You know when you're totally exhausted because you've taken the kids out on a last ditch day out to make up for not really doing anything these holidays, AGAIN, and you stamp up the stairs to go and shout at them because the little *****s won't go to sleep and one of them's got to be up in the morning for a not-really-a-schoolday-day-at-school-but-a-day-to-reaclimatize-before-the-real-thing-day and you say all the right things that someone as clever and beautiful as you WOULD say and they are just looking at you, not with terror, sadly, but with mirth, and you leave before you ACTUALLY lose your temper, because you're too exhausted to lose your temper and you want to go back to your mac and write about the oceanarium's lovely amphibian exhibit that you've seen for the first time since they opened it, which, though small, would have been rather lovely, if it wasn't for the cruiser-load of thick Italians and some rather brusque Germans who wouldn't let you get near to take a decent picture of anything and then your battery died on your proper camera, so you had to rely on your iphone camera, which, though adorable fun, isn't a G10, instead taking lovely pics that you can easily fake up to look like you took them twenty years ago, but not well defined pictures of frogs and toads and newts — there WERE some lovely newts and some VERY strange flattened toad things — and as you're walking down the corridor your feet feel kind of funny and it is only when you're half way down the stairs that you realise that your wearing one croc cayman and one birkenstock flip flop thing and that is why your feet felt funny and why your kids don't take you bloody seriously?

That.

By the way, the first picture is one of the beautiful Tejo (that's Tagus to you) with its wonderful flora and fauna.... huge knobbly tentacled jellyfish and the common green PET bottle for lemon drink (sometimes lemon AND lime).

The second picture is of some tiny tiny yellow and black frogs.  I didn't lick them.

It's funny how a village you know quite well can radically change in character with a couple of road blocks, a few hundred people, some live music, night time and lighting.  My friend and I mused on this as we wandered round a village festa last night, the street fête that each village holds once a year, that is all their own, that lasts a weekend and involves the eating of a lot of bifanas (pork steak in a bun), a lot of beer, and some unnecessarily loud pimba (look it up) music.

It was the pimba that almost did for me last month when my village's festas were on.  The chapel grounds where the festas are held is a good 500m from my bedroom window, yet you would have sworn (as strongly as I did) that the pimba man (a man and his synth) were in the garden.  The only way to avoid being annoyed by the neverending pimba was to go, which we did one night, and drink enough to blot out the pimba as it played until 4.30 in the morning.  We had a blast.

Last night, before the pimba began its assault to our ears, Vila Fresca put on some better music in the form of its own not-very-big Big Band, that had set up shop in front of the village font.  I climbed up the stairs of a derelict house that I have driven past dozens of times without really noticing, to take photographs from up on high.  It was really rather a beautiful sight, of the brightly lit village against the backdrop of the blackened peninsula dotted with sodium lights until Barreiro and Lisbon in the distance, then the pure black of the sky.

Sometimes, there's a lovely friendly atmosphere, where everyone's welcome, everyone remembers that they know you, or have passed you in the street.  Sometimes there isn't.  Last night, there definitely wasn't, it was one of those closed-shop kind of nights... one of those "I don't recognise you, I'm not even going to smile" and my blond-bead-braided pal, tall and fit and gorgeous, who has lived here as long as I have drew even tougher stares of "you're gorgeous, but who the hell are you?".

Sometimes Portugal is the friendliest place in the whole world.  Sometimes, it isn't.

Sex and Bowls and Rock and Roll
by Alex Marsh aka JonnyB

Did you ever watch Northern Exposure in the nineties, and think "I'd like to live there in that hostile and cold, moose-filled place with those few and quite mad people"?  Or watch Hamish MacBeth and fall inexplicably in love with Robert Carlyle and his dimwitted villagers?  At a stretch, did you not entirely want to have the whole of Ballykissangel electrocuted with Dervla Assumpta Kirwan because you might like to move there and you'd need someone to be manning the pub?

Well, I have fallen for a little village in Norfolk, where there's a pub and a bowling team, and an 18th century cottage, split down the middle, where, in a shared back garden some chickens live.  In one half of the cottage lives Tony (who is short) with his wife and kids.  In the other lives Alex and his long suffering LTLP (long term life partner) who puts her head in her hands quite a lot and they have a very special bookcase.  This is where Sex and Bowls and Rock and Roll is set.

This little Norfolk village — the name of which we will never ever know, lest it befall the same fate as the village that was the protagonist of Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence" and gets over-run by twots in Volvos — is just like Ambridge in my head (only the interior of the pub is unlike The Bull and the villagers are far less preachy about sustainable farming) and I would like to live there if it weren't for the fact that I already live in a village that twots would like to descend upon in their Volvos. 

I laughed out loud and sniggered and grinned all the way through Sex and Bowls and Rock and Roll.  I never laugh out loud when I'm reading, rather like the fact that I don't drink on my own... although now I've discovered that laughing out loud on my own at chickens and lawn bowls and really quite brilliant musical careers is quite fun, I may start drinking alone too.  It is just really, really funny, gently funny, sad funny, hapless funny, and recognisably true funny.  Alex's account of being a London-leaving newcomer with a new job title of househusband and being a bit hapless and shit at housework resonates with this London-leaving newcomer housewife who is quite hapless and shit at housework.  It also made me feel extremely homesick for so much of England, such an English village, such an English story, such an English use of the English language. 

I love this book, loved it from the first page to the last and I shall be reading bits of it to those among my Portuguese friends who still need to be schooled in what is utterly brilliant about the English.

Bloody bravo, Alex.

There's an important thing in Portugal.  It's called lunch.

Yesterday I went on my annual trip to near Viseu to pick up my sogra* from the "termas" at the end of her two week stay.  "Termas" are hot spring spas, dotted about the country, much like Bath Spa, but still functioning as a spa and not as a railway station.  The "termas" and the experience of the "termas" is like something from another century... but that's for another day. 

I left home at seven thirty yesterday morning.  I had to be there by midday and with the inevitable stops ordered by my bladder and a quick trip to a shopping centre in Coimbra to grab something for my sogra, there was no time for meandering about, taking pictures, something I always swear I must do every time I drive anywhere beyond Lisbon.  Portugal never ceases to amaze with its beauty.  Decadence, yes, squalor, sometimes, but underlying all that, beauty.  

It was about 35ºC yesterday, overcast and humid... but I luxuriated in my air conditioning... something I wouldn't be able to use on the way home.  After the termas' treatments, my sogra can't get cold or draughty for at least two weeks, or the treatments will have been a waste of time (I really DO have to look into the science of the termas one of these days) and air conditioning is specifically a cold and draughty utility.

Every time she visits these termas, her special treat at the end is to go and eat leitão in her favourite leitão restaurant in Mealhada, which is just north of Coimbra.  So much of Portugal to see in one day.  I left home, drove up the ghost motorway that is the A13 (don’t use it, it’s MINE) to Santarém and Almeirim (birthplace of sopa de pedra), then up to Coimbra (birthplace of Coimbra University), then across to Cabanas de Viriato (birthplace of Aristídes Sousa Mendes, look him up), then back to Santa Comba Dão (birthplace of Salazar, look him up if you really know nothing of Portugal), through Luso (birthplace of more hot spring water) and finally Mealhada (the birthplace — and deathplace — of tiny cooked baby pigs). 

When I was growing up, the suckling pig featured in every illustration, film or cartoon that involved a banquet; that small pig on a silver platter, sitting on a bed of lettuce and, of course, it had an apple in its mouth.  I never saw one.  When you’re growing up you just hear the name.  It’s only when you’ve already grown up that it suddenly occurs to you that THIS IS A TINY ICKLY BABY PIGGY WIGGY!

Coming down the hill from Luso, another spa town, a beautiful one that is half preserved in aspic, you start to see restaurants with pictures of either happy rounded cartoon pigs or photographed dead and roasted ones — unappealling, aesthetically speaking — until you arrive in Mealhada, the mecca of the tiny roasted baby piggies, where it seems there is nothing to eat except those roasted baby piggies.   Everywhere you turn there’s another sign for “Leitão da Bairrada”, Bairrada being a name for this region of mid Portugal, the beiras.  The bigger restaurants along the main road have their own roasting ovens at the back of the restaurant… this is industrial scale roasting of the tiny baby piggies, with huge chimneys black with burnt pig grease smoking away above the buildings, an uneasy sight.

We went to the one we always go to.  It’s how the Portuguese side of this family rolls.  I pulled into the car park at 1.20pm and if there’s one thing that the Portuguese are punctual for (it is just the one thing) it is lunch: the place was already heaving.  Yesterday was August 31st.  This means it was the last day of the holidays and people may have just been paid.   As I did a quick tour of the car park,  20 more cars drove in behind me.  The car park was already full, but I waited until those who didn’t just give up (those who maybe didn’t belong to families who have to go to exactly the same place, year in, year out, and went to try somewhere else) had improvised an extra line of cars down the middle.  I improvised with them. 

Once through the door it was confirmed that the place was extremely full.   We saw a waiter in a big white apron scuttling past, saying to a bunch of about eight people "follow me, follow me".  We didn't follow him, because I didn’t think he was talking to us.  My sogra said who cares if he’s not talking to us.  But in our deliberating we missed the man-in-the-white-apron-train.

We went to ask at the bar.  “When you see a waiter in a white apron, follow him”.  oh.

We waited.  Every minute more and more people came in the door.  Hungry looking people.  There was no way that an orderly queue could form.  Firstly it is the wrong shape of restaurant for that, secondly, this is Portugal — people queue, but “orderly” is not a word in Portuguese — so we had to depend on the kindness of strangers that might concede that we were first, because there was leitão involved, because waiting for other people to be seated first would be a wait too long, because there was hot, crispy leitão with pepper sauce involved.   “We” were all hungry for our leitão.  I say “we” because I had become part of a crowd, a small mob of gently jostling Portuguese people, with the slight anxiety that they might not get their lunch within the next two minutes.  I don’t do being part of a competitive jostling crowd very well and I find clamouring for one’s lunch when one isn’t in a disaster zone quite undignified (I do do undignified, of course, but only when it’s fun).  My sogra was doing the talking.  Yes, we were here before the rest of you lot, she said, as nicely as possible.  I was uncomfortable.  For a few moments I pretended I wasn’t there and lost myself in twitter on my phone:

"Oh god. Leitao. Too many people waiting. Relative who WANTS baby roast pig. Losing myself in twitter."

Downstairs there must be a good 150 covers, upstairs another 100, and almost all covered by hungry baby pig eating people.  But we were lucky, it was a Tuesday and there were a few tables left upstairs.

Yes, we want leitão, said my sogra and we waited for a few minutes for our leitão to arrive, as the first rain in weeks started to fall outside, on the edge of what promised to be a spectacular thunderstorm, one that we had been driving away from for the last hour.  It was still tremendously hot, and fuggy enough to kill you, not the kind of weather, you’d think, for eating steaming hot roasted pork.

Within minutes the leitão arrived.  A dish of four or five large hunks of pork, a dish of home made crisps (i.e. the greasiest kind), a vinegary green salad, a sauce boat of pepper sauce and enough coke to replenish the half litre of sweat I had lost in the last hour when I couldn’t have the air conditioning on and only the merest crack in the window.

I’m kind of ambivalent when it comes to leitão.  It would be entirely ludicrous of me to get sentimental about it being made of tiny baby piglets, when I’m not SO sentimental about eating its mother, and I tend not to think like that…. but the fact that it’s a tiny baby animal makes it harder to disguise its animalhood, when you can be holding its entire leg or ribcage in your hand (and it’s not a chicken, who can get sentimental over a bird? not me, that’s who).  Soon after I arrived in Portugal, my father in law was once brandishing the leg of something as he spoke over lunch; picture Henry VIII and a big turkey leg that you always see (were there even turkeys this side of the Atlantic by then?).  It looked like that.  But when I got closer, I saw that this leg had tiny teeth and some eye holes.  It was half a head of a tiny baby roasted piglet. 

Roast pork is one of the best things in the world to eat.  The crackling from a proper well grown pig cannot be bettered.  The crispy skin of a tiny roasted baby piglet is something like that, but as thin as a wafer and not half as satisfyingly crunchy.  Similarly, the flesh on a proper pig, when properly cooked, is heavenly… but the meat of a leitão, especially when fresh out of the ominous looking ovens, is kind of slimey.  It’s okay, but I’m not crazy for it. 

What I AM crazy for is the pepper sauce.  On an industrial scale, I don’t know how they go about it, but when a friend of mine roasted a wild boar-black pig hybrid baby pig in his bread oven (now that WAS delicious, nothing to be ambivalent about), he baked it with ground pepper and salt, large quantities of both, sewn up inside the body cavity of the pig, making a natural sauce when it was unsewn once roasted.  This is a pepper sauce that really tastes of black pepper as well as packing the spicy heat at the same time.  The sauce in the restaurant is almost as good, but so salty that you can’t eat much.  I dip my incredibly greasy crisps into it.  I pour it over my green salad.  I dip my bread into it.  It is good. 

There was a chunk of leitão left at the end.  The waitress was about to clear it away when my sogra asked why I wasn’t going to eat it.  I replied that I may well puke if I ate another thing.  In that case, it’s a crime to leave it behind, she said, and asked the waitress to bring her a piece of bread to stick it in and take home for her dinner.

We left at three o’clock and when we got home three hours later (including several rehydration stops and no air-con on the way, before the more macho car part of you says “ugh! How can it take three whole hours to get back to Azeitão from Mealhada! Waaaah waaaaah! Waaaaaah!”) the large hunks of leitão that we had bought at the take out part of the restaurant were still hot, wrapped up in their wax paper, and making the car stink of warm pork. 

The kids had leitão for supper.

I shall eat it again this time next year.


*sogra = mother-in-law.... it's quicker to type... fewer hyphens.

just SOME people.

Now, shall we have a sweepstake on how many people will die on the roads of Portugal this weekend?
How many paraplegics and quadraplegics created?
How many drunks/uninsured/unMOTed caught by the 1700 moustachioed GNRs they've announced that there will be "fiscalizar-ing" the roads.

This weekend is the main going home weekend...  people coming home and people going home.... and there will probably be, as usual, carnage.

It occurred to me the other day that maybe the still disgraceful state of driving in Portugal is the fault of all of us living here.  How often do you shout at stupid drivers  from the safety  of your car?  Or shake you head in dismay reading the headlines in the paper everyday about road accidents

Do you have friends and relations who drive like morons?  Do you dare to tell them to slow down?  I don't. 

And what about the drinkers?  Do you offer to drive them home? Take their keys away? I don't.  I'd like to.  There some people I know who I'd like to call the police about, so drunk do they drive.  But then I'd be an antisocial pariah.

Some time in the eighties in Britain, drink driving became the really antisocial habit that it is now.  There are still people who do drive drunk, of course, but it's mostly just scumfucks and good old fashioned alcoholics who do it.  It's not embarrassing to say "I'm driving" and decline a drink.  It's not unheard of for friends to take the keys from each other, to prevent them from driving.   This social turnaround is still to happen here.  There have been plenty of campaigns but it doesn't seem to stick; everyone must know by now that drink driving is stupid, illegal and horribly dangerous, but we ALL know people who do it. 

(And sticking a load of police or GNR on the roads doing road side stops doesn't work very well.  Everyone knows where they are because they tell each other, and as soon as they're out of sight they just speed up again).

So, are the rest of us to blame for not bugging the shit out of them? I think we are.