It’s a pretty plant. Soft, luminous green; pointy leaves – you can look it up. The thing is, it strangles everything else in the flowerbeds. So I am trying to remove it from the little sheltered side garden of what used to be my parents’ house here in the west of Ireland, in order to have blooms.
Read MoreI’m no geographer or cosmologist, but I’m certain that the light in the Southern hemisphere is different to the light in the Northeast of England. It has a flat, sharp quality; a deep intensity that seems to me to illuminate with particularly unflinching exposure. It feels concrete and palpable, something to touch, resist and be absorbed by. Between 4.30 and 6 pm the light is positively animate; nostalgic, accusing, revealing, caressing….
Read MoreMy friend Paulo Bezulle and I walk northwest from my apartment through a pleasant, very Paulista mix of modern apartment buildings with metal picket fences and electronic gates jostling with one, two and three storey concrete and stucco buildings from the early 20th century painted in bright colours; many little bars, newsstands, lanchonetes(cafés), laundrettes, drugstores, barbershops, tiny groceries, dentists; a jumbled, jostling mix…
Read MoreIt is four weeks today since I landed in São Paulo. I feel joyously alive, present and deeply grateful.
Read MoreOn Thursday last (17/7) I spent the day working with the Coro Juvenil (Youth Choir) of Guri Santa Marcelina, and the next day we all travelled together to Porto Alegre for the ISME 2014 which starts Sunday (today). The journey was a wild delight, and Porto Alegre is a sunlit city of dreams, of which more anon; but right now I want to talk about the youth choir, and singing.
Read MoreWaking up after my first night on the 14th floor I absorb the different quality of the light; the sudden arrival of morning rather than a slow dawn, and the sharpness of the shadows cast. It is both startling and refreshing. The next thing I notice is an extraordinary sensation of lightness, a lift in my shoulders and a feeling of space….
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Sao Paulo first appears as orange snakes of light intertwined beneath us as the plane sinks through fog, and then we are on the ground and everyone applauds….driving into town the sky is pearly; the city is grey and ochre and blue and green and noisy and inviting…
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