When I printed the texts of this blog between February and December 2005 I've called it "Season One: A Bachelor in Madrid". The texts from January 2006 until now will be grouped under the name "Season Two: Waiting for Timotchka".
Blogs are a great invention for those with mild multi-personality syndrome. Besides this "Praiagrande" blog, I posted some texts in two other blogs: "Cintratlantico", named after an ephemeral literary summer magazine I was involved with two decades ago; and "Arabiafelix" where I could write more serious stuff on Arab/Islam political matters. And now I've started "Timotchka", in Portuguese, a diary of having a new-born for once from a Father's perspective.
The ones writing those blogs are all "heteronimous" of mine (to use Fernando Pessoa's word for different competing selves inside one's wholeness). My deliberately frivolous persona in "PraiaGrande" is quite distinct from my more serious mindset as a civil servant who had dealings with foreign policy issues, I hope the Right Honourable Reader might have suspected it!
Www.timotchka.blogspot.com on the other hand, has to do with my soft spot for the very little ones. As Sir Peter Hall once said in an interview which I keep remembering, it's difficult for those who have lived more orthodox lives to fully understand the sheer luck and enormous privilege of keeping having small children of yours around you..
Season Three, no name yet, is just around the corner...
