I once heard an estate agent* say to a client (in a bright yet, sincere manner) ‘…it never rains here you won’t need any’. He was of course answering a query as to the lack of guttering on most of the old houses in Central Portugal.
He was obviously elsewhere several years ago when it rained for 12 weeks straight, flooding the entire valley and washing half of the roads and bridges away. It was the type of Biblical downpour that only a man with good boat building skills and a penchant for bestial matchmaking could appreciate. He must also be busy hibernating every spring and autumn when ‘the rain in Spain falls mainly in…’ well in Portugal apparently. There’s a reason it’s so lush and green around here.
The same estate agent** was then queried upon the lack of central heating in the aforementioned houses. This question was unfortunately posed during the balmy heat of the summer months, so it was impossible for these hapless house viewers to imagine a potential drop of over 40 degrees celcius during the few months leading up to Christmas.
In real life it gets proper cold up here in the mountains. Cold enough to need thermal pants and woolly socks. Cold enough to really need central heating and certainly cold enough to cause irreparable damage to the procreational prospects of a copper/zinc alloy based Simian.
I didn’t surf today. Too f**king cold…
*please feel free to insert one of the following words to replace ‘estate agent’: Shark, Scheister, Weisenheimer.
**at this point just ‘tool’ will do. Or any other idiomatic term for the male genitalia.
As we all know commuting to work adds a certain drudgery to the day’s proceedings; the stuffy, crowded train carriage where you rattle to work with your head lodged into somebody’s armpit. 
