Wildfire
We leave the village for a day and the place nearly burns down. Within hours of our departure I receive a text from a friend saying there is a bush fire encircling the village and everyone has been… Read More
An Aleph in my hand
Drove up to the Gers, in France, to visit the brother. It is a four-hour drive in our old Citroën, which starts rattling if required to exceed about 75 mph. It is hot, and the car has no… Read More
The Black Lake of Antonio Machado
El ojo que ves no es ojo porqué tú le veas es ojo porqué te ve. The eye you see is not an eye because you see it but because it sees you. This morning,… Read More
Coetzee’s Foe
‘When I was young there were degrees of certainty’: these words I quoted the other day from Anne Carson evoke a sense of certainty instilled by the repetition of known stories. In childhood, if the world makes… Read More
Translation
All your stories are about yourself, she said, even when they seem to be about other people. I was not going to deny this, nor give her the pleasure of being right. So I quoted Proust, who said that… Read More
The Glass Essay
This morning, with the first light, I read Anne Carson’s long poem The Glass Essay, 38 pages and not a word wasted. Now every line feels engraved in my consciousness. What a rare occurrence this is. I sit… Read More
Walter Benjamin at Portbou
Yesterday an excursion to Portbou and a picnic on a nearby beach to celebrate the birthday of our dear friend Juliette. As usual our large and straggling international party effectively turned a section of the beach into an… Read More
Naked Man with Pit-Bull
Imagine my surprise yesterday, when visiting one of our favourite beaches with friends (where I intended doing a little underwater fish-gazing with mask and snorkel) I spied a naked man washing his pit-bull in the shallows. Bending over… Read More
The Foreigner
The Foreigner – What country is this foreigner from? – I don’t know. – What’s his name? – I don’t know. – What does he do? What language does he speak? – I don’t know. –… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- The Open RoadThe sun is never so beautiful as on a day when you take to the open road. For several months, during my travels on foot around southern Europe at the tail end of the 1980s, I carried with... Read More
- A tight knot of mermerosityWhen we set out, just past Castell Dinas, we pass a dog driving a tractor. Or so it seems. The shadow of Bruno the dog is long. We see him everywhere. Every morning when I first go downstairs... Read More
- The Olchon Valley and Walter LollardThe Olchon Valley, which I only discovered recently, is a place that feels as though it shouldn’t exist. It is almost the definition of somewhere lost to the world; undiscovered, little known even to those who walk its... Read More
- Flight of the IsardI filmed this isard, or chamois, a couple of summers ago while hiking above Coma de Vaca, in the Pyrenees. I came across the clip on my computer this morning and thought I would post it. It felt... Read More
- Bruno’s last picnic (part 2)When we had finished our meal, I covered the embers of the fire with tranches of muddy turf, trod them down. We returned to the car. The lane winds down the narrow valley for six miles, between wooded... Read More
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
Ricardo Blanco's Blog 