A blog about adventures in tango, travel and storytelling
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If you read my newsletter, or follow me on Twitter, you might remember me mentioning Kate Swindlehurst’s “The Tango Effect: Parkinson’s and the healing power of dance”, when it was still crowdfunding on Unbound. I received my copy back in March, just before lockdown started and it’s been a while now that I have wanted to share my thoughts about it. The book is part personal memoir, as the author...
There’s something magical for me about getting on a train for a long journey. You get to see how the landscape gradually changes around you, you can walk around and the sound of a train on the tracks is one I have always found comforting. I feel like flying is sometimes too fast and airports are hectic in a way that train stations aren’t for me. Long journeys have a...
In October, I shared this blog post from two years ago on Facebook and announced my intention to participate in NaNoWriMo for the third time. Subscribers will also have read about it in the newsletter I sent out in October. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, you can find out more here or read about my previous NaNoWriMo experience here. Like the previous time I did NaNoWriMo, I did...
There are two people buried in the monastery of Alcobaça and it was them who first brought me to Portugal. I was fifteen and had just won a writing competition organised by the Portuguese Ministry of Education. My entry was a re-telling of the story of Ines and Pedro, written in diary format from the point of view of Pedro. I called it “The Dead Queen”. Don Pedro and Ines...
Just like many of the best things, I discovered Polish tango music by accident. It was shortly after I had been to a concert of Tango Diagonales, a quintet of young Argentinian musicians from La Plata. It was the first time that I had heard the flute played in a tango ensemble. Although the flute was one of the original instruments used to play tango you don’t hear it that...
A bit more than a month ago, I announced that I was participating in a writing challenge known as NaNoWriMo. The aim was to write 50,000 words during the 30 days of November. You can find out more about NaNoWriMo here. It is a fantastic initiative which promotes creativity and a sense of community among writers at all stages of their journey. It was the second time I participated –...
So it is now four weeks since I announced that I was doing NaNoWriMo this year. You may recall that I promised weekly updates of my progress. You can read my account of how week one went here. What about my account of week two? Or week three? How can it possibly be week four already? As you’ll have probably guessed, I didn’t get around to writing those updates. I...
One week ago, I wrote here that I was going to do NaNoWriMo this month and post weekly updates. And here we are at the end of week one and so I suppose it’s time for an update. I started with plenty of time (for the first five days), a blank screen and ideas for ten short stories scribbled in my notebook. A couple of those ideas were quite developed...