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.
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.
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 mati, 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.
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.
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...
After a good while enjoying a football match that held little sporting interest but was deeply moving, today, Claire Fontaine and TheGrandma have decided to go for breakfast in Vieux Lyon before catching their flight back to Barcelona.
It is time to come back although Lyon is always home, too.
This morning, they have tasted a dessert that seemed very familiar.
Lyonesses? Lionesses? Lioneses?
Football? Gastronomy?
French? English? Catalan?
For a few moments, everything seemed to share the same name, and everything seemed, once again, very familiar and very dear.
After a salade lyonnaise, there should always be room for dessert. At least, that is what The Grandma and Claire Fontaine firmly believe. And in Lyon,surrounded by boulangeries, pâtisseries, chocolate shops and windows filled with irresistible little creations, there is certainly no shortage of possibilities.
But today The Grandma stopped in front of something extremely familiar. A small, round pastry. Light and hollow. Filled generously with cream. A chou à la crème. And The Grandma smiled. Because she had seen this before. Many, many times. Only at home, in Catalunya, she would probably have called it something different. Una lionesa.
And suddenly a very simple pastry raised a fascinating question. How can something so French feel so Catalan? The answer lies in one of the great travellers of European gastronomy: pâte à choux.
Few pastry doughs behave quite like pâte à choux. Flour, water or milk, butter and eggs. The ingredients could hardly be more ordinary. But the technique is unusual. Unlike most pastry doughs, the flour is first cooked with liquid and butter. The mixture is dried over heat to form what pastry chefs call a panade. Eggs are then gradually incorporated. And then the real magic happens in the oven. There is no yeast. There is no baking powder. Instead, the water contained in the dough becomes steam. The steam expands. The pastry rises. And inside, a cavity appears. The result is a light shell with an almost empty interior. And humanity, naturally, looked at that empty space and reached the only sensible conclusion: we should fill it with something delicious.
Cream. Chocolate. Pastry cream. Ice cream. Anything, really. The empty centre became an invitation.
The history of pâte à choux is surrounded by one particularly persistent story. According to the traditional account, the pastry was created in the sixteenth century by an Italian cook associated with Catherine de' Medici, who married the future Henri II of France in 1533. Different versions call this mysterious cook Pantanelli, Penterelli or Popelini. He supposedly created a preparation known as pâte à chaud -literally hot pastry- which later evolved into pâte à choux. It is a wonderful story. There is only one problem. It is almost certainly a legend.
Modern historical examination has challenged the idea that Catherine de' Medici arrived in France accompanied by an army of Italian cooks who revolutionised French cuisine. The supposed Italian creators of pâte à choux cannot be reliably documented at her court. And I rather like that uncertainty. Recipes rarely have birth certificates. They evolve. One cook changes something. Another improves it. A technique moves from one kitchen to another. Names change. Ingredients change. And eventually everybody forgets exactly where the journey began.
What we can follow more confidently is the evolution of the technique itself. Earlier preparations known as popelins or poupelins already existed in France. They involved a dough that was dried over heat before being baked. Eventually this family of preparations developed into what we recognise as modern pâte à choux. The great transformation took place particularly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when French pastry became increasingly sophisticated.
Two names are especially important: Jean Avice and Marie-Antoine Carême. Avice, an important pastry chef of his time, helped develop the possibilities of the dough. Then came Carême. And Carême changed almost everything.
Marie-Antoine Carême was one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of European cuisine. Born into poverty in Paris in 1784, he eventually cooked for some of the most powerful people in Europe. But Carême was much more than a cook. He thought about food architecturally. His spectacular pièces montées transformed sugar, pastry and confectionery into towers, temples, ruins and monuments. He codified. He classified. He refined. And pâte à chouxbecame part of the sophisticated vocabulary of nineteenth-century Frenchpastry. From this extraordinary dough emerged an entire family.
Choux à la crème. Éclairs. Profiteroles. Religieuses. Paris-Brest. Saint-Honoré. Different shapes. Different fillings. Different presentations. But the same extraordinary principle: a cooked dough inflated largely by steam, leaving space inside for the pastry chef's imagination.
But why are they called choux?
Here language becomes delicious. In French, chou means cabbage. And choux is its plural. Look carefully at a little round baked choux pastry. With its irregular, folded surface, someone apparently thought it resembled a tiny cabbage. And the name stuck. So one of the foundations of elegant French pastry bears, essentially, the wonderfully unpretentious name: cabbage pastry. French has another affectionate expression: mon petit chou. Literally, my little cabbage. But used rather more charmingly as: my darling. Perhaps pastry and affection were destined to meet.
And then something even more interesting happened. Pâte à choux travelled. French pastry techniques became enormously influential throughout Europe, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Pastry chefs moved. Cookbooks circulated. Hotels adopted French culinary terminology. Restaurants imitated Parisian fashions. Local pastry shops absorbed foreign techniques. And recipes that had once belonged to professional French pastry kitchens began appearing in bakeries far beyond France.
Portugal. Italy. Catalunya. Each culture adopted them. And often renamed them. This is where our story becomes particularly close to home.
In Catalunya, those small filled choux pastries became known as: lioneses. The word is completely natural to Catalan speakers. A lionesa literally means a woman or something from Lyon. And yet the irony is wonderful. The French themselves do not normally walk into a pâtisserie asking for a lyonnaise when they want one of these pastries. They ask for a chou à la crème. What Catalans call lioneses belongs to the wider French tradition of pâte à choux, rather than exclusively to Lyon.
Even modern descriptions of Lyon's gastronomy sometimes have to explain this curious distinction: the pastries popularly known elsewhere as lionesas are choux and are made throughout France, not just in Lyon. So somewhere during the pastry's journey south, geography became a name.
France gave us the pastry. And we gave it Lyon.
But something even more beautiful happens when food crosses a border. Eventually, we stop thinking of it as foreign.
In Catalunya, lioneses became completely at home. They entered neighbourhood pastry shops. They appeared in Sunday assortments. They were carried carefully inside cardboard boxes tied with string. They arrived after family lunches. And they acquired the fillings that generations of Catalans recogniseimmediately. Nata. Crema. Trufa.
The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana itself defines the lionesa as a small pastry made from what is sometimes called pasta choux, baked and then filled with chocolate, cream or custard. That definition tells us something important. The lionesa is no longer simply a French pastry eaten in Catalonia. It has entered the Catalan culinary vocabulary. It belongs here too.
And now we reach one of those questions capable of dividing otherwise perfectly reasonable people.
Which lionesa? Nata? Light whipped cream against the crisp pastry. Crema? Thick pastry cream, richer and more substantial. Or perhaps: Trufa? Cream transformed by chocolate.
There is no correct answer. Although every Catalan family probably contains somebody absolutely convinced that there is. Sometimes the pastries are finished with icing sugar. Sometimes chocolate. Sometimes they appear together on a tray, allowing everyone to choose. And perhaps that tray tells the story better than any history book could. Because the technique is French. The name points towards Lyon. The fillings have become familiar within Catalan pastry culture. And nobody sitting around the table needs to think about any of that. They simply reach for another one.
We often think about cultural exchange through enormous historical events. Wars. Empires. Migrations. Trade routes. Political borders. But culture also travels through much smaller things. A cooking technique. A recipe copied into a notebook. A pastry chef moving to another country. A word misunderstood or transformed. A customer tasting something abroad and wanting to recreate it at home. Food crosses borders remarkably easily. And when it arrives somewhere new, it changes. That is not corruption. That is culture.
The croissant travelled. Chocolate travelled. Coffee travelled. Tomatoes travelled. Potatoes travelled. And pâte à choux travelled too.
Eventually it crossed the Pyrenees and became so familiar that generations of Catalans would know one of its descendants simply as: la lionesa.
And this is why The Grandma finds today's dessert particularly charming. She travelled from Catalunya to Lyon. But the pastry had already made the opposite journey long before her. Perhaps not directly from Lyon. Perhaps not in one single journey. And certainly not with a passport identifying its birthplace. Recipes do not travel like that. They move from kitchen to kitchen. From chef to apprentice. From cookbook to cookbook. From country to country. And eventually they become part of somebody else's memories. That is what makes culinary history so fascinating. A recipe can belong to more than one place. France can recognise the chou. Catalunya can recognise the lionesa. And both can be right. Because food does something that borders sometimes struggle to do. It allows identities to overlap.
So today, sitting in Lyon, The Grandma looks at a little chou à la crème and sees something simultaneously foreign and familiar. France calls it chou. Catalunya calls it lionesa. The pastry itself does not seem particularly concerned. It has spent centuries crossing borders. And it knows that, sooner or later, wherever it goes... someone will fill it with cream.
Les beaux-arts sont au nombre de cinq : la peinture, la sculpture, la poésie, la musique et l'architecture, laquelle a pour branche principale la pâtisserie.
The fine arts are five in number: painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture, whose principal branch is pastry.
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