Here I am at the edge

  A great actress from Spain. While she may not everyone's idea of a beauty, Blanca Portillo  is one of my favorite actress from Spain; I first saw her playing a distraught judge trying to save her son from prison in Boy Missing ; but she is in her forte in the series Se Quien Eres (I know who you are) again playing a judge. This time the story centres on the man playing her husband, a dishonest lawyer, trying to convince everyone he has amnesia to escape an abduction and attempted murder charge. Amnesia is easy to feign for a short, but almost impossible to maintain for a long period, and is probably the easiest defense to crack. One series I would love to get English subs for is Accusados ; this series is about trying to prove the guilt of a man who caused a fire that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people among the cast is another of my fave actors from Spain , Jose Coronado .

The culture destroyer. There is no doubt that life in Spain during the Franco years was miserable; one of his greatest crimes was dragging back the culture that the country had to the Middle Ages by banning most of the artists/ writers to exile if you were lucky to escape. Some like Federico Lorca (shown above) were executed like dogs, his body has never been found. The exception to this rule is Salvador Dali who thrived during this period. There are two stories called El Hombre Oculto, one tells of a man who hid in house for the period until Franco died, still believing someone would betray though his family told him that people no longer cared about what he was doing. The other is about a man who hid in a cellar under his house until Franco died. Very few of the ones fortunate to afford the price of an escape returned, if you were in your 20's you would have been at least in your late 50's when Franco died, and what would you come back to; a country you don...

The Joys and the Sorrows. Los gozos y las sombras in English means The Joys and Sorrows. This TV adaption of the books by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester is set in the years before the Spanish Civil War , the story is centred on the return of a man who had left the fictional village many years ago, and the impact of his return to the fishing village. I finished watching the series last night, Sept 9th. the episode where the village turns out to witness the rescue of the vessel Marianna iii as she struggles in the stormy seas is typical of many such villages anywhere we men fish. My short story Lifeboat heroes on sale as Draft2Digital   retells the story of one of my late uncle's  who was involved in such a rescue in the late 70's with the Teesmouth lifeboat; also the story on the Christian short stories link tells a similar story about men fighting the seas, this was inspired by the hymn " Child, your cries have awoken the Master ." One of my fave actresses from Sp...