David Leigh

I first came across espresso many years ago when I was fortunate enough to be sent to the Italian island of Sardinia for work when I was in my early twenties. I was there fior a week or ten days at the end of July and beginning of August and I was lucky enough to find that we’d be working mornings only due to the heat. - so what was supposed to be a business trip in fact turned out to be a good deal of all-expenses paid holiday too.

One of the great Italian habits I was introduced to was the coffee break, where a few times a day people make their way to the nearest coffee bar and drink a minute quantity of blackest of black coffee followed by a glass of water. I so loved the espressos that when I got back home I began my search to produce good espresso at home.

But it was one falso start after another, with stove top makers that produced unfailingly bad coffee, a Krups espresso maker that was perhaps even worse and so eventually  just gave up the chase.

Then one day my brother mentioned that he’d just bought a Gaggia coffee maker after sampling an espresso made by a Baby Gaggia at his friend’s house - his friend is married to an Italian so good espresso is both essential and guaranteed.

When I visited my brother one day I had free access to his new toy. He showed me how to work it and then produced the best cup of espresso I’d ever had outside Italy. At that moment I knew I had to have one - the only problem was that I’d just resigned from a highly paid job and was about to move to Barcelona. So I waited again…

…until for my birthday last year, what should I receive but a Baby Gaggia!

It’s a pump driven machine, which means it is slightly noisy, but don’t let that put you off as the coffee it produces is amazing.  Although the machines you see in cafes are steam driven, a pump-driven espresso machine is ideal for home as you can switch it on and produce coffee 6 minutes later - the pump ensures that the water is delivered uniformly at the optimum pressure.

I usually use Illy coffee, although I can’t always get it in Barcelona. I’ve also tried Lavazza, which isn’t quite so good but much cheaper, as well as Alto Grande from Puerto Rico and Jamaican Blue Mountain, although the latter is a bit strong for my tastes.

The Baby has recenty been updated slightly by Gaggia, although the differences appear to be cosmetic. They’ve also added the ability to use coffee pods, but I don’t see this as an advantage at all - yes, they produce less mess, but you’re tied into the type of coffee you use and that is a huge disadvantage for me. I’ll also add that I tried coffee from a pod machine - I don’t remember the brand, but it wasn’t Gaggia - and the coffee was terrible. I don’t know whether it was because of the type of coffee thay had or the machine itself, but I was glad I had my Gaggia tucked up at home.

So what don’t I like about my Baby? Not a lot really, it requires a bit of maintenance and a good clean, but other than that it produces excellent espresso when I want it.

More about the Baby Gaggia

I’m not a fan in any respect of Lluis Llach, but there are many people in Catalonia to whom he means a great deal. As a protest singer during the last 20 years of Franco’s dictatorship I suspect that you had to live through it with him in order for him to mean much.

Last night he retired after a 40 year career. I guess he wanted to go out with a bang rather than a whimper as it seems to me that he has plenty more life in his musical career, but apparently he’s going to spend his retirement on his vineyard - sounds a good retirement plan to me, but I have a good idea that we’ll see him again on stage.

His retirement was marked by a concert - but when the 5,000 tickets sold out in 30 minutes he announced that he’d celebrate with two concerts. And so it was that last night 5,000 people were packed into a marquee in his home village of Verges.

In addition to regular public, the audience also included some of the top politicians from Catalonia. The event was televised on TV3 and the director seemed to take particular delight in zooming in on the politicians’ faces every time that Llach made a political statement, which was at least amusing. So why did these politicians put themselves through all that?

It struck me that they are blinded by one side of Llach which is his anti-centralist stance, which is shared by most Catalans. They believe that because he stands against what they stand against he is an ally - a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. But they couln’t be further from the truth - he didn’t have a good word to say about any of the political parties whatsoever, the fact that they share a common viewpoint doesn’t make them allies in the slightest.

And this same deluded thinking prevailed in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War when disparate groups formed the Republican alliance against a common enemy - Franco - but then spent much of their resources fighting each other.

It’s almost as if by staying at home and watching the concert of television those same politicians felt they would be bad Catalans. So where does this idea come from?

I like to keep an eye on what the SEO gurus and wannabe gurus are up to and so I’m on the mailing lists of anyone who is anyone in SEO as well as anyone who thinks they’re someone too, so one of regular mailings I get is from The Rich Jerk.

His current campaign features some videos which supposedly take you inside his Adwords campaigns. I haven’t seen them yet, but since I noticed his ebook was at the knockdown price of $10 I decided to buy and see what he says.

Well, I’ll tell you something - save your $10, The Rich Jerk is just not worth it. How he was selling it at $50, or whatever it was previously, I’ll never know.

The ebook consists of 60-ish pages which supposedly tell you how The Rich Jerk makes millions online. But in fact there is not detail and what it is really doing is preselling affiliate products. There is no way you could set up a successful website based on the information in the ebook alone, which is what his book claims.

If you want to go the affiliate route then there is plenty of information to get you going, with far more detail than this. Although I’m not particularly keen on SiteBuildIt as a product - perhaps it’s ok for beginners but it’s too clunky for me and you can’t do any PHP coding - the process behind it is sound and you can find that in a free ebook 193 page ebook written by Ken Evoy called The Affiliate Masters Course. That ebook takes you by the hand and takes you through all the steps, from keyword research onwards and I recommend it for everyone.

Why buy The Rich Jerk for $10 when you can read The Affiliate Masters Course for free?

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Normally at home we watch TV3, which is a Catalan channel. The reasons for doing so are simple. First, it shows all programmes in Dual, so I can watch English language programmes in English. Second, the programmes are, on the whole, much better than any of the Spanish language channels. Lastly as I live with a Catalan she likes to watch TV in her own language - natural enough.

One thing I’ve noticed some time ago and now more recently is the political bias of the news. I first noticed this when every edition seemed to have an item about domestic violence. So why were there so many stories of domestic violence suddenly - had Catalans as a whole suddenly become sick of each other and needed to bludgeon/shoot/strangle/poison their spouses to death?

Unlikely I think, a more reasonable explanation seemed that since the Generalitat (the autonomous government of Catalonia) was raising the issue of domestic violence in a series of posters across Barcelona and television advertising, that the news was also reporting in line with the Generalitat, who funds them.

Without wanting to diminish the issue of domestic violence, I am really uncomfortable with the fact that news reporting is being corrupted by issues that the Government is raising, whether or not they fund them. One of the Generalitat’s latest initiatives accidents in the workplace, and guess what - daily news items about work accidents, mainly in construction.

But to top it all, the Generalitat is lobbying at the moment so that the Spanish train operator Renfe’s operations in Catalonia are handed over to be controlled by the Generalitat. And so guess what we see on the news every day at the moment - a news item about how bad the train were today, look at the chaos.

Now domestic violence and workplace accidents are one thing, but this is complete propaganda; when I watch the news I want to make up my own mind, not be brainwashed into thinking what the Generalitat wants me to think. And since the Government is made up of a tripartite of incompetant liars, do they honestly expect me to believe that they could run a train service?