ENRICO CARUSO & SURRIENTO, ‘TE VOGLIO BENE ASSAI’

Today is the 153rd birthday of Enrico Caruso, one of the best operatic tenors and one of the most universal Neapolitans. The Grandma spent two fantastic years living and studying in Napoli, an incredibly beautiful city that holds a huge place in her heart and that she visits very often.

Campania is a wonderful land, with unforgettable people who make you enjoy and value what is truly important in life: life itself.

It's not just Napoli, it's Pompeii, Ercolano, Procida, Paestum, Ischia, Capri, Mount Vesuvius, Baia, Campi Flegrei... it's opera, the weight of history, Neapolitan resilience, cuisine, football, tarantellas, San Gennaro, the Neapolitan language... and this Mediterranean Sea that united us politically centuries ago and that continues to unite us culturally nowadays.

Therefore, listening to Enrico Caruso is like closing your eyes and transporting yourself to that fighting and humane Napoli, where the motto is Vive e lassa campà (Live and let live), that is, life is short (tempus fugit), enjoy it (carpe diem) and don't bother others or judge their lives.

In 1986, Lucio Dalla wrote Caruso, a tribute to Enrico Caruso, a song and lyrics that express Neapolitan culture in all its extension.

Caruso is a song written by Italian singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla in 1986. It is dedicated to Enrico Caruso, the Neapolitan tenor. Following Lucio Dalla's death, the song entered the Italian Singles Chart, peaking at number two for two consecutive weeks. The single was also certified platinum by the Federation of the Italian Music Industry.

The song simply tells about the pain and longings of a man who is about to die while he is looking into the eyes of a girl who was very dear to him. The lyrics contain various subtle references to people and places in Caruso's life.

Lucio Dalla told the origin and the meaning of the song in an interview to one of the main Italian newspapers, the Corriere della Sera. He stopped by the coastal town of Surriento and stayed in the Excelsior Vittoria Hotel, coincidentally in the very same room where many years earlier the tenor Enrico Caruso spent some time shortly before dying. Dalla was inspired to write the song after the owners told him about the last days of Caruso and in particular the latter's passion for one of his young female students.

Caruso was an acclaimed Italian operatic singer who was one of the greatest and most sought-after singers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unfortunately he lived a very difficult and rather unhappy life, having had many challenges and problems with Italian opera houses, but gained more fame and success in the United States.

Caruso was born to a poor family in Napoli. He was often involved with women, and had several love affairs with prominent married women in the performing arts, which often ended badly. His longest and most passionate love affair was with the married Ada Giachetti, with whom he had two sons. It ended when she left him for their chauffeur. A few years before he died, he met and wed a woman 20 years his junior, Dorothy Park Benjamin, whom Lucio Dalla describes in this song Caruso. With her he had a daughter named Gloria.

Guardò negli occhi la ragazza
Quegli occhi verdi come il mare
Poi all'improvviso uscì una lacrima
E lui credette di affogare

Sorrento is referred to as Surriento, which is the name in the Neapolitan language. It refers to Caruso's frequent visits to the seaside town and its Excelsior Vittoria Hotel.

Te voglio bene assaai
Ma tanto, tanto bene, sai
È una catena ormai
Che scioglie il sangue dint'ê vene, sai
Te voglio bene assai
Ma tanto, tanto bene, sai
È una catena ormai
Che scioglie il sangue dint'ê vene, sai

Here the "chain" is a translation, but what is meant is a chain reaction -such love melts the blood and so forth. The music and words of the above refrain, written in a mixture of standard Italian and Neapolitan, are based on a Neapolitan song, titled Dicitencello vuje, published in 1930 by Rodolfo Falvo (music) and Enzo Fusco (text) written according to the best tradition of Neapolitan romances with a style reminiscent of opera.

Lucio Dalla's official video of the song was filmed in the Caruso Suite at the Excelsior Vittoria Hotel where Caruso spent most of the final weeks of his life, though Caruso died at the Vesuvio Hotel in Napoli.

In 2015, on the occasion of the third anniversary of Dalla's passing, GoldenGate Edizioni published the biographical novel by Raffaele Lauro, Caruso The Song-Lucio Dalla and Sorrento", which through unpublished testimonies reconstructs the almost fifty-year-long bond (from 1964 to 2012) of the great artist with Surriento (Surriento is the true corner of my soul), and the authentic inspiration for his masterpiece, Caruso. The documentary film by the same author, Lucio Dalla and Sorrento-Places of the Soul, was presented in the national première in 2015 at the Social World Film Festival 2015 in Vico Equense.

Andrea Bocelli, Il Divo, HAUSER, Maynard Ferguson, Lara Fabian, Florent Pagny, Nana Mouskouri, Mireille Mathieu, Johnny Hallyday, Josh Groban, Milva, Fiorella Mannoia, Ornella Vanoni, André Hazes, Luca Minnelli, Neal Schon or Céline Dion have covered 'Caruso', but The Grandma stays with Luciano Pavarotti, although today we must pay tribute to Enrico Caruso, but also Lucio Dalla.

More information: Daily Italian Words

The fact that I could secure an opera engagement 
made me realize I had within me the making of an artist, 
if I would really labour for such an end. 
When I became thoroughly convinced of this, 

I was transformed from an amateur 

into a professional in a single day.

Enrico Caruso

NON ME OLVIDES, QUERIDIÑA, SI MORRO DE SOIDÁS…

The Grandma is a crazy passionate about Galician-Portuguese literature and music. In the south, the fados of Mísia and Dulce Pontes or the poems of Fernando Pessoa; in the north, Luar na Lubre, Uxía, Cristina Pato, Amancio Prada or Escuchando Elefantes. They sing about saudade, longing, migration and great writers like Rosalía de Castro and her Cantares Gallegos, whose day we celebrated yesterday. 

Para sempre Rosalía

Adiós ríos, adiós fontes
adiós, regatos pequenos;
adiós, vista dos meus ollos,
non sei cándo nos veremos.

Miña terra, miña terra,
terra donde m'eu criei,
hortiña que quero tanto,
figueiriñas que prantei.

Prados, ríos, arboredas,
pinares que move o vento,
paxariños piadores,
casiña d'o meu contento.

Muiño dos castañares,
noites craras do luar,
campaniñas timbradoiras
da igrexiña do lugar.

Amoriñas das silveiras
que eu lle daba ó meu amor,
camiñiños antre o millo,
¡adiós para sempre adiós!

¡Adiós, gloria! ¡Adiós, contento!
¡Deixo a casa onde nacín,
deixo a aldea que conoso,
por un mundo que non vin!

Deixo amigos por extraños,
deixo a veiga polo mar;
deixo, en fin, canto ben quero…
¡quén puidera non deixar!

Adiós, adiós, que me vou,
herbiñas do camposanto,
donde meu pai se enterrou,
herbiñas que biquei tanto,
terriña que nos criou.

Xa se oien lonxe, moi lonxe,
as campanas do pomar;
para min, ¡ai!, coitadiño,
nunca máis han de tocar.

¡Adiós tamén, queridiña…
Adiós por sempre quizáis!…
Dígoche este adiós chorando
desde a beiriña do mar.

Non me olvides, queridiña,
si morro de soidás…
tantas légoas mar adentro…
¡Miña casiña!, ¡meu lar!

Goodbye, rivers, goodbye, springs,
Goodbye, trickling streams;
Goodbye, all I see before me:
Who knows when we’ll meet again?

Oh my home, my homeland,
Soil where I was raised,
Little garden that I cherish,
Fig trees I grew from seed.

Meadows, rivers, woodlands,
Pine groves bent by wind,
All the chirping little songbirds,
Home I cherish without end.

Mill nestled between the chestnuts,
Nights lit brightly by the moon,
Tremor of the little bells,
My parish chapel’s tune.

Blackberries from the wild vines
I picked to give my love,
Narrow trails between the corn-rows,
Goodbye, forever goodbye!

Goodbye, glory! Goodbye, gladness!
I leave the house where I was born,
Leave my village so familiar
For a world I’ve never seen.

I’m leaving friends for strangers,
Leaving prairies for the sea,
Leaving all that I love dearly…
Oh, if I didn’t have to leave!…

Goodbye, goodbye, I’m going,
All you grasses over the graves,
Where my father lies deep buried,
Grass I’ve often leaned to kiss,
Sweet soil where we were raised.

Far off I hear them, far away,
The bells over in Pomar,
That ring for me, oh, heartache,
They’ll ring for me no more!

Goodbye too, my beloved…
Goodbye forever it may be!…
I cry as I bid you farewell
From the shoreline of the sea.

Don’t forget me, home beloved,
Though I die of loneliness…
So many leagues across the sea…
My sweet abode! My hearth!

 

More information: Rosalía

 

Só cancións de independencia e liberdade 
pronunciaron os meus beizos, 
aínda que ao meu redor, dende o berce, 
sentira o estrépito das cadeas 
que estaban destinadas a aprisionarme para sempre...

Only songs of independence and freedom 
have my lips uttered, 
even though all around me, from the cradle, 
I had felt the clanking of the chains 
that were meant to imprison me forever...

Rosalía de Castro

LILE, CAPITAL OF FRENCH FLANDERS & MORGANE ALVARO

After enjoying an amazing Six Nations match where France beat Italy in a very good way, Joseph de Ca'th Lon and The Grandma have taken advantage of Monday morning to make a quick visit to Lile, a city they know well, but where they will never tire of returning because they are both in love with Flanders, its history and its culture. They had just enough time to drive to Brussels and catch the planes back to Basel and Barcelona where they both have to continue with their lives.

Lile in Picard, Rijsel in Dutch, Lille in French, and Rysel in West Flemish is a city in the northern part of France, within French Flanders. Positioned along the Deûle river, near France's border with Belgium, it is the capital of the Hauts-de-France region, the prefecture of the Nord department, and the main city of the European Metropolis of Lille.

The city of Lile is the fourth most populated in France after Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. The city of Lille and 94 suburban French municipalities have formed since 2015 the European Metropolis of Lille.

More broadly, Lile belongs to a vast conurbation formed with the Belgian cities of Mouscron, Kortrijk, Tournai and Menin, which gave birth in January 2008 to the Eurometropolis Lile-Kortrijk-Tournai, the first European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), which has more than 2.1 million inhabitants.

Nicknamed in France the Capital of Flanders, Lile and its surroundings belong to the historical region of Romance Flanders, a former territory of the county of Flanders that is not part of the linguistic area of West Flanders. A garrison town (as evidenced by its Citadel), Lile has had an eventful history from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. Very often besieged during its history, it belonged successively to the Kingdom of France, the Burgundian State, the Holy Roman Empire of Germany and the Spanish Netherlands before being definitively attached to the France of Louis XIV following the War of Spanish Succession along with the entire territory making up the historic province of French Flanders. Lilewas again under siege in 1792 during the Franco-Austrian War, and in 1914 and 1940. It was severely tested by the two world wars of the 20th century during which it was occupied and suffered destruction.

A merchant city since its origins and a manufacturing city since the 16th century, the Industrial Revolution made it a great industrial capital, mainly around the textile and mechanical industries. Their decline, from the 1960s onwards, led to a long period of crisis and it was not until the 1990s that the conversion to the tertiary sector and the rehabilitation of the disaster-stricken districts gave the city a different face. Today, the historic center, Old Lille, is characterized by its 17th-century red brick town houses, its paved pedestrian streets and its central Grand'Place. The belfry of the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) is one of the 23 belfries in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Somme regions that were classified as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in July 2005, in recognition of their architecture and importance to the rise of municipal power in Europe.

The construction of the brand-new Euralille business district in 1988 (now the third largest in France) and the arrival of the TGV and then the Eurostar in 1994 made the city easily accessible from major European cities. The development of its international airport, annual events such as the Braderie de Lille in early September (attracting three million visitors), the development of a student and university center (with more than 110,000 students in colleges and schools of the University of Lile and the Catholic University of Lile, the third largest in France behind Paris and Lyon), its ranking as a European Capital of Culture in 2004 and the events of Lile 2004 (European Capital of Culture) and Lile 3000 are the main symbols of this revival. The European metropolis of Lille was awarded the World Design Capital 2020.

Archeological digs seem to show the area as inhabited by as early as 2000 BC, most notably in the modern quartiers of Fives, Wazemmes and Vieux Lille. The original inhabitants of the region were the Gauls, such as the Menapians, the Morins, the Atrebates and the Nervians, who were followed by Germanic peoples: the Saxons, the Frisians and the Franks.

The legend of Lydéric and Phinaert puts the foundation of the city of Lile at 640. In the 8th century, the language of Old Low Franconian was spoken, as attested by toponymic research. Lile's Dutch name is Rijsel, which comes from ter ijsel (at the island) from Middle Dutch ijssel (small island, islet), calque of Old French l'Isle (the Island), itself from Latin Īnsula, from īnsula (island).

From 830 to around 910, the Vikings invaded Flanders. After the destruction caused by Normans' and the Magyars' invasion, the eastern part of the region was ruled by various local princes.

The first mention of the town dates from 1066: apud Insulam (Latin for at the island). It was then controlled by the County of Flanders, as were the regional cities (the Roman cities Boulogne, Arras, Cambrai as well as the Carolingian cities Valenciennes, Saint-Omer, Ghent and Bruges). The County of Flanders thus extended to the left bank of the Scheldt, one of the richest and most prosperous regions of Europe.

More information: Lille Tourism

Never lose an opportunity

of seeing anything beautiful, 
for beauty is God's handwriting.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

Walking through Lile is walking through Flanders, because political borders have nothing to do with cultural ones and we all know that. You know you are in the city of Louis Pasteur and Jean Baptiste Perrin, but also of Morgane Alvaro, the fictional character resident of Lile who takes advantage of her high intellectual capacity to help solve the most complex police cases.

HPI is one of the freshest and most innovative TV series of recent years that combines great scripts with a staging where under a comic appearance the social dramas and personal difficulties of a woman to bring her family forward are hidden.

HPI, acronym for French: Haut Potentiel Intellectuel, is a Franco-Belgian crime-comedy television series.

Created by Stéphane Carrié, Alice Chegaray-Breugnot, and Nicolas Jean, it is broadcast in Belgium on La Une since 20 April 2021, in Switzerland on RTS Un since 27 April 2021, in France on TF1 since 29 April 2021, and in Canada on Addik since 1 June 2022. It streams in the United States as HIP: High Intellectual Potential on Hulu since 12 July 2024. The series is a coproduction between Itinéraire Productions, Septembre Productions, TF1, Pictanovo, Be-Films, and RTBF.

It stars Audrey Fleurot as Morgane Alvaro, an intellectually highly gifted housekeeper, who becomes a consultant for the DIPJ (a police division that investigates serious crime) in Lile, and helps solve several cases thanks to her sharp mind. 

More information: TV Festival

Mon cerveau marche tout seul, 
et puis je cours derrière.

My brain works on its own,
and then I run after it.

Morgane Alvaro

ENJOYING NEUVILE-ASK & SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP

Today, The Grandma got up early so as not to miss the plane that took her to Brussels where Joseph de Ca'th Lon was waiting for her to drive to Neuville-Ask where they plan to attend the France-Italy Six Nations match this afternoon.

It has been an intense morning of accumulated sleep and coffees, but now they will rest a little at the hotel, write this new post, watch the first half of the FA Women's Cup match between Manchester United and Chelsea, and Joseph will give her a summary (if possible) of their stay at the Olympic Games. Then, they will go to the Stade Pierre-Mauroy where they hope to experience a great rugby spectacle, possibly the most honest sport and with the fairest play in the entire sports panorama.

Joseph is a fan of Ireland and The Grandma of the U.E.Santboiana where she has great friends like Toni, Susanna, Àngels or Mima, who have made her enjoy this spectacular sport. If you like rugby, any Six Nations match should be watched, and if possible, lived.

Tomorrow they will make a quick visit to Rijsel before returning to Basel and Barcelona, where both must continue with their respective lives.

Neuvile-Ask is a very beautiful city, where Picard is historically spoken, with a great sporting tradition where its women's basketball team stands out, but it is also one of the headquarters of the French national rugby team when it plays in the Six Nations. 

Neuvile-Ask in Picard or Villeneuve-d'Ascq in French  is a commune in the Nord department in northern France. With more than 60,000 inhabitants and 50,000 students, it is one of the main cities of the Lille metropolitan area (Métropole Européenne de Lille) and the largest in area after the city of Lille itself. It is also one of the main cities of the Hauts-de-France region.

Built up owing to the merger between the former communes of Ascq, Annappes and Flers-lez-Lille, Neuvile-Ask is a new town and the cradle of the first automatic metro system in the world (VAL).

Neuvile-Ask is nicknamed the 'green technopole' thanks to the implantation of many researchers, including two campuses of the University of Lille and many graduate engineering schools, and companies in a pleasant living environment. Owing to its activity centres, its Haute Borne European scientific park and two shopping malls, Neuvile-Ask is one of the main economic spots of the Hauts-de-France region; multinational corporations such as Bonduelle, Cofidis and Decathlon have their head office there.

Outside its academic, scientific and business facilities, Neuvile-Ask is known for its sporting events, boasting two stadiums (Stade Pierre-Mauroy and Stadium Lille Métropole), some top division sports teams, its museums, its green spaces, and its facilities for disabled people.

Its name means new city of Ascq in French. Ascq is possibly derived from the Dutch word for ash. The name of the city is generally written without the customary (official) hyphen.

The city counts approximately 10 km2 of greenspace, lakes, forests and arable lands. It is located between Lille and Roubaix, at the crossroads of the principal freeways towards Paris, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels.

Development on what is now Neuvile-Ask can be traced back to the Celtic Gaul era, and are anchored in two feudal mounds, a Gallo-Roman site and a Carolingian one.

The area was selected in the 1960s to accommodate a new town then designated the name Lille-Est, which was to channel the growth of the agglomeration of Lille city and development of institutions based in the area. The commune of Neuvile-Ask was created in 1970 by the amalgamation of the communes of Ascq, Annappes and Flers. Its name evokes at the same time the new (neuve) and the old: former commune Ascq and its memory as martyr town of 1 April 1944, date on which the Nazis massacred 86 men (Ascq massacre).

The city's merger with Lille was contentious and failed twice (1972 and 1976). The Hôtel de Ville was completed in 1977.

The Stade Pierre-Mauroy, also known as the Decathlon Arena-Stade Pierre-Mauroy for sponsorship reasons, is a multi-use retractable roof stadium in Neuvile-Ask, Metropolis of Lille, Northern France, that opened in August 2012. With a seating capacity of 50,186, it is the fourth-largest sports stadium in France and the home of French professional football club Lille.

Initially named Grand Stade Lille Métropole, the stadium was renamed on 21 June 2013, after the death of the former Mayor of Lille and former Prime Minister of France Pierre Mauroy (1928–2013).

The stadium, which hosted UEFA Euro 2016 and 2023 Rugby World Cup, can also be turned into an adjustable arena being expandable to 30,000 seats where indoor sports games and concerts take place. Therefore, multiple Davis Cup events, EuroBasket 2015 and 2024 Summer Olympics basketball and handball tournaments matches have been held in the building.

More information: Six Nations Rugby

 Rugby is a game that's constant. 
If you are not growing with it, 
you get left behind.

Owen Farrell

W. H. AUDEN. THE AGE OF ANXIETY, A BAROQUE ECLOGUE

Today, The Grandma has been correcting dozens of activities all day and her head is spinning. So, this evening, she has decided to relax her body and soul by reading poetry and has chosen one of her favourite authors, W. H. Auden, the British-American poet, who was born on a day like today in 1907, and who wrote The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, a masterpiece in literature.

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907-29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as Funeral Blues; on political and social themes, such as September 1, 1939 and The Shield of Achilles; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue; and on religious themes, such as For the Time Being and Horae Canonicae.

Auden was born in York and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family. He attended various English independent (or public) schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in 1928-29, he spent five years (1930-1935) teaching in British private preparatory schools.

In 1939, he moved to the United States; he became an American citizen in 1946, retaining his British citizenship. Auden taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s.

Auden came to wide public attention in 1930 with his first book, Poems; it was followed in 1932 by The Orators. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood between 1935 and 1938 built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. 

Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the 1940s, including the long poems For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror, focused on religious themes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era. From 1956 to 1961, he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his lectures were popular with students and faculty and served as the basis for his 1962 prose collection The Dyer's Hand.

Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. Critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive (treating him as a lesser figure than W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot) to strongly affirmative (as in Joseph Brodsky's statement that he had the greatest mind of the twentieth century). After his death, his poems became known to a much wider public through films, broadcasts, and popular media.

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947; first UK edition, 1948) is a long poem in six parts by W. H. Auden, written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.

The poem deals, in eclogue form, with man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world. Set in a wartime bar in New York City, Auden uses four characters -Quant, Malin, Rosetta, and Emble- to explore and develop his themes.

The poem won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948.

A critical edition of the poem, edited by Alan Jacobs, was published by Princeton University Press in 2011.

More information: The Guardian

A poet is, before anything else, a person 
who is passionately in love with language.

W. H. Auden

CAROLINE MIKKELSEN, THE 1ST WOMAN ON ANTARCTICA

Today has been an exhausting day at work for The Grandma, who has just arrived home and just wants to read a little and rest. She has always been fascinated by those periods of history where there were still places on the planet unknown to humans, by the explorers who risked their lives to reach the most remote places on the planet. Then, she has chosen to read about Caroline Mikkelsen, the explorer who set foot on Antarctica on a day like today in 1935. Now that the planet has become small and we have mapped it, we have a whole Universe waiting to be discovered and understood.  

Caroline Mikkelsen (20 November 1906-15 September 1998) was a Danish-Norwegian explorer who on 20 February 1935 was the first woman to set foot on Antarctica, although whether this was on the mainland or an island is a matter of dispute.

Caroline Mikkelsen was born on 20 November 1906 in Denmark, later she married her first husband Norwegian Captain Klarius Mikkelsen and moved to Norway.

In the winter of 1934-1935, Mikkelsen accompanied her Norwegian husband Klarius on an Antarctic expedition sponsored by Lars Christensen, on the resupply vessel M/S Thorshavn with instructions to look for Antarctic lands that could be annexed for Norway. Mount Caroline Mikkelsen is named for her.

On 20 February 1935, the expedition made landfall somewhere on the Antarctic continental shelf. Mikkelsen left the ship and participated in raising the Norwegian flag and in building a memorial cairn. Mikkelsen never made any recorded claims to have landed on the mainland, but was initially thought to have landed on the Vestfold Hills not far from the present Davis Station. She did not publicly speak about her Antarctic voyage until sixty years after her landing in 1995 when she spoke about her journey to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten having been contacted by Davis Station Leader Diana Patterson.

In 1941, her husband Klarius died and in 1944 she married Johan Mandel from Tønsberg. Mikkelsen-Mandel died in 1998.

In 1998 and 2002, Australian researchers published historical articles in the Polar Record concluding that the landing party from the Thorshavn -and thus Mikkelsen- landed on the Tryne Islands where a marker at Mikkelsen's Cairn can still be seen today. The landing site is an approximately five kilometres from the Antarctic mainland. No alternative mainland landing site for the Mikkelsen party has been discovered, in spite of years of searching by Davis Station workers.

Consequently, Mikkelsen is regarded as the first woman to set foot on Antarctica, and Ingrid Christensen as the first to stand on the Antarctic mainland.

More information: Ocean Wide

 Problems will arise should it ever happen 
that women are admitted to base complement.

Caroline Mikkelsen 

THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE & ABDUCTION OF ADULTS

Today, The Grandma wants to share this following story by Roger Ballescà i Ruiz, and extends it not only to adults but also to teenagers who only live on social media; who base their self-esteem on the number of views they have; who have no criteria of their own because they don't make the effort to consider whether what they see or read is true or not; who let go of all their insecurities and complexes by writing toxic messages against other people; who have no ethical or moral respect for the lives of others; who have enormous emotional and social shortcomings that they believe they can make up for with followers and opinion groups; and who, without realizing it, are social prey for a future that will ignore them when they don't know how to recognize themselves beyond a tweet, a post or a like.

Several Mental Health projects nowadays treat these young people, already addicted, and the diagnoses are mainly grouped into 'the culture of the perfect image', 'body shaming', anxiety, depression, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), different eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

The challenge is great because as teachers or health personnel, we can only guide and advise these young people, but they must be the first to be aware of the situation and their families, the main ones involved in avoiding these situations and, if they are already real, in working to reverse them.

Social Media or AI are not bad per se, but it is the use that is made of them that determines their positivity or negativity: teenagers addicted to screens, famous people in their sectors who do not know how to control their degree of exposure to social media, companies that take advantage of easy customers to place their products to an audience hungry for content, or simply, adults who have begun to disappear...

 

No one knows exactly how or when it started happening, but one day, the children realized that the last of the adults had disappeared and that, definitively, they were alone as owls.

It was not a sudden or spectacular disappearance. No sirens, dramatic headlines or committee of experts. They did not all disappear at once in a big puff of smoke. They disappeared little by little, with a subtle, almost imperceptible discretion.

The first to fall were those abducted by the screens. They took up space, breathed and even said things. But their gaze escaped into a parallel universe of notifications, emails and cat videos. The children spoke to them but the words bounced off them softly.

Then the ones swallowed up by work disappeared. Adults with their agendas as a natural extension of their bodies who always promised to be there "soon", "in a while", "maybe tomorrow..." Adults in a state of promise.

Others disappeared when they decided to stop setting limits. They confused education with "do whatever you want but don't yell". They decided that children would self-regulate and would know how to decide for themselves what was best for them.

There were also those who dissolved into educational protocols, into documents full of arrows and boxes. Some were transformed into algorithms, others into international diagnostic manuals, where each discomfort found an appropriate label.

Finally, the most disturbing of all: adults who became children. They dressed the same, talked the same, wanted to be colleagues and called you "bro".

When the children noticed this, they celebrated with enthusiasm. Chocolate, unsaturated fats and screens without stopping. Not a single "no" in sight. Absolute freedom with sugary taste and video game music.

For a while everything seemed magnificent. But then things started happening.

Some children didn't know when to stop. Others didn't know what to do when there was nothing to do. Anxieties appeared without an instruction manual, sadness that was difficult to explain, anger that shot out in any direction. Without adults, no one helped put words to what was going on inside and give it meaning. No one said: "this is not right", "this is scary but it happens".

They discovered, with perplexity, that freedom without limits does not always liberate. That growing up without guidance is dizzying.

Some children began to play the role of adults, with little trace and little success. Others showed symptoms in the body, thought or behavior. Still others, sadly, faded away, without making a sound.

And the adults? Well, no one really knows where they are. Maybe they're still looking at a screen. Maybe they're working overtime. Maybe they're "on a random schedule."

The thing is, the children are still alone like owls, looking around and waiting for someone to play the adult again. And with each passing day, the question becomes more uncomfortable:

What if the disappearance of the adults wasn't a passing accident, but the natural state of things?

Roger Ballescà i Ruiz

Psychologist and psychotherapist

Centre de Salut Mental Infantil i Juvenil de Martorell

 

The challenge is great, enormous, colossal, but from the teaching and training point of view we do not give up despite being fighting against everything and everyone, despite suffering an enormous lack of prestige, despite always being the bad guys in all the stories, but we will continue working to reverse these situations and help train people of present and future generations because it is our profession, and therefore, our obligation as teachers and as citizens of the society in which we have to live.

More information: University of California

 It is okay to own a technology, 
what is not okay is to be owned by technology. 
In an overwhelming attempt to capture memories, 
people have forgotten to make memories.

Abhijit Naskar