“Erase the thought that we always have to lose”

We thought we'd never see the Sau reservoir full again, but it turns out that, between the rains of these past months and the snow that will fall in spring, they'll have to release some water. Just a year ago it was at 12% of its capacity, and now it's over 86%. The Susqueda reservoir is nearing 90%.

Now is the time, then, to continue with desalination plants and water conservation, because time is fickle like people (Montaigne) or life (Plan), but it has a tendency towards rising temperatures that will mean that suddenly, any day now, we'll see the bones of the Sant Rom church again.

Fickle like historical cycles. These days mark the 50th anniversary of Lluís Llach filling the old Sports Palace on Lleida Street for three consecutive nights, concerts that have gone down in history collectively as the January 1976 concert. According to the press of the time, they constituted a dress rehearsal for the entire democratic society. The dictator had been dead for less than two months. Llach, who had been banned from singing in Catalonia for months, while in Paris the press was surrendering to the Journey to Ithaca which he had performed at the Théâtre de la Ville, achieved the first ovation of the night with that verse of the song Wake upwhere he says: "I have to erase the thought that we're always destined to lose." There's a desolation in realizing that we're discussing funding under the enemy fire of old insults, on the decidedly un-epic course that day after day takes. Llach's verse is once again fitting, even though a disillusioned realism of today has replaced the enthusiasm with which people 50 years ago first tasted freedom.