MEMORIES

I ac­tu­ally picked up a copy of the first issue of Cat­alo­nia Today in Plaça Catalunya in Girona in June 2004, as that is co­in­ci­den­tally the very month I moved to Girona from Barcelona with my fam­ily. We had made the move in search of a calmer en­vi­ron­ment in which to raise our baby son, who had been suf­fer­ing from health is­sues since his birth and did not sleep for more than a few hours with­out wak­ing up in dis­tress, even at the age of one and a half. Girona was my wife’s home­town, and we were seek­ing out fam­ily sup­port to help look after our son so we could get some rest and be able to lead a more nor­mal life while we fig­ured out what was going on with him, since the doc­tors were not prov­ing to be of any use.

It worked. A year or so later he was a healthy young boy who could not eat wheat or dairy prod­ucts, as I had fig­ured out that he had an in­tol­er­ance to both. Nei­ther the doc­tors nor any­body else be­lieved me at the time, but thanks to my in­sis­tence on try­ing an elim­i­na­tion diet, we found that to be the prob­lem. I di­gress. But only slightly, be­cause that is how I came into con­tact with Cat­alo­nia Today at that early stage. My wife and I had a trans­la­tion com­pany at the time, and I have to admit I wasn’t overly im­pressed with the qual­ity of the Eng­lish in those early is­sues, which were mainly full of ar­ti­cles about Cata­lan pol­i­tics that I strug­gled to fully un­der­stand. But I kept pick­ing up my free is­sues from the rack in Plaça Catalunya to get my dose of a local Eng­lish news­pa­per, until one day I went for lunch with the ed­i­tor and her hus­band – I think you know who I’m re­fer­ring to – to talk about the idea of my com­pany re­vis­ing the Eng­lish in the paper. I hon­estly can’t re­mem­ber if I ap­proached them or they ap­proached me, but after a very pleas­ant lunch in the city cen­tre I re­alised this was a pro­ject I would like to get fur­ther in­volved in, and so not only of­fered my Eng­lish proof­read­ing ser­vices but sug­gested I write a reg­u­lar col­umn – The Cul­tural Tightrope – with re­flec­tions on the life of a guiri liv­ing in Cat­alo­nia. And that is the col­umn you are read­ing now, many years later.

It was orig­i­nally in­tended to be hu­mor­ous, and I be­lieve it has had its mo­ments in that re­spect, but nowa­days re­flects the mus­ings of a mid­dle-aged man search­ing for mean­ing to life through anec­dotes of his life in Cat­alo­nia.

As you will know if you have fol­lowed this pub­li­ca­tion for some time, or just from read­ing this edi­tion, we also had our mo­ments in the sun when it comes to tele­vi­sion. I my­self had a weekly show about foot­ball – The Week in Foot­ball, or more af­fec­tion­ately TWIF – where we dis­cussed the for­tunes of Cat­alo­nia’s biggest clubs, Barça, Es­panyol and Girona. I was for­tu­nate enough to have a large group of in­ter­est­ing guests from var­ied back­grounds who were happy to come on TV and talk about the most im­por­tant of the less im­por­tant things, i.e. foot­ball.

I was also asked to do some one-to-one in­ter­views for the TV and ended up in­ter­view­ing some fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple who had landed here in Cat­alo­nia. You can still find these on­line if you do a search under the show’s name of Small Talk. And fi­nally with re­gard to the TV, we also took turns read­ing the daily news in Eng­lish for a while, which proved much more chal­leng­ing than I had an­tic­i­pated; I was re­lieved when we packed all that in, to be hon­est. TWIF I loved doing, how­ever, and it did ac­tu­ally lead to greater things as I was sub­se­quently con­tacted by FC Barcelona to be­come the club’s of­fi­cial on­line league com­men­ta­tor in Eng­lish, which I did for three sea­sons. As a re­sult, my com­men­tat­ing voice can now be heard on the Net­flix se­ries FC Barcelona: a new era. The scream­ing voice as Barça score their fourth at the Bernabéu is mine.

But I feel like this col­umn is be­com­ing a lit­tle too wist­ful now, and I’m in dan­ger of falling into a deep worm­hole of mem­o­ries, so we will have to stop here by say­ing what a won­der­ful jour­ney it has been to work on this mag­a­zine for the past 20 years. My heart­felt thanks to all those who have made it pos­si­ble. Ex­cept that Scouser Neil (there you go, we man­aged to get a laugh in at the end).

Opin­ion