How to be a Free Spirit
Decide what you want to do Get up and do it!
Chicken and Almond tagine
During the time I was in the Moroccan Sahara, dinner every night was a variation on the same theme. It was ‘Al Gamila’, quite literally ‘The Pot’. Even though Al Gamila utilises the same ingredients as a tagine, for me they are fundamentally different. Tagines are fancier, and laid out with symmetrical precision and fine flavours. Al Gamila is what families eat every night, what you smell mid afternoon walking down back alleys in a thousand tiny villages. Al Gamila traditionally ...
Alhambra Days
Welcome to the new site! Blogging is something I’d more or less stopped doing. But lately I’ve been looking around my adopted home with new eyes - something to do with Spring, maybe – and realizing just how extraordinarily beautiful it is. When I first returned here from Australia just over a month ago, it snowed. Really came down. Big fat white flakes that settled on the orange tree over my balcony, and decorated the ochre walls of the Alhambra in a ...
Fifty Shades of Utter Rubbish
I downloaded a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey on Sunday night, after finding no less than eleven references to it in the pages of this week’s Sunday Times. I figured that if AA Gill and Jeremy Clarkson were citing the book in their columns, there must be something beyond the hype. There wasn’t. I’ve read plenty of drivel in my life. I was addicted to Mills and Boon at age twelve and devouring Jackie Collins and Sheldon by thirteen. I’m no ...
One day in Spain…
A post without photos for once – or maybe with just a few. Mainly this post is for my own thoughts, and because I have come across something I find really fascinating. I’ve spent a lot of this walk wondering what on earth I was going to write about in another book. After all, the Sahara it isn’t, and much of the camino has been a solitary ramble with my head buried in Roman ruins. Much as that fascinates me and ...
Salamanca
There is a frog built into the plateresque facade of Salamanca University. It seems a rather frivolous thing to adorn Spain's first University, and the third in Western Europe, but it also one of Salamanca's favourite tourist attractions: even in the very wet, cold weather we have been enjoying this week, at any given time a number of camera wielding frog-spotters can be found, squinting up at the elaborate carvings, trying to pick out the elusive little fellow, who is ...
Semana Santa Caceres
Palm Sunday began in Caceres under a slate grey sky, with men dressed as Roman centurions before midday this morning. It is nearly ten at night, and I have just left the procession still winding through Caceres’ ancient laneways, drums beating and penitents hauling their crosses. Semana Santa – Holy Week – is a big deal in Spain, and Palm Sunday is one of the first official celebrations. For months now the brass bands have been practicing, the sound of solemn ...
Merida
In 1975, Merida celebrated an anniversary - a 2000 year anniversary - of the city's official foundation by order of the Emperor Augustus. For someone who grew up in a country that acknowledged 200 years of European inhabitation during my own lifetime, it is something of a treat to wander beneath Roman archways, and amongst ancient buildings, that were established two millennia ago. Merida is an historical treasure trove. As I was walking here, reading the background to the area had ...
Comments
Wonderfully inspirational and lovely to have you back. May the r
Just finished your second book. I truly loved it and read it in a