THE LITTLE PRINCE, SEE THE INVISIBLE WITH YOUR HEART

A late-summer Sunday is synonymous with vermouth at Can Déu, football, and -of course- Lego.

Today, The Grandma has invited Claire Fontaine to build four magnificent Lego sets based on The Little Prince -a masterpiece by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that also happens to be one of The Grandma's most beloved books, because it speaks of something as complexly simple as life itself.

There are books that belong to childhood. There are books that we discover as adults. And then there are a few extraordinary books that seem to accompany us throughout our entire lives. The Little Prince is one of them.

Published in 1943 and written and illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a universal son of Lyon, Le Petit Prince appears, at first sight, to be a children's story. There are drawings, tiny planets, talking flowers, strange adults and a little blond boy who travels through the universe asking questions.

But appearances, as the Little Prince himself teaches us, can be deceptive. Behind its apparent simplicity lies one of the most profound reflections ever written about love, friendship, loneliness, responsibility, loss and what it means to be human. Perhaps that is why The Little Prince is not really a book for children. Nor is it a book for adults. It is simply a book for life.

The story begins with one of literature's most memorable misunderstandings. As a child, the narrator draws a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Adults look at the picture and see a hat. So the boy draws the inside of the snake to make the meaning obvious. The adults advise him to abandon drawing and concentrate instead on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar. And in only a few pages, Saint-Exupéry establishes one of the central ideas of the book. Growing older and growing wiser are not necessarily the same thing.

The adults in The Little Prince have acquired knowledge, status, possessions and responsibilities, but somewhere along the way many of them have lost something essential: the ability to see beyond appearances.

The Little Prince has not. He asks questions. He observes. He wonders. He refuses to accept something merely because everybody else considers it normal. And perhaps this is the first philosophical invitation of the book: adulthood should not require us to abandon the child we once were.

During his journey, the Little Prince visits several tiny planets. On each one he meets an adult. There is a king who wants to rule even when there is almost nobody to rule. A vain man who needs constant admiration. A drunkard who drinks because he is ashamed of drinking. A businessman obsessed with counting and owning stars. A lamplighter endlessly following orders. And a geographer who writes about the world without actually exploring it.

They are amusing characters. But they are also mirrors. Each has reduced life to a single obsession: power, admiration, possession, routine, knowledge without experience.

Saint-Exupéry's satire is gentle, but devastating. These adults are so busy organising life that they have forgotten to live it. And perhaps this is one reason why reading The Little Prince as an adult can be slightly uncomfortable. Eventually, we recognise ourselves.

How many things do we count simply because society has taught us that numbers prove their value? Money. Followers. Productivity. Qualifications. Possessions. Years. Achievements.

The businessman counts stars and believes that owning them makes him important. The Little Prince cannot understand why. Sometimes neither should we. 

Then there is the rose. The Little Prince loves his rose, but loving her is not easy. She is beautiful, proud, demanding and contradictory. He is young and does not yet know how to understand her. So he leaves his asteroid. Only later does he begin to understand what she meant to him. When he reaches Earth and discovers a garden containing thousands of roses, he is devastated. He had believed that his rose was unique. Apparently she is not.

And then the fox teaches him one of the most important lessons in the book. What makes someone unique is not necessarily what they are. It is the relationship we have created with them. The Little Prince's rose matters because he has watered her. Protected her. Listened to her. Worried about her. Spent time with her.

Love transforms one rose among thousands into his rose. Saint-Exupéry is telling us that value does not simply exist. Sometimes we create it through care. 

Perhaps no character expresses the philosophy of The Little Prince more beautifully than the fox. The fox asks the Little Prince to tame him. But taming does not mean domination. It means creating ties. Before their friendship, the Little Prince is merely one little boy among thousands, and the fox merely one fox among thousands. Afterwards, they become unique to each other.

That uniqueness has a price. If we create bonds, separation can hurt. The fox knows this from the beginning. And still he chooses friendship. That is an extraordinarily mature idea for a book often placed on children's shelves. Saint-Exupéry does not promise that love will protect us from sadness. He suggests almost the opposite. We can suffer because we have loved. But the solution is not to avoid loving.

The memories, meaning and transformation created by that relationship make the vulnerability worthwhile. The colour of the wheat will remind the fox of the Little Prince's golden hair. After somebody has become important to us, the world itself contains reminders of them. Absence changes presence.

The fox teaches another lesson that connects love with something we can never recover: time. The Little Prince's rose is important because of the time he has devoted to her. This idea is extraordinarily simple and extraordinarily profound. Our most valuable gift is rarely an object.

It is often time.

Time spent listening. Time spent caring. Time spent teaching. Time spent travelling with someone. Time spent sitting beside somebody when there is nothing useful to say. Time spent simply being there.

Money can sometimes be recovered. Possessions can be replaced. Time cannot.

And therefore the time we freely give to another person may be one of the purest forms of love. The fox's lesson does not end with affection. Love creates responsibility. Once we establish a genuine bond with another being, we cannot behave as though that relationship has no consequences. This is true of friendship. Of family. Of love. Perhaps even of our relationship with animals, communities and the world around us. The Little Prince learns that loving his rose means accepting responsibility for her.

Not ownership. Responsibility. There is an enormous difference. 

Much of the framing story takes place in the Sahara, where the narrator has crashed his aeroplane. The desert seems empty. Yet emptiness is one of Saint-Exupéry's great illusions. A desert may conceal a well. A house may contain memories. A star may contain somebody we love. The visible world never tells the entire story. That is why the book repeatedly invites us to look beyond surfaces. The things that give life meaning -love, trust, memory, loyalty, friendship- cannot normally be weighed or counted. They do not appear on balance sheets. They cannot be photographed easily. And yet they may be more real to us than almost anything we can touch.

And eventually The Little Prince becomes a book about loss. This is perhaps where reading it at different stages of life changes the book most profoundly. A child may experience the ending as mysterious. An adult who has experienced separation or bereavement may read those same pages very differently. Saint-Exupéry does something remarkable. He does not pretend that absence is not painful. Instead, he transforms memory into another form of presence. After the Little Prince leaves, the stars will never again be simply stars for the narrator. Somewhere among them is his friend. And therefore the entire night sky has changed. The person may be absent. But the relationship has altered the world permanently. Anyone who has deeply missed somebody can understand this. 

Sometimes a street becomes a memory. A song becomes a person. A smell becomes a childhood. A photograph becomes a conversation. A star becomes somebody who is no longer beside us.

Perhaps this is why The Little Prince can comfort without offering easy consolation. It understands that love survives in the way we continue to see the world.

There is another curious thing about The Little Prince. You can read exactly the same words at ten, twenty, forty or seventy years old. The words have not changed. But you have. And therefore the book changes too. Read it when you are a child and you may understand the Little Prince. Read it when you are young and you may understand the rose. Read it after falling in love and you may understand the fox. Read it after losing somebody and you may understand the stars. Read it when life has become too busy and perhaps you will suddenly recognise the businessman counting things that do not really matter. Read it when you feel lost and you may understand the pilot alone in the desert.

The book waits patiently for us. And each time we return, it seems to know which lesson we need.

Perhaps the story becomes even more moving when we remember who wrote it. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was not simply a writer imagining an aviator. He was himself a pioneering pilot. He flew dangerous postal routes across Africa and South America and experienced crashes, isolation and the immense solitude of the sky and desert. Then came war. Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince during exile in the United States while Europe was being torn apart by the Second World War. 

In 1944, he returned to flying reconnaissance missions. On 31 July, he took off from Corsica. He never returned. His aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean. The man who had written about a little prince who leaves Earth and becomes associated forever with the stars had himself vanished into the sky. It is difficult to read the ending in quite the same way after knowing that.

Maybe this is ultimately why The Little Prince never grows old. Technology changes. Countries change. Societies change. We change. But human beings continue asking remarkably similar questions.

Who do I love? Who loves me? What deserves my time? What have I lost? What am I responsible for? What really matters? And what will remain when I am gone?

Saint-Exupéry does not answer these questions with philosophical theories. He gives us a boy. A rose. A fox. A desert. A well. And a sky full of stars.

Perhaps we are all, in some way, little travellers moving from one tiny planet to another, meeting people, creating bonds, making mistakes, saying goodbye and slowly discovering what deserves to be called essential.

That may be why there is no wrong moment to read The Little Prince.

Read it when you are happy. Read it when you are lonely. Read it when you have fallen in love. Read it when somebody has left. Read it when you are beginning something. Read it when something has ended. Read it when you know exactly where you are going. And read it when you have absolutely no idea. Because The Little Prince is not really a book that tells us how to live. It simply reminds us to look again at the life we are already living.

And perhaps, beneath all the numbers, obligations, possessions and noise of the grown-up world, to ask ourselves whether we can still see the elephant inside the boa constrictor. 

After all, the essential things were never meant to be seen with the eyes.

Download The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Et tu ouvriras parfois ta fenêtre, 

comme ça, pour le plaisir… 
Et tes amis seront bien étonnés 

de te voir rire en regardant le ciel.

And you will sometimes open your window, 

just for fun... 
And your friends will be properly astonished 

to see you laughing as you look up at the sky.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

THERE'S NO CHANCE FOR US, IT'S ALL DECIDED FOR US...

There's no time for us

There's no place for us

What is this thing that builds our dreams

Yet slips away from us?

Who wants to live forever?

Who wants to live forever?

Ooh

There's no chance for us

It's all decided for us

This world has only one sweet moment

Set aside for us

Who wants to live forever?

Who wants to live forever?

Ooh-ooh-ooh

Who dares to love forever

Oh-woah, when love must die?

But touch my tears with your lips

Touch my world with your fingertips

And we can have forever

And we can love forever

Forever is our today

Who wants to live forever?

Who wants to live forever?

Forever is our today

Who wants to live forever?

Who wants to live forever?

Forever is our today

More information: Queen

Oh, I was not made for heaven. 

No, I don't want to go to heaven. 

Hell is much better.

Freddie Mercury

THE DELOREAN, A GREAT JOURNEY THROUGH TIME

Today, The Grandma has been building another Lego set with Claire Fontaine's help: the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

It is a very special Lego set because it was a gift from The Morgans -her most recent host family, with whom she shared some fantastic months.

While building this set, it was impossible not to reflect on a topic of such fundamental importance: time  -the past, the present, and, of course, the future.

A stainless-steel car. Two gull-wing doors. A flux capacitor. And a digital display showing a date that may belong to the past, the present or the future. Few cars in the history of cinema are as instantly recognisable as the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

When Dr Emmett Brown unveils his extraordinary invention to Marty McFly in 1985, an unsuccessful sports car becomes something infinitely more fascinating: a machine capable of travelling through time. 

All it needs is enough energy, a destination programmed into its circuits and a speed of 88 miles per hour. Then the impossible happens. Time becomes a road. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the DeLorean is not where it takes Marty and Doc. It is the question it leaves behind. What exactly is time?

Human beings have been trying to answer that question for thousands of years. We have observed it, divided it, measured it and filled our lives with devices designed to tell us precisely where we are within it. And yet time remains one of the strangest dimensions of human existence.

So today, instead of travelling from 1985 to 1955, perhaps we can use Doc Brown's DeLorean for another journey. A journey through the history of time itself.

Long before humans invented clocks, nature already provided them with one. The sky. The alternation between daylight and darkness created perhaps our most fundamental unit of time: the day. The phases of the Moon provided another regular cycle, while the changing position of the Sun and stars helped societies recognise the seasons and eventually organise years.

For early agricultural communities, understanding these cycles was essential. Knowing when winter was approaching, when rivers might flood or when crops should be planted could mean the difference between abundance and hunger. 

Timekeeping therefore began not as an abstract intellectual exercise but as a matter of survival. Ancient civilisations gradually transformed astronomical observation into increasingly sophisticated calendars. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Maya, Chinese and many other cultures developed ways of organising the cycles they observed in the heavens.

The movement of celestial bodies became humanity's first great clock. 

One of the simplest ways of measuring the passage of time was to observe shadows. Place an object vertically in sunlight and its shadow changes position as the Earth rotates. From this principle came the sundial. 

Ancient Egyptians were using shadow clocks thousands of years ago, while later Greek and Roman societies developed increasingly sophisticated sundials. The principle was beautifully simple. No gears. No batteries. No electronics. Only the Earth, the Sun and a shadow. But there was an obvious problem.

What happens at night? Or when clouds hide the Sun? 

Humanity needed clocks that did not depend upon the sky. One answer was water. Water clocks appeared in several ancient cultures. The Greeks called them clepsydrae, from words meaning roughly water thief. Instead of observing the Sun, people measured the controlled movement of water from one container to another. Suddenly, time could be measured indoors.

And at night. The passage of water became the passage of time. Clepsydrae were used for many purposes. In ancient Greece, for example, water clocks could regulate the amount of time available to speakers in courts.

There is something wonderfully modern about that idea. More than two thousand years before PowerPoint presentations and meeting timers, somebody was already being told: Your time is up.

Water was not the only substance that humans turned into time. Candles and incense could provide approximate measurements through their rate of burning. Later, hourglasses used the regular movement of sand through a narrow opening. Hourglasses became particularly useful aboard ships because they could operate independently of the motion of the vessel. But all these devices shared the same fundamental idea. We cannot see time itself. So we measure something else that changes. 

A shadow moves. Water flows. Sand falls. A candle burns. And from those changes, we construct time. 

During the Middle Ages, mechanical clocks began transforming European towns. From roughly the late thirteenth century onwards, large weight-driven clocks appeared in towers and public buildings. This represented an extraordinary cultural change. Time was no longer something visible only in the movement of the Sun or experienced through natural rhythms. It could now be heard.

Church bells and town clocks divided communal life into increasingly regular intervals. Hours became part of the architecture of society. Eventually, clocks became smaller. They entered houses. Then pockets. Then wrists. And as clocks became more accurate, human life became increasingly organised around them.

Work begins at a particular hour. A train leaves at a particular minute. A lesson lasts a specified amount of time. A football match lasts ninety minutes. Modern civilisation gradually became a civilisation of the clock. 

One of the great advances in timekeeping came from studying something apparently simple: a swinging object. Galileo Galilei investigated the behaviour of pendulums around the end of the sixteenth century, although he did not build the first successful pendulum clock. That achievement is generally associated with Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, who designed a practical pendulum clock in 1656. Its accuracy was revolutionary.

Where earlier clocks could lose significant amounts of time each day, pendulum clocks reduced those errors dramatically. Once again, time itself had not changed. What had changed was our ability to measure it. 

During the age of oceanic navigation, accurate clocks acquired another importance. They could help determine where you were. Sailors could calculate latitude relatively easily by observing the sky, but determining longitude was much more difficult. The solution required knowing the difference between local time aboard a ship and the time at a known reference location. That demanded a clock accurate enough to survive long voyages at sea.

In the eighteenth century, English clockmaker John Harrison developed a series of marine chronometers capable of maintaining extraordinary accuracy aboard ships. A clock could now help sailors determine their position on Earth. Measuring time had become a way of measuring space.

For most of history, time was local. Noon was simply the moment when the Sun reached its highest point in the sky. That meant noon in one town was slightly different from noon somewhere farther east or west. For centuries, this hardly mattered. Then came the railways. Suddenly, trains were travelling quickly between towns that used slightly different local times. Timetables became confusing and potentially dangerous. The solution was standardised time.

During the nineteenth century, railway networks helped drive the adoption of common time standards, and eventually the world was divided into time zones.

In 1884, an international conference established the Greenwich meridian as the principal reference for longitude. Humanity had begun synchronising its clocks on a global scale.

The twentieth century brought another revolution. Quartz clocks exploit an extraordinary property of quartz crystals: when electrically stimulated, they vibrate at highly stable frequencies. Those vibrations can regulate a clock far more precisely than many mechanical mechanisms. Timekeeping became cheaper, smaller and extraordinarily reliable. Quartz eventually entered watches, clocks, computers and countless electronic devices.

But scientists wanted still greater precision. And for that, they turned from crystals to atoms. Modern atomic clocks are among the most precise instruments humans have ever created. Instead of relying on pendulums or gears, they use extremely stable atomic transitions as their reference. The definition of the second itself reflects this extraordinary change.

Since 1967, the SI second has been defined using a specific transition of the caesium-133 atom: precisely 9,192,631,770 periods of the corresponding radiation. Think about that for a moment. Our ancestors once watched a shadow moving across a stone. Today we count phenomena associated with atoms. Yet we are still trying to answer the same basic question: How much time has passed?

And then physics made the story considerably stranger. For centuries, people largely imagined time as something universal -a great invisible clock ticking at the same rate everywhere in the universe.

Albert Einstein showed that reality does not work that way. According to relativity, measurements of time depend upon motion and gravity. Two clocks following different trajectories can eventually disagree. This is not science fiction. It is measurable reality. Even the satellite systems used for GPS must account for relativistic effects. Without those corrections, positioning errors would accumulate.

So although Doc Brown's DeLorean remains fictional, the underlying idea that time is not as simple or absolute as everyday experience suggests belongs firmly to modern physics.

Can We Travel Through Time? In one sense, we already do.

Every second that passes carries us towards the future. Relativity also tells us that sufficiently high speeds or differences in gravitational conditions can make different observers experience different amounts of elapsed time. Travelling into the past, however, is an entirely different matter.

No DeLorean waits in a laboratory. No flux capacitor has opened a road to 1955. And perhaps that is why Back to the Future remains so fascinating. Its time machine allows us to imagine doing something humans constantly desire but cannot actually do: return.

Correct a mistake. Meet people who are gone. See our parents when they were young. Discover what the world was like before we existed. Or travel forward and discover what happens after us.

The DeLorean transforms one of humanity's oldest dreams into an automobile. There was another stroke of genius in choosing the DeLorean DMC-12. With its stainless-steel body and extraordinary gull-wing doors, the car already looked futuristic when Back to the Future was released in 1985. Doc Brown even explains his choice with characteristic enthusiasm: If you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?

And style it certainly had. The film transformed a commercially unsuccessful automobile into one of the most famous vehicles in popular culture.

Today, seeing a DeLorean immediately evokes lightning, flaming tyre tracks, 88 miles per hour and three glowing dates on a dashboard.

Past. Present. Future.

Perhaps there is one final irony. Humanity has become extraordinarily good at measuring time. We have gone from shadows to water clocks, from sand to pendulums, from mechanical gears to quartz crystals and finally to atoms. We can measure fractions of a second with a precision our ancestors could scarcely have imagined. 

And yet we still cannot control the thing we measure. We cannot stop a second. We cannot store an hour for later. We cannot return to yesterday.

Every clock humanity has ever constructed ultimately tells us the same thing: time is passing.

Perhaps this is why stories about time travel fascinate us so deeply. The DeLorean offers something no real clock can provide. A clock tells us that the past is gone. And so perhaps Doc Brown's greatest invention was not the flux capacitor after all.

Perhaps it was the possibility of looking at those three little displays -past, present and future -and imagining, just for a moment, that time was not something carrying us relentlessly forward.

Perhaps it was a road. And all we needed to choose was the destination.

More information: Back to the Future

If my calculations are correct, 
when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, 
you're gonna see some serious shit.

Dr. Emmett Brown

THE FLYING FORD ANGLIA, WHEN A CAR BECAME MAGIC

It is the third day back from vacation; The Grandma's body is still sluggish and her mind scattered. 

She has enjoyed her favourite antidote: a Lego set. This time, she has decided to build the Weasley family's Ford Anglia and she has invited Claire Fontaine to join in on the build.

Some vehicles are remembered because they are fast. Others because they are beautiful, luxurious or revolutionary. And then there is a small pale-blue Ford Anglia that once flew across the British countryside carrying two young wizards towards Hogwarts.

In the world of Harry Potter, magic usually comes from wands, spells, potions and enchanted objects. Yet one of the most memorable magical objects in the entire saga began its existence as something completely ordinary: a family car.

The Ford Anglia belonging to Arthur Weasley becomes one of the great symbols of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It is funny, unreliable, illegal, surprisingly brave and, eventually, wonderfully independent.

In other words, it is a perfect Weasley car.

The existence of the flying Ford Anglia tells us something important about Arthur Weasley long before the car begins its greatest adventure. Arthur works at the Ministry of Magic and is fascinated by Muggle technology. Unlike many witches and wizards, who either ignore the non-magical world or look down upon it, Arthur approaches it with genuine curiosity and affection. 

The car represents that fascination. He has secretly modified a Ford Anglia 105E, enchanting it so that it can fly. He has also given it an Invisibility Booster and magically expanded its interior and luggage space. 

There is something wonderfully characteristic about Arthur's choice. He does not enchant a prestigious sports car or an expensive limousine. He chooses a modest British family car.

The real Ford Anglia 105E was introduced by the Ford Motor Company in 1959 and became a familiar sight on British roads during the 1960s. Its distinctive rear window, sloping backwards, made the model immediately recognisable. It belonged to everyday Britain. And perhaps that is exactly why it belongs so naturally in the world created by J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter constantly places extraordinary things inside apparently ordinary British life.

Behind a brick wall there can be Diagon Alley. Beyond an ordinary railway platform there can be Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. And inside a small Ford Anglia there can be a flying machine.

The car first becomes important when Harry is effectively imprisoned at 4 Privet Drive by the Dursleys. Ron Weasley, accompanied by Fred and George, decides that waiting for adults to solve the problem is clearly not an option.

So they borrow -or, more accurately, steal- the enchanted Ford Anglia and fly to Surrey. The image is unforgettable: a pale-blue car floating outside Harry Potter's bedroom window while the Dursleys sleep inside the house. But beneath the comedy lies something more important. The car becomes Harry's vehicle of escape.

Harry's life with the Dursleys is defined by confinement. His bedroom has been locked, bars have been placed across his window and his connection with the magical world has been deliberately cut off.

Then Ron appears in a flying car. It is difficult to imagine a more literal representation of friendship arriving to set somebody free. The Anglia carries Harry away from Privet Drive and towards the Burrow, one of the first places where he experiences something resembling a loving family home. For Harry, therefore, the car does not simply transport him geographically.

It takes him from isolation to belonging.

Its most famous journey comes shortly afterwards. When Harry and Ron cannot pass through the barrier leading to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, they make one of those decisions that seem perfectly reasonable only when you are twelve years old.

They take the car. Their flight to Hogwarts is one of the defining sequences of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. They follow the Hogwarts Express northwards, flying above roads, fields and railway tracks. For a while, the adventure feels exhilarating.

Then reality intervenes. The Invisibility Booster begins to fail. The car struggles. The boys are seen by Muggles. And when they finally reach Hogwarts, their spectacular arrival ends not with a heroic landing but with a crash into the Whomping Willow.

It is pure Harry Potter: wonder, humour, danger and disaster compressed into a single journey. The episode also reveals something essential about Harry and Ron's friendship. They are loyal to each other, courageous and resourceful -but they are also children capable of making spectacularly bad decisions together.

Magic does not prevent them from making mistakes. Sometimes it simply makes those mistakes much bigger.  After crashing into the Whomping Willow, something extraordinary happens. The Ford Anglia throws Harry, Ron and their luggage out, ejects them from its interior and drives away into the Forbidden Forest. From that moment onwards, it seems to cease being merely an enchanted object.

It becomes almost alive. Months later, when Harry and Ron are in terrible danger in the Forbidden Forest, surrounded by Aragog's enormous family of Acromantulas, the Anglia suddenly returns. No wizard is driving it. Nobody has summoned it. It simply appears. The battered little car charges through the spiders, rescues the boys and carries them back towards safety before disappearing once again among the trees. It is one of the strangest acts of heroism in the series. A machine enchanted by Arthur Weasley has apparently developed enough independence to survive alone in the forest -and enough loyalty to return when Harry and Ron desperately need it. The car that they once used to rescue Harry eventually comes back to rescue them.

The Ford Anglia also represents something fundamental about the aesthetic of the Harry Potter universe. This is not a world where magic replaces ordinary life. Magic transforms ordinary life. Trains still exist, but one of them leaves from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. Schools still have homework, teachers, exams and sports competitions, but the staircases move and the portraits talk. Families still own old cars. Some of those cars simply happen to fly. That mixture between the mundane and the impossible is one of the reasons why the wizarding world feels so tangible. The Ford Anglia is funny precisely because we recognise what it is supposed to be. A modest family car has no business flying through the clouds beside a steam train. And yet, somehow, it feels completely natural.

The Ford Anglia has relatively little time in the enormous Harry Potter story, but its presence is unforgettable. Perhaps that is because it represents several of the ideas at the heart of the saga. It represents Arthur Weasley's curiosity and tolerance towards a world different from his own. It represents Ron's loyalty to Harry. It represents childhood rebellion and the wonderful conviction that rules can occasionally be ignored when a friend needs help. Above all, it represents escape. The first time Harry travels in the Anglia, it carries him away from a house where he is unwanted. The last time we see it play an important role, it carries Harry and Ron away from creatures that are about to kill them. Between those two journeys, something curious has happened.

The machine has become a character. Perhaps that is the real magic of the flying Ford Anglia. Arthur Weasley enchanted a car so that it could fly. But somewhere along the road -or somewhere above it -the little blue Ford seems to have learned something that no spell could easily explain: how to be free. 

And perhaps even how to be a friend.

More information: National Motor Museum

Look, the forest has turned it wild.

Ron Weasley

CRIDAT, ARA ENTRARÉ EN LES FOSQUES ESTANCES...

El sol ha anat daurant
el llarg somni de l'aigua.
Aquests ulls tan cansats
del qui arriba a la calma
han mirat, han comprès,
oblidaven.

Lluny, enllà de la mar,
se'n va la meva barca.
De terra endins, un cant
amb l'aire l'acompanya:
"Et perdràs pel camí
que no té mai tornada".

Sota la llum clement
del matí, a la casa
dels morts del meu vell nom,
dic avui: "Sóc encara".
M'adormiré demà
sense por ni recança.
I besarà l'or nou
la serenor del marbre.

Solitari, en la pau
del jardí dels cinc arbres,
he collit ja el meu temps,
la rara rosa blanca.
Cridat, ara entraré
en les fosques estances. 

Cançó del matí encalmat, Salvador Espriu i Castelló

Descansa en pau, estimat Rafa. Que la terra et sigui lleu.

FONT DE CANALETES, BARCELONA CELEBRATES BARÇA

The first day back after a vacation is always tough. Your mind is in another dimension, and your body resists getting back into the daily routine.  A good way to ease back in -both physically and mentally- is to do something you enjoy that isn't too demanding.

The Grandma loves building Lego sets and has a few waiting to be assembled, so she hasn't missed the chance to build one each day; it helps her regain her focus without putting any physical strain on herself.

Today, she has chosen a beautiful Lego set of the Font de Canaletes -a magical, historic spot that holds great emotional significance for all Culers, and has decided to share the building experience with the fantastic company of Claire Fontaine.

There are football stadiums where history is made. And there are places where history is celebrated.

In Barcelona, when Barça wins something important, thousands of people know instinctively where to go. Not to the stadium. Not to Plaça Sant Jaume. Not even to Plaça Catalunya. They go to a small nineteenth-century fountain at the beginning of La Rambla. The Font de Canaletes.

For anyone unfamiliar with Barcelona, the choice may seem rather strange. Canaletes is not monumental. It is not particularly large. You could walk past it without realising that you had just passed one of the most emotionally significant places in the geography of FC Barcelona.

But when Barça wins a league, a Champions League or another great title, everything changes. Flags appear. Scarves are raised. Songs begin. People climb onto anything that allows them to be seen above the crowd. And Canaletes becomes blaugrana. It has happened generation after generation. But why here?

To understand that, we need to return to a Barcelona without television, without radio commentary and, of course, without mobile phones. A Barcelona in which knowing the result of a football match could itself require a journey.

The present Font de Canaletes dates from 1892. Its name preserves a much older history. An eighteenth-century water deposit located beside Barcelona's old walls distributed water through small channels  -canaletes in Catalan- and both the fountain and this upper section of La Rambla eventually inherited the name. Made of cast iron, with four taps arranged around its base and a lantern rising above them, the fountain belongs to a type that can be found elsewhere in Barcelona.

Architecturally, therefore, Canaletes is modest.  Symbolically, it is enormous.

And before football entered its history, water had already given the fountain its first legend. Tradition says: Whoever drinks from Canaletes will return to Barcelona. It is Barcelona's version of throwing a coin into the Trevi Fountain.

Drink. Leave. And somehow the city will bring you back.

But during the early twentieth century another kind of ritual began to develop around Canaletes. This time it involved football.

Imagine being a Barça supporter in Barcelona more than a century ago. Your team is playing away. There is no television. There is no internet. There are no live scores arriving every few seconds on a screen in your pocket. How do you discover what happened? You wait for the news. And Canaletes became one of the places where that news arrived.

FC Barcelona traces the association between Barça and Canaletes back to 1909, when supporters began learning the team's results at the drinks kiosk beside the fountain. Football supporters gathered there. They discussed matches. They argued. They exchanged news. And, naturally, Barça and Espanyol supporters could engage in some lively football debates. Then the connection became even stronger.

During the 1920s, newspaper offices around La Rambla displayed football results on blackboards outside their buildings. Among them were Las Noticias and El Sol. People gathered to read the scores. And when the score announced a Barça victory, something beautifully simple happened. They celebrated immediately. The place where people had come to receive the news became the place where they celebrated the news. No committee decided it. No marketing department invented it. No one needed to declare Canaletes the official celebration point of FC Barcelona. The supporters simply made it theirs.

That transformation fascinates me. Today a football result reaches us instantly. A goal can be watched repeatedly within minutes. Messages cross continents in seconds. But in early twentieth-century Barcelona, information had a physical location. If you wanted the result, you went somewhere. And because you went somewhere, you met other people who wanted exactly the same thing. Football became communal before the celebration had even begun.

One person arrived. Then another. Someone knew something. Someone else had heard something different. A result appeared on the board. And suddenly strangers had a reason to embrace. Canaletes therefore became much more than a fountain. It became an early social network made of people.

And perhaps this tradition could only have developed on La Rambla. Barcelona has many great avenues, squares and boulevards. But La Rambla has always been something different. It is movement. People arrive and disappear. Residents mix with visitors. Newspaper sellers, florists, theatres, cafés, shops and pedestrians have shared the same urban corridor.

The Catalan writer Josep Pla captured something of this beautifully when writing about La Rambla in 1919: La Rambla is a marvel. It is one of the few streets in Barcelona where I feel completely at ease (El Quadern Gris).

He observed that there were enough people to encounter someone you knew and, at the same time, enough people to disappear into the crowd. That is almost the perfect description of Canaletes.

Individual and collective. Anonymous and familiar. Barcelona compressed into a few metres of pavement.

As FC Barcelona grew, so did the ritual. Victories became championships. Championships became nights of celebration. And generations of supporters repeated what previous generations had done. They went to Canaletes. The fountain gradually became inseparable from the emotional geography of the club. This is important because football clubs do not exist only inside stadiums. They occupy cities. Certain bars become meeting points. Certain streets become processional routes. Certain squares become places of triumph or disappointment. And sometimes an ordinary object acquires extraordinary meaning. For Barça, that object is a fountain.

Even the club's own historical records describe Canaletes as the traditional setting for popular blaugrana celebrations. During Barça's centenary, the club deliberately returned there to revive the old ritual, with players and representatives drinking from the fountain.

More than a century after the connection began, the tradition remains alive. When Barça secured the 2024/25 Liga title, supporters once again packed Canaletes and the surrounding streets. Different generations. Different players. The same fountain.

But perhaps calling Canaletes simply the place where Barça celebrates titles does not quite explain it. Because the tradition tells us something about the relationship between the club and Barcelona itself.

FC Barcelona was founded in 1899. The present Canaletes fountain had been installed only seven years earlier. They therefore grew old together. And during the twentieth century, Barça became much more than a sporting institution within Catalan society. Its colours became part of Barcelona's visual language. Its victories entered family memories. Matches became conversations between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren. And Canaletes became one of the places where private emotion turned public. A football victory experienced at home could end several hours later among thousands of strangers on La Rambla. For one night, strangers were no longer entirely strangers. They were culers.

If objects could remember, imagine what Canaletes could tell us. It would remember supporters waiting anxiously for results they could not obtain anywhere else. It would remember newspapers and blackboards. It would remember arguments between Barça and Espanyol supporters. It would remember victories and disappointments.

Kubala. Cruyff. The Dream Team. Ronaldinho. Messi. The great European nights.

And it would also remember generations of supporters whose names never appeared in newspapers. People who simply loved their club. That may be the most beautiful thing about Canaletes. Football history is usually written around famous people.

Players. Coaches. Presidents.

But Canaletes belongs to the supporters. Its history was created from below. Literally from the street.

And then we return to the old legend. Drink from the fountain and you will return to Barcelona. Perhaps for Barça supporters the prophecy has acquired another meaning. You may leave Barcelona. You may travel. Players come and go. Teams change. Stadiums are rebuilt. Generations replace one another. But when the next great victory arrives, the city remembers where to meet. At the top of La Rambla. Around a small cast-iron fountain. Someone begins singing. A flag rises above the crowd. More people arrive from every direction. And Canaletes becomes blaugrana once again. Because some monuments are built intentionally. Others are created by memory.

And the Font de Canaletes became one of Barcelona's monuments not because of its size, but because generation after generation of people decided that this was where happiness should be shared.

Visca el Barça!  Visca Barcelona!  Visca Catalunya!

More information: Barcelona Born and Bred

 

Si beveu aigua de la font de Canaletes,
sempre més sereu uns enamorats de Barcelona, 
i per lluny que us n'aneu, 
tornareu sempre.

If you drink from the Font de Canaletes, 
you will forever be in love with Barcelona, 
and however far away you may go, 
you will always return.

Popular proverb

JE SUIS ENTRE LA COLLINE QUI PRIE ET CELLE QUI CRIE...

L'eau qui dormait'se réveille d'une longue nuit de sommeil
C'est comme si j'étais parti, parti la veille
Je suis entre la colline qui prie et la colline qui crie
Je ferme les yeux et mange, mange un morceau de soleil

Je serai dilettante ou mort de rire en sentant la mort venir
Du moins j'espère, j'espère, je serai dilettante à temps partiel
Même à l'autre bout du ciel du moins j'espère, j'espère, j'espère
Revoir la mer et la famille
Le point du jour, la statue d'or, la tour en stylo bille

Lyon, presqu'île

Il y a une gare morne et l'autre fière d'aller jusqu'aux sports d'hiver
C'est comme si j'étais parti, parti hier
Et puis la statue du Roi-Soleil sur la grand place éternelle
Des belles cours gorgées, gorgées, gorgées de soleil

Je serai dilettante et mort de rire en sentant la mort venir
Du moins j'espère, j'espère, je serai dilettante à temps partiel
Jusqu'à l'autre bout du ciel, du moins j'espère, j'espère
Revoir la mer, et la famille
Le point du jour, la statue d'or, la tour en stylo bille

Lyon, presqu'île, Lyon, presqu'île

Je voudrais m'éteindre ici ou pas loin de l'Italie
Avec ceux que je chéris, chérie que j'aime
Et puis regarder pousser le lierre, la guitare en bandoulière
Même si je ne suis pas hippie, hippie, hippie chic, mais quand même

Je serai dilettante et mort de rire en sentant la mort venir
Du moins j'espère, j'espère, je serai dilettante à temps partiel
Jusqu'à l'autre bout du ciel, du moins j'espère, j'espère revoir

Lyon, presqu'île, Lyon, presqu'île

 

The sleeping water wakes
from a long night's slumber
It is as if I had left -left just the day before
I stand between the hill that prays
And the hill that screams
I close my eyes,
And eat, eat a piece of the sun. I’ll be a dilettante or die laughing
As I feel death approaching
At least, I hope, I hope, I hope
I’ll be a part-time dilettante
Even at the far end of the sky
At least, I hope, I hope, I hope
To see the sea again, and my family,
Daybreak, the golden statue, the ballpoint-pen tower

Lyon, Presqu'île

There’s one dreary station and another proud one
Bound for the winter sports resorts
It feels as if I’d left—left just yesterday
And then the statue of the Sun King
In the eternal main square, Place Bellecour, bathed
Bathed, bathed in sunlight

I’ll be a dilettante or die laughing
As I feel death approaching
At least, I hope, I hope, I hope
I’ll be a part-time dilettante
All the way to the far end of the sky
At least, I hope, I hope, I hope
To see again...

Lyon, Presqu'île
Lyon Presqu'île

I’d like to pass away here
Or not far from Italy
With those I cherish -cherish and love-
And watch the ivy grow
With my guitar slung over my shoulder
Even if I’m not a hippie-hippie, hippie-chic-still...

I’ll be a dilettante or die laughing
As I feel death approaching
At least, I hope, I hope, I hope
I’ll be a part-time dilettante
All the way to the far end of the sky
At least, I hope, I hope, I hope
To see again...

Lyon, Presqu'île, Lyon Presqu'île

More information: Benjamin Biolay

 

 Jusqu'à l'autre bout du ciel, 

du moins j'espère, j'espère revoir

All the way to the far end of the sky
At least, I hope, I hope, I hope
To see again...

Benjamin Biolay