So Reads The Fate

[image error]

I’m perhaps unusual — and it’s perhaps part of the uniquely Portuguese upbringing — in that my earliest memories include story-songs.

Maybe not absolutely unique. A lot of European culture included folk ballads that told stories in song.  Fairytales, mostly, but also strange otherwordly happenings.

Mine were mostly fado. And it wasn’t just being sung to sleep with them (though that was part of it, my being a sickly premature baby who often had trouble breathing through the night, I spent a l...