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[Original version of an article published as ‘Hand it Over’, Frontiers San Francisco 16/7 (7/31/97) and Frontiers Los Angeles/National 16/7 (8/8/97).] Flying into Hong Kong’s famous airport, which lies practically between rows of apartment buildings, I thought: Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that Hong Kong was beautiful? Because it is beautiful: behind the crowds…

That last afternoon: a major lunch, utterly Catalan food, in a fascinating but frankly rather bizarre restaurant. No wonder, maybe, that Dalí was Catalan – this was indeed surreal at many points – from the sausage tree (actually a grapevine, shellacked, with a selection of local sausages hanging from the branches) to the garlic soup,…

Today, cloudy, gray, a sprinkle of rain on the balcony. What a relief, frankly – much cooler (somewhat like a normal summer day in northern England!) – I feel as though I’m recovering from wilting, like a plant at the height of summer. ••• A Girona Yesterday, Girona. Much to do, lots of it tourist-style,…

Selling it I suspect I’m not exactly selling my readers on Sitges this year. Well, obviously that doesn’t matter to Sitges itself – it can take the blow, I think – and most readers will have already decided, quite rightly, that the problems lie with me rather than with the town. But I’m thinking particularly…

Tomorrow I shall go to Girona for the day – a good idea, as I clearly need to get out of my funk here (for which pardon me – here I am blogging about a lovely vacation spot and just handing you a lot of neurotic miseries; chalk it up to the heat, and reading…