August 2007 Archives

Heathrow Airport has suffered a lot in the press this summer (see Heathrow hell: Britain's Awful Airports). It's been criticised for its inefficiency in processing travellers, resulting in long delays and missing luggage. Given that it was built to handle 45 million passengers annually but now processes 67 million each year, it's not surprising that it sometimes has problems.

However I've always been impressed with Heathrow, particularly the speed with which it processes arriving passengers. The last thing a tired traveller wants is a delay getting home from the airport, and Britain's immigration and customs procedures have always been excellent in my experience (unlike the equivalent authorities in some other countries e.g. USA).

This summer's criticism has focussed on departures, but I have bad news for the critics. We passed through Heathrow in record time this month at the start of our holiday to France. We left home by taxi at 6:35 am and were sitting at the departure gate at 7:07, having travelled to the airport, checked our bags and gone through security in only 32 minutes! It's a 20 minute drive from our house to Heathrow at the best of times, so that means it only required 12 minutes to get through the Heathrow check-in palaver.

Of course it helped that we had checked-in online the previous day and only had to drop off our bags, which we did by blagging our way through the business class fast bag drop (the check-in attendant was sitting there idle). Nevertheless, the security procedures were working well and so we had almost two hours to wait for our flight. To top it off, our bags were among the first off the plane upon arrival in Nice. Travelling from the UK really can't get much better than that!

El Born, Barcelona 1962

Ten years ago I purchased an original photographic print titled El Born, Barcelona 1962 by Xavier Miserachs. I did so simply because I loved the image. At the time I attempted to find out more about the photographer, but the only fact that I could establish was that he was Spanish.

Last month I once again tried to find out more, and this time my search was more productive. Here is what I found at Photolounge.eu (which has additional images taken by Miserachs):

Xavier Miserachs belongs to a generation of photographers who modernised Catalan photography at the beginning of the sixties. Maspons, Colita and Pomés, in Barcelona, or Ontañón and Masats in Madrid are some of his most important contemporaries. He studied medicine which he gave up to pursue a photographic career. He was a multifaceted person with interests in many fields, e.g. worked as a disk-jockey, was a member of the "gauche divine" in Barcelona, an advertising photographer, a teacher and a columnist. Miserachs was all of this and more as we can see in his memories, "Contact sheet" which he wrote just before leaving us, still young, in his sixties. His photography is direct, fresh, full of irony and a sense of humour; definitively without any complexes, which reflected his attitude to life. The archive of this unique artist fortunately is well taken care of by his two daugthers Arena and Mar, who even have the initiative to come up with new book projects (Memories de la Costa Brava, 2005, Miserachs / Català-Roca), and sign all modern prints.

I also found an interview given by Miserachs just before his death in 1998, which you can read online (if your Spanish is up to it), and last but not least, I discovered that the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya has its own print of this image and included it in one of its recent promotional leaflets (available as a PDF file 836Kb).

So it seems that I'm in good company, and I now know a lot more about the photograph that hangs on my wall.

PS — My print is dated 1988 and is signed by the photographer.

So I'm in the park with my just-turned-three-year-old daughter when she asks:

Daddy, can I have an ice cream?
I don't think we have time. We've got to go soon.
There is always a way, Daddy.
What?
Stephanie says, there is always a way!
Who says?
STEPHANIE!