When I was a little boy my parents signed me up to a local scout group. What I remember about those outings was that we always got lost. I remember hiking through the mountains, my water bottle empty and my mouth dry. The...

A few days ago I reread an article about Michael Jackson in the magazine of a Barcelona based newspaper. I hadn’t seen a picture of this man for ages: I don’t know how many operations he has been through to try and dissimulate the shape...

Its 10 o’clock on a hot Sunday morning in May. This is where I found myself every Sunday here in Ceuta, sitting still in the square with the rest of my fellow men from the no. 1 Tetuan Regular barracks. Waiting for...

Chile, 1978

I was not a born soldier. Others were perhaps, but I was just a kid then: Just like the others who were there with me. We didn’t know the islands we were sent to defend....

It’s 8 o’clock at a family supper. Juan and Maria, two close friends planning to get married, have invited me to their home. The objective of the meal is for the families of each one to meet each other. Juan...

My father once went to visit the Dominican Man Museum in Santo Domingo. This museum tells the history of Quisqueya (Hispaniola), now known as the Dominican Republic. It is an archaeological museum and it explains the origins...

My mother’s family lived in a small town in Cuenca called Mira. They lived through the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship “better”- so...

The story I’m going to tell you belongs to my family. My mother’s father was more than seventy years old when he was widowed. Soon after he met a women in her early twenties and they got married. They had two...

On Christmas Eve 1986 heavy snow fall covered the roof tops and narrow streets with a deep blanket of white in a tiny village in the Pyrenees that I prefer not to name. When the storm was over many children ran out into...