When I was invited to speak about my personal journey and my research to a group of secondary education students at the school Petit Plançó, the obvious thread which seemed to link both things together was an interest in place and mobility: how we become attached to place (the place we’ve been born in, we’ve lived in, or we feel an emotional link to) and how this is reflected in a range of artistic expression. I talked about the places I’ve lived in (from the Galician border to Scotland) and how this has informed both my published novels as well as, in a more indirect way, my research into exiled composers from Spain and Catalonia and about urban geographies and the arrival of the phonograph in the Iberian Peninsula. One particular challenge was to explain to student what a phonograph was, as they said they predominantly listen to music on their phone or laptop, and so the idea of a device you use only to listen to recorded music might sound terribly old-fashioned by now!