You may never have heard of Antoni Gaudi. But if you live in Barcelona you can’t NOT hear about him. The two are inseparable.

I can see his masterwork, La Sagrada Familia, from my roof terrace, surrounded by cranes. They started building it in 1882 and it’s still not finished.

But more than 2 million people come to see it every year, making it one of the most visited monuments in Spain. It has become a ‘gawp factory,’ in the words of PJ O’Rourke. You will never see a cathedral like it.

As you walk out of the Metro at LSF you stare up at immense swirling spires of lace made out of stone. It is a soaring, eccentric gingerbread fantasy. It is like a kid’s giant sandcastle; it’s as if he stuck shells and bits of seaweed in it, depicting trees and birds. Continue reading

For thirteen years I volunteered as a medic on a country ambulance in Australia.

Friends were often concerned about me whenever we attended a particularly bad motor vehicle accident, but I dealt with those okay. I was too busy doing what had to be done to get emotionally involved, at least most of the time.

Give me a two-car wreck and I came home and went back to the computer and carried on writing. Am I messed up? Don’t think so. I’d done my job best as I was able, and the rest was up to God.

No, what threw me were the old folk making their last trip.

Because then it wasn’t t about God or Fate or Luck like the outcome of a trauma. These people made me think about the choices we all make in our life. Continue reading

Have you noticed how the news calls every item a ‘story’.

As in: We’ll keep you updated with that story as it unfolds.

Yet it’s not a story. Most things we see on the news are nothing likea story. They are just things happening, a chain reaction of events without any foreseeable closure. Afghanistan,

for instance. Coalition troops went there, took Kabul, and they’ve been fighting ever since. Some days they take out Taliban or Al Qaida fighters, some days they take casualties themselves.

But there’s actually no story; a story has well defined parameters. It has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Much of what happens in the world has none of these things. The ‘story’ is artificially imposed.

That’s why newspapers and TV stations have journalists and news editors; their job is to turn world events into stories. Why? Because otherwise we wouldn’t be interested. Human beings process like stories. It’s innate. Spin doctors, admen and CNN editors know this. Continue reading