online as I eat. And then I'll get ready. I'll paint my face and by the time I'm done my arms ache with the effort of holding them up so long. But I like to look nice, and appreciate the confidence it gives me. I dress, with clothes that, if I'm honest, reflect a little vanity. Vanity that covers over the cracks of pity and fear, and, though the word play here is easy, fear of pity. I select a walking stick. The best days are the days when it has been raining, because then I can use an umbrella instead. But otherwise, I have four sticks that I like, if 'like' is the right word. I pick one, idiotically I know, based on the colour of my clothes - as if being coordinated in such a manner were somehow chic. I remember a line from a House episode: 'Does this stick make me look fat?' But no criterion other than that of colour occurs to me, much as I wish it would. And then finally I open my front door. I smile at the world. I assume my fiction that all is as it should be. And I sit in that fiction, and talk from it all day. People like a little Hollywood. Moving, plastic, paint-by-numbers leitmotifs of overcoming adversity, and having it all make you into a better, deeper, more compassionate person. It's not untrue. It does make you into a better person. But I'm tired of being seen through that lens. Muscular dystrophy is a bitch, and, just in case you ever doubted, I'd give anything, anything, for another go at life without it. I'm sorry if I've shared too much. I've had a horrid day. If you've read this far, thank you.


Me to you
This is my second love letter to you. And I do not know how to write it. I wish an exception could be made, an exemption, just for me, just for today, such that you could know the content of my heart and mind without having to perceive it through the inadequate and clumsy old glass window of my words.
Clumsy. I don't know that clumsy is the word. I feel like I'd feel if I wore expensive shoes and cheap perfume. The shoes let me follow you everywhere in comfort, and even make me look elegant in repose. Yet I fear that if I draw too close you will breathe my scent, and know, suddenly, that I am less than I appear, less than I have ever wanted to be.
And so here I stand, at the point where the forces, the push and pull, the desire and fear, the longing and the fleeing, are equal and opposite. At this place, at least, I can be at rest, quietly balanced, until another 'I love you' sends me spiralling, heady, anew.
And despite it all, I love this moment. I love now. There is nothing in the world save you, me and my will to talk of this. No future, no distraction, just this. Like running for a train. Like the moment between breathing out and breathing in. A mayfly of bliss. A moment of you. And oh I do love you. I think I love you in the way that winter gives up April, softly and inevitably. Or the manner in which people sometimes tell secrets to strangers: candidly and unexpectedly. Recklessly, even.
I can't expect you to know the magnitude of what I would trade just to make real a scene I have in my mind. Naked, we both. Your head on my tummy, like a pillow. And I'd read to you. A poem, a short story. And I'd know, as I read, that we were both in the same place, thinking like-things. One. I couldn't hope to be closer to you. And if I hold this scene in my mind, and if I dare, and if the mood takes me, I imagine myself running my fingers through your hair as I read, hoping you like it. And then our fingers interlock. And my stomach tightens. And our grip tightens. And then. Then I am lost in you. I am suddenly bold. Moved. Aroused. Yearning. Oh my love. The simple conjured image of my breast against yours... sends me, sends me, sends me. Am I saying too much? I cannot know. But I must be brave, and err on the side of speaking. Just know that this is truly new to me, this flavour of love, and its imperceptible frontier with heated passion. And I present it to you with all the innocence that comes with newness, and all the wonder that attends the unprecedented, even if this is in the tiny history of one woman.
You, my love, will know I am never lonely, since I always have myself. But you have discovered for me a new way in which I can be terribly unaccompanied. And so, softly and inevitably, I ache for you. Candidly and unexpectedly, I desire you. Clumsy but not unbeautiful in my expensive shoes and cheap perfume, right now, right here, and accepting of every consequence, I love you.

Mireia



:::September::::::::::

The Land and the Free
Mohammed -we're told- once cut off the sleeve of his tunic rather than disturb a cat that had fallen asleep on it. I'm faced with an analogous situation right now, my skirt pinned to a bench by a napping feline who has crept up next to me, as cats do, and set up shop. Alas I lack the patience and consideration of the Prophet, and the animal has only until I finish this paragraph until the slumber party is over. This heat-seeking fur-ball is one of untold numbers of feral cats that reside in one of the modern world's most remarkable enclaves, which, by chance more than by foresighted intent, just happens to be a short walk from my house. This is Christiania, Europe's largest, oldest and totally coolest hippie commune. It is a self-declared 'free-state' flying its own yellow-spotted flag and operating under its own rules, underpinned by the maxims of peace and free-love. There are no cars in Christiania, and the buying and selling of property is absolutely prohibited - people are allotted space according to their requirements. Governance of a kind is executed through a weekly assembly representing the 800 or so people who live in the scattered, often exquisitely painted dwellings strewn across what was once an abandoned naval base in the heart of Copenhagen, and is now verdant woodland and gleaming lake. Indeed, its very location is a source of simmering trouble. Evermore, the powers that be appear to have their eye on all that lovely real estate plonk in the middle of the capital city, and this has induced the commune residents to close ranks and show their teeth. Recent riots hit the international news after officials went in to close down a centre there, and the streets around my home still show the scars of molten tar where the residents erected flaming barricades along their borders. For what it's worth, I like it here tremendously, inside Christiania. The people, by and large, are overwhelmingly kind, and as my now local face has become more familiar to them, I have had ample demonstration that they genuinely believe in and act in consequence with the flower power principles they extol. Despite the perennial squabbles with the government, Denmark in general is a fine country, and I deeply admire the importance given to real freedom, so very unlike the drum-beating overtures made to it in many other countries. Time magazine (September 17, 2007, p14) reports on the findings of the Worldwide Governance Report, which ranks countries 'according to the amount of freedom citizens have to voice opinions and select a government.' While the USA comes in a sobering 35th place in the world (please guys, take stock), Denmark comes top. I'm not surprised at this supreme ranking. It is this kind of consensus feeling that people should do as they will that allows Chrisitania to survive and prosper. Of course Denmark has hit the headlines recently for quite another matter - that of the cartoons depicting Mohammed. I'll avoid sounding off on the subject here for concern of stepping on the IMVU TOS, but I think it fair to say that an attempt to describe the abyss between the two cultures in conflict would leave many groping for superlatives. I lack patience with oppression in any guise, and even this cat has nailed me to the spot for quite long enough. In a moment I'll push him gently away, and walk back home through the woodlands of Christiania, offering a smiley 'Hej!' as I go to admirable people who have the substance and conviction to remind us, without posturing or fanfare, that life can of course be lived in may ways, but is best lived free.

:::August::::::::::

New World My word. Now that was what I call exciting. I write this returning home, hurtling along, splashing through time zones over the North Atlantic. I'm a mile up in the air, and slightly nauseous, on my flight back to Denmark. I think it's the thrill. I'm exhausted and affected after a thrilling two week trip to the Americas, and I've come away with extraordinary memories and a rather good job offer, which in all likelihood will have me returning soon as a permanent resident of Chicago. But that's all by-the-by. Lemme tell you about my trip. I flew in to Chicago and followed the idiot-proof signs to take a train to somewhere in the city centre. I got off the train and after looking around I decided I was officially clueless and so I stopped a random American in the bustling street with a request: to point me in the right direction to continue my journey. If you do this in Europe you either get a concise and unobtrusive response or you are presented with a series of questions about where you come from, what your business is, what age you stopped wetting the bed. But this particular (gorgeous hunk of a) guy came through just right, Goldilocks-style, answering my question (which way was the lake?) and going on to inquire as to where exactly I needed to be. He then gallantly pulled my suitcase for a block, manifestly secure enough in his sexuality to be undaunted by the tasteful bubble-gum pink finish. The number 6 bus was packed to the gills and beyond. Intrigued, I noticed that being on the number 6 is a good predictor of one's ethnicity. If a human is on the number 6 in Chicago in August 2007, a significant portion of his or her genes is most likely to have spent the Pleistocene south of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, number 6 bus rides seem to say nothing about one's age or sex. I have yet to ride number 6's in other cities, so I don't know if this applies generally. Either way, the bus driver kindly indicated to me that the Museum of Science and Industry was coming up, so I hopped off. And there it was. Lake Michigan in all its glory. I scurried my way over to the waterfront and peeled off my dress with gay abandon, to reveal a last season's KC bikini which I had been cunningly wearing underneath my clothes all the way from a grotty airport toilet in Munich. Off came my shoes and in I splashed. It felt so good in the lake it should probably be illegal. When I eventually crawled out of the water lung-fish-style I lay for a while belly-up on the sand. My jet-lagged body was screaming at me that it was midnight, while the hot 5pm sun was soaking into my bones. Real what's-wrong-with-this-picture stuff. Priceless. Yes, I had arrived in America. I have an old friend who works in the aforementioned Museum of Science and Industry. We studied Linguistics in London together back in the day. I moseyed on over to the Museum and rooted her out, and once the hugs and catch-up stories abated she asked me why I was soaking wet. I explained that I'd been swimming in the lake. She took one step back and ew-ed, explaining that the lake was grossly polluted - something to do with bird-pooh. I can't recall the exact superlative, whether it was the worst lake, the worst day this year, the meanest gulls or what, but I do remember that it was all pretty horrible and I knew I needed a shower fast. She took me to her place, handed me a glass of enthusiastically overpriced Spanish wine and I promptly fell asleep on her sofa, complete with my coating of bio-hazard gull-droppings. Ick ick ick. The following morning I did Chicago stuff. I went up skyscrapers, checked out the architecture and whistle-stopped the main attractions. In the afternoon I met up with a journalist friend of mine. She and I first met quite by chance when she was covering the Pope's visit in Valencia, and she stayed in my house for the duration. I was excited to learn that later that very afternoon she was going out on the lake in a big ole sail boat belonging to a certain local politician -would I like to come along? Hell yeah. Now while I know you know that Chicago is the 'Windy City', you may not know that this appellation has little to do with climate. Rather, a New York journalist coined the term with reference to what terrible 'wind-bags' Chicago's political elite are. This, for what it's worth, was also my experience. And now they have yachts and perfect day-glo white teeth too. The view of the city from out in the lake, though, is truly breathtaking. It reminded me, incongruously, of the view of the high-rise Hades of Benidorm, seen from Benidorm Island. Still jet-lagged and dazed, I had to leave for Omaha, Nebraska, the next day. Omaha is about as far away from the sea as you can get anywhere on Earth. In that sense Nebraska is to North America what Chad is to Africa. Omaha owes its success as a city to that very centrality - hosting, as it does, Strategic Air Command and a bunch of nuclear missile silos. An American flag is, if not obligatory, then standard fitting outside the patriotic houses of Omaha. Downtown is an empty and rather ugly hull, and the surroundings are smothered with strip-malls and acres of parched parking lots. The whole, I found, was unattractive. I spent several days in Omaha giving a course and hanging out with a few fine academics who invariably displayed that boundless generosity to me which one often finds in Americans. Sometimes, a bubbly and delightful shopkeeper would engage me in lively conversation, usually beginning with an inquiry about my accent (when speaking English my accent is Irish), but in general I felt foreign and lonely in Nebraska, and the days passed slowly as the unrelenting cicadas screamed their horny prowess from every tree. To help me pass the time I went on a few outings hither and yon. First, I went to the Durham Western Heritage Museum. Well worth a visit. The section on the War of Independence was enjoyable, if peddling an expected bias. No mention that said War cannot be properly understood without perceiving it as a civil war, in which brother fought brother and each side was sponsored by a different state (France or England); no mention that the Boston Tea Party was an example of big business starting wars for profit (Iraq, anyone?); no mention that the outcome was an absolute unmitigated calamity for African and Native Americans. Speaking of Indians, the section on the Omaha Indians was similarly skewed. Lashings of white liberal guilt mixed with misunderstanding. Not mentioned at the Omaha museum is the fact that the Omaha Indians were so shattered by repeated cycles of disease and ill-treatment that they actively decided to go into suicidal battle to kill themselves off and end their millennial history, rather than live in such wretched misery and subjugation. They made their own choices to the very last, and simply re-telling the old 'living lightly on the land' story hides that sobering and proud fact and affords them no special dignity. Anyway, all this is not a criticism - if you left a Museum of Catalan History in my hands I don't suppose you get a very unbiased picture either. My high point in Omaha was to be an open-air concert. The Plain White T's were playing Memorial Park and I went along. Unfortunately, after the warm-up bands had done their thing an extraordinarily violent thunderstorm happened along. People went hurrying into the toilets for shelter and peered out at the rain like barn animals. I didn't find that idea very dignified so, already soaking wet, I sat under a tree with a Dostoyevsky paperback, no doubt looking cool and interesting. No sooner was I comfortable than a spotty kid came by and told me merrily that during the 4th July celebrations someone had been struck by lightning while standing under that very tree. I decided to move on. After a few days in Nebraska I had to go down to Little Rock, Arkansas. In an effort to fit in in the Confederacy, I rented a white Chevy pick-up to drive down south in. At first, driving an automatic (no gear lever) freaked me out entirely (the damned things move forward as soon as you take your foot off the brake - stay still, dammit) but later I found there were advantages to having a whole arm free your entire journey. One might variously drink, eat, scratch and groom oneself or otherwise make offensive hand gestures at other drivers. This last is especially useful in Arkansas. For some transient indecisive driving on my part, born of not knowing where in hell I was going, I was called a 'f***ing tard' by a gentleman driving a Chevy not unlike mine. On seeing that he was addressing a lady he modified the epithet somewhat to 'tard bitch'. I was so utterly taken aback that I missed the moment to produce a sharp-tongued witty come-back, but I entertained myself thinking of what I might have said in response all the way to the state capital Little Rock. Little Rock itself is, if I can be forgiven for voicing so brash an opinion, singularly unlovely. I don't know whether it was the crippling heat, witnessing what passes for food at an institution called 'Denny's', or seeing road-kill used as baskets, but it really is a corner of the world I wouldn't want to call home. The exception, as so often, was the people, who were profusely welcoming and warm. I went to a Mexican restaurant called Señor Tequila where I was treated regally by the Mexican staff (who had rarely heard a Spanish accent in Spanish, let alone the caramel tones of my Catalonian one, and apparently found it endearing). In general, I find, waiters in America are an extraordinary group. They always seem climactically happy that I have actually chosen to sit at a table under their watch, as if my mere presence in their restaurant had revealed to them the cosmic godhead. They laugh way too loudly at my jokes and at times I suspect them of Prozac abuse. I don't see how else they could be so effervescently obsequious on minimum wage. But then again I come from a country where to get a waiter's attention you have to marry into the family. Anyway, at Señor Tequila, I saw another lady eating alone with a small child, so I struck up conversation. Black and radiant with that beautifying glow unique to the pregnant, she gave me her take on life in Arkansas, local and personal history and racial tension. I told her about Catalonia and Denmark and my visit. Our conversation not over when the restaurant closed, she invited me to dine at her place the following day. I found her house with some difficulty, but was treated to a unique afternoon of rich and unfamiliar foods, illuminating conversation and attentive company, and to boot, her younger sisters corn-rowed my hair and did all kinds of funky stuff to my nails. I had absolutely never looked so cool and knew that looking like that no one in Arkansas could possibly dare call me a tard bitch anymore. While driving back from Arkansas I heard about the Peruvian earthquake on the radio. In a flurry, I called my journalist friend in Chicago and learned that she was flying out there the next day. I got on to the editors at the two publications I write for in Catalonia and told them I could be in Peru shortly if they could pay for my transport. The previous sentence actually makes it sound like I didn't beg a little. A lot actually. The upshot is that they agreed and I went. Well, the scenes I saw fill my head every time I close my eyes, and I've written about that elsewhere. It certainly wasn't my dream first visit to Peru, in which I had imagined myself roaming the Nazca Plateau and canoeing across Lake Titicaca into Bolivia. In Peru I had my bag stolen, with all my money and notes and sundry whatnots, and well as all my clothes. My only regret is that I wasn't carrying more cash and my only hope that the taker was the neediest rather than just the most shrewd. I also lost a walking stick in Peru, which, you can believe me, was a real, real bummer. Initially I compensated by employing a shaft of wood as a staff, which made me look like something out of the Old Testament, an air accentuated by the scenes of destruction around me. Before leaving I appropriated a length of wood from what was once the roof of some poor bastard's home. I'm having it treated and fashioned into a new stick in Denmark. Back in Chicago, and rather crestfallen from our Peruvian experience, my friend and I decided to drive up to Milwaukee for their annual 'Irish Fest', a kind of cultural fair celebrating the Emerald Isle. This was hilarious. I wasn't sure whether to consider the whole affair some risibly hopeless parody of 'Oirish' folklore, or a legitimate expression of roots by the descendents of Irish immigrants. Both maybe. At different points in the afternoon, my Irish accent earned me a free coffee and a pink baseball cap with 'Irish Princess' emblazoned across it. I wear it with pride as I write. In my final days in the New World, I flew down to Mexico to cover the hurricane. That was scary, but despite the nasty consequences, I admit to a deep love of extreme meteorological phenomena. I used to drive down to the south of Spain alone just to watch end-of-summer storms roll in from Africa, or sometimes, if the tempest struck at night, I would go and swim in the rain in an abandoned reservoir in the orange groves some 10 miles inland from Valencia. Regardless of my profound attraction for such things, certain responsible people get grumpy with me when I say I want to see a big-arse tornado, but I do. The power electrifies me to my core, and I relish seeing my planet so very alive. In fact, when I sent in the story about the hurricane to my editor, normally a most compliant individual, he told me to re-write it - it sounded like I was in love with the storm. He was right. So here I am, barrelling through the skies somewhere near Iceland. It really has been an exhausting two weeks. I started by saying that I'm going 'home', but I've flitted around the world so much that I'm not quite sure what 'home' is for me now. The Pyrenees, Barcelona, London, Rome, Valencia, Denmark, and now the States is calling. I don't think I need a fixed abode, but I miss a certain constancy of people in my surroundings. I miss that library of shared experience you can call upon with people you have known for a long time. Maybe that's why I like IMVU. You guys are always there, no matter where I go. Time to catch up on a little sleep. Thanks for reading. Catch you later, and I hope to see you online. X

Away
In a few hours I'm headed out to the airport, there to take a plane to Chicago, where I'll be staying (not counting excursions to Nebraska and Arkansas) until late August. Wake me up when we get there. Besos a todas y a todos, Mireia XXX

:::July::::::::::

Pirenaica Quickly. Give me your hand. Put it there, on my chest. Do you feel that? How it's racing? You see, after spending time in the lovely but oh-so-flat land of Denmark, I am very thankful to have an excuse this weekend to visit a village near the town where I was brought into the world. I love this place with a passion that transcends any telling, but I'm going to try, because I want you to see what I see. These are the Pyrenees. On a map, they draw a neat division between France and Spain, reaching from the Mediterranean coast to the Bay of Biscay in the Atlantic some 270 miles away to the west. They were thrown up in the Tertiary period, when Iberia smashed into the rest of Europe and buckled upwards at the edge under the inexorable pressure. A slow motion car crash, on-going, at the rate that fingernails grow, writ large upon the earth. Unlike other European mountain ranges, there is an almost total absence of great lakes here, and the altitude and rarity of passes is unheard of for such a great chain. But there is a large abundance of torrents, particularly on the French side, that form waterfalls high up in unreachable ravines of silver granite, and which can be heard sometimes when the wind brings their voice to the limestone valleys far below. Once, these mountains marked the end of Europe, and people spoke of Africa as lying to the south of them. Now they mark the end of nothing, and they divide nations like the Basques or the Catalans into different States, cutting them into humble pieces and weakening them as the centuries roll past. Other countries, they nourish and protect, like little Andorra that crouches in a single valley between its more powerful and bellicose neighbours, and which became so lost unto itself that it remained a feudal state until a generation ago. The best way to see them, to capture a little of their grandeur, is not by walking their slopes or skiing, or even by being particularly close to them. The best way, I think, is to take the train at dawn from Port-Bou north across the border to Perpignan. The mountains are distant, and they glow bright shades of magenta as the new sun reflects off their snowy peaks. They are so remote that, in the early light, the blue of the sky is not just above them and around them, but below them too, and the burning mountain tops look like floating islands of fire held up by some divine hand in the firmament, little pieces of blazing purgatory loose in heaven. Another way to see them, again without touching them, is to fly over them. This is best done at night, and preferably when there is no moon. Sometimes, from the plane, you can see the very stars reflecting off the ice, but mostly everything is black except for the amber lights of towns and roads that sprawl in tortured shapes along the valley floors. The lights look like embers smouldering in black coal, and the darkness between them is tangible and infinitely present, like the precious, ancient rock itself. If you come here, and you want to touch the mountains, then please do. For my part you are very welcome here, and if I find you, I shall invite you into my house, and cook for you, and give you a bed for the night. In turn I will ask you about the distant lands and cities you come from, what you do, and why you do it. If you ask me, I'll tell you what it's like to grow up here, in this long mountainous corridor of limestone, granite, meadow and ice. This, I will explain, is a world that never had a Middle Ages: fast sports cars hurry down the twisting roads to buy cheap tobacco or Viagra in Andorra, as if excusing the horses and mules that they overtake in their haste, pulling carts full of dates and almonds from the valleys. Sometimes, the horses are old and arthritic, and sometimes they are even the last of their family, or their race, the last in a line of horses with a pedigree so perfect it reaches back to the times when man first brought them here, millennia ago. In this world of old and new, the goats, I notice, are calmed by MTV, and when people occasionally make scarecrows, they use Coca-Cola cans on horizontal sticks for the bobbing hands. But even though you see signs of your world here, you will never know this land, not truly. You have to grow up here to know it. As a child, you have to have watched a cloud heave up and spill over a mountain top, and release its snow as the peak appears to puncture it, causing a long, fatal gash in its belly. And when the cloud begins to snow, it retracts slightly, recoils, as if in pain from the wound, and then gathers strength once more and tipples over the rise, perhaps into another country. You have to have watched the seasons turn, and seen spring wash up the slopes leaving a carpet of wild flowers behind it as it climbs, like tiny stars in the wake of a magic wand from a child's story. You have to feel how the summer rises from the valley floor and how the winter descends from the peaks, and how this up-down motion is a pulse of life as true and exact as any beating heart. As a child you have to have run up a mountainside to find the exact point where two neighbouring peaks appear to be in perfect alignment. And there you would leave a stone or a coin in the tall grass, and vow to use the alignment again one day to find the exact same spot anew, and recover the object you left. As a youth, you have to have climbed hundreds of feet to look for a lost goat. And when you found it, stranded on an inaccessible ledge with a broken leg and unable to descend, you need to have taken a rifle and shot it, and watched silently as its limp body tumbled into the clouds far below. You need to have seen summer tempests from above, and have watched the unruly clouds bustle into the valley beneath you like schoolchildren eager to explore every corner of a new room. You need to know not just the names of the mountains and passes as they appear on maps, but the local names, and you need to have named places yourself: little places like boulders, caves, and small ponds that appear one year when by some whim of nature a mountain stream adjusts its course. You need to have heard the old people remember their grandparents' tales that the Sun used to be just visible at dawn at a certain point on midsummer's day, and then realise that they have witnessed precession, the slow wobble in the orbit of the Earth itself, barely detectable as the aeons pass by. You need to have eaten the snow, and picked oranges from the trees, crushed almonds to make oil. You need to have pretended the mountains are everything: boats, whales, monsters, buildings in a city. You need to have sat motionless on a hot autumn day and heard the cooling sound of a torrent from high above you, knowing you could never find it if you tried. And if you say to me, now, yes, of course you can feel my pounding heart - but isn't that from the steep climb we have just made as we spoke, from the thin mountain air, from the exhaustion of my tired legs? Then I will say yes, you're right. And I'll know you have understood nothing.

Qui uenit in nomine Poloniae
In the year 20BC, two Indians travelled to Athens. One was a Buddhist philosopher, and the other a cultural ambassador. We know of the visit because the philosopher, in a scene reminiscent of a Rage Against The Machine album cover, took it upon himself to self-immolate, and his tomb became a gruesome tourist attraction of Antiquity, noted by many historians of the age. Word of the famous event would no doubt have reached Paul, and may be what he refers to obliquely in his first letter to the Corinthians: "though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profits me nothing." In fact, at Paul's time, Buddhists had been wandering all over the Middle East for many a century, and it is not surprising that a few aspects of Christianity should be born of its ancient influence. Indeed, the very idea of monks may ultimately be of Buddhist inspiration. Ideas that travelled from Far to Middle East often suffered mutilation on their westward way. For example, the grotesque (and philosophically and legally insupportable) notion that just thinking something bad is as wicked as actually doing it appears to be a corruption of the Buddhist concept that thought generates karma and thus has consequences. But the finest example of Buddhism-meets-Christianity goes hands-down to my man Saint Josaphat. Josaphat, so the Christian legend informs us, was a prince born in northern India, the only son of grumpy Christian-hating King Abenner. When Josaphat was born, astrologers gave his father some good news and some bad news. On the upside, Josaphat was destined to become a great man, while on the downside, he was to become a Christian. King Abenner freaked, and to forestall his son's conversion to Christianity, he kept the child inside the palace walls, surrounded by luxury and opulence. When Josaphat became a young man, he finally left the confines of the castle, and was shocked by the suffering he saw all around him. He met a monk, became a Christian, and lived the remainder of his life as a recluse. This story was extremely popular in the Middle Ages. In fact the Golden Age Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca even re-wrote it, setting it (weirdly) in Poland, and thus created his greatest and most famous work, Life is a Dream. But when the Buddhist scriptures were finally translated into European languages in the 19th century, there was a widespread and glance-exchanging you-gotta-be-kidding-me moment. Josaphat's story, minus the Christian bit, is clearly a re-telling of the biography of the Buddha. Even the very name 'Josaphat' is a Middle Persian corruption of the word 'Bodhisattva'. Succinctly put, the Buddha is a Catholic (and Eastern Orthodox) saint, complete with churches dedicated to him and a feast day in November. I'm delighted that the Buddha's life story can still be distinguished in Christian lore, even in this obscure, re-edited form. As Paul himself went on to say in that same Corinthian letter, "we see through a glass, darkly."


Septentrional
It's all but midnight. I'm peering through my misshapen kitchen window at the unflagging rain that has accompanied me almost since my arrival in Denmark. Strangers walk past in the street below, heads uncovered, oblivious. I'm slowly coming to appreciate that rain is quite different up here, in the north. In the Mediterranean, rain-wet cities look back at you in quiet, grey embarrassment, stripped of their happy protagonism. Here, though, rain is not an occasional disinherited visitor, but an intimate aspect of the scenery, a player, and the cities and their people look comfortable in it. The rain, I've decided, turns up the contrast and resolution settings of my surroundings, making them lucid and reflective; closer, even. So much cloud, however, takes the stars away, and