ADELE, GOD THIS REMINDS ME OF WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

I remember when I was a teenager. After leaving my hometown, Andorra La Vella, my family and I lived in a little town in the Garraf coast near Barcelona. 

It was a fishermen village with large beaches of white sand and a quiet sea.

I met him there. He was the most famous clown in the world, and I fell in love immediately. 

We were very young and our story was very short, but I still remember him, I still remember when we were young. Now, he is like a shadow that accompanies me everywhere. I will never forget him. He will be always on my mind and my memories.

The Grandma

 

Today, The Winsors and The Grandma have met Adele, one of the best singers of all time. They were very excited and happy.

Before this wonderful visit, the family has studied some English grammar with To Be (Past) and Could/Couldn't, and they have talked about the myth of eternal youth with Bram Stoker's character, Dracula, and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

More information: To Be (Was/Were)

More information: Could/Couldn't

More information: Bram Stoker & Dracula, The Myth of Eternal Youth

More information: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins (born 5 May 1988), known mononymously as Adele, is an English singer-songwriter. She is known for her mezzo-soprano vocals and sentimental songwriting.

Adele has received numerous accolades including 16 Grammy Awards, 12 Brit Awards (including three for British Album of the Year), an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award.

After graduating in arts from the BRIT School in 2006, Adele signed a record deal with XL Recordings. Her debut album, 19, was released in 2008 and included the UK top-five singles Chasing Pavements and Make You Feel My Love.

19 has sold over 2.5 million copies in the UK and was named in the top 20 best-selling debut albums of all time in the UK. She was honoured with the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

Adele released her second studio album, 21, in 2011. It became the world's best-selling album of the 21st century, with sales of over 31 million. 21 holds the record for the top-performing album in US chart history, topping the Billboard 200 for 24 weeks, with the singles Rolling in the Deep, Someone like You, and Set Fire to the Rain heading charts worldwide, becoming her signature songs. The album received a record-tying six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.

In 2012, Adele released Skyfall, a soundtrack single for the James Bond film Skyfall, which won her the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Adele's third studio album, 25, was released in 2015, breaking first-week sales records in the UK and US. In the US, it remains the only album to sell over three million copies in a week. 25 earned her five Grammy Awards, including the Album of the Year. The lead single, Hello, achieved huge success worldwide. Her fourth studio album, 30, released in 2021, contains the chart-topping and Grammy-winning single Easy on Me. 25 and 30 became the best-selling albums worldwide, including the US and the UK, in 2015 and 2021, respectively.

As of 2023, all of her studio albums, except 19, have topped the yearly best-selling albums chart worldwide in the 21st century.

Adele is one of the world's best-selling music artists, with sales of over 120 million records worldwide. The best-selling female artist of the 21st century in the UK, she was named the best-selling artist of the 2010s decade in the US and worldwide.

Her studio albums 21 and 25 were the top two best-selling albums of the 2010s in the UK and both are listed among the best-selling albums in UK chart history, while in the US both are certified Diamond, the most of any artist who debuted in the 21st century.

More information: Adele

 It's hard to win me back
Everything just takes me back
To when you were there

My God, this reminds me
Of when we were young

Adele

BRAM STOKER & DRACULA, THE MYTH OF ETERNAL YOUTH

Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker (8 November 1847–20 April 1912) was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.

Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel, and invasion literature. Stoker did not invent the vampire but he defined its modern form, and the novel has spawned numerous theatrical, film, and television interpretations.

The story is told in epistolary format, as a series of letters, diary entries, and ships' log entries, whose narrators are the novel's protagonists, and occasionally supplemented with newspaper clippings relating events not directly witnessed. The events portrayed in the novel take place chronologically and largely in England and Transylvania during the 1890s.

Count Dracula

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells wrote many tales in which fantastic creatures threatened the British Empire. Invasion literature was at a peak, and Stoker's formula was very familiar by 1897 to readers of fantastic adventure stories, of an invasion of England by continental European influences.

Dracula is a work of fiction, but it does contain some historical references, though it is a matter of conjecture and debate as to how much historical connection was deliberate on Stoker's part.

More information: Count Dracula's Legend & The story of Vlad the Impaler

Popular attention was drawn to the supposed connections between the historical Transylvanian-born Vlad III Dracula of Wallachia and Bram Stoker's fictional Dracula, following the publication of In Search of Dracula by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally in 1972. During his main reign (1456–1462), Vlad the Impaler is said to have killed from 40,000 to 100,000 European civilians: political rivals, criminals, and anyone that he considered useless to humanity, mainly by impaling. The sources depicting these events are records by Saxon settlers in neighbouring Transylvania who had frequent clashes with Vlad III. Vlad III is revered as a folk hero by Romanians for driving off the invading Ottoman Turks, of whom his impaled victims are said to have included as many as 100,000.

Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931)

Historically, the name Dracula is derived from a Chivalric order called The Order of the Dragon, founded by Sigismund of Luxembourg, then king of Hungary, to uphold Christianity and defend the Empire against the Ottoman Turks. Vlad II Dracul, father of Vlad III, was admitted to the order around 1431, after which Vlad II wore the emblem of the order and later, as ruler of Wallachia, his coinage bore the dragon symbol, from which the name Dracula is derived. People of Wallachia only knew voievod Vlad III as Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler.

The name Dracula became popular in Romania after publication of Stoker's book. Contrary to popular belief, the name Dracula does not translate to son of the devil in Romanian, which would be pui de drac.

Stoker came across the name Dracula in his reading on Romanian history, and chose this to replace the name, Count Wampyr, originally intended for his villain.

More information: Vlad The Impaler-Vlad Dracula

For death is no more than a turning of us 

over from time to eternity. 

William Penn