In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the second part of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the character Humpty Dumpty asks Alice how many days there are in a year. She replies 365. Then he asks how many birthdays a person has. And the protagonist says one. And Humpty Dumpty triumphantly concludes that this allows for 364 days a year to celebrate unbirthdays, non-birthdays. From a satirical and literary perspective, the proposal might seem attractive. But it is of absurd logic because the fun lies in celebrating the exception and not the norm. Years later, from Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter character sang A very merry unbirthday to you during the tea party. It was a way of telling us again that any occasion is good for a celebration without giving too much importance to the reason.

A young man gets off a train car of the Railways. He is not dressed up, but the intention to achieve a good appearance is noticeable. On his left arm, he carries a bouquet of roses, upside down. He holds it with theatrical nonchalance, as if the flowers were accidental. It is as if he were somewhat ashamed to walk around with that bounty of flowers. He is uncomfortable. It is inferred that he has to give them away, but until he delivers them, it seems he is also carrying an added dose of vulnerability that he tries to hide.

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Where do they go? What do they learn? What do they gain from it? Each person's favorite place – to get lost in, spend time in, work in, or even live in – is explained by intimate and profound reasons. Experiences that, possibly, take root in childhood; others are born from impressions awakened by certain landscapes, silences, mysteries, or subtleties that reveal the reason for an attraction. A person's connection with a space they feel is their own activates an inner pulse. An office where ideas turn into realities, a sea that evokes pirate stories, rocks bathed in colored water, depths and sea distances that revitalize, a street steeped in history, and that first place that sparked a vocation that became much more than a profession: these are six life stories shared by well-known personalities from the country, revealing the extent to which the place they return to is important to them, the lessons they draw from it when they are there, and what they take with them simply for being there.Lluís Llach, singer-songwriter

“I am from here and I have it very clear”

“This is where I learned to swim with my mother”, recalls the singer-songwriter Lluís Llach. With towels in a basket, that woman ahead of her time – she had studied to be a teacher during the Republic and, at a time when almost no one had a car, she even knew how to drive – often accompanied her son to the beach of l’Estartit, with the Medes Islands in the background. A corner of the Empordà coast with a sea full of pirate stories that fueled the outings of that child and where he would continue to go, also, as an adolescent. His friends beat him at swimming, but he always surpassed them underwater. “I knew how to relax submerged, which is very important”, he assures. With his father, on the other hand, he didn't come as much. “He was a doctor and couldn't afford to go to the beach”, comments Llach as he admires this “curious” place that appears before his eyes as a “living horizon” of geometries and contrasts.

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Annalisa Massaro

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The Wall Street Journal, one of the main economic newspapers in the United States, has had a monthly column reserved for three years to talk about retirement. The section Retirement rookies (which could be translated as Retirement for beginners) is written by two people. It is signed by Stephen Kreider Yoder, one of the former editors of the newspaper, and his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, both retired from professional activity and motivated to reflect on this new stage of life. The couple, who have not yet reached seventy years of age, live in San Francisco and are presumed to have a privileged and quiet retirement. They address everything from the most typical dilemmas such as the opportunity to travel, move to a quieter town or buy a motorhome, to some fears such as health, widowhood or staying in good shape. They delve into psychological and emotional aspects related to personal identity when you stop working. They also deal with economic issues, such as the anxiety of running short of savings, the need to reduce expenses or the consequences of inflation for retirees. However, from the first columns they wrote, a recurring concern of the Kreider Yoders about time management becomes evident and, above all, a certain demand to invest it wisely. In these three years, they have insisted on the complexity of finding a balance between doing a lot of activities and learning to disconnect, changing old routines for new ones, making lists of realistic plans without getting stressed or correctly distributing attention to the rest of the family. Time is a background headache that always appears.

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In the magnificent novel Instructions for living without her, by Empar Moliner, the narrator explaining Claudia Pruna's story contrasts her husband's low energy with Pruna's productivity: “Perhaps this is the real difference between men and women. Women, past fifty, want to do a lot of things. They have energy, they laugh, they wet themselves laughing. Men lose it all and some never laugh again. It's like a transfer.”

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Dear Regi, I should be angry, envious, and resentful of you for many reasons. Your book Les calces al sol (La campana) and my Un cor de neu (La Magrana) were released together in September 2022, and yours, slowly but surely, succeeded, and mine, well, it didn't. And this is despite yours being the first book you published, not like me who has published a few. On top of that, you're quite a bit younger than me. And a good person. And talented and wonderful and hardworking and persistent. And stylish! According to the manual for a good follower of the patriarchal cliché, I should choke every time I read something about you. But the opposite happens to me.

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Zara has done it again. Without any shame or embarrassment, it has strolled through the supermarket of social struggles, underground cultures, and symbolic identities with its cart wide open: a bit of marginality to give it pedigree, some uncomfortable figure of those who were a nuisance in life, and, above all, a good dose of rebellion. That's right: all nicely domesticated. Everything, passed through the quick boil of fast fashion, shrink-wrapped and ready to be consumed in the form of a prefabricated identity. And this time, who got to enter the shredder of turbocapitalism? Camarón de la Isla.And this in the full Camarón year, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the birth of the iconic cantaor, a figure who was not only an exceptional voice of flamenco, but also one of its great renovators. From La leyenda del tiempo, he opened the genre to new sounds and sensibilities, and moved it from an almost fossilized space to a living territory in tension with the present. But, furthermore, he contributed to overflowing the social image of gypsy culture beyond the cliché to which it had been subjected during Francoism, trapped between folklorism and marginality. Together with key figures like Paco de Lucía, he broadened the imaginaries around gypsy identity, both from within and in its public projection.

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An omnipresent element in Rosalía's concert is a large white canvas that serves as the backdrop for the stage, as if it were stretched over a wooden frame. It is the reverse of an immense cloth, as if you were seeing the back of an imposing painting. With a Palau Sant Jordi still with its lights on and the audience filling the stands in a hurry, the back of this canvas patiently awaits the start of the show until, when everything goes dark, it opens in half, as if we were entering the interior of the work of art. It is a way of telling us that what we are seeing is not just a musical performance, but also an artistic process that will unfold before us. It is much more than a concert, it is a total work of art, in motion, full of life, of references, and in constant evolution and transformation. Rosalía is the artist who completes her work during the two hours of the show.

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“Salvador Espriu Castelló, writer, single, sixty years old, a native of Santa Coloma de Farners [...]. He declares that he in no way wishes to be buried in the cemetery of Arenys de Mar. He further declares his express wish that his body be cremated, if the laws permit”. These are verbatim words, handwritten by Salvador Espriu in what is a document of last wishes, a draft of a will, written at some point between the summer of 1973 and that of 1974 – he was born on July 10, 1913 –, drafted in Spanish – the law did not provide for any other option – and addressed to his great friend and lawyer Josep Ferrer i Rius.

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During the launch of Artemis II in NASA's lunar mission, CNN interviewed William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk in the series Star Trek. Shatner didn't just navigate the Universe in fiction. In 2021, at ninety years old, he traveled to space with Blue Origin. When asked about the experience of seeing Earth from so far away, he confessed that he felt immense sadness. In his memoirs, he explained that he couldn't stop crying: “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration and, instead, it was a funeral. It was one of the most intense sensations I have ever experienced. The contrast between the ruthless coldness of space and the protective warmth of Earth, down there, filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day we learn of new destructions of Earth caused by ourselves: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna... things that have taken five billion years to evolve and which, suddenly, we will never see again due to human interference. It filled me with dread”.

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Three days before the start of the confinement due to Covid-19, Sergi Poyatos received the keys to what was to be his home and the gastronomic meeting point for all the people of Cervelló. Let's remember how we suffered and the vital and economic consequences that the pandemic had for everyone, but at the same time we saw that the world does not stop and, in July of that same year, El Secret del Vell opened its doors in Cervelló, a municipality that originates with the castle of Cervelló in the early 10th century.However, in 1714, the Catalan defeat in the War of Succession symbolized the end of an era. Among the first consequences of the conflict was the destruction of the castle, ordered by Philip V. The construction of the road between Barcelona and Valencia, in the second half of the 18th century, favored the formation of the grouped nucleus of Cervelló and marked the beginning of the town we know today.But let's leave history for another day and focus on Sergi's cuisine. We begin the meal with a taste of acorn "morcón" elaborated according to Sergi's family's traditional recipe. Originally from Cuenca and Extremadura, every year, for four generations, they return to their starting point to do the slaughter. We continue with "escalivada" aubergines from the Agrarian Park with goat cheese, hazelnuts, and their praline, and a dish of veal tripe with "capipota" and pork trotters. We are faced with a proposal based on good product, curious, and very well cooked.The main courses are house classics: steak tartare of aged Galician beef fillet, the famous cod pil-pil in homage to a centenarian client, and a rice dish with acorn-fed pork ribs, porcini mushrooms, and black sausage from a family slaughter. We ordered the rice after seeing it was a majority dish on many tables. The rib one was sublime, but we were left with the desire to try the seafood rice with squid, clams, and red shrimp. It will be a good excuse to return. The wine that accompanied us was Abadia de Poblet, from Conca de Barberà. A Santa Teresa toast in the Catalan style and a gin and tonic ice cream with Bulldog gelatin, lemon air, and red berries concluded a great lunch.A project to reconcile

After a very demanding service, we sit down with Sergi to talk about family, the town, cooking, and secrets. “I am a thirty-five-year-old family man, I have been living in Cervelló for fifteen years and I have a total family unit. The three things I like most are being a father, being my wife’s partner, and the restaurant business. I created the project ‘El Secret del Vell’ to be able to reconcile everything”, he tells us with the demeanor and tone of a happy guy. The team is very important: Sergi, Annuar, and Àlex in the kitchen, and Danae and José Luis in the dining room. The restaurant is divided into three spaces: a dining room with seven tables, a private room for eight diners, and a very nice interior terrace.Sergi began studying Art History, but his passion was cooking. His family is in the trade and, after studying and working in various renowned kitchens, he decided to start his own project. Cooking is his passion and the house that hosts his restaurant, his devotion. It is one of the first houses that was part of the beginning of Cervelló as a town; it was called the "basket makers' house" and is dated from the year 1793.Hey! We almost forgot to tell you about the secret, but we'll leave that for when you go. Ask Sergi about it: his face lights up when he explains it. A promise: you will eat very well.

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In 2001, Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, began to notice the emotional burden of decades of research into depression and mental illness. He felt that the professional approach based on trying to cure trauma was imbuing him with a certain sadness. This led him to reflect on psychological therapies, often so focused on repairing harm that they forget to inject us with a good dose of optimism that makes us face life with more enthusiasm and joy. Seligman had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and paved the way in a new direction: the so-called positive psychology. He wanted to study, scientifically, what the mechanisms are that make us feel that life is worth living. He did not intend to build any abstract theory but to establish effective behaviors that could be tested and measured. In 2005, Seligman and his research team recruited four hundred and eleven volunteers and divided them into five groups. One group would make a list of positive memories, another would identify their personal strengths. A third group would introduce small specified changes in their daily lives and a fourth would limit themselves to describing childhood memories. The fifth group would undertake a more elaborate task: they would write a letter of gratitude to someone important in their life, someone to whom they had not properly thanked. Afterwards, they would call them by phone, arrange to meet without explaining the reason, and once they had the person in front of them, they would read the letter aloud. It could not be a card with a meager “thanks for everything” to get it over with. The letter had to be about three hundred words long and specify the reasons for the gratitude, the details of that event, and how that person's gesture had changed their life. They named this exercise the gratitude visit.

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A sign that says "Welcome to the Gross Happiness CountryIt welcomes you to Paro International Airport in Bhutan. Next to it is a large portrait of the king and queen and a sign reminding you that smoking is prohibited throughout the country and that the speed limit is 50 kilometers per hour.

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