Twitteretter

The Christmas and New Year festivities are awash with traditions. For me, this includes a combination of Spanish and British ones, plus some family specials. For example, watching the Vienna New Year’s concert with a cup of espresso, followed by the ski jumping at Garmisch Panterkirchen. As I was growing up, I stuck to those even through some pretty terrible hangovers in the late eighties and nineties. After all, what good are traditions if one iconoclastically bails out just because one overdid the drink the night before? Some others have been abandoned through lack of practicality, a result of emigrating to the UK. And so a new combination of traditions is developed by me, to pass on, partly common with those of my parents, partly my own, partly Sandra’s contributions. This, I guess, is so much a part of our social environment as the political system or the economy, but this part we can protect and cherish, and their survival is entirely down to us. What are your traditions? Length: ...

I’ve already introduced JJ Rousseau and his The Social Contract in previous Twitteretters. He is not only a very renowned philosopher, but quite possibly the most influential political author of our history. His work set the basis for the advent of modern democracy, providing the ideological backbone to the constitutional assemblies of the French Revolution and, nearly at the same time the other side of the Atlantic, to the American Revolution and its development of a sophisticated parliamentarian republic. However, and unlikely as it seems, Rousseau was hugely influential also by writing what is credited by many as the first romantic novel, La nouvelle Heloise, opening the floodgates of a genre that has produced incalculable pages and book sales of a volume unthinkable for philosophy works. Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Rousseau both gave us the tools to challenge our social and political environment, to possibly improve it, and to evade it, reducing the urgency to do so...

I come from Santiago de Compostela, in Northwest Spain, best known for the Way, a pilgrim route that saw many travellers cross Europe on foot in the Middle Ages, a trip which has been revitalised in the last 30 years, with modern travellers undertaking it as a combination of challenge and adventure. Nowadays, close on half a million people walk to Santiago every year, and the numbers were not dissimilar at its heyday 800 years ago. A lot has been written about The Way’s contribution to building European culture by the connections that pilgrims on foot established along the way, and the ideas and technologies they spread. But also very interesting is how it originated. At a time when European powers needed to stop the Muslim hordes’ advance through the Pyrenees to France and the heart of Christianity, the grave of St James was providentially (sic) found on the very spot that would unite all of Christianity on the defence of an open path through the Pyrenees to the backwaters of Galicia ...