THE MATTER WAS ACUTE

My Cata­lan friends will tell you I have an ac­cent, but I am pretty sure it was the lack of one that led to Cat­alo­nia Today. How glad I am. I wasn’t one of the orig­i­nal writ­ers two decades ago, but my 15-plus years of paint­ing word pic­tures in the deep south of this coun­try are fun­da­men­tal to the priv­i­lege of im­mer­sion into a won­drous Pri­o­rat land­scape and its deep-rooted, proud and trust­ing peo­ple.

One of my books was trans­lated into Cata­lan and pub­lished in 2007: Es pot beure te amb porró? It is a can­did/com­i­cal ac­count of our jour­ney and dis­cov­er­ies after set­tling here in 2001.

I was wheeled out by my Barcelona pub­lish­ers to pro­mote the book, in­clud­ing live on air on Radio Catalunya, where I pro­ceeded to mur­der the lan­guage and in­vite peo­ple to enjoy my book en­ti­tled Can you drink tea and have a spliff? My re­peated fail­ure to stress the ó at the end of porró caused acute panic be­yond the glass in the stu­dio, but prob­a­bly did won­ders for book sales. I think that might have fu­elled Cat­alo­nia Today’s in­ter­est.

Words, along­side fam­ily, com­mu­nity and na­ture, brought me and my fam­ily here in the first place. I had been a news­pa­per ed­i­tor and colum­nist with one book on the shelf. I wanted space to write more books and screen­plays and have done so. Mean­while my steady flow of words in Cat­alo­nia Today have fos­tered friend­ships and vital mem­o­ries. I am not sure of the value of my con­tri­bu­tion, but as a reader I bear wit­ness to how the ed­i­to­r­ial team has in­formed, en­riched and de­fined Cat­alo­nia’s open­ness and place in the world. It calls out wrongs when needs be. It is in­clu­sive and in­struc­tive, whether you are Cata­lan and seek­ing to learn Eng­lish, or you are Eng­lish-speak­ing seek­ing to in­te­grate and ap­pre­ci­ate the whole gamut of what it means to call this home.

I have to men­tion dear Terry Par­ris. She was a light. Her words in Cat­alo­nia Today, right up until her death at 93 in 2020, re­flected her good na­ture. To share mo­ments with her was en­gross­ing for many rea­sons - her beau­ti­ful elo­quence, long-life wis­dom, mod­esty and hope, smile and laugh and pride in fam­ily chief among them. This for­mer ac­tress, writer, broad­caster and ed­u­ca­tor’s ex­pe­ri­ences of the world and her 47 years in Cat­alo­nia, which she loved, en­riched these pages.

As for me, I won’t stop cham­pi­oning Cat­alo­nia and its cul­tural foun­da­tions that un­der­pin so­ci­ety; nor its na­ture and bio­di­ver­sity. But I will also keep try­ing to raise the spir­its with the oc­ca­sional non­sense.

Best mo­ment? I cher­ish the mem­ory of the late, bril­liant satirist Tom Sharpe’s brief ad­dress to the Eng­lish Cul­tural So­ci­ety just a cou­ple of years be­fore his death at his home in Llafranc in 2013. He seemed a lit­tle squiffy, tipsy. “I just want to say... you are all in­vited to my house.....(wow).... if you come on a horse.”