News from El Punt Avui

HEADING FOR THE HILLS

Watershed

I have stood many times on the red rock by the river, deep in the winter shadows. The sun never touches the base of this Priorat valley during the shortest days of the year. It can be unnervingly quiet...

THE CULTURAL TIGHTROPE

POWER to the people

HEADING FOR THE HILLS

David and Goliath

David is looking you full in the eye. Do not look away.You know me a little by now. I am, fundamentally, just like you. I love my family beyond words. I need and appreciate community. Living a loving,...

Long-term resident

Hell’s kitchen

As I write, scandal after scandal is bubbling its way up out of the darker conduits of the Spanish state, revealing a network of corruption, dirty tricks, coercion, blackmail, and illegal funding that...

THE LAST WORD

Sophie’s CHOICE

THE LAST WORD

TRY before you buy

THE CULTURAL TIGHTROPE

Fluency versus accuracy

In my work as a language and communication coach I endeavour to help my clients understand the difference between speed and fluency as communicators, and the need to monitor the former when we speak so...

Long-term resident

Universal WHINGE

There are days when the personal and the political mesh in a way that can only be described as immensely depressing. Days when I get tired of living in a state which locks people in jail cells for 22 hours...

HEADING FOR THE HILLS

Pagesos

My wife, my partner, my love, Maggie Whitman, is a fifth generation farmer. For the past twenty years, after a career in classical music, she has been a pagesa, most of them as a member of a sustaining...

All doom and gloom