THE WAY WE ARE

Twenty years ago, the then jour­nal­ist Car­les Puigde­mont told me about a new pro­ject of his: an Eng­lish-lan­guage mag­a­zine which would give Cat­alo­nia-ori­en­tated news on the arts, cur­rent af­fairs, sport and any other field that might in­ter­est read­ers, be they Cata­lans or na­tive Eng­lish-speak­ers. It was not, he stressed, going to be a pro­mo­tional rag for tourists and nei­ther was it going to limit it­self to the in­creas­ingly fash­ion­able city of Barcelona, but would talk about the en­tire coun­try, with some ex­cur­sions into the other Cata­lan-speak­ing areas of Eu­rope. I thought it was a great idea, at which point he came up with a sug­ges­tion that caused me in­stant col­ly­wob­bles: he wanted me to be the mag­a­zine’s ed­i­tor-in-chief. I im­me­di­ately told him that I was psy­cho­log­i­cally in­ca­pable of being the chief of any­thing, my­self in­cluded, but that I would love to write a col­umn for the mag­a­zine. He not only agreed, but gave me total free­dom to write about what­ever I wanted to. This offer was like (or so I imag­ine) win­ning a gold medal: I had long been an en­vi­ous ad­mirer of George Or­well’s ‘As I Please’ col­umn in the British left-wing news­pa­per ‘Tri­bune’, which had al­ways struck me as being the Holy Grail of non-fic­tion writ­ing, al­low­ing Or­well to play around with lan­guage and ideas and sub­jects à la Josep Pla, with­out lim­it­ing him­self to the lin­guis­tic re­stric­tions which pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists usu­ally have im­posed on them (or im­pose on them­selves).

Cat­alo­nia Today orig­i­nally came out as a free daily in black and white, and even­tu­ally turned into the monthly full colour sub­scrip­tion mag­a­zine you are cur­rently hold­ing (or screen­ing). The mag­a­zine had its oc­ca­sional (usu­ally Eng­lish) en­e­mies, of course, one of whom – who by all ac­counts found all things Cata­lan in­her­ently ridicu­lous – lam­basted it to a cho­sen few as ‘Cat­alo­nia Toadie’. And even a cou­ple of the mag­a­zine’s Eng­lish staffers com­plained that it wasn’t cov­er­ing enough Span­ish stuff, ap­par­ently un­aware that the name of the mag­a­zine wasn’t ‘Spain Today’ (my Cata­lanocen­tric columns, so I was told, were very much in their line of fire). Much of this bad-mouthing came from the old chest­nut that any­thing Cata­lan was ‘na­tion­al­ist’, which I found odd com­ing from peo­ple who could ac­cept with equa­nim­ity that Scot­land and Wales were coun­tries, yet were men­tally in­ca­pable of re­al­is­ing that Cat­alo­nia was one, too, and for sim­i­lar rea­sons.

A lot has hap­pened since that first con­ver­sa­tion be­tween Car­les and my­self. He be­came the Mayor of Girona and then the Cata­lan pres­i­dent, and was obliged to go into exile along with sev­eral other Cata­lan min­is­ters (the rest were jailed) after or­gan­is­ing a ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence (which was still legal at the time). He re­mains the last Cata­lan pres­i­dent who was freely elected with­out any tin­ker­ing from Madrid (and, as it hap­pens, the only pres­i­dent in Eu­rope who speaks flu­ent Ro­man­ian, apart from the Ro­man­ian pres­i­dent him­self). Im­mi­gra­tion has in­creased dra­mat­i­cally in Cat­alo­nia, with Eu­rope’s largest ever pro-im­mi­gra­tion demon­stra­tion being held, pre­cisely, in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal. As for Cat­alo­nia Today it­self, it is now a var­ied, in­ter­est­ing and use­ful mag­a­zine read by all sorts of peo­ple, in­clud­ing, for in­stance, the Eng­lish-speak­ing South Asian com­mu­nity in Cat­alo­nia, which uses it to find out what’s going on in their adopted place of res­i­dence. And I still write my columns as I please. But un­like Or­well, whose ’Tri­bune’ col­umn lasted for three and a half years, I have had the priv­i­lege of writ­ing mine for twenty. And count­ing.

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