Little boys (i.e. those under the age of consent and or drinking age who can't find anything better to do) like to roam the streets trying to look threatening, walking the pimp limp, hats on, hoods up. The pimples (zits/plukes/etc) give the game away when the street light catches them in the face so instead of trying to look threatening anymore, they'll just go and nick your car, drash it, crash it and burn it in a back street.
Ah, England.
I have to leave England tomorrow so I am a little melancholic, as I always am when we leave as I never know how long it will be before we're back.
On the subject of things terrible (were we?) I wonder if the blogosphere has yet made it's own organic move towards fundraising/aid-raising for the Tsunami-hit people around the Indian Ocean. I'm 'aving a thunk about it. There must be some good ideas out there. spread 'em around. The people who are left have lost everything including their means of making a living to recoup what they have lost. I hope we westerners can find it in our hearts to sacrifice (not just give what we can spare... what's that?) something from our comfortable lives to help them. You know it's true.
That was a message from the "Madge-Side"
December 29, 2004
Bad things and Worse things
December 27, 2004
slaaag
oh, christmas! Still in zombie mode here. small people all chocolated up into hyper monsters, and the middle-aged amongst us all just plain empty-brained. We've had a good one, which pictorially would bore one to tears. So this is a rendition of Barnstaple on a Christmas Eve. Just imagine the young lady in the red puffa saying "Kerry, Kelly and Kylie, you can all f**k off, you bunch of slAAAAgs!" which is pretty much an authentic journalistic report of a five minute walk through the town. lovely.
December 22, 2004
time to stop blogging for a couple of days
and thank you all who come and read here for making my little obsession worthwhile. It wouldn't be such fun without the feedback and conversations I have with all my new pals in the blogosfera. I'll be back blogging in a few days, refreshed and fattened up like the goose.
beijinhos, abraços and have a luvverly Christmas or Hanukkah
it's a very special time of year
for it is the only time of year when the british human being is allowed to go out shopping at night, fighting through the crowds to get the last minute christmas presents (i.e. all of them)... and bloody freeeezing it is too.
December 21, 2004
distaste
I met this women the other day in a fabric shop. She wanted to make it quite plain to her customers that she not only did not like her colleagues in the shop (who admittedly were a pain in the neck as they all gossiped and bitched and whined the whole time we were there) but neither did she like us, our choices of fabric nor our attitude (sunny and cheerful and polite). We also discovered that she did not like babies, just labradors. But, most of all, she was wearing a hideous floor length waistcoat in about the ugliest material I have ever seen, which made me hate her. It that wrong?
the mysterious red flannel jacket
I don't know where they come from. They just seem to always be there. They aren't sold in any shop I've ever been in, but middle aged ladies all over the town wear these jackets, whether they clash with their shoes or earrings or not. The sort of ladies who enjoy Delia Smith, but Rick Stein is an upstart. They are ladies who are easily shocked by nooodity on the television. Maybe the red flannel jacket is a code.
December 19, 2004
lost toffs
text coming when I've had a cup of tea! pork, roasted in copious amounts of garlic and things, and stuffed my self silly (vitsma IS the best cook ever to have been my mother... and to have roamed the earth)... and I'll tell you all about these country toffs then.
The next day....
Right, well, we had to watch a dvd of last year's "the office" Christmas special, so it was more important to cringe for an hour or so, so I did. If you've never seen the office, you must see it... just to understand the English, and to understand our sense of humour... at least SOME people's sense of humour. That and "Little Britain" are my bestest things at the moment. so watch them!
Anyway, now that I have digested my kippers from lunch (another thing British that the rest of the world misses out on... TOO good to miss) I shall explain who these people are up top.
They are the "poor gentry"... the skint upper class... the extended aristocracy... they live in enormous houses and estates between the towns and the moors. They are broke through having to keep their houses up and not actually working. They live as virtual recluses because they have no money and because the outside world is a little daunting. Television is an unknown quantity to them and they live with Radio 3 (dry and classical) in their enormous piles, children all gone orf to either set up communes or to be orfly clever in the city. They still wear clothes from the seventies, since they don't go out much and nanny bought in a lifetime's supply of mothballs in the 1930s. The National Trust is eagerly waiting for them to spend their last penny, so they can go in and buy them out. A British phenom from the furthest tip of Cornwall to the highest peak of Scotland.
Right, what are we having for dinner?
btw.. a few more devonian photies, not many, cos IT'S BIN RAININ'!
when two tribes meet in the high street
a "high street" is a british thing. Sensible people might call it a main street but for some historical reason we have always called it the "high street" (I'll look it up). A high street is where one finds most of a town's shops and where one does all one's shopping.... well, where one DID one's shopping, until the big out of town stores put half the high street out of business and the other half in the hands of the chain stores (marks and spencer, boots, whs, next, monsoon... etc etc etc....).. but, as usual, I find myself floating gaily away from what the hell I was going to talk about and that was THE BARE MIDRIFF.
So, the high street is where teenagers strut their stuff. And this high street is where I used to strut my stuff, whatever kind of misguided deluded stuff that was. I was a teenager that came in various shapes and sizes since I could never make up my mind what I wanted to be style-wise (ask vitsma and papavit and they will HAPPILY regale you with stories of the vitster as a teenager with technicoloured hair, no hair, looking like a bag-lady (tramp), looking like a vamp, looking like a vampire... they are still horrified... ) but one thing I never did (except once, in the summer, one EXCEPTIONAL summer when I had an almost washboard stomach) was bare my midriff, nor did anyone else, unless they were supermodel material or otherwise deluded.
But, now it seems (bloody hell, I sound like my uber-suburban grandmother from Scotland) standards, and trousers, have slipped and girls have no shame, for they happily walk the streets or work in the clothes shops or cut hair with great big flabby floppy wobbly white blubbery midriffs hanging, no hanging is wrong, BURSTING from their middles. It is unspeakably unpleasant to look at and in December it must be bloody freezing!
And this nasty habit crosses cultural/style divides... not only do the classic chavettes (this country, I find, is currently OBSESSED with the glitzy underclass chavs and their "bling"... I'll explain further later) wear their tummies naked, but now even the goth-nerd-chicks (I made that term up, but I think you'll know what I mean, dyed black hair, red lips, black eyes, short fringe, pony tail, with nerdy square glasses, black clothes and bits of girly stuff like pretty handbags), a group who would NEVER have bared naked skin around the middle unless it was high summer and it was too hot to wear the enormous black jumper that they had nicked off their big brother, can now be seen parading down the high street with tummy out and pierced belly button (silver ring, not gold; that would be tacky) in the depths of winter.
I feel like my grandmother.
December 17, 2004
an interlude...(put in your own elevator music here)
while I'm knitting and painting up a storm (and we're in the middle of a lovely storm today... PROPER WEATHER... wind, rain, more wind, blue skies, black skies, more rain) I realise that the past few days haven't been very colourful here in vitriolica world, so here's a bit of colour from the archives... especially for newbies who haven't gone back that far:
fado - I loathe it when it's done badly
the red-haired family, over for Euro 2004
i should have been a food illustrator just for that one fish
well, you try and find pesto in a supermarket outside of Lisbon
the foul, ridiculous and ever-so bleedin' pompous so-called upper classes of Portugal
an exemplar of the "tia" class
to celebrate the wonderfully despotic tv talent of Marcelo (and to avoid a riot induced by Renato "nice snow in the background" Inepcia)
these were a few of my favourite and most colourful drawings that I've done for vitriolica world.... hey! I AM on holiday!
December 15, 2004
my house ha ha ha
What a clever bloke Alain de Botton is. In last Sunday's Sunday Times' "A Life in the Day of..." Alain de Botton (philosoper and clever bloke) wrote down his day....and how nice it was to read some sensible words from such a clever bloke. He is a self confessed neat freak... but is honest enough to see the truth! and I quote:
"Our house is extremely tidy and painted white throughout. A messy house is a sign of a robust inner state - it requires courage and strength of mind. The houses of the tidy, these are the homes of the psychologically brittle."
HA!
Vitsma and me/vit/madge felt vindicated indeed when papavit grudgingly read this out to us (I'm still unsure why he read it out to us, since it will do him no favours whatsoever, nor will significant-other-senhor-professor-life-partner ever hear the end of it). Bloody neat freaks.
double HA!
slow week for drawings cos I'm fermenting Barnstaple in our head... having spend a few hours smirking to myself in the grey murk ridden streets of said Devonian market town (Renato and Claudia will know what I mean!) I'm leaving it to stew a bit, and when I've finished a bit of relaxing knitting, I hope the results will pour forth in some repellently lovely drawings of the dear folk of North Devon.
December 14, 2004
North Devon Wildlife and the Sea
Making the most of some beautiful long sandy beaches, far from flat seas and the ever present "surf shop" are the species the 'lesser spotted masochist' (common name: BRITISH SURFER) and the 'long suffering wetsuit carrier' (common name: SURFER'S GIRLFRIEND). The lesser spotted masochist is commonly sighted along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, though almost never seen away from the coastline, unless it has to go to a wedding or something else important that has to take place inland.
It has a dark rubbery outer skin, usually in shades of black or grey, sometimes with flashes of red or turquoise... though these are normally only seen in the younger ones who haven't completely given up hope of mating yet.
Obviously, there are some that manage to find a mate, but the mate has to be carefully picked because she will have to put up with being skint for the rest of her life with the lesser spotted masochist, since he will work only when the surf's not up.
The Devon and Cornwall Masochists are so-called because they are willing to jump into the Atlantic at any time of year, including December, whereas the surfers in the warmer parts of the world are named 'lesser spotted layabouts'.
As members of the species get older, they either open up surf shops in the seaside towns or do odd jobs during the summer seasons and chat up fifteen year olds to keep themselves feeling attractive and virile. Old surfers don't retire, they just float out to sea.
December 13, 2004
Me? a SWAN? (cisne)
The first picture is a picture of me after I read the first two comments this morning in THIS post, from Rita A. and Vivi en France (thank you girls for telling me about it) about "The Swan", the reality game show that, if we lived in a truly civilized world we would never have believed that such a repulsive thing would be possible, but here it is: "the swan" .
The second picture is after FOX TV has found that I am seriously less than physically perfect (and am really looking like this having looked at that website, gawping in horror), have serious "issues" with my looks, invented a "wrong side of the tracks" background for me and then put me under the knife.... seriously, go and see what has happened to these women, read their synopses, and then tell me that you could watch FOX TV with a clear conscience ever again (though what I'm going to do without "King of the Hill" I just don't know).
December 12, 2004
what you put on top of your christmas tree....
says a lot about you.
Letitia and Madge made this together in the spirit of... a bottle of spirit probably.
The ultimate reality show...
should be entitled "Stick The Egotistical Bastards In The Jungle In Their Ballgowns And Wait For Them To Be Eaten"... and it should literally be the ultimate as in THE LAST ONE!
In the last week, I have seen the last episode/grand final of "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here!" series 47... (very like Quinta, just in the jungle and lots of extremely nasty challenges with eating vile living creatures and kangaroos' bollocks, and lying in dark pits with rats - now I WOULD enjoy watching cinha etc in pits with rats) and the last episode/grand final of "Strictly Come Dancing" - a competition for celebs to learn ballroom dancing of the icky kind, all grinning and glittery, desperately trying to be tongue in cheek and failing miserably... some of the most cringey television I have seen since.... last week.
The worst part of it was what it did to our normally highly intelligent and reasonably sensible (well, it's all relative isn't it? I'm wondering what papavit was thinking when he bought that inflatable roofrack) family... Vitsma, Papavit, Letitia and even Gwen and Mimi, were shouting at the television screen in disgust. They berated the "General Public" for voting Julian Clary (professional queen and comedian, very lovely man but obviously not put on this earth for dancing) in and the squeaky clean Alyd Jones (choir-boy in the eighties "we're walking in the airrrrrrr!" and all that till his voice and everything else dropped, the grannies' favourite) out. They bemoaned the presence of the highly irritating Paul Burrell (campissimo butler to Princess Di) and bewailed (I made that one up) the fact that there were contestants who they'd never heard of ("well, I think he goes out with models or something"). Monsters. TV monsters.
So how about we take all the celebs who put their names forward for these nonsensical reality game shows, and put them in the jungle and just leave 'em there. I'd watch that.
December 11, 2004
To be dirty or to bathe in dettol
People in the British Isles fall roughly into two main camps: townies or mud-squelchers.
Townies live in towns, cities or villages. They have clean houses, they iron their pants and believe that colds (constipações) are caused by getting a bit wet. The extreme version of the townie is "Hyacinth Bucket"... (look her up).
Mud-squelchers live mostly in the countryside and smaller villages. They have less clean houses, don't iron anything until it is absolutely necessary and believe strongly that mud is extremely good for you and that you must expose yourself to a good dose of muddy extravagance on a regular basis to maintain your resistance to nasty things in the air and picked up on the bottom of your shoes. The extreme version of the mud-squelcher is the "new age traveller" who does away with the house and lives in a muddy field, believing that the mud has mystical and health giving properties.
Occasionally townies end up living in the countryside because they watch too many "We'll tell you how to live with a LIFESTYLE" television programmes that make up 90% of British TV these days which tell them that is extremely posh to live in the country.
Since most of the work is obviously to be found in the towns and cities, many mud-squelchers find themselves living in towns and cities and find it very hard to adapt to the black-snot-in-the-nostrils inducing traffic fumes and the lack of reasonable puddles to jump in. The lucky ones maintain a good relationship with their parents who still live in the country and are happy to have plenty of visitors at the weekends.
Some mud-squelchers find themselves living in countries like Portugal where it is against the law to have un-ironed knickers or to have a dirty car and punishable by shooting squad/gossiping neighbours to leave the house wearing any item of clothing with the tiniest hint of dirt on....i.e. it is a legal requirement in Portugal that you at least PRETEND to be a lifelong TOWNIE.
December 10, 2004
would you?
"would I what? Why is she always asking me stupid vague questions?" Well, would YOU want to get one of these two pregnant? They belong to the British phenomena of the "Teenage Mother Plethora". And it has always astonished me that they manage to get preggers in the first place... who'd want to get near them?
One doesn't see many teenage mothers in Portugal, nor, I think, in the rest of Europe. Then, one has to remember to use the uniquely British formula: council house provision/age of mother = income support + ciggie allowance.
Sorry, was that too cynical?
See that they are both sporting the "council face lift" hairdo, very similar to the "cigana scalp stretcher" in Portugal, also known as the "Croydon face lift" (thanks petite). In this peculiar Devon variety, the wearer smears her a short thin fringe down onto her forehead with hair gel so that it looks like it's stuck with grease and it is held in place with a particularly ugly "scrunchy".
For lots of pretty pictures of North Devon over the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting them as a set on my flickr page, not to disrupt the flow of the blogola.
December 09, 2004
Theodore Dalrymple-land
If you have ever read Theodore Dalrymple's (my favourite pseudonym ever) column called "Second Opinion" in the Spectator magazine, you will probably never want to visit Britain for the first time.
Theodore is a prison doctor and hospital doctor in an inner city somewhere and he brilliantly describes the people he meets in his work. They are utterly vile, hugely entertaining to read about, but mostly just vile. But, if you are British, and lived in Britain for thirty years you would know that this is just a tiny percentage of the population that Theodore (who I'm sure is a dashing Ian Ogilvy ("The Saint" version 2 in the seventies) type) describes. Then you become an expat, visit your own country just a couple of times a year and begin to see things through expat/clearer/different goggles.
These two are father and son in town yesterday (accompanying two women with the strange fringed hairdo described below)... not a smile between them. And there were DOZENS of them.
Theodore Dalrymple is soon to emigrate to France.
Thems urdoos, them is (trans. Those are hairdos, they are)
As Letitia reminded me yesterday on a trip into town (the town of which a friend of mine once remarked "a town for which I can see no purpose"... nice!) highlights have never gone out of fashion here. And not just highlights... lowlights, midlights, redlights, bluelights and godawfullights have remained in the style vocabulary of many occupants of my delightful not-quite-home-town-cos-we-live-in-a-village-nearby. And now the strange and particularly nasty fashion from the eighties that was forgiveable in twelve and thirteen year olds twenty years ago has come back witha vengeance... that of the short hair with a longer fringe (franja) at the front and back which has been bleached beyond recognition as hair. See the top diag. above.
Then there's the "multi-coloured badger" look where a nastily cropped (bem cortado) and/or permed (caracolado) hairdo is coloured in with several different shades of red and brown and blonde streaks. The colours are invariably the cheap nasty looking colours, the equivalent of that strange copper-like hair colour so adored by many Pt women that is supposed to make their hair look more brazilian.
Put together with the now obligatory pullover fleece, leggings (calças apertadas de tecido de tshirt) and trainers (ténis) any hint of the rosy, rounded, devonian dumpling lady seems to have been lost to the national council estate grandmother look. Later on I shall explain the "council face lift" hairdo so loved by the granddaughters and daughters.
December 08, 2004
December 07, 2004
Pastey and overwhelming
a couple of ladies I saw in glorious Sainsbury's yesterday. It struck me that it is a slow slow process becoming a true expatriate of one's own country.
When you first leave to live abroad, the people who live in your new country are all exagerated and strange to you. The ugly people are incredibly ugly and the beautiful people are incredibly beautiful and anyone in between is just odd or interesting to look at. Then you go home for the first time and everything feels comfortable and homeish. But over the years you get steadily used to the foreignness that you encounter in the country where you live until finally visits to your "homeland" are the ones full of strange and exotic creatures.
I exaggerate a little to say that the occupants of Sainsbury's, Barnstaple, Devon, UK, yesterday were strange and exotic, but they were getting that way. There was a great horde of pale and pastey people... being Monday morning it was mostly full of retired people, which helped in the pastiness stakes... all of them ambling through the aisles with their enormous trolleys... ambling aggressively if that's possible... stuffed into great big coats and fleeces... the huge majority with enormous bottoms... probably due to a greater variety of crisps, cakes and ready-prepared-in-a-plastic-wrapper chinese and indian party food than they could possibly say no to.... utterly overwhelming for someone who is now used to a Modelo on one side and a small Intermarché on the other... I could have stayed there yesterday for another six hours and spent about €1500 EASY!
Have you noticed that these ladies are VERY similar to my Azeitonense ladies? Obviously, the bata is missing... and the skin is thinner... but LOOK AT THE HAIRDOs!
December 06, 2004
blighty
and lovely it is too.... accurately depicted here you can see the famous Vitsma and Papavit, our other sister Letitia who wears gravity defying hipsters all the time (not so gravity defying ALL the time, sadly) who is staying with Vitsma and Papavit for a little while... the dogs, Gwen and Mimi, and the cats, Dogbert and Maureen and a few sheep. This IS Devon after all, so I couldn't miss out the sheep who watch our house night and day, trying to look like stupid nervous big balls of fluff.... but I know better. O Senhor Professor Doutor cleverpants will be joining us in a few days when he's done his little conferencie-wonferencie thingy in Oxford. And IT'S WARMER HERE THAN IT WAS WHEN I GOT ON THE PLANE AT PORTELA YESTERDAY! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH... sorry.
And it is green and muddy, just how I like it. We don't have proper claggy clayish cloying mud in Azeitao, so I shall be getting the most out of my mud while I'm here.
And we're going to SAINSBURYS later to stock up and buy chocolate that HASN'T been nestléd (believe me, wherever in the world you live, if you think that the kitkat that you have in your country is the real deal... it ain't... nestlé DID something to it... try it sometime... compare an english kitkat to a Euro kitkat and then to an Indian kitkat... three entirely different choccy bars in an identical wrapper).
I promise I won't completely obsess about chocolate while I'm here. and just wait for the drawings of the Sainsburys customers. HA.
December 03, 2004
Retrato da Semana
The week jorge dropped the bombshell.
busy packing to go away, so I'm double posting this week's retrato for o acidental here. For those who don't know what happened here this week.... I guess that's everyone outside of Portugal, since I've barely seen any mention of it elsewhere... the president dissolved the goverment this week after just four months (there was a bit of a swap around after José Durão Barroso, the last Prime Minister, left for Belgium to be erm, correct me if I'm wrong cos I'm crap with job titles, president of the european commission)... so it just seemed like a huge bombshell being dropped without anything really exploding/hitting the fan yet...except maybe a few egos.
I will be posting almost as frequently over the next few weeks in Ingerlund, so do stay tuned for some Vit treatment of her homeland. lalalalalalalala
December 02, 2004
parabens a você
vit 'n' madge's darling papa makes 60 today...happy birthday dad, we love you.
we suspect he won't see this today, busy with meetings and driving on chocka motorways, so, if you're a colleague of papavit's and you see this, don't forget to call him to say happy birthday. (and tell him that I DID put this up at 9am on his birthday and didn't forget! ta)