"Wine and a whine" – My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

 

As a reptile – I like to think of myself as one of those lizards that runs across the hottest desert sands with a high knee action like an Olympic hurdler, though in reality I’m probably more of a slow-moving komodo dragon – waking up to yet another spring morning with a sky the colour of an iron lung is all too much.

Most likely, you’re reading this with summer’s heat well underway but I actively resent the idea that most foreigners have moved to Mediterranean countries solely for solar delight. 

Not true. 

Speaking only for myself, there’s plenty of other reasons to live here long-term and I’ve written in detail about them in this column over the years.

But yes, I admit, I don’t remember a spring here in the last decade and a half that was so bloody gloomy. 

Apparently, March had the least number of sunlight hours in 50 years and April/early May didn’t feel much better. 

I want my money back. I didn’t sign up for these relentless, grim overhead conditions and general damp.

Simon Winder in his book Germania, makes an argument (with Germany as the exception) that “one very odd aspect of European countries is that if you start in their north-wests they are generally unattractive, harsh places but if you head south-east life gets better.” 

He goes on to put this down to fairly obvious factors like the existence of more sun, olives, melons and an outdoor life including wine and vineyards.

Then the author uncorks some wider history, quoting a British wine-merchant who maintains that for most people in England until the First World War, “wine meant drinking ‘hock’ (German Rhine/Mosel white) or [what was popularly called] ‘claret’ (French Bordeaux red). 

Following this, post-war, the German drop “tasted too much of steel-helmet” and apart from the sweeter “Blue Nun” it largely disappeared from many British tables.

It seems to me that a lot of 21st-century Europeans, including Catalans and Spanish of course, take good wine slightly for granted. 

In some areas, the geography supports that. Just travel [I almost remember what that verb means] down the roads or look out the train window between Martorell and down the line through the Penedès to near the coast at Sant Vicenç de Calders. 

The landscape is a non-religious hymn to the grape.

That great truth-teller Eduardo Galeano wrote, “We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.” 

Personally, I can’t remember ever having anything better than an ice-cold Chilean dry white called Concha y Toro in a Canberra restaurant called El Rincon Latino.

With the recent scarcity of a penetrating heat and further east a war that must’ve taken any warmth out of any scattering of sun, I hope that rays of natural serotonin are soon seeping into our souls like “that first swallow of wine… after you’ve just crossed the desert.”

Now I’m reminded of the basic and essential difference between climate and weather, though I doubt Leonard Cohen was thinking about that when he wrote, “Springtime starts and then it stops in the name of something new.” 

What else is new apart from the season? Anything? Something?

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2022.]

    

Leave a comment

Video: "TV talk: Trump, Catalan language and Leonard Cohen"

http://www.elpuntavui.tv/video/192005057.html

This week I was once again a guest on Matthew Tree's panel show "Our Finest Hour." We discussed Donald Trump, where Catalan is and is not able to be spoken in Catalonia and Leonard Cohen, before a live performance by Guillem Gené of Cohen's song "Bird on a Wire."

"Cohencentric" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

Finishing a long biography of the long, long life of the singer/songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen, something occurred to me the other day. 

Here was a man who had toiled away on his work year after year, suffering from regular periods of depression, only to become commercially successful across the globe after the age of sixty.

Cohen had been a well-known figure in his native Canada and much of Europe since the 1970s but that massive market of the USA had largely ignored the richly dark and sombre images that filled his music and writing; this despite the fact that he has lived in California on and off for most of his now eighty one years on the planet.

What I admire, just as much as the penetrating insight of his wordcraft, is Cohen’s resilience against the storms of our existence (his father died when he was only eight years old) and his resolute persistence in being the artist that he wanted to be. He was, and most probably still is, an extremely generous man who rarely took on the egotistical trappings of the standard popstar.

After being born into a wealthy family, he always lived in small houses and in fact spent many years of disciplined silence and contemplation in a Buddhist monastery. Over time, he learned to embrace his own imperfections and saw that this was how the universe is constructed too. 

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” he wrote: a phrase now used by a number of psychologists to counsel their patients.

For much of his free time though, Cohen had been a womaniser and used drugs such as speed and alcohol to keep him going but in his later years the love of a wonderful woman collaborator helped him find a satisfaction and contentment that eludes so many of us in middle-age. 

More than almost any other contemporary singer, he was intent on bringing female singers from the background into sharing centre stage in his recordings and his songs benefit greatly from this.

Around the same time he had every dollar of his earnings stolen by a former lover (whom he had trusted) and an accountant who exploited her. After years of gruelling court cases he was able to get back some of his money but reluctantly, he went back on the road to tour again after a decade and a half of avoiding playing to live audiences. 

To his surprise, this time he loved it in a way he never had before. The wider public loved it too, as shown by his sell-out world tours since 2007 (that included Zaragoza-born band member Javier Mas.)

Always a spiritual man and often superstitious (his outlook combined his family’s Judaism with aspects of Hinduism and a taste for bible myths) today, he remains an inspiration to writers and musicians as diverse as Judy Collins and Jeff Buckley. 

There are over three thousand versions of his songs recorded by other artists. One of the most beautiful songs of the twentieth century was at least partly written about Leonard Cohen. I must have listened hundreds of times to the soaring vocals of Joni Mitchell in “A Case of You”:

“On the back of a cartoon coaster

In the blue TV screen light

I drew a map of Canada

Oh Canada

And I sketched your face on it twice.”

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2016.]

"The best of times?" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Has there ever been a better time to be alive in the history of our tortured, super-intelligent species? 

At the press of a few buttons we have virtually all the accumulated knowledge of the last several hundred (or is it thousand?) years available. And it is available fast.

We have the answers to a billion conceivable questions and we can communicate almost instantly with the majority of people on the planet, language barriers excepted. 

For many of us, our taste buds can be stimulated by the food from dozens of cultures who, just a few short years ago were out of reach, either geographically or economically. 

In this increasingly mixed European society, young people have started to grow up sitting next to others from Asia, Africa and assorted parts of the wider continent and for them this is as natural as mother's milk.

On top of all this, there is a gentleness that in so many senses did not exist just a generation ago. 

A man can be intimately involved in the care of his baby or child without automatically being a figure of gossip or ridicule. He can be the main cook for his family and not be thought of us somehow suspect. 

Finally too, homosexuals are more accepted or at least tolerated in the majority of circles, rather than being chemically castrated as some were less than seventy years ago (in the UK for example.)

Today too, there are increasing numbers of people who are not only acknowledging their own depression or mental illness but are speaking openly about it in public forums and in the media. 

Such a development was virtually unthinkable merely a decade ago. 

Equally though, the average women in the developed world has a wider horizon than ever before. Her place in the workplace is now barely questioned at all, though she may still be paid less than a man or have trouble getting a full-time position or promoted according to her ability.

Yet despite this progress, despite the modern mind being freer from superstition and religious dogma than probably any time in history, what do we also have?

Underneath the shiny towers of vanity there is a great, putrid sewer stench of injustice. 

There is the distinct sensation of a nausea without relief and that comes from having both your eyeballs open and your ears unblocked. Anyone who chooses to not be ignorant knows, as Leonard Cohen wrote, "the deal is rotten." 

And all those signs of enlightenment that came to view in the the first half of the 20th century now have a faded quality and there is a hollow ring to the chants, songs and poems of social movements.

Throw into this mix the fact that the warming of the earth continues at pace. 

It is only those who genuinely don't understand or politicians who have been bought out by the polluting industries that do not accept the truth of the overheating globe that we walk on. 

Or think of the wealth that flows through financial systems. Shockingly, the 85 richest people on the planet now have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion. 

And what else?

There's the vacant look of history's books

Slave labour and murder thy neighbour

Greed as a virtue and carers that hurt you

This is the present we have

We see the limp hand of the state and rape-a-date

The power of one at the point of a gun

And the good times are back with daily Prozac

This is the future that right now we have

See that liar's smile when the truth's on trial?

This is the justice we have.

Living and laughing in ignorance bliss

We have fashioned a world exactly like this.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2014.]

Leonard Cohen wins Prince of Asturias award

"Veteran songwriter and musician Leonard Cohen has won a top Spanish literature award for a body of work which has influenced three generations around the world" it was reported today.

Amongst many others, his inspirational classic 'Who By Fire' has stood the test of time.