Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

I lined up outside the Western Union offices last night to send my money back home to my family. I haven't set up a regular bank transfer yet. Bilal was driving all day and I was his second to last visit of the day. Just before Id. He'll be back home at 10.30pm. I Skype home and speak to Tere and John and Carmen is packing to go to Manchester and I'm nervous and exited for her. Eve gives me a brief and cheery hello. Tere talked to his mother for three hours. They talked and eve said they talked of everything and that they would be calling on her regularly from now on. On the first day of walking on the Camino the first person to pass me was a Japanese gentleman wearing a banner, rather affectedly. He had an aura of wealth about him, a soft carapace.he wore his body like a luxury good, stepping carefully, trying not to scuff his feet. He nodded a greeting, a liminal shiver, and walked past. It really was quite like walking the North Downs way. As I walked my mind murmu

I had not prepared for this physically, I was badly overweight and felt unhealthy. I looked at the sign

Expert advice on foot care from a man called Brett The walk, for me, started in Roncesvalles . I saw the bus coming into the underground car park before anyone else and lined up at the bay. The driver, when he got off, seemed to ignore me. One by one he let everyone else on the bus and when it was my turn to get on he sent me to put my little rucksack into the luggage bay. I was the last on. There was only one seat left on the bus, next to an old man with a beard leaning against the window. I wasn't going to talk to him. Just sit. but I had problems adjusting the seat belt and so finally he reached over and pulled it out from behind the seats and said. 'You're rather large. Wouldn't you be more comfortable up front? you could swap seats.' 'No, but thanks for being so considerate.' I smiled. After a while he broke the silence again. 'I am going to give you some advice for the Camino. He said. I have done it four times. Once with my

'...Las calles están mojadas y parece que llovió, Son lágrimas de una niña, de una mujer que lloró. Triste y sola, sola se queda Fonseca triste y llorosa queda la universidad y los libros… y los libros empeñados en el monte… en el monte de piedad. No te acuerdas cuando te decía, a la pálida luz de la luna'   .... Yo no puedo querer más que a una y esa una mi vida eres tú Aileen and Philip in Santiago de Compostella in 1987 In 1987 I was sent to Santiago de Compostella to teach on an English course. I went with Aileen. An elegant Englishwoman with a small pursed mouth and short hair. She was soft spoken, in control and she knew how to teach children. I did not.  We met in the morning in the cafe next to a small green square and the rain fell softly. It was like mist. So gentle. Together we designed a summer course for the Galician children. It worked. I remember some of our students. They would be in their late twenties or early thirties now.  After work

Pam explained: 'What is a real friend? I'll tell you what a real friend is Phil. When your Mom discovered she had stage three breast cancer she phoned me up and she said.  "I want to go into shopping with you and buy some really good sheets. Egyptian cotton. I am going to be spending a lot of time in that bed, and I want some nice sheets." 'And so we went shopping for your mother's sheets.'

The corniche, photo by Abushababi. I had dinner with Andre last night. A Big Mac, fries and a coke. Andre's face wrinkles just before he says, for the hundredth time: 'There is something else I need to tell you about this place.' He's been here 14 years, so I listen attentively. The Muzzein stop singing. We walk through the streets because Andre needs the exercise and I need to get to know the town.   He shakes hands with all the shop keepers. Cracks a joke with them. Calls them all his friend. I buy four pairs of socks. Two pure cotton bed sheets, a phone top up card and a bottle of Bounty chocolate milk. The shopkeeper slips in a packet of fruit polos, which I discover when I get home. 'I used to walk a lot in Greece, in Crete, I loved walking. Tomorrow we’ll walk on the corniche. The name of the melting promontory of land we are on translates from the Arabic as 'The Brazier.' Andre is generous. He’s helped me find a flat. Explained

Pilgrims' mass in Roncesvalles, From Tauxu2000 I went to the pilgrims mass in  Roncesvalles  in 10 languages. I had a feeling the priest was showing off a little and only pretending to speak Japanese. I pride myself on my fluent Spanish and I swear he did say. All non-Catholics can join in with the mass. That must mean,  I thought,  that I finally get to eat the host, not as an ingredient of hand-crafted Mexican confectionery, with caramelized peanuts, but eat it with full symbolic force. This may help me understand the religious significance of the walk to Santiago de Compostela - as a method actor might.   I convinced myself. So I stood up, dizzy from the coach trip and altitude, and and ate the transubstantiated flesh of The Christ. Well that was very generous of them; to share a bit of their God. Then I realised I had made a mistake. In fact, I realised I was making the mistake as soon as I stood up. Of course I shouldn't be doing this! I was wrong. You ha

I wanted to share with you that I dreamed of Nola last night. I don't think I have ever dreamed of her before. She was beautiful, ageless, but mature. I would say somewhere between her 40's and 60's. I was grown, but perhaps younger than I am now. Maybe in my 30's. My former husband Charles was in the dream also, and there was something there, that Nola knew about, with us but she did not say it out loud but I could tell she understood and had compassion when she looked into my eyes. I think my parents may have been in it too but that part was foggy. My mother was for sure, I think. Nola did Tai Chi. She was an expert in the dream, and I followed along and tried to do the form, and was standing behind her, there were rows of people practicing. She moved flowingly and beautifully.

I thought the theme of Othello was not racism and xenophobia, but I was shocked to discover it was. Of course none of Shakespeare's work is encompassed by a 'theme' as such. Of course Iago is a banker, a Thatcherite, an 80s City boy on the make. A social Darwinist, a realist - a democrat. Simon Bowel is an Iago so are the corporate sharks in Glencore, the Liberals who writing stories about the Arab spring joke about putting sexy Tunisian girls instead of grieving mothers on the front cover, the social entrepreneurs who fight to sustain dependency relations with the poorest producers of commodities, the jobbing builders who work for cash in hand, and all the different levels of British society who belong on different levels of the inferno. They speak in unison and they say: O, sir, content you; I follow him to serve my turn upon him. We cannot all be masters, nor all masters Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knav

 Terry Gilliam enlightens us, through opera, about corruption and the Nazis What is astounding to me is that no one has linked the old German high culture of Goethe and Schiller with Nazism more often and more directly before. Not only in the sense of culpability, but in relation to the themes explored. It's interesting how high culture and racial superiority are so closely linked.You can almost hear the Nazis and their vast German following, not all of whom are dead yet say: But we are superior. German culture is superior. We produced Beethoven and Beethoven produced the 9th Symphony and that really good bit by Schiller, what was it? Alle Menschen werden Brüder, - ale menshen verden brider.. Hmm. Now. The inferior races and cultures couldn't produce that could they?' Not since the musical Spring Time for Hitler and Germany has anyone put Nazism into song in such a big way. And who is the more profound comic and who has more 'gravitas' when

Who was Nola Phillips?

This was a regular school walk that we did from the Friend's School to Roseberry Topping .

Personality and personal history are the forward wake of memory. How is a snakeskin like a poem? A really good poem is the sloughed off skin of a snake. Less than a year ago we found a black Mamba skin in our garage. It was warm and delicate. It was slippery and lacy at the same time, and it still held something of the form of the snake. I phoned the neighbours. 'What should we do? There's a black mamba nest in the garage somewhere.' 'There's nothing you can do, they said. Nothing. Nothing. Just put the snakeskin in the bathroom and admire it when you brush your teeth.' A really good poem should be slippery and lacy to the touch and it should take the form of a snake. It should cause you to be alert and to look thoughtfully into shadows. A childhood friend of mine is an artist: Simon. A decade ago, in Mexico, he showed me pictures of his paintings. They were of large interlocking earthworms painted in homemade colours: ochres, browns and red

8/ ?/1941 A Good Friend of Bulgaria Obituary for I. Steinhardt I do not speak Bulgarian. I speak Russian so this translation may not be completely accurate; it is based on my knowledge of Russian. I would love someone to help me translate it. On the 8 th of this month in Prague the famous Czech journalist I. Steinhardt passed  away. He was born in Pol Moravsko in 1873. I Steinhardt completed his education in journalism in Prague and Vienna. Around 1890 I. Steinhardt went to Sophia where he became the editor of the German language paper Bulgarski Trgovski Vestnik (Bulgarian Evening Trader) where he gained a reputation as an excellent journalist and cultural figure. He made a particularly strong impression with his  brilliant reviews of the National Theatre. His articles in the Bulgarian Evening Trader on national and cultural questions were widely read. As the correspondent of the English Daily Mail and the Viennes

Peter Orlovsky, Jack Keruac and William Burroughs in Morroco I have never read William Burroughs though I have glanced at a passage or two of his and have seen a bit of Hollywood's pretentious version of one of his books. I am hardly qualified to pronounce sentence on him, but I will anyway. Burroughs was American. This is important. Burroughs is a flag. Burroughs was supposed to have described what you would find if you stripped the bark off the trunk of American society. Underneath there would be termites. Burroughs was a writer, but also a killer, someone who inadvertently broke the deepest rule of human society. He didn't kill an enemy in the second world war. he wasn't ordered to kill. Ordinary killers are rewarded with medals and processions. He was the executioner, his unconscious was the executioner and the same unconscious was the source of his literary output. He placed an object, drunk, onto his wife's head. He said he would shoot it off her head,

Reconstituted like a Turkey Twizzler - the philosophy of generation X Generation X are those men and women who hide amongst the good people of the 35 to 45 age bracket. They are located right at the rotting end of Thatcherism. They are John Major's children and adopted social Darwinism and the new materialism as their philosophy. To them, not only was greed good, but greed in its component parts was good. They plagiarised madly and shallowly. You can't pilfer in Generation X world. The world of the DJ. Intellectual property is a joke unless it's reconstituted. I was disgusted by it's exponents. The DJs the re mixers. It shows how toxic trickle down philosophy can be when even the wide boys and girls didn't have to finds arguments against thieving other people's music and remixing it. And now intellectual property theft is mainstream. I wonder if John Berger would sanction it? I doubt he would. Give me Julie Birchill any day. Now she was my generation

Maurizio Cattalan donated this sculpture only on condition that the Milan authorities displayed it pointing directly at the office of the head of the stock eschange. In fact I am not representing the people giving the finger to the stockmarket speculators so much as representing the financial speculators giving the finger to us, said the artist. How many of you would sign a petition to have one of the these put up in front of the London Stock Exchange? By Mark in History

 Richard Steinhardt, Isidor Steinhardt and Artur Steinhardt  Regina Steinhardt, Eve Steinhardt (our  mother), and Lisa  Steinhardt in Paris  Artur Steinhardt in Israel during the war  Paula Neumann and Else Steinhardt in front, Regina and Isidor Steinhardt behind. Dear Sir / Madam, I am the great  grandson of Isidor Steinhardt, born in 1873. I have all the  documentation to prove this together with birth certificates and photos. In 1998 my Mother gave me his gold Doxa watch which the King of Montenegro awarded him. I have been researching our family history and writing a biography of my mother who lived in Paris during the war with her mother. Isidor's story is extraordinarily sad. His wife Regina, my Great Grandmother was sent to Terezin and then onto Treblinka and my  great aunt, their daughter was rounded up in Paris and died in Auschwitz. Their oldest son, Arthur emigrated to Israel with his wife Flora and then  went on to live in South Africa. But the i