two years two months two days

'My lines, all  my lines, are of the tenth intensity. They are not the words that express what I want to express; they are the only words I can find that come near to expressing a half.' The Dylan Thomas Centre is all I know in Swansea other than the (OK, not so) many blocks I walked from the train station (while eating awful Linda McCartney's vegetarian sausages) because a taxi driver refused, politely, that's true, to take me there, claiming it wasn't worth the ride, it was just down there, round the corner. He was, I was soon to find out, mistaken. Oh, well, it was a nice walk, even though I wouldn't say that particular part of the city was particularly pleasant. It wasn't unpleasant, either; it even reminded me of other cities, generic cities, even South American ones. Apart from the castle , of course. That's something I'd love to do if I ever go back there, to have a proper look at the castle. Hunt down the city's world-reno...

El cuarto de Tula has long been a favourite with Eliades Ochoa ’s group Cuarteto Patria . This extended descarga (Cuban jam style) features the great soneros Ibrahim Ferrer and Manuel ‘Puntillita’ Licea joining Eliades in improvising lyrics laced with sexual innuendo in the Santiago tradition. The extraordinary solo on the laoud (a small, twelve string instrument similar to a lute) is by Barbarito Torres , the finest player in Havana. The timbales are played by the 13 year old phenomenon, Julienne Oviedo Sánchez, already a veteran of some of Cuba’s most celebrated modern big bands.** Watching them (well, not exactly them , as this was… over a decade later and some of them had already passed away) live twice (‘passed away live twice’, great writing, Bruna, great writing) is high on my (still very modest) list of been-there-done-that things. Neither time was in Wales, I dragged my sister along to the Rio de Janeiro concert of their farewell tour a few years ago. She thought i...