Summer in the city. You lie around in your underwear, eyes glazed, watching TV adverts for canned iced tea, air conditioners, mosquito machines and indefinably pornographic ice creams.  It’s time to head for the hills for the Catalan Picnic Experience, an elaborate ritual that bears no resemblance to the consumption, in the car in a [...]

Hello from rainy Manchester, where I’m visiting my mother. I left Barcelona in balmy, springlike weather. We flew over the snow-capped Pyrenees. And I thought: they look like meringue. And remembered the Spanish expression for beating egg whites till they form stiff peaks: montar las claras a punto de nieve – to snow point. And [...]