What can we do for Pere? Touching elbows just doesn’t cut it.The 80-year-old blacksmith, mop of grey curly hair, flat lip from pipe-smoking, easy smile and gentle nature, has gifted us more of his metal...

Six years ago I was emerging slowly from the fog and anxiety of the darkest of drug trips. A cocktail of morphine and other mind-boggling medications had my brain doing loop the loop, cartwheels and the...

I saw and stack logs on the dry stone wall. When will the music begin? The sun will rise soon. Then he is there, behind me, on the dead branches of a walnut tree strangled by ivy. The song thrush fills...

January 19, 2001 (2am)Twenty years ago we bounced up the track to this farmhouse. Our new home. It was pitch black and bitterly cold. But we could not have been happier. Life had just changed beyond our...

I appreciate the way some Catalan friends possess, in their succinct English, the gift of getting to the nub of a matter.“If your body is making a noise,” says our doctor Marta, glad of the opportunity...

When it comes home again for good (it may still be absent but remains deep in the DNA of this wild, wonderful country) I will rejoice.When, not if.The lynx, such a scarce, stunning creature, is emblematic...

Thank you Frida.Your self-effacing, sweeping memoir of living on a continent sliding towards disaster offers an engaging and at the same time shuddering perspective on the human condition and the ever-present...

I dig in the garden with my partner. At dusk we wander the farm. Sometimes we talk. We ache with age and labour, but we press on, gladly. We have a lot to do, much to plant and a great many things to abstain...