Author Archives: hedgecoe

When I was an English-language teaching assistant in a small town in Castilla-La Mancha in the 1990s, one of the first things students would ask me was: “Do you know Robinson?”. It took me a while to find out that Michael Robinson was an English ex-footballer who had made a living for himself as a […]

“Mr Sánchez, you only care about power and we only care about Spain.” – Pablo Casado. Another crisis hits Spain and once again the country’s political class responds not with unity, statesmanship and deliberation but with tribalism, conspiracy theories and the airing of old grudges. When Pablo Casado, leader of the main opposition Partido Popular […]

“…I believe ardently that real memory, not historical and documentary memory but living memory, will be perpetuated only through literature. Because literature alone is capable of reinventing and regenerating truth.” – Jorge Semprún. In the early 1940s, as Spain settled into a period of grim dictatorship, one of its exiled citizens was embarking on a […]

In a culture so often dominated not just by winning, but also those other prized skills of ‘owning’, trolling and tooting your own horn, it’s refreshing to find a radically different mindset. I was recently lucky enough to visit Donostia, where eight locals were competing in the Gipuzkoa provincial final of Berstolarismo. Bertsolarismo is an […]

Facha: a Spanish person whose political views place them on the hard-right of the political spectrum. Chaleco: a garment, usually without sleeves, which is buttoned up and covers the torso, being worn over a shirt. Few words contain as much sartorial and political significance as the wonderful compound noun fachaleco. My favourite word of 2019, it […]

When commenting on his massive CIA novel, ‘Harlot’s Ghost’, Norman Mailer once remarked: “It is a fictional CIA and its only real existence is in my mind…If I have an argument to make then, on grounds of verisimilitude I will claim that my imaginative CIA is as real or more real than nearly all the […]

I have known Mateo since he was born. Now a bass-playing, Beatles-loving, comic-reading, basketball-playing 16-year-old, you could not meet a more charming teen. Recently, he underwent a six-hour operation to help improve his balance and mobility, which have been affected by cerebral palsy, and having come through his op with flying colours and world-class positivity, […]

Like moths to the light, we journalists tend to get drawn towards the dramatic. In the case of politics that can mean dwelling on the extremes: the colourful, the freaky, the radicals. But there are also, of course, characters and opinions that are less eye-catching yet equally important. Catalonia’s on-going crisis has been so relentlessly […]

It has been a strange spectacle watching the optimism generated by Pedro Sánchez’s general election victory at the end of April turn sour. The stop-start slow-mo negotiations between the Socialist Party and Unidas Podemos to form a new government never really seemed to get beyond second gear. Instead, they have become a marathon blame-game full […]

Last October, I joined a group of foreign journalists for an off-the-record meeting with Ciudadanos party leader Albert Rivera. We’d had plenty of these kinds of events with leading politicians before, and several with him, but on this occasion he seemed different to the man I remembered. He seemed more hurried and less at ease. […]