Monthly Archives: December 2011
Rick Stein’s Spain
In case you missed it, try and pick up somewhere, sometime on Rick Stein’s Spanish Christmas shown last night on BBC 2. Rick, in my view, is the most human of ‘celebrity’ cooks, with a genuine interest in Spain’s culinary habits, and a deep respect for and understanding of how food and wine –in its varied manifestations-go to the heart of the country’s soul. As someone born in Spain to a Spanish mother and with many years of experience of living and working in the country, I felt privileged to …
Havel and a spy who came in from the cold
If I’d read the character in some spy novel, I would have thought him a figment of the writer’s imagination-so unlike he was from anything I had encountered thus far. It was in the early 1990’s and I was in Oxford attending a weekend conference on the changing post-Cold war intelligence landscape when a friend suggested there was someone among the foreign delegates I might be interested in meeting in a more relaxed atmosphere. I arrived one saturday evening at one of the town’s quieter pubs to find my friend …
Barca rules the World
On June 12th 1963, thousands packed the Camp Nou to watch FC Barcelona play Santos FC of Brazil in a friendly , and in particular one player called Edson Arantes do Nascimento Pelé. A year earlier, Santos had won the Brazil Cup, the Campeonato Paulista, the Copa Libertadores and the Intercontinental Cup.The Brazilian national side won the World Cup that same year. In the following season, Santos went on to win the Copa Brazil, the Libertadores and the Intercontinental Cup once again.At the Camp Nou, Barca won 2-0 and yet …
A Personal Tribute to Christopher Hitchens
The last time I spent any time with Christopher Hitchens was in the early summer of 2006. I was house-sitting in Georgetown researching a new book and he, with instinctive generosity towards a friend, insisted I’d come over to his apartment for supper ‘a deux’. I can’t remember what we ate. But I do remember we drank not insubstantial amounts of alcohol and consumed countless cigarettes as we talked into the early hours about God- he was writing his book against him at the time, and he wanted to know …
A better Europe with Pep
I have a suggestion to make in the hope that we might just end up the year with some hope for the next one: let’s appoint Pep Guardiola EU supremo for solidarity and the common good. But first let me eat half my hat. In recent days I have been warning that Real Madrid was a much stronger team than last season’s while suggesting that FC Barcelona, looking tired and demotivated, would find it hard to prevail at the first Classico of the season, at the Bernabeu. Last night I …
When solidarity matters
The story of the International Brigades, the foreign volunteers who fought against the forces of fascism in the Spanish Civil War , is one of the more noble, if tragic chapters of that terrible conflict. The majority of these volunteers , from a variety of national backgrounds including the UK,were motivated by a simple spirit of solidarity, and the belief that Franco’s military uprising against the democratically-elected Spanish Popular Front government, backed as it was by Mussolini and Hitler, represented a defining ideological battleground that would define the future of …
The beauty of youth
I think it was Oscar Wilde who wrote something once about how the best relationships were those that drew together the energy of youth and the wisdom of experience. I guess not many of you bothered to watch Tuesday night’s FC Barcelona game at the Camp Nou against a hardly glamorous champion from Belarussia. After all , Barca have already qualified for the next round of the Champions League at the head of their group, and you are saving your voice, and your liver for this coming weekend’s Classico. You …
I am an indignado
I have been felled with my first flu of the year and I have no doubt about its cause.I’ve spent recent days standing by one of the entrances to Battersea Park , still dressed for the summer, as the days have grown more wintry, trying to get local residents to sign a petition. So there you have it Mad dogs and Englishmen.The park is not short of canines or eccentrics so I have been in good company, and generally treated with respect by people delighted to do their bit to …
The beginning of the end of the coalition
I feel that in future years yesterday’s nationwide public sector strike in the UK will be looked back on as one of those political defining points when the clock starts clicking towards the end of a government. Damp squid it was certainly not. The phrase used by Cameron was not only inaccurate , it was also insulting, as Ed Milliband rightly said, to demonise the dinner lady, cleaner or nurse who earn in a year what the chancellor George Osborne pays for his annual skiing trip. Not only was this …
