If there’s something strange
in the cherry treesWho you gonna call?
Bugbusters!
Category: spain
a little bit of this…
One of the basic foods that I miss when in Spain is bread.
They do eat plenty of bread here, but it’s mostly white – a sort of faux baguette – and has no more flavour than I would expect from cotton wool or cardboard.
Other than the incredibly expensive pan artesano on sale in the village square some Saturdays, there is, however, one type of bread here that I like.
Since I buy it at the cut-price supermarket, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s cooked from frozen dough rather than made on the premises. It’s labelled as pan 6 cereales – six cereal bread. I was a little taken aback, though, when I read the ingredients list more closely: Continue reading “a little bit of this…”
poems & pomegranates
It’s been a while since I talked on the blog about the narrator/writer dichotomy, but it’s still a subject that interests me.
Recently, I started writing a column for The Woman Writer (the magazine of the SWWJ – the Society of Women Writers and Journalists). In the article “I”: an invitation to poetry, published in the April issue, I talked about how first-person, present-tense poetry can encourage the reader to empathise and participate rather than simply observe.
Although it’s not a long article, it brings together a number of my thoughts on the subject, so I’ll include it in its entirety here:
Continue reading “poems & pomegranates”
visitors
This creature was buzzing outside my window this morning, investigating all the cracks and crannies that might give access to the space that the old blind used to roll up into.
the actualité
“Actual” is one of the words that tends to confuse English-speakers learning Spanish. It’s a “false friend”, connected with reality in English and with current in Spanish.
So, while we might use “the actual situation” to talk about the real state of things, perhaps to correct someone’s misconceptions about what was going on, “la situación actual” would be the current situation.
When my computer tells me there are software actualizaciones disponibles, then, it’s not telling me to “get real”, but that I need to get the latest version – to update to a newer release.
The picture is a screenshot from my phone this week. (Yes, I have the complete works of the Bard on my phone – in English, it’s the phone that talks to me in Spanish; I find the frustration of queuing in the bank can be relieved by dipping into the sonnets, and having a searchable text of the plays is sometimes useful for the crossword.)
The question is, though, do I really want to update Shakespeare?
don't confuse the narrator 