…things are getting a tad chilly over here. Some mornings all you can hear is a couple of thuds from the brass monkey cage. One great thing about living here is when it’s really cold you know it’s going to be sunny – I took this photo just as the frost was melting in the [...]
Category Archives: portugaliness
Strictly by candle light…
December 14, 2008 – 2:58 pm
A million years ago when I had hair and Ronald Reagan was having a career change we used to sit around an open fire, playing instruments, singing songs. We drank, we smoked, we fell over in the mud. Portugal was a natural place to be – we had no mains electricity or water. No mobile [...]
A glimpse of the real Portugal…
October 2, 2008 – 8:53 pm
…is still visible if you know where to look for it. Progress has been marching through western Iberia like a premenstrual Croatian federation wrestler on her way through the chocolate aisle at Asda (Sidcup branch). Tarmac and concrete seem to be enveloping the countryside – new roads bringing prefabricated apartment blocks, supermarkets and petrol stations [...]
Chicken Licken…
August 20, 2008 – 6:03 pm
…clucked and flapped around the farmyard protesting the inevitable plummet of Heaven toward Earth. Not even this sage like poultry could have predicted the instantaneous appearance of an enormous French hypermarket within the county limits of my local town. Seemingly overnight this behemoth of consumer heaven has landed its air-conditioned aisles in our midst, thrusting [...]
Good kharma…
August 19, 2008 – 5:40 pm
…I received another chain email today professing great kharmic reward for the simple action of forwarding it’s life lessons to others. Maybe the author of this message could explain to me (as I sat amidst the dust and rubble of my new ‘house’ in tears this morning) why my door had been kicked down and [...]
Portuguese highway code – lesson 1
March 19, 2008 – 9:11 am
Lesson 1 – Indicators These should generally be used with hesitancy and caution usually to display a recent action (ie to be used just after making a turn or overtaking another vehicle). They can also be used to indicate a state of impatience and frustration on motorways – normally associated with large imported German cars [...]
It’s either really close…
March 15, 2008 – 12:32 pm
…or really really big. For those of you who frequent my flickr pages you’ll probably know that I have a fascination with wind turbines. The windmills on the ridge of hills above my house are a recent addition to the landscape and as far as I am concerned are extremely welcome… These however are the [...]
Whoever said…
January 10, 2008 – 4:26 pm
….it doesn’t rain in Portugal has obviously never been there. Or they have a huge propensity for the utterance of untruths. Or they have a mutation of that syndrome that turns wives into hats but for them it turns a larraping load of vertically descending precipitation into blistering sunshine and an abundance of dryness. Or [...]