Tim Parfitt's Blog

Letter from Spain #67

I’ve started to eat three yoghurts a day here in Catalonia - and it’s a Catalan brand called La Fageda. Why? Because I recently discovered that the ‘supercentenarian’ María Branyas Morera ate three of them a day.

I don’t know how much Bezos and Zuckerberg spend a year in search (and/or research) of longevity but a 4-pack of La Fageda yoghurts costs just €1.88 in my local Bonpreu.

María Branyas, who lived for the past two decades in the Santa Maria del Tura nursing home in Olot, Catalonia, died of natural causes in her sleep on 19 August 2024 at the age of 117 years and 168 days. That’s 117 and a half.

María was born in San Francisco in 1907 before moving with her family to Spain at the age of eight. Over her lifetime she lived through the Spanish Civil War, two world wars, and two pandemics (Spanish flu and Covid). She even recovered from Covid at the age of 113.

Guinness World Records had officially confirmed María’s status as the world’s oldest known person alive before her death. She’d held the record since January 2023 following the death of a French nun, aged 118. I don’t know how many yoghurts the French nun used to eat a day, but I bet she had a few. The world’s oldest living person is now 116-year-old Ethel Caterham from Surrey. My guess is that she also has a soft spot for yoghurt.

Before María died, bless her, the Catalan supercentenarian said to doctors: ‘Please study me so I can help others.’

And they did.

About a year before her death, doctors collected samples of her blood, saliva, urine and stools to perform a ‘multi-omic analysis’ and build a biological profile. They also investigated María’s genes, immune cells, blood levels of lipids, and proteins in her tissues, comparing her results to those of younger individuals who had undergone similar testing. For example, they compared María’s genetic results to those of 75 other Iberian women in the 1000 Genomes Project, an effort to map variation in the human genome. The biology of such an elderly person had never been studied in such depth.

Some 40 scientists participated in the research, and it was led by Manel Esteller, Head of the Cancer Epigenetics group at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute. Overall, they studied the biological basis of María’s longevity and its possible connection to her habits and attitude toward life.

The results of the study were published last Wednesday 24 September in the journal Cell Reports Medicine and they have detailed the key factors that may have influenced María’s longevity.

Apparently she ‘lacked many molecular hallmarks of typical late-life illnesses’ and carried ‘genetic variants that favoured efficient cholesterol and lipid processing’, both linked to long life and good brain function. Epigenetic testing also suggested her biological age was at least a decade younger than her real one.

But one striking detail researchers want to explore further is her diet, especially her routine of eating yoghurt three times a day. She favoured La Fageda, a Catalan probiotic brand rich in beneficial bacteria such as Lactobacillus delbrueckii bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, known to reduce inflammation.

The study states that María’s gut microbiome was distinct from that of 61- to 91-year olds previously studied. In particular, she showed a high level of actinobacteria, which typically decline in old age. Bacteria of the genus Bifidobacterium, which are known to excrete anti-inflammatory compounds, were especially prevalent.

‘She had this bacteria in the gut that protected against inflammation and she had this bacteria for two reasons,’ Manel Esteller said. ‘The genome was very welcoming of the population, but [it was] also due to her food.’ María ate three yoghurts a day, he said; fermented foods like yoghurt contain probiotics, or living microorganisms that can replenish and maintain the gut microbiome.

This is a direct quote from the Cell Reports summary link above:

‘Our supercentenarian ingested a high amount of yoghurts, a trait associated with reduced body weight and type-2 diabetes incidence and diminished body fat and insulin resistance. In our case, whether the dominance of the Bifidobacteriumrelated genus is fully attributable or not to the yoghurt diet cannot be completely confirmed since that would have required a longitudinal study with sample collection over several years. However, we believe that it is likely that a beneficial effect of yoghurt ingestion via modulation of the gut ecosystem could have contributed to her well-being and advanced age. In addition to the dietary influence, there is an increasing interest in fecal microbiota transplantation studies that through promoting gut microbial rejuvenation could also foster healthy aging.’

So, there you go. Yoghurt. Longevity.

María also started her mornings with a cereal smoothie made from eight different grains - but that sounds too complex for me. Either no breakfast at all, or some fruit and a tiny bit of Kellogg’s All-Bran does the trick.

Okay - one final note: her longevity was not due to genetics (or yoghurt) alone. She maintained a healthy weight, had a strong social circle with family and friends close by, and never smoked or drank.

I can’t never drink - but at least it’s now mainly Catalan wine, like the yoghurts.

On and off, I have worked in the media in Spain for some 30 years (click here for more info). Currently, in addition to writing my books set in Spain and developing one of them for the screen (see below), I also chat briefly on most Wednesdays to Giles Brown on Talk Radio Europe about the latest news from Spain. If you’re interested, here’s the clip from Weds 24 September in which we discuss the current corruption trials in Spain, Pedro Sánchez and Felipe VI’s comments on Israel & Gaza, and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona …

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Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Madrid Connection … coming soon!

‘The Madrid Connection’, the sequel to ‘The Barcelona Connection’, will be officially published on 21 November. I will be posting further details about the book over the coming weeks. The digital edition is available for pre-order here.

The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen

Development for the screen: ‘The Barcelona Connection’ is currently in development as a film, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.

Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real ‘real’ Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull’s testicles.

Tim Parfitt’s rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain’s glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn’t a clue what they’re on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don’t miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #66

Over 100,000 Madrileños managed to cut short the 21st and final stage of Spain’s ‘La Vuelta’ cycling tour yesterday, protesting against the participation of a team with links to Israel - and amid Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The Israel-Premier Tech team is not an official state team, but privately funded by a billionaire Israeli-Canadian property developer. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also praised the team throughout La Vuelta, and it was widely seen as representing Israel.

We could debate the seriousness of all issues here for hours: from simple rider safety right up to the accusations of genocide being carried out by Israel in Gaza; from the EU’s double standards (banning Russia from sporting events but not Israel); from mixing sport and politics to the current diplomatic fallout between Israel and Spain.

Whilst I feel sorry for the riders and athletes participating in La Vuelta, I share the same view as the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez: ‘As long as the barbarity continues, neither Russia nor Israel should participate in any international competition.’

Sánchez has gone further, of course, openly calling it a ‘genocide in Gaza’ on several occasions now, and stating that Spain ‘is and will be on the right side of history’.

Last week, announcing a series of measures against Israel, he said that while Israel is entitled to defend itself, this right does not extend to attempts to ‘exterminate a defenceless people’. He also condemned what he described as the international community’s inaction in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.

On Sunday, speaking at an event in Malaga before the final stage of the race was abandoned early in Madrid, he said: ‘Today marks the end of the Vuelta. Our respect and recognition for the athletes and our admiration for the Spanish people who are mobilising for just causes like Palestine.’

‘Spain today shines as an example and as a source of pride, an example to an international community where it sees Spain taking a step forward in the defence of human rights.’

Today (Monday) he went even further, reiterating his ‘deep admiration’ for the protesters who took part in rallies during various stages of La Vuelta - not just in Madrid.

And on that, I think he also has a point …

Because although the Madrileños are getting all the glory (again) for calling time on the final stage of La Vuelta, I think it’s only fair to salute the warm-up acts.

Catalonia kicked things off as far as protests are concerned (as is very often the case), during Stage 5 around Figueres - very much Dalíland for readers of ‘The Barcelona Connection’ ;). A small group of protesters stepped into the TTT (team time trial) and briefly blocked Israel–Premier Tech. TV cameras missed parts of it; the headlines didn’t. The team remounted and finished, but Catalonia had lit the fuse.

Then came Navarre for Stage 10, from Sendaviva to Larra-Belagua. Protesters spilled into the road, causing the Italian rider Simone Petilli to be knocked off his bike in the mayhem as riders swerved and braked to avoid the mob. Fortunately he was not seriously hurt and went on to finish the stage. However, Navarre was the moment the peloton collectively realised this wasn’t a one-off.

Then to Stage 11 in the Basque Country - where they also know how to protest - and to Bilbao itself where everything escalated. With barriers heaving with protesters near the finishing line, organisers took the time three kilometres out and declared no stage winner.

Stage 13 reached the foot of the Angliru in Asturias … and then stopped. Demonstrators blocked the road at the base, halting the break and race vehicles before police cleared a path.

Stage 15 in Galicia saw a lone demonstrator darting towards the road near Monforte de Lemos, causing a crash while he was being chased, with riders later abandoning the race from injuries. The following afternoon, the Stage 16 win was taken 8 kilometres early, with the finish moved to Mos to avoid a blocked final climb at Castro de Herville.

By the time La Vuelta reached Valladolid in Castilla y León, the organisers appeared to have learnt a lesson. They pre-emptively halved the ITT (individual time trail) to 12.2 km ‘for greater protection’.

Then came Madrid - the grand finale that wasn’t.

Stage 21 was supposed to be nine laps of late-summer fast cycling around the city. Instead, pro-Palestinian crowds pushed through metal barriers and occupied sections of the course, including the main Gran Via, where cyclists were due to pass multiple times. Police officers were forced into repeated attempts to clear the route.

At around 7pm local time, the organisers posted a short statement on social media: ‘For security reasons, stage 21 of La Vuelta has been ended early. There will be no podium ceremony.’

And there wasn’t. All thanks to the Madrileños … as well as protesters in Catalonia, Navarre, the Basque Country, Asturias, Galicia and Castilla y León.

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A bit about me

On and off, I have worked in the media in Spain for some 30 years (click here for more info). Currently, in addition to writing my books set in Spain and developing one of them for the screen (see below), I also chat briefly most Wednesdays to Giles Brown on Talk Radio Europe about the latest news from Spain (am doing it again from 24 Sept).

Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Madrid Connection … coming this autumn

‘The Madrid Connection’, the sequel to ‘The Barcelona Connection’, will be officially published on 21 November. I will be posting further details about the book over the coming weeks. The digital edition is available for pre-order here.

The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen

Development for the screen: ‘The Barcelona Connection’ is currently in development as a film, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.

Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #65

I’m back - hopefully every Monday from now on. I hope you’ve had (or are still having) a great summer. I spent mine writing, editing, re-writing, editing, re-writing, and still re-writing … but (touch wood) ‘The Madrid Connection’ will be available soon (see below).

This Substack blog is called ‘Letter from Spain’, which means it is normally about Spain, in one form or another. Today, it’s not only linked to Spain, but it’s also about Giorgio Armani, who died last Thursday, aged 91. Today, he was laid to rest in the 14th-century Church of San Martino, in the picturesque village of Rivalta, near Piacenza, the city where he was born.

Last week, many ex-colleagues from the Condé Nast and fashion-world days wrote wonderful tributes to Giorgio Armani. I also have a fun memory of being with him that I wanted to share with you.

Nearly 30 years ago now, I was invited to one of his own private cocktail parties in Milan, just after one of his fashion shows, and before a dinner to be attended by other guests. There were only about 20 of us at this exclusive pre-dinner soirée. I was 35 at the time, running Condé Nast in Spain, and I felt slightly out of place among some of the other guests (as you’ll see). I think Giorgio Armani could sense this, but in addition to being very charming, elegant and stylish - everything you might expect - he was also very kind to me. He put me at ease. He checked I was OK. He personally refilled my glass. We laughed out loud together - and I have a very fond memory of the man. RIP.

So … I wanted to share this true story about something that happened at his party, exactly as it was published in my first book - ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’. I’ll be back with a ‘Letter from Spain’ again next Monday.

This is the extract from the book:

It is early 1996. Kirsa and I, together with my new Spanish Vogue editor, Mara Malibrán, are in Milan for the night, attending some fashion shows, and the Giorgio Armani show in particular. It is a far cry from the day I first walked into Vogue House, London, at the age of eighteen, and asked for a job – and only got one because I reminded the personnel manager of her nephew.

A lady called Isabel Preysler is with us. Isabel Preysler is the ex-wife of the ever-tanned Latin crooner, Julio Iglesias, whom she married when she was just nineteen. She is therefore the mum of heartthrob Enrique Iglesias. She is also the ex-wife of the Marqués de Gríñon, or Carlos Falcó, as he prefers to be called, the aristocratic non-conformist who just happens to grow some of the best grapes in Spain. Today, however, she is the wife of the ex-Finance Minister of Spain, Miguel Boyer, one of the country’s most successful businessmen.

Isabel Preysler is Hola magazine’s constant and loyal cover star, a close friend of King Juan Carlos and the Spanish royal family, as well as an integral part of Spanish high society. She is the PR-mafia’s must-have guest at a never-ending social circuit where the Spanish glitterati of empresarios, singers, actors, writers, toreros, futbolistas, flamenco stars, designers, models and key social celebrities, all fight to rub Armani-clad shoulders with her. To me, she’s just a great lady in a great dress. It just so happens that since she’s also done an Armani shoot for us in Vogue, she’s become a sort of friend. She’s even hidden under the dashboard of my new Mercedes whilst I’ve smuggled her out of our office to avoid the paparazzi.

After his catwalk show, Giorgio Armani has invited us to his private quarters in the elegant palacete for a cocktail party before dinner. Among the guests are Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Martin Scorsese and Eric Clapton. An official Hola photographer takes shots of Isabel with Giorgio, then Isabel with Sophia, then Isabel with Claudia, then Isabel with Giorgio, Sophia and Claudia altogether.

I’m exhausted and could do with an early night back at the hotel (without any kids jumping on me in the morning), but I feel as if I am on the film-set of something which is too good to be missed. I eye Giorgio’s private telephone next to Sophia Loren. It has already rung once or twice for one of the guests and I am tempted to phone my dad in England from it and yell, ‘Hi, dad! Hang on a sec, I’m just going to pass you to Sophia Loren. Yes, Sophia Loren! No, the real one. Yes, the real Sophia Loren, dad!’ I can see myself covering the mouthpiece with my palm, passing it to Sophia, saying, ‘Just say, “Ciao, Ronnie …”’

Instead, I wander around the room, admiring the paintings and furniture, watching everyone else, and wondering what time we’ll be able to leave. Suddenly this woman approaches me. She’s an American, fairly tall, very, very thin, with wide eyes, a strange fixed grin, and taut stretched skin. She is watching Isabel being photographed and asks me if I know who she is.

‘Sure, I do,’ I reply. ‘That’s Isabel Preysler.’

‘And that photographer?’ asks the skeleton.

‘I think he’s with Hola,’ I say. ‘I think they’re doing an official shoot with her and Giorgio to cover his shows.’

She pauses, trying to take this all in.

‘Hola?’ she finally spits. ‘That’s that Spanish magazine, right?’

‘Right,’ I nod, quietly wondering who’s been rattling her cage.

She pauses again, then says sharply: ‘I always see people buying it at airports.’

‘Right,’ I nod. She’s said ‘buying’ as if it’s a crime. What are people supposed to do? This woman is highly-strung and wacko, no doubt about it. Whoever she is, she’s too rich, too thin and too irritating for me. ‘Right,’ I say again, trying to catch Kirsa’s eye. ‘Oh well, I suppose I’d better go and – ’

‘Why is it so popular?’ continues the skeleton, abruptly.

‘It’s also very successful in England,’ I say. ‘It’s called Hello over there. And I reckon they’ll launch a version in the States one day. Perhaps they could call it Hi.’

I start to laugh but she glares at me as if I’m demented.

‘Oh, really,’ she shrieks, as if I’ve just sprinted stark-bollock-naked across her lawn at the Hamptons. ‘You really think something like that would work in the States? I mean, it’s a European thing, isn’t it – what with all your royal families?’

I turn to have a good look at her.

She’s beginning to appear vaguely familiar but I still can’t place her. She’s glaring at me and by now, Kirsa has joined us, having overheard the last few lines of our conversation. ‘Oh,’ I say, oddly finding myself defending the Hola philosophy more than it deserves. ‘Hola and Hello don’t just publish pictures of royal families, you know. And anyway, even if you don’t exactly have a royal family, you still have the Kennedys, Trumps and all that crap …’

There’s a brief, deafening silence, before:

‘Oh. My. Gawwwd,’ whines the skeleton, twisting her head and neck around in what looks like agony. ‘Puh-lease don’t mention us both in the same sentence.’

‘I’m sorry?’ I say.

Kirsa whispers loudly in my ear.

‘Tim,’ she says. ‘It’s Jackie Kennedy’s sister …’

‘Oh, right,’ I say, turning beetroot and wanting to hurl myself out of Giorgio Armani’s window.

What was I even doing there? My love affair with Spain was never supposed to have turned out like this. I was sent to Madrid for six weeks nine years ago, for heaven’s sake. I’d overstayed my welcome by nearly a decade …

Click here to order ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’.

Subscribe now

A bit about me

On and off, I have worked in the media in Spain for some 30 years (click here for more info). Currently, in addition to writing my books set in Spain and developing one of them for the screen (see below), I also chat briefly every Wednesday to Giles Brown on Talk Radio Europe about the latest news from Spain. If you’re interested, here’s the clip from Weds 3 September:

Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Madrid Connection … coming this autumn

‘The Madrid Connection’, the sequel to ‘The Barcelona Connection’, will be published this autumn. I will be posting further details about the book over the coming weeks. The digital edition is available for pre-order here.

The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen

Development for the screen: ‘The Barcelona Connection’ is currently in development as a film, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.

Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #64

Just a very short but sweet post this week, simply to say that I’m delighted to announce that ‘The Madrid Connection’ - the sequel to ‘The Barcelona Connection’ - will be out this Autumn, and it is already available for pre-order (at least the Kindle version).

Just to say that I am very excited about the book, and below is a teaser image of the cover by the brilliant designer, Llorenç Perello, who also created the cover for ‘The Barcelona Connection’.

I will post further details about the book over the summer months. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet read ‘The Barcelona Connection’, now would be a very good time to do so! Full details about it and how to get hold of a copy - including links to all the research - are below.

On and off, I have worked in the media in Spain for some 30 years (here’s some more info about me). Currently, in addition to writing my books set in Spain and developing one of them for the screen (see below), I also chat briefly every Wednesday to Giles Brown on Talk Radio Europe about the latest news from Spain. If you’re interested, here’s the clip from Weds 22 May:

Subscribe now

Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Madrid Connection … coming this autumn

‘The Madrid Connection’, the sequel to ‘The Barcelona Connection’, will be published this autumn, and I already have two dates in the calendar in Madrid and Barcelona to launch it. I will post further details about these events and the book itself over the summer months.

The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen

Development for the screen: ‘The Barcelona Connection’ is currently in development as a film, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.

Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #63

We were invited to a friend’s Eurovision party on Saturday night. I’ve never been a great Eurovision fan, but I’m a great party fan - and this was a great friend throwing a great party, and so it was … great.

Speaking Spanish all night with Spaniards, Swiss, Austrians, Dutch and Germans, I think I was the only Englishman there. Also, everyone else seemed to know what the UK entry was and some had already heard it before the big night, but I didn’t have a clue. Apparently it was What The Hell Just Happened? by Remember Monday. Well, I can’t remember when whatever-the-hell-it-was happened to be sung, but it didn’t get a very loud cheer at the party. Unlike the German and Swiss entries … and especially the Spanish one, Esa Diva, sung by Melody.

I had assumed that none of the guests would be taking the contest very seriously, but I was wrong.

The Eurovision’s always been a bit of a ‘nul points’ event for me - simply something to laugh out loud at, if only for the costumes - men in armour and prosthetics, metallic bodysuits, cone-shaped hats or a techno frog prince … the more bonkers the better.

There were plenty of moments to laugh out loud on Saturday, especially when the long-haired Estonian in a tie started crooning to a takeaway coffee cup, or when the woman from Malta started bouncing up and down on an exercise ball. And I nearly choked when the Swedish men started singing in a giant sauna set - ‘We’re gonna sauna, sauna, steam it up’ - as it reminded me of Monty Python’s lumberjack song.

I didn’t know this before, but apparently the so-called Big Five – the UK, Spain, Germany, France and Italy – always qualify for the Eurovision final automatically, thanks to their financial contributions to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Money can buy access, but it didn’t guarantee any points, though. The staging for the Esa Diva song from Spain’s Melody was good - the Spanish guests at the party loved it, anyway - but Spain finished 24th out of 26 countries, with just 37 points.

That didn’t go down very well.

The Eurovision might be a celebration of flamboyance, creativity and campness, but it is also competitive, often catty, and certainly controversial. It was nearly 1am here in Spain when it looked like Israel might win the four-hour grand final - and by then it was clear that Spain was finishing 24th. Everyone at the party, and especially the Spanish guests, started to speak and shout their mind … telling it like it is, because that’s what the Spanish do, and that’s why I love them.

They’d done it earlier, too - before the Eurovision had already begun.

At around 9pm, Spain’s national broadcaster, RTVE, had aired a black screen, with a stark white message, in both Spanish and English: ‘When it comes to human rights, silence is not an option. Peace and justice for Palestine.’

Spain - or at least its state broadcaster - had spoken its mind.

They’d openly defied directives from the organisers of the Eurovision by broadcasting the message, despite prior warnings from the EBU instructing them not to mention the Gaza conflict, citing the competition’s strict stance on political neutrality.

Spanish media suggested the EBU’s warning had been prompted by a complaint from Israel’s own public broadcaster, KAN. The complaint alleged that during the second semi-final last Thursday, Spanish commentators had mentioned casualties in Gaza attributed to Israeli military actions, while the Israeli contestant Yuval Raphael was performing.

Today (Monday), Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, known for being one of the most vocal European leaders criticising Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, went even further.

Drawing a parallel with Russia – barred from competing in the Eurovision after invading Ukraine in 2022 – Sánchez said during an event in Madrid: ‘Spain’s commitment to human rights must be constant and consistent, including in Europe. If Russia was required not to participate in Eurovision after the invasion of Ukraine, neither should Israel. We cannot allow double standards, not even in culture.’

I try to avoid writing too deeply about any world conflicts in this ‘Letter from Spain’ blog. I know that Israel’s Eurovision entrant had survived the October 2023 attack by hiding beneath bodies for hours as Hamas gunmen attacked the Nova music festival, killing hundreds. I know this is sensitive - but this barbaric, humanitarian crisis in Gaza has to stop.

When Spain’s national broadcaster says ‘when it comes to human rights, silence is not an option’, they are dead right. When the Spanish prime minister says that he has ‘serious doubts that Israel is complying with international humanitarian law’, he is dead right to have those doubts. Other countries’ national broadcasters and leaders should be saying the same.

As they say here: basta ya. The barbarity must stop.

In addition to writing my books set in Spain and developing one of them for the screen (see below), I also founded the ‘Spain in English’ news site and chat briefly every Wednesday to Giles Brown on Talk Radio Europe about the latest news from Spain. If you’re interested, here’s the clip from Weds 14 May:

Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Madrid Connection … coming this autumn

‘The Madrid Connection’, the sequel to ‘The Barcelona Connection’, will be published this autumn, and I already have two dates in the calendar in Madrid and Barcelona to launch it. I will post further details about these events, the book - and how to pre-order it - over the summer months.

The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen

Development for the screen: ‘The Barcelona Connection’ is currently in development as a film, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.

Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #62

So, we have an American Pope who can speak Spanish. Along with English, Pope Leo XIV also speaks Italian, French and Portuguese, and he can read Latin and German, too - but let’s just focus on the Spanish for now.

He speaks Spanish because of his dual citizenship - American and Peruvian - having been born in Chicago, and later serving as a bishop in Peru for nearly a decade, first in Trujillo and then in Chiclayo, where he embraced the local culture and language.

He loves deep-pan pizza and playing Wordle, considers himself modestly as ‘quite the amateur tennis player’, and he has a deep passion for football and baseball. In Peru, he supported Alianza Lima. In Italy, he supports Roma. But for baseball, he’s a Chicago White Sox fan (not a Cubs fan as first reported) - and he even watched them win the World Series in 2005.

Despite being an American, Robert Prevost had became known within the Vatican as the ‘least American’ of US cardinals before he became Pope Leo XIV last Thursday. The ‘least American’ Pope who then suddenly spoke some Spanish during his first address in St.Peter’s Square. I found that very interesting.

Before that address, US President Donald Trump had congratulated Leo on social media. ‘It is such an honour to realise that he is the first American Pope,’ he wrote. ‘What excitement, and what a Great Honour for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!’

And then Leo goes out onto the balcony, waves to the crowd, and speaks some Spanish …

Some commentators have said that the new pope’s dual nationality ‘shows a broader global perspective he brings to the papacy’, as well as his choice of the papal name ‘Leo XIV’. The last pope to carry the name, Pope Leo XIII, was well known for focusing on issues such as poverty, workers’ rights and social justice.

And so Leo, of course, was not Trump’s first choice for pope.

Other than suggesting that he (He?), Donald himself (me, me, me), might want to be pope with a photoshopped image of himself in papal vestments, the president had previously suggested another American: Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, a perceived ally who gave a reading at his second inauguration … and who presumably speaks no Spanish at all. Fortunately, however, Donald (me, me, me) isn’t the one who chooses the pope.

From what I’ve read and heard, the USA under Trump is not exactly in love with the Spanish language. And if you’re a Venezuelan with a Real Madrid tattoo - or rather, a tattoo featuring a crown over a football which, according to US authorities, also signifies an affiliation with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua - then you could end up in an orange boiler suit and chains for a decade at El Salvador’s maximum-security prison with your head shaved.

Don’t even say ‘Hola!’ to any US customs official if you’re heading over there, as you could be detained and deported under the Alien Enemies Act, ‘an 18th-century wartime law invoked by the Trump administration to expedite deportations of individuals deemed threats to national security’. You think I’m kidding? OK, maybe I’m exaggerating, but have you seen the Netflix movie, Upon Entry?

Since February 2025, the Spanish-language version of the White House website has been removed. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, the administration removed what was previously located at whitehouse.gov/es/. The Spanish-language social media accounts were also deactivated. All this despite the Latino community’s decisive support for his victory.

The White House stated that the removal was part of a ‘broader website redesign’ during the transition and expressed a commitment to restoring the Spanish-language section - but so far, it has not been reinstated (I just checked and I couldn’t find it).

Earlier this year, speaking at an event in Madrid organised by the Cervantes Institute, (a public institution created by Spain in 1991 to universally promote the teaching, study and use of Spanish and contribute to the dissemination of Hispanic cultures abroad), Spain’s King Felipe VI criticised the Trump administration for its decision to eliminate Spanish from their official communications, website and social networks, describing the move as ‘striking’.

Felipe also highlighted that the number of Spanish speakers in the US would reach 100 million by 2050.

Fortunately Trump has been unable to stop one of them becoming the new pope.

If you’re interested, I was back on Talk Radio Europe again on Wednesday, chatting about the news from Spain with Giles Brown. Here’s the clip from Weds 7 May:

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Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Madrid Connection … coming this autumn

‘The Madrid Connection’, the sequel to ‘The Barcelona Connection’, will be published this autumn, and I already have two dates in the calendar in Madrid and Barcelona to launch it. I will post further details about these events, the book - and how to pre-order it - over the summer months.

The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen

Development for the screen: ‘The Barcelona Connection’ is currently in development as a film, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.

Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #61

This is just a short post to say that I’m back. I have returned to Substack.

This time last week we were still waiting for the power to return.

In Spain, the power normally goes off if you plug in your kettle and toaster at the same time - or at least that’s what I’m used to. I think it might be one of the reasons that many Spaniards don’t bother having breakfast at home. They go to work, to an office, and then leave and go out for breakfast somewhere. Or at least that’s what they did the last time I was in an office.

When the power went off at home last Monday at 12.30pm, I went outside and blamed a couple of workmen in the street. You’ve cut through a cable again, I said. No, we haven’t, they said. And they hadn’t.

I then blamed Putin. He gets blamed for everything (most of it rightly so). I then briefly blamed the Chinese, and then I blamed an Israeli ammunitions company, as Spain had cancelled a €6.8 million order to purchase bullets from them for the Guardia Civil police just 5 days previously.

Meanwhile, Spain’s opposition parties were already blaming the government’s renewable energy policies. PM Pedro Sánchez quickly hit back, saying that they were ‘frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance’, adding that nuclear power generation ‘was no more resilient’ than other electricity sources. The country’s Minister of Ecological Transition said that blaming renewable energy was ‘irresponsible and simplistic’.

At around 7.30pm in the evening of the blackout, when I briefly got a signal again on my phone, it pinged with two messages that had been sent mid-afternoon. They were from LBC and Talk Radio - both asking if I was available to chat with them on air about the power cut in Spain. No, I wasn’t available because I didn’t have any effing power.

At the moment, we still don’t know what really caused the blackout, and the government has said that it needs ‘several more days’ to work it out - or several more days to come up with the perfect fib.

Anyway, I’m back. I will try to post something here every week, although I’m not sure what day it will be. Hopefully Mondays.

If you’re interested, I’m also back on the Talk Radio Europe each Wednesday, too, chatting briefly about the news from Spain with Giles Brown. Here’s the clip from Weds 30 April, in which we chat about some of the things I’ve mentioned above:

My last ‘Letter from Spain’ was on 17 November - about President-elect Elon Musk - and I think I was right about him …

Since then, I’ve been working on ‘The Madrid Connection’ - which will be available this autumn - and the development of ‘The Barcelona Connection’ for the screen. More on this very soon.

Just a final note for today:

If you’re in the UK, Canada or Australia, and you like reading on Kindle, then BookBub is currently promoting the ‘riveting thriller’, The Barcelona Connection, on Amazon for just £0.99 (or $) until midnight tonight (Monday 5 May). Good time to read it with the sequel out soon … ;)

Click on the image below for the Amazon USA link:

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Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Madrid Connection … coming this autumn

‘The Madrid Connection’, the sequel to ‘The Barcelona Connection’, will be published this autumn, and I already have two dates in the calendar in Madrid and Barcelona to launch it. I will post further details about these events, the book - and how to pre-order it - over the summer months.

The Barcelona Connection - Research & development for the screen

Development for the screen: ‘The Barcelona Connection’ is currently in development as a film, and I hope I will be able to post further news about this here in due course.

Research: In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #60

I’m back, after travelling for the past 16 days, firstly to Madrid, then to the Baix Empordà region of Catalonia (a bit more on those trips in a future post), and finally to the UK for a week. During that time we’ve had the catastrophic floods in the Valencia region … and Elon Musk has become the President-elect of the United States (sorry, Donald).

As for Valencia, I simply can’t imagine the trauma - the sheer horror - that people have faced and are still facing after the flash floods of 29 October, which have so far claimed over 220 lives and with many still missing. Almost half the people killed were 70 years old or older.

Spaniards, especially in Valencia, have been critical of the regional and national government’s initial response to the disaster. Under Spain’s decentralised system of government, it’s supposed to be the regional governments that lead the response to any disaster - but many residents were left without food and water for days and had to rely on aid provided by volunteers instead of any government.

There’s also real anger and outrage at the Valencia government’s failure to send out any warnings about the imminent flooding in the first place. Again, Spain’s decentralised government tasks regional authorities with handling civil protection - but this clearly failed in Valencia.

Despite Spain’s national weather agency (AEMET) having issued the highest red alert warning as early as 7.30am on 29 October, warning of the risk of ‘very intense’ rain and floods, the local emergency alert to all cell phones in Valencia was only sent out after 8pm, nearly 13 hours later. In many cases residents were only contacted when floodwater was already gushing through their towns, or their vehicles were floating away.

The head of Valencia’s emergency department has since admitted she didn’t know it was possible to send such warnings until the evening of the first day of the floods. As for the president of the regional government, Carlos Mazón of the right-wing People’s Party (PP), he’s not only totally incompetent but he’s also a liar.

He was having a three-hour lunch with a journalist on the day of the storm, while some towns and villages had already started to fill with water. He’d initially lied about his whereabouts and he’s also lied about the timing of ordering the emergency authorities into action.

‘I’m not going to deny mistakes,’ he told Valencia’s regional parliament on Friday, adding he was ‘not going to shirk any responsibility’. As the head of the regional government he also said he ‘would like to apologise’ to those who ‘felt’ that ‘the aid did not arrive or was not enough’.

As he spoke, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the parliament building, jeering and chanting slogans demanding his resignation and calling him a liar.

But has he resigned? No. That doesn’t happen in Spain.

As for the USA elections and Elon Musk-cum-Donald Trump … well, it was always going to happen, wasn’t it? In hindsight, it was obvious.

I’m no Trump (or Musk) fan, but on the morning after the election results became clear, I posted a simple comment on my Facebook page about 71 million Americans voting for him can’t all be wrong or insane, ‘can they?’ Well, it was finally 76,427,168 Americans. Two weeks on, I think some people are still arguing about it on my Facebook comments section.

Those 76.4 million Americans (including Musk, who we’ll get to in a minute) knew exactly who they were voting for:

A convicted felon, the first former president ever to be convicted of a crime … a man accused of 34 other felony counts across criminal cases in New York, Florida, Washington DC and Georgia - a man declared liable by a court for sexual abuse - a man who talks about the size of a golfer’s penis during political speeches - a man who accused immigrants of eating cats and dogs - who fomented an uprising at Capitol Hill by refusing to concede a previous election that he’d clearly lost - a man who has often demanded the jailing of his opponents - a man who will imperil NATO - who thinks of his own interests above all else … who survived two impeachment attempts … etc etc …

Those 76.4 million Americans didn’t care. Most of them probably thought they were positive attributes. They knew exactly who they were voting for and they still wanted him as their President. Who are we to call them all insane and wrong? It’s called democracy (with the help of a bit of fake news, I guess).

Trump won because his policies obviously made sense to 76.4 million people. Okay, he probably also won because too many male US voters refused to vote for a woman (or a black woman), hence the fact that he beat Hillary and Kamala but not Biden … although that might be simplifying things a bit. But Trump clearly offered voters simple, old school American patriotism and aspiration instead of what Kamala Harris was offering … which wasn’t clear.

What is clear is that the liberal and ‘woke’ campaigns didn’t work, and they will need to change.

In the final weeks of the US election campaign, Trump’s team launched an advert not focusing on the economy and immigration, but on Kamala’s past support for taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for transgender prison inmates in the US.

‘Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,’ she’d said in a clip from 2019 that was used in the ad, before the narrator delivered the tagline. ‘Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ It quickly went viral.

According to the New York Times, the ad was credited with tipping the race in Trump’s favour in all seven key ‘swing states’.

Now … if you must know, I’m more worried about Elon Musk than Donald Trump.

Musk wields more power than anyone else on the planet. He oversees companies valued at more than a trillion dollars, whose engineers have built, or are building, reusable rockets, a humanoid robot, hyper loops for rapid transit, and a man-machine interface to be implanted in human brains. Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply …

He personally owns and controls the biggest, ‘instant’ media platform in the world. We know that Twitter (X) has been riddled with far-right fake news and biased since Musk took it over - but the current alternative of Bluesky (or whatever it is) is just a drop in the ocean.

Musk’s campaign group ‘America PAC’, which was set up to support Trump in the presidential contest, called on registered voters in seven swing states to sign a petition supporting the United States First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment, with its right ‘to keep and bear arms’. Each day until the election, one signatory was selected at random and awarded a million-dollar prize. He promoted it widely on Twitter. A US judge rejected arguments that the sweepstakes were an illegal lottery violating state laws.

Since Trump’s election victory last week, Musk has been a near-constant presence at his side, offering advice on cabinet appointments and even sitting in on his first phone calls with foreign leaders. He’s now going to co-lead a new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) with Vivek Ramaswamy.

According to some reports, Musk is overstaying his welcome at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, and he’s beginning to annoy the transition team - those who have been alongside Trump for many more years, before Musk came on the scene.

Years ago, in another era, we (or ‘many other people’) used to worry about Rupert Murdoch’s influence on world politics. But Musk has clearly ‘outFoxed’ Murdoch … and we’re just allowing him to get on with it. That is scary.

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Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Barcelona Connection - Research

In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #59

There’s been one major news story in Spain this week, and it looks like another nail in the coffin for the left-wing umbrella group known as Sumar. The group was formed only two years ago by Spain’s current Labour Minister, Yolanda Díaz, who also acts as deputy prime minister. Sumar is the socialist-led government’s junior coalition partner.

The news story concerns accusations of sexual assault by a (now former) left-wing politician called Íñigo Errejón.

Firstly, who is Íñigo Errejón?

Well, as a sideline, I always thought he was about 14-years-old - I mean, he’s always looked as if he was 14-years-old - but apparently he’s now 40. Anyway, that’s beside the point.

Íñigo Errejón shot to prominence a decade ago as the co-founder and deputy leader of the left-wing (many call it far-left) political party Podemos (meaning ‘We can’), and which shook up Spanish politics.

Errejón is a ‘Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science’ and was an MP and the secretary for policy, strategy and campaigning for Podemos. He split from the group in 2019 after his relationship with the party’s then leader Pablo Iglesias broke down over differences on strategy. He then founded his own platform called Más Madrid, under which he was elected to the Madrid regional government. This party was later re-constituted as Más País so that Errejón could run in Spain’s November 2019 general election, successfully returning to the national parliament as an MP.

Last year Más País joined the left-wing / far-left umbrella group, Sumar. Up until midweek, Errejón was Sumar’s parliamentary spokesman.

Now, to add a bit more context before what follows … Sumar, Más País and, of course, Podemos, have always prioritised gender equality in Spain and the fight against sexual violence in their political manifestos. And with Sumar as his fragile coalition partner, Spanish socialist (PSOE) Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has often boasted that his government is ‘the most feminist’ in Spain’s history, putting the defence of the feminist movement in Spain at the height of his policies.

Errejón himself always associated himself closely with the feminist values of Podemos, Más País and Sumar, and was also a prominent critic of Luis Rubiales, who resigned as head of Spain’s football federation after forcibly kissing a player from the national women’s team (see Letter from Spain #19).

So, what’s happened?

It started on Tuesday with a social media post from a well-known feminist journalist and writer, Cristina Fallarás on Instagram. She cited an anonymous account by another woman who said she had suffered sexual violence from ‘a well-known politician who lives in Madrid’, describing him as a ‘psychological aggressor’, a ‘real psychopath’, and a ‘real monster under the guise of a normal person’. The accuser did not name this ‘well-known politician’.

Cristina Fallarás said she had gathered similar testimonies of at least eight other women who also described alleged episodes of ‘abuse of power and psychological mistreatment’, reportedly by the same well-known politician.

Although he had not been named, on social media the suspicions immediately fell on Íñigo Errejón. On Wednesday, Sumar and Más Madrid said they had opened ‘internal investigations’ - although the issue is also whether these investigations should have been opened several years ago, or indeed whether they were opened but then hushed up.

On Thursday early afternoon, Errejón suddenly announced his resignation from frontline politics. He did so in a cryptic (or simply weird) written statement posted on social media. Without making any apology about anything, he instead referred to his mental health, ‘mistakes’ in the ‘neo-liberal’ environment of politics, and a breakdown of his ‘sentimental and emotional structure’.

‘ … this generates a toxic subjectivity that in the case of men, is multiplied by the patriarchy … with male and female colleagues, with organisational colleagues, with affective relationships, and even with oneself’, he wrote … or at least that’s my best translation of what I think he wrote. He also said that in this ‘intense and accelerated’ political cycle, he had reached the ‘limit of the contradiction between the character and the person’. If you want to practise translating neo-liberal Spanish, you can try and make your own sense of what he wrote on X by clicking here.

That evening, deputy PM Yolanda Díaz - founder of Sumar, remember - posted the following short statement: ‘This week, Sumar has started a process to gather information about the testimonies that have emerged on social media about Iñigo Errejón. As a result of the process, he has resigned from all his posts today. Our commitment against sexism and for a feminist society is firm and without exception.’

Her statement was not enough. It quickly became apparent that testimonies about ‘alleged behaviours of Errejón’ had been appearing on social media for over a year, yet Sumar had failed to initiate any investigations at the time.

Just an hour after the statement from Sumar’s founder, and in the face of accusations that his deputy PM had been aware of Errejón's behaviour but had done nothing about it in the past, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez himself waded in, posting a message on X to express his ‘confidence’ in Díaz and that Sumar was ‘an organisation that has done and is doing a lot for the progress of women’.

‘The government is working towards a feminist Spain where women have the same rights, the same opportunities and the same freedom and security as men,’ Sánchez wrote. ‘I fully condemn those who threaten this project of equality. All my support to women who suffer harassment and abuse. And all my confidence in the deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz and Sumar, an organisation that has done and is doing a lot for the progress of women.’

It still wasn’t enough.

Shortly after Errejón resigned, an actress and television presenter, Elisa Mouliáa, suddenly announced that she had lodged a complaint with the Spanish police against Errejón for sexual assault - and she is the first person to publicly accuse him.

‘Hello, I am a victim of sexual harassment by Íñigo Errejón and I want to denounce it,’ she wrote simply on X, as well as tagging some journalists and the EFE news agency. She later told a radio station she had not made the allegations public before ‘because of fear, because of who Errejón was, because of the power of politics’. The police are now investigating the alleged assault that reportedly took place in September 2021.

According to El Pais newspaper, in her complaint Mouliaá has alleged that Errejón accosted her at a party three years ago and took her into a room, locked the door and touched her several times without her consent before exposing his penis. Afterwards, she said that they went by car to Errejón’s home and there he tried to have sex with her against her will.

So, despite Más Madrid and Sumar now opening ‘internal investigations’ and stressing the importance of supporting victims of sexual violence ... how much did they already know about Errejón’s behaviour?

An anonymous Twitter thread, published in the summer of 2023, before the general election campaign, has also become very relevant. It recounted how Errejón had touched a girl’s bottom, and then a regional deputy for Más Madrid had tried to ‘mediate’ with her to prevent her from publicly denouncing him. On Friday, a party member was dismissed over the incident, but has since claimed that she has been made a ‘scapegoat’. She claims she had brought the accusation to the head of the party but that it had been ignored.

The Sumar party has said it is ‘implementing a series of protocols to try to prevent these situations from happening again’. It has admitted to failures in ‘detection and prevention’ in the Errejón case and asked for forgiveness.

‘If we had known about the information before, Errejón would have left much earlier. The mechanisms failed, as is evident,’ Ernest Urtasun, Spain’s Culture Minister and leading Sumar official said on Friday.

Even Pablo Iglesias, the former leader of Podemos and previously a close friend of Errejón before their highly publicised split, said that ‘this [these accusations] was being talked about a year ago’ and that ‘there were victims who didn’t have a safe space to complain’.

Spain’s right-wing and far-right opposition parties have seized on to the scandal to argue that the government’s pro-feminist stance is ‘hypocrisy’ - and they are also pointing the finger at the deputy PM Díaz, claiming that she was more than aware of Errejón’s behaviour.

A top official in the People’s Party (PP), Elias Bendodo, has claimed ‘everything suggests’ Sumar's leadership ‘knew about it and covered it up’.

‘And if they knew and covered it up, that’s called complicity,’ he said.

It’s a powerful accusation to make. I’m no fan of the right-wing in Spain, but if Sumar did deliberately turn a blind eye, then the book should be thrown at them.

You might have noticed that I didn’t post a Letter from Spain last week … and for the moment, I will continue this way and post something every two weeks. But it’s all good news: I’m just very busy writing The Madrid Connection … and we’re also busy working on the development of The Barcelona Connection for the screen …

Thank you for reading!

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Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsThe Barcelona Connection - Research

In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks for reading Letter from Spain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Letter from Spain #58

It’s that time of the year in Spain for long trousers again. On cue and without fail every year, the weather changes to coincide with the so-called ‘Día de la Hispanidad’ (‘Hispanic Day’) on 12 October, and this time it literally pissed down on the parade in Madrid on Saturday, drenching the Spanish Legionnaires’ poor goat mascot that always gets wheeled out - but more on all that in a sec.

It has also coincided with all the chiringuito beach bars now packing up in my hometown of Sitges, and where the Film Festival drew to a close at the weekend, too. In two weeks from now (27 October), ‘daylight saving time’ ends and the clocks will go back an hour, and so we all have that back-to-school feeling … at last.

I say ‘at last’ because we’ve had fiestas non-stop, every weekend since the Carnival back in February, at least as far as I can remember (although I admit some of it is blurred). We have one more three-day festival this coming weekend, the grape harvest festival known as the Festa de le Verema, starting on Friday with wine tasting from the Garraf and Penedès regions (silly not to), ending with the traditional ‘grape stamping’ competition on Sunday - but then things will grind to a halt until next year’s Carnival.

Nothing really happens here from November until late February, with a number of establishments shutting totally for the winter months, having been open for seven long days and even longer nights every week for the other eight months of the year. The town goes from one extreme to another, almost overnight.

I believe that Catalonia, more than anywhere else in Spain, is capable of dragging out the summer long after its sell-by date. You’d think everyone would go back to work on 1 September after taking nearly a month off, but many wait until after La Diada (Catalonia’s National Day) on 11 September … and then they party again for a very long weekend before or after the Mercè Festival (24 September). We had the similar week-long Santa Tecla festival here in Sitges in late September … and then the Film Festival started on 3 October for 10 days. Believe me, it’s been non-stop.

They officially call it the ‘Sitges – Festival Internacional de Cine Fantástico de Catalunya’, and which some writers translate as the ‘Fantastic’ film festival - but that’s not really true. ‘Fantástico’ refers to the ‘fantasy’ genre of films - but not only ‘fantasy’, as the festival is mainly about terror and horror films, too.

The film festival is great, but to be honest I’ve walked out of more films than I’ve sat through over the years because I’m not a fan of the chainsaw-horror or slasher genre, or ‘fantasy’ or whatever you want to call it, or goths, or vampires, or zombies, or werewolves, and I’m not a great fan of sci-fi or animation, either - which they also screen - although I have total respect for those who make these movies and/or make a living out of them.

I like the festival for the networking, chatting with directors, producers, actors and others in the industry who are visiting the town.

This year, by chance, and because he was staying in the same hotel as my ‘producer boss-colleague’ who was over from London, I bumped into the American actor Giancarlo Esposito, perhaps better known as Gustavo ‘Gus’ Fring in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He was in town because he’s in a new movie that had its premiere at the festival, Please Don’t Feed the Children, directed by Destry Spielberg (yes, ‘daughter of’ … and which she had to keep answering questions about during the press conference, rather than about her own film, the poor woman). One thing led to another, and we were invited to the premiere’s after-party on the roof of the hotel … but we didn’t go.

Anyway … the summer is over, the fiestas are over (almost) and I was going to mention something else about the ‘Hispanic Day’ or at least Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón in Spanish) before signing off.

It’s because the date of 12 October originally commemorates his so-called ‘discovery’ of the Americas. In 1492 a Spanish expedition led by him arrived to what today is known as San Salvador, in the Bahamas, and made the first step towards what would become the Spanish empire.

In 1987, the name was officially changed to La Fiesta Nacional (Spain’s National Day), removing any reference to Spanish colonialism.

Most South American nations have changed it to become a combination of the ‘Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity’, a ‘Day of Interculturality and Plurinationality’ or a ‘Day of Indigenous Peoples and Intercultural Dialogue’ - preferring to not celebrate their indigenous ancestors being subdued, enslaved, raped or murdered by Spanish ‘conquerers’.

Meanwhile, Spain’s state broadcaster RTVE has just broadcast a documentary that concludes Columbus was not Genoese and Italian, as had been believed (or at least touted by the Italians) for over 20 years.

Indeed, the documentary’s findings aim to put an end to some 500 years of speculation over Columbus’s birthplace and nationality. Over the centuries, it has been suggested that not only could he have been Genoese, but also Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Portuguese or even Scottish. But he wasn’t. According to the documentary, he was of Spanish Sephardic Jewish origin. So now you know.

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Books, Reviews, Research, News & EventsForthcoming Events

The event at the Hotel Castell d’Empordà in La Bisbal d’Empordà (Catalonia), which is scheduled to be part of the hotel’s 25th anniversary, will take place in April next year. The hotel is part of a key plot element in The Barcelona Connection (mentioned in Letter from Spain #8) and which is based on true events. The event is planned to be about ‘The Dalí Connection’ to the hotel and, of course, the book. More details about this event will follow in due course …

The Barcelona Connection - Research

In my weekly ‘Letter from Spain’ from #7 right up to #42, I included notes about all the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection. Many of the posts include photos and descriptions of locations that appear in the book, from Nîmes, Figueres, Cadaqués, La Bisbal d’Empordà and, of course, many areas of Barcelona. There are also posts about Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and ‘The Face’, the Dalí Museum in Figueres, the Picasso Museum and MNAC in Barcelona, even Girona Airport and nearby motorway service station - as well as the G20 Spouse Party, museum visits and ‘art attacks’. I hope the notes about the research are of interest … and I hope you might buy, read and take The Barcelona Connection with you to some of the locations that appear in the book! If you do, please send me a photo and I’ll post it here …

The Barcelona Connection - Book & Reviews

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three. Every crime scene is a work of art …

Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective. Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don’t always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don’t, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.

Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his hire car stolen, together with the painting.

Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.

From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

If you can’t locate a copy of The Barcelona Connection in your local store, it can be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBNnumber: 978-1-7393326-1-7.

It is also available in print or as an eBook via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from.

Click here for the latest reviews on Amazon and on Goodreads.

A review by Michael Eaude of The Barcelona Connection was published in the October 2023 edition of Catalonia Today.

‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’

‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’

A review by Dominic Begg of The Barcelona Connection was published in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’

‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’

Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’

‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid - Book & Reviews

Eighteen years since it was originally published, ‘A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid’ has been re-issued with a new introduction, new cover and five extra chapters that were cut from the original book.

It is available in print and as an eBook worldwide, in both formats. You can also order the new paperback or digital edition via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the digital version on Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, or on many other platforms by clicking here.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you will now acquire a copy and laugh out loud. If you did read and enjoy the original edition, I think you’ll love this new edition with additional chapters! More details about the book and links to many reviews are below.

As with previous posts showing images and locations that form part of the research I carried out for The Barcelona Connection novel (above), I am also planning to publish an archive of photos here of Madrid that relate to many chapters in ‘A Load of Bull’ - although it will take time! In Letter from Spain #52, I cover Chapter 1 - the Centro Colón aparthotel (entrance) Watch this space for further images …

A LOAD OF BULL - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid

The hilarious true story of an Englishman sent to Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue …

In the late eighties Tim Parfitt blagged his way into a job at Condé Nast in London and from there into a six week stint in Madrid to help launch Spanish Vogue. Six weeks turned into nine years, and helping out turned into running the company. Along the way, Tim Parfitt discovered the real 'real' Spain. He never saw a Costa and he certainly never bought an olive grove. Instead, he discovered a booming city in hedonistic reaction to years of fascism, where sleep was something you only did at work and where five hour lunches invariably involved a course of bull's testicles.

Tim Parfitt's rise from unwanted guest to paparazzi-pursued mover in Spain's glamorous social scene is a hilarious comedy of errors. Frothing with a language designed to make foreigners dribble, hospitalised by tapa-induced flatulence and constantly frustrated by the unapproachable beauty of the women parading through the Vogue offices, he nevertheless falls in love with a city, a country and its people - despite the fact he hasn't a clue what they're on about.

You can click here for all the reviews of A Load of Bull on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads.

Links to newspaper and magazine reviews:

‘A hugely entertaining memoir ... frequently laugh-out-loud funny.’ (The Daily Express)

‘Parfitt is no ordinary Englishman … his light touch and neat line in self-deprecating humour perfectly suits this entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.’ (The Sunday Times)

‘A love letter to Madrid ... brilliantly captures a truly eccentric and hedonistic place.’ (The Daily Mirror)

‘Often hilarious ... a side-splittingly funny travel memoir.’ (BBC Online)

‘Vivid yet affectionate … fascinating, escapist stuff.’ (OK! Magazine)

‘Magnificent ... brilliant and moving, hilarious and truthful.’ (La Vanguardia)

‘Don't miss it … Madrid through the eyes of an Englishman.’ (Vogue España)

Spanish edition

A Load of Bull was also published in Spanish under the title, Mucho Toro - las tribulaciones de un inglés en la movida. Click here or on image below for the current eBook version.

Contact Details

You can email me at: tim.parfitt@hotmail.co.uk

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