I'm a sucky photographer... and I didn't have much chance to take piccies of the city... but this is an idea of what Porto is:
A MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE OF PORTUGAL:
I'M SORRY!
I HAVE BEEN HARDENED BY LIVING TOO LONG IN THE AREA OF GREATER LISBON AND I HAVE BEEN UNJUST.
In three days in Porto I only encountered one miserable bastard café owner and one miserable bastard who wouldn't even deign to say good morning to me in a hotel lift (and he was probably from Lisbon anyway). Almost everyone was cheerful and kind and helpful... a taxi driver, A TAXI DRIVER, said "good morning, are you well... so, where can I take you?" ... imagine anything other than "grunt!" in Lisbon...
I was blown away having become so used to the dry grumps that sell me coffee or newspaper or train tickets.
But, something else is likely to stay with me for even longer, at least in my digestive system:
PORTO!
More on way... so tired... so much to blog about.... blog blog blog....
We are going on a very well earned couple of days break, and what to leave on my blog for three days? *starting to hyperventilate*...three days, never left it for three. whole. days. before. *madge passes paper bag to breathe into*. I dunno.
So. I chose two things. An abstract that may have something to do with going to a WARM hotel after a winter in our icebox house.
The other is a mouse eating a biscuit. 
Have a great weekend. Back on Sunday. I'm sure I'll have lots to blog about.
Beijocas and jinhos and all that.
And leave me lots of messages.
Well, a morning in Lisbon is as good as a shot in the arm with a dose of blogging-idea fluid (that you couldn't buy anyway, because it would be illegal). Yesterday, just a little trot around Baixa, Bairro Alto and a nip into El Corte Inglês (the Spanish for John Lewis) and I've got enough material for another seventy posts. This country is so great.
Madge got me to run behind this lady so she could accurately draw the effect of her transparent hairdo. It's quite a feat of hairspray engineering, but there is a fleet of Lisbon ladies and their hairdressers (and no doubt, a few maids... though, there can't be THAT many maids, since this IS the twenty first century and despite half the bleedin' awful telenovellas on the telly depicting families with SERVANTS in UNIFORM, I don't think there are that many left, even in Lisbon, doing their ageing mistresses' hair) *gasps for air*.... that can manage to create this large puff of hair, through which one can see scalp and the rest of the street, expecially on a sunny day.
I would feel a bit mean, being so rotten and laughing about these extremely old ladies, since they don't even know there's an internet for me to ghastly about them on, nor would they deign to look at it if they did... as I say, I WOULD feel a bit mean, but they are so pompously ridiculous that I frankly don't give a damn. Scarlett.
It must have been the thing to at some point in fashion history, this big hair thing, that they have kept up, loss of hair thickness notwithstanding...(I love that word, notwithstanding... it's just so close to not meaning anything).
In the seventies and eighties, I remember middle-aged men sporting terrible greasy quiffs and long duck's arses at the back, with great ugly sideboards on their cheeks, trying to stay teddy boys for ever (see Bernard in the Brit Guide). For some reason, they always wore great big thick woolly belted cardigans. They died out, both literally (from brylcreem overuse and fags and fry-ups) and because they no longer had the hair to do the quiff... but you can still see British be-sideboarded men with a desperate and greasy combover on top. It's the same syndrome as the big puff of hair thing; people stick with the style they felt most comfortable with or most identified with.
That's why it took a good ten years for turquoise and bright green eyeshadow to FINALLY disappear after the seventies.... and what happens? IT BLOODY WELL CAME BACK INTO FASHION!
Sadly, I will go down in history as having Minnie Mouse's dress sense as well as her ears, as Madge refuses to draw my real hair and real clothes. She worries that if were recognised in the street get pelted with rotten eggs.
by the way and por acaso...I've been well and truly micheled today....thank you michele and everyone who's been here for the first time (keep coming). I can't explain "being micheled"... you'll have to go and see for yourself.
Getting to a certain age (and shape) is difficult on a girl.
It must be that much easier if you're bloke, suit, tshirt, shirt, trousers, tie, socks... you're done. Bigger, smaller, fatter, thinner, smart, casual, loud, tasteful. easy bloody peasy.
Now. Consider this. You're a woman. You HATE looking frumpy, you also HATE looking like everyone else, but you're too old and respectable (ahahahahahaha) to go round wearing a spike through your head and just your knickers (which, if I was fifteen and still thin I'd probably be reduced to these days...for being "artistic")... your middle is a little squishier (quite a lot after Christmas) and you can't afford your own tailor. What to DO?????
This morning, I resolved finally and completely that the only way I can carry on wearing clothes is to make them myself.
I had to pop into the city to pick some things up, and slogging up and down the extreme hilly bits of Lisbon that are Bairro Alto and around I looked in shop windows and went in a couple. Holy McPoop, but what a load of nonsense and/or DULLNESS.
If I wanted to look like a middle aged tia, or a secretary who's bored with life, or just plain dead... I'd be fine.
If, on the other hand, I wanted to look like a nastily psychedelic TINY clown with pin legs and a flatÃssimo stomach on a bad acid trip...I'd also be fine.
So, if you see this vision:
... this seems a bit strange:
Out in the village this morning, faced with the blogger's daily problem - "what to blog today?" - I did what I normally do, stopped thinking and let the village just happen around me. Within twelve seconds, this guy had driven past me on his moped. Oh, it's so easy!
The kid was no more than five, and his badly oversized crash helmet was resting on the handlebar, with his sad little face looking out. I don't for minute think he was sad because he was being given a ride on his dad's or brother's moped; he'd probably just been told he couldn't have chocolate for breakfast or something (that's what I look like when I'm told I can't have chocolate for breakfast), but his expression touched me and I now that I've drawn it, it has cemented in my brain. (if you ever want to really remember something, don't take a photo... it's a surefire way to forget that something, since your brain doesn't have to do the work. DRAW it... even if you don't draw, because it's not to do with the drawing itself, it's the SEEING.... oh, god, she's off again on her drawing crusade......anyway, it'll stick in your head like glue.)
I've seen quite a few kids on mopeds and bikes like this... there is even a young couple who drive around here on their motorbike in the summer with a tiny kid sandwiched between them with no helmet on at all.
And every day when I go get my kids from school, there are parents and grandparents, in old cars, new cars, crappy cars and bloody 'normous flashy jeeps that just chuck the kids in and drive away at full speed, no belts, no car seats.
In a highly emotional place like this, where children are the apples of everyone's eye (and have a chocolate/soup consumption and/or snazzy wardrobe to prove it), where sentiment is king, where children aren't called by their names but by "granny's favourite babykins in the whole world" or "my beautiful wootiful loveykins" (bad translations, but you get the gist of the heightened voices and enormous cuddles that accompanying them) it just doesn't compute properly in my small (but brilliant) brain that people put kids on motorbikes or don't strap them in.
I can't even go and punch the mopedder/bikers in the head, because they've got crash helmets on and wouldn't feel anything....and the kid would fall off the bike anyway. bummer.
In September 1991 I was in Porto. It was my second time in Portugal - the first time was in 1977 and I was seven, so all I remember is blinding white paint, bougainvillea, olive groves and a very castle-ish pousada somewhere - on a field trip with my illustration course. We were there to do trips up the river, into the vineyards to paint and paint and paint. It was a riot... we got to dance with twenty other very sweaty people in a huge cement vat of grapes... we painted on the sides of those wonderful blue stripey hillsides, terraced for grapes... I had a glass of aguardente bagaceira (like grappa but tougher!) delivered to me by a foreman while I painted in his vineyard on a hot hot hot day.... I suspect he thought it would be funny to see me splutter and cough, but being a hardened whiskey drinker already, I slugged it down and thanked him... then he brought me a glass of port... what a guy...
It was ten days of beautiful weather, amazing sights - the Douro valley is just one of the most incredibly beautiful places in the world - and quiet nights in Porto. Each night we'd wander off in small groups to find somewhere to eat, difficult for most since they were artistically vegetarian, have a couple of beers and go back to the Pensão (Monumental, I think) on Avenida dos Aliados to draw and be fairly pretentious... we were art students after all
.
But, the Sunday evening was different...
On our way back up from the riverside to Avenida dos Aliados, we were suddenly caught up in a river of orange. None of us spoke or read Portuguese and we'd been in the countryside for most of the week, so we had no idea that there had been an election that day... and that the orange team had one. The tide luckily threw us out at our pensão and we watched from our fourth floor windows for the next few hours a thrilled orange crowd chanting Pay Ess Day Pay Ess Day.... CavACKOO! CavACKOO! or something like that (I'm guessing obviously, since the only word I spoke in pt then was obrigaaaahhhdaa), hooting car horns, singing and whistling. It was amazing to me... at the time, Britain was still under the tories, and had been for twelve years... we young things pretty much knew nothing else... the only thing I remembered of the Labour government before was that the PM, Jim Callaghan, looked like a nice grandfatherly sort of old man... and whenever we had elections, the aftermath would be more "right, good oh...the tories are back" or "oh bugger" rather than whooping raucous partying in the streets.
It was only eight years later, once I'd moved here, that I found a sketchbook from that visit and in it I had written somewhere "I'm going to live here one day". I'd forgotten I'd written that. That election night was one of the reasons.
In the crush of people that night, I managed to salvage an almost perfect billboard poster of Cavaco Silva's campaign... a toothy photo of him, with a bad paste up of "general public" behind him... I'm now appalled that I lost that poster in one of my house moves over the years, because I'd love to have it now.
By the way, if you don't live here... the Partido Socialista (I'm NOT translating that!) won. So for the picture above, change the orange for red and white..... or pink if you blur them together.
Let's see.
Today is election day in Portugal. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion what the result will be, going by the polls, and how the country has arrived at this point. It'll be the COMMUNIST PARTY! (Well, that WOULD be funny, wouldn't it?)
But, the part of me that revels in chaos and watching what happens when all goes wrong rather hopes that one day, in a general election, somewhere, it all goes horribly wrong, all the supporters of the main, serious (hahahaha) parties assume that their fellow voters will do the work for them and do the voting except they ALL think that and stay at home and watch Celebrity Bull Shit Big Brother Go Dancing in the Jungle While Unergoing Cosmetic Surgery instead, so that in the end only the tiny parties - the ones who never actually dream of actually winning - win and have to share a government and take turns at being prime minister, because they only fielded a couple of candidates each.
I can but dream.
GIGANTO-BATA's HERE:
I promised... I delivered. THIS is what the lovely ladies who care for and educate-pre-primarily my delightful (HA) children wear to work.
Now, if this were you, would you feel a slight loss of dignity?
Of course, this IS Portugal, The Land of the Bata (for further explanation on Bata see: here, here, here, here.... I swear, it's not an obsession, it's REAL!), so the ladies that are obliged to look like big pink meringues for their work have been brought up surrounded by the Bata, so they don't notice how extremely fluffy they look.
Two of them are getting on for six foot tall ...terrible.
Portugal is a land obsessed with cleanliness, or rather, with being SEEN to be clean - the Bata being an essential tool toward this end, i.e. keeping one's clothes beneath CLEAN - but when you feel people giving you the once over in supermarket checkout queues and in the street, checking for stains ... it's a bit much, especially for a scruffy git englishwoman like me, who works/paints in scruffy clothes... and I will never manage the Portuguese habit of getting changed and making myself über-presentable everytime I leave the house, just to go to the corner shop or get the girls from school. I suppose that's why I have the reputation in my village of being "not at all vain" which, to an english ear, is a high complement.... sadly, to a Portuguese ear it sounds rather different. Oh, sod it.
Maybe I should just buy myself a Giganto-bata.
It occurred to me yesterday afternoon as I picked up my girls from nursery school that some things really are universal.
There is a huge window at the front of the school which looks into the "classroom" that my kids are in and it's quite hard for me to able to get to the front door without their having seen me and making it my absolutely favourite five seconds of the day by throwing themselves at me, grinning their faces off and shouting "mummeeeeeeeee!".... my chest fills just writing that....
But occasionally I get to the front door and inside and up to the door of their "classroom" without being spotted and I get to spy for a few seconds through the small window in the door on the goings on in the world of three- to five-year-olds.
And there they are... acting out in their little circus of pre-primary school life... little gangs of the things that I was plagued by when I was little girl myself, a rotten lot of desperadoes all of them, vicious, mean, bitchy, nasty, devious, selfish and beguiling.....: other. little. girls.
They are a dangerous lot and since every little girl has the capacity to be a nasty little girl, every other little girl had better watch out. It's a complicated game and I sure as hell still haven't figured out how to duck the nasty girl ball when it's thrown at me (I think that most of us grow out of it, but nasty girl syndrome sticks with some women till they die). Some little girls are just nastier than others. Some people just are nasty. They come out that way and stay that way. And we must put up with them.
And there are some little girls who you can tell learn all their tricks from their mothers. The mothers who turn up at school who don't bother to say good afternoon to any other mother who isn't as immaculately (or as tartily) dressed as they...
And I watch these little girls, sticking together in twos, leaning forward to tell another little girl that she's not invited to the party (remember girls? "YOU'RE not coming to MY party! nyeugh!"), dangling the better and more expensive barbie in front of the others', showing off in her new boots/hair slide/pencil case....
And my heart breaks, for I know that my daughters will be the victims of these little girls at some point (well, they already have, although one of my girls is likely to punch someone's lights out if they persist), but more because I know that my little girls, for at least some moments of their lives, will also BE nasty little girls.
Nyeugh- nyeugh-nyeh-nyeugh-nyeugh!
And I promise that one day I'll draw the lovely ladies who look after my babies, and they really are lovely... but they all wear giganto-batas, big, pink, candy-striped, frilly batas and I fear for their dignity.
Wouldn't it be good if you could do more than one thing at a time; write with one hand and one side of your brain and draw with the other hand and the other side, make dinner with your feet and clean the house with telekinesis (let me dream)... but I suppose that's what you have to put up with if you're a mummy, a little bit of work and a rush round like a maniac once in a while to clean up before you drown in the muck and dirty socks while they're at school. Then try to forget it all when they come home and until you collapse with them asleep. Gosh, we women are bloody fantastic and under-rated. But enough of that.
There is nothing like getting stuff in the post and I so rarely do apart from the bills and statements and crap from LIDL. So, I was a happy vit the other day when my first copy of "The Beany" came through the post. The Beany is a blog-zine on paper (you can read it in the bog and everything!) by my e-friend Michael Nobbs who lives in an unpronouncable village in Wales. And it is bloody good too. Consisting of Michael's thoughts and drawings about life and his downsized life, it's a small paperback you can read in bed. And as much as I love blogging and blogreading, I can't read great quantities on-screen. I'd love to be able to read blogs in bed or in the bath or if I was a bloke, on the bog. And with the Beany I can. Go and have a look for yourself and if you are a fan of Michael's writing and drawing, subscribe to The Beany! (I believe it's named after his hat, a beany is a "gorro"... ) Michael will send worldwide.
And while we are on the subject, I have other e-friend bloggers who sell stuff: In London, Natalie D'Arbeloff (Blaugustine) is an artist and as well as selling her paintings, her book "The Joy of Letting Women Down", the truest and funniest tract on treacherous bloody men ever writ, can be bought via Amazon. Rebecca Loudon (Radish King) has a book of beautiful, funny, mad poetry that I love, Tarantella. Hilda Portela (Planeta Hilda) sells her beautiful creations and objects of desire in various places in Lisbon, go to her blog and ask, and Rosa Pomar (Ervilha Cor de Rosa) sells her amazing and adorable creatures via her site and venues in Lisbon. Of course, there are many more, and I'm going to dedicate a bit of my sidebar one of these days to "bloggers wot sell stuff" (and not forgetting me! I'm just getting some paintings ready for selling to the highest bidders, stay tuned... and when I ever get any of my books finished and persuade a publisher that it has to be published then they'll be here too!).
If you've been reading the comments for the post below, you'll see that Miguel went off on one in Portuguese about some blokes called Socrates and Portas and Lopes and Sousa and Loucã. Oh, and an OVNI which is a portuguese UFO (well, not a portuguese UFO, because then it wouldn't be a UFO would it, but an identified one.... YOU know what I mean). He wrote it while watching the last big debate last night between the five main party leaders before Sunday's general election - to recap for you non pts, the president dissolved parliament (sadly not in sulphuric acid, renato) last year, after a mid-term swap around because the last elected Prime Minister went off to preside over the European Commission, leaving the Mayor of Lisbon to be PM and the president decided after four months that they were ballsing it all up (how portuguese democracy works I will never understand... a lovely example of something I don't get is that when you get to be PM you can choose your buddies to be ministers, whether they've ever been in politics/been elected by anyone/know anything about anything political. Cool huh?) - *gasps for air*, so you can imagine the hot air and blather that drove Miguel to his desperate bid to sanity by commenting in Vitriolica Webb's Ite (!??)
And hence the drawing of me and Madge above, trying to watch said debate AND stay awake at the same time in an effort to get to grips with it all. The prof is just out of range of this drawing, so glued to the debate/telly was he, waiting for someone to say something silly or tell a big porky.
Well, unfortunately the OVNI didn't come and whisk them off, but hey, let's face it... without the strange people that WANT to be politicians (i.e. arguing all the time with everyone, getting nasty things said about them all the time, saying nasty things about other politicians all the time - aaah... the universality of politics) then we would be left with what actually would be the more normal human beings (because basically we are all a bunch of power hungry rotters underneath it all, aren't we?) that would be dictators.
So, to sum up, because if you're as confused by this post as I am, you need a sum up (and a gin and tonic):
Democracy is BOORRRRRRRRRIINNNNG. But, it's worth sitting through the odd unbearably tedious debate not to have to put up with Salazars, Castros, Hitlers, Pinochets, Saddams, Gadaffis, Stalins, Maos etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
(I hope you like my strawberry satin pjs by the way. And I'm afraid Madge really owns those socks)
Roald Dahl was right. He said in The Twits (you see, you only get high culture here) that if a person spends a life thinking ugly thoughts they are bound to become ugly even if they started out pretty. If a person has a warty nose, looks like a walrus just spat them out or has a splished face (I have NO idea what splished means, I made it up, but here it serves the purpose) they can never be really ugly if they are thinking kind and good thoughts.
So, when you see a nasty old dragon like this one, you can tell she has spent her fifty-odd years thinking nasty things about people, thinking everyone is doing her a injustice by asking her a simple question, trusting no-one.
You see, recently I've been noticing more, far more, pleasantness in people who work in shops and restaurants. Some are even bubbly. Things really do seem to be changing for the pleasant. I'm sure in part it has to do with a huge influx of Brazilians working in retail and foodithings, who are the bubbliest people on the planet... can you imagine a depressed Brazilian? But this pleasantness just highlights even more the women of a certain age in the service industries. They are in high proportion rude and grumpy and only smile at you when you have them cornered. This isn't just a Portuguese thing - go into Smiths or Boots in England and you'll see the same attitude problem from the ladies with big orange hair and tasteless glasses - but here it feels like the rules of niceness were changed by Portugal when these women went to niceness school.
If you live here, test it out. Go to El Corte Inglês, where there are so many staff you can get a good representaive section. Wander round, looking at stuff, buying the occasional thing and make a note of who was nice to you and who was downright sniffy rude. This works especially well if you don't look exactly right....a bit quirky or a bit scruffy or a bit different or a bit foreign even if you do speak bloody good portuguese. I predict the results will be that 70% of men will be quite pleasant; 70% of the younger women (under forty) will be quite pleasant; and 89.58% of women over forty were downright bloody rude to you.
And now, I shall take my morning bath of bile. ta ta!
One of my favourite songs ever ever ever is "My Funny Valentine"... and my favourite rendition of it is by Elvis Costello. I don't know why it's my favourite because there isn't a day in the calendar that I despise more than Valentine's Day.
I don't know yet how it really is for teenagers here, but I suspect it's the same here and now as it was there and then. I still get a feeling of an empty rush of cold air through my middle whenever Valentine's Day is here, thinking about every year of doomed failure in the games of love.
I was a hopeless romantic teenager, though I tried to tough it out, pretend I wasn't interested in all that nonsense, horrified at the thought that anyone might think I had even the slightest crush on anyone else. And every year, I knew KNEW KNEW that I would get at least one valentine's card dropped into my coat pocket by some desperate dish who loved me from afar. And every year I was horribly let down, since there was no desperate dish who loved me from afar. I was surrounded by big boobed lovelies who were drowned every February in love and loveliness every year and I was left feeling empty and knowing KNOWING KNOWING that next year would be the one. Eventually things improved, but it took a long long time, and as much as I find modern teenagers a rather unpleasant arrogant bunch, I also feel deeply sorry for them; for all the stuff they have, the iPods, the mobile phones, the flares and the baggy shorts (or whatever ... I'm not THAT out of touch, I just haven't got the space to write a 10,000 word essay on teenagers), they still have to deal with heartache, unrequited love (oh that one is the stinger) and crushes and being spotty or ugly or fat.
I shall keep a good eye on my kids when they reach teenage, the poor little sods.
It is a cruelly aimed day exacerbated by marketing men and card companies and I reckon it probably makes everyone feel bad... and when I'm president of the world, I'm banning it.
It makes you spend stupid money on tasteless gifts for each other that maybe you don't really feel you want to give... do you really want that pink and red stuffed heart with lace around the edge with a tacky saying printed on it in tacky plastic script? No, of course you don't. Or the red satin boxers that say I love you? No. So, if you're lucky enough to have a lover who you love and are loved by, put down the frying pan (for hitting purposes) and buy a box of chocolates, eat them together and enjoy an hour together feeling a bit nauseous.
And if you don't have someone, well buy yourself a box of chocolates anyway, count your blessings and go out for a drink with your buddies.
(Of course, my consolation prize for all those unloved years at comprehensive school was that a good proportion of the big boobed lovelies at school didn't get to their seventeenth birthdays without getting pregnant.... although a couple did go off to be bloody bank managers and high city flyers... but hey, you can't win 'em all)
happy bloody valentine's day. I love ya.
Being a mummy, I haven't slept a whole night through for over six years, since I was pregnant with the first one and the size of a large nuclear submarine. Therefore, when I put the kids to bed at night, I regularly keel over and fall asleep, only to wake up at one o'clock in the morning, perched on the edge of one of the beds with a crick in my neck and an aching back.
Then I generally take a good couple of hours to get back to sleep in my own bed. Ugh.
But last night, I had a dream while I was breaking my spine, asleep on the edge of my littlest one's bed and the end image of the dream rather stuck with me all night, since the goddam rooster who lives diagonally opposite and diametrically opposed to us cockadoodledooed all night, as he does every night and every day, as he is a sadistic little bastard who knows no sleep.
And this dream was awful strange and involved a snow storm with snowflakes the size of cats and other vit 'n' madge in wonderlandesque nonsense... but when I got to the point where I took some cold meat from the fridge, to make a salad out of it having pulled it all to pieces, not really registering the black GORILLA fur that covered it, ate a large chunk as I was putting the small bit I didn't use back in the fridge and spat my mouthful roundly out again, as I confronted his friends sitting judgementally in judgement on the rim of a squared pink plate on the fridge shelf, I woke up.
WHAT THE BLOODY HELL WAS THAT ABOUT?
It tasted of chicken, by the way. Bit dry though.
Talking of feverish with carnal excitement (see previous post) did you see what happened in London's third and newest IKEA? But... coincidentally... I went to our IKEA yesterday to pick up a few things (it is a disease, I know) (and don't worry this isn't another post extolling the virtues of the great church of IKEA), (I use a lot of bracketed text, don't I?).... and to get to IKEA I have to go on a couple of my least favourite/downright bloody lethal stretches of road in the known universe.... that is the stretch of the A2 just before/after the bridge where it is sport to be in the fast lane, doing 120kmph then cutting in to take the Almada/Caparica turn off) and the goddam A5 towards Cascais where it is just sport to try to kill people. In my half an hour there and half an hour back, I was seriously and serially harrassed by white-van-man (not as was previously supposed just a british phenomenon) and various types of young men (although young women in fast cars were doing their very best to be extraordinarily stupid/lethal/vitmadgicidal). I told one pair of what could only have been students (i.e. erm... aren't they going to be the doctors/lawyers/leaders of the free world in the years to come?) to #"%& off in my mirror and they laughed and whooped and clapped their hands at me for getting riled at their attempts to rile me and hump my exhaust pipe with their imagined manhood.
I used to be brave. I used to be fatalistic about these things. But two things happened.... I became a mummy twice over and I came to live here in Portugal. The first makes it more important to me to stay alive... the second makes that an awful lot harder.
I was driving along with a portuguese friend the other day and I said/cursed/spat/screeched my usual "WHY do these people in cars think that the laws of physics don't apply to them? WHY don't they think they are going to kill someone, or BETTER, themselves? WHY don't they listen? WHY don't they get it? Don't they READ Vitriolica Webb's Ite?" (so I made the last bit up).
And my friend said, "Well, they just don't care." so I thought, how do you make people care? And I thought, and I thought and I thought, and yet again, I came up with the only answer: HUMILIATION (unfortunately the comments from pre-move posts are gone, but the gist of it was you all agreed with me). I hope you now see the purpose behind the drawing above... I'm not a granny dominatrix lesbian fetishist with a thing for smacked bottoms.
I've thought of all kinds of things to this end and I look for ideas, for we need a national move against MORONS! There are several dozen ways such as name-and-shame campaigns but none of these would be legal nor legally upholdable and would be too open to abuse... and the police forces seem to do sod all... I assume they can't be arsed because they'll never get a prosecution through the courts within ten years so they don't bother....
send ideas on a postcard to the president .... and wait for the oil to run out.... electric cars don't go very fast.
OR think of some good civil disobedience strategies that make stupid people want to go running home to mummy and never put their keys in the ignition again.
Mardi Gras... New Orleans... hot evenings of jazz and sex and voodoo and nonsense.... Carnival.... Rio... warm nights, hot passionate people, feverish with carnal excitement.... neither need many words.
OR
Carnival ... somewhere in Portugal...
February: at the the best of time it's not very warm, but it doesn't stop the dutiful carnival dancers getting into their costume bikinis with glittery bits and, for the brave/tarty, holes for their boobs to hang through, with sequined headresses and wings and handless glove things and feathers and bits of wire holding it all together.
Small children dress up as polyester pirates and barbie pink shiny princesses with costumes bought from the supermarket and look underwhelmed by the whole deal... especially since they had their own carnival already at school when they processed the streets of the village with weary looking teachers trying to stop them getting run over by the speeding cars.
The desperate desire is to emulate the Rio Carnival and try to make it look as if the Samba was the national dance of Portugal... but in the concentrating faces of the dancers, making sure to get the Samba right, making sure they are doing the Samba better than the girl next to them, or trying to be sexily Samba-ing for the RTP television cameras, it is plain that it is not the national dance of Portugal.
The streets are lined with more costumed children and cold, bored looking parents and grandparents; middle aged ladies, holding the coats and bags of everyone in the family, bounce up and down to the Samba rhythm and the men smoke their cigarettes and watch the bared boobs bounce up and down to the Samba rhythm surrounded by glitter.
I'm getting jaded, I know.... frivolity is a wonderful thing.... but mediocre contrived imitative frivolity is a bad form of flattery to the Brazilians especially since Portugal has its own culture to celebrate.
cause this weather is wrong wrong wrong.... it's warmer in Britain than it is in Portugal and WHO will be wanting to get their boobs out for carnaval in this weather? ... the gulf stream doesn't work any more and I'm freezing... we had the first rain of the year... boy, did it rain... and hail... and sleet, which usually warms things up a bit. But no.
Listen. I OBVIOUSLY have to post something about bloody carnaval... I will. later.
In this blog you know I don't normally do the linking thing, but I urge you, if you have broadband AND understand spoken English, to listen to this week's (5th Feb) edition of "From Our Own Correspondent" on BBC Radio 4. Listen to Hugh Sykes's piece from the voting in Iraq (it's about 14 minutes into the programme). However Iraq has arrived at this moment, one can't fail to be moved by this.
For years, one of the few things I missed terribly from Britain was Radio 4. There is no station like it in the world. It is talk radio and all life is here. It has news, current affairs, the arts, the media, comedy, drama, science, nature and bloody Jenni Murray (if you know of Jenni Murray, you don't need me to explain. If you don't, it would take too long).
I can't stand music radio, since 90% of the time on any station is not going to be playing stuff I like or can bear. So, I don't listen to music radio. Talk radio in anything but one's own language is too much to concentrate on. So, I never had the radio on. And watched far too much telly.
But then I got broadband. And now I have my wonderful Radio 4 as the background music to my life.... information just soaking into my bones.... I'm even transported nightly to my mother's kitchen in Devon when "The Archers", (the world's longest soap opera, about 165 years old already, all about farming folk and village life with a tiny bit of informative agriculture... addictive stuff!) comes on.
Try it out. There is a radio player within the website, or you can opt for using realplayer. For me, it is a lifegiving lifesaver.
so, we're running up to elections here and of course the mud-slinging has begun and god I wish politics could be more than about mudslinging but there you go. What does it matter what a poor illustrator and mother expatriated to Azeitão (that sounds exotic, huh?) thinks about politics?
Do you have your own swear words? I swear an awful lot. I'm a foul mouthed horror. But, obviously, I don't want to swear in front of my impressionable little darlings. So I have my own dictionary of expletives that aren't expletives. They change on a regular basis. Sometimes they are ex-boyfriends' and/or enemies/arch-nemesi's (that's plural for arch-nemesis... but then you can't have more than one of them CAN YOU?) names. Sometimes they are gutteral noises. Sometimes they are words like Schickelgrüber. But this year, so far, I have plumped for Kinshasa! (the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Sankha Guha! (pronounced. shunka gua... he's a journo with the beeb-eecee). I'm not entirely sure why these are my expletives of choice. But they are.
It's been a long day.
It has become the 2nd law of blogging (the 1st law is that if you aren't addicted by the second week of your inevitably world famous blog, you give up) that once in a while, the blogger blogs the reason that that blogger blogs... and since today I'm a bit snowed under with real life, and trying to think of a way to make several million euros, and doing a few non-my-blog-but-other-people's-blog things, I thought I'd do one of those I-don't-have-to-think-TOO-hard posts.
So, blogging. Blogging for me is a wonderful miracle drug that will change the world, bring about world peace and find a cure for the common cold and ... well...it HAS made me less of a lazy sod. For years and years I smoked fags and didn't blog and didn't use my spare time for drawing or writing nonsense. Now I blog, draw loads more than I used to (for non-profit, that is) and know a load of e-people (much cheaper than real people cos you don't have to buy them drinks) and write drivel that entertains at least me.
And I was thinking about this and I thought "wouldn't it be nice to see the drawings I've done for this blog in its ten months of life?" (I know this really is a rather blogbirthday kind of post, but hey, I have other things up my sleeve for that) but since most of them aren't real drawings and I can't spread them out on the floor or anything like that I'll put together a composite of a tiddly square thumbnail of each of them.... so I did. (and talking of how computers/pcs/macs have changed the world... when I was an art student, the only people in the world who knew what a thumbnail was were artists, illustrators, designers and printers. everyone else would look blankly at one when one mentioned a thumbnail.....hmmmmm... she's off again).
I've missed a few out, but there's 197 thumbnails here of drawings I wouldn't have drawn if I didn't blog.
Ain't blogging wonderful?
I don't mean to harp on.... well, actually I do...but when will people driving lorries, enormous great monster lorries used for lugging stone from quarries, stop using their mobile phones? Especially when driving towards me!
Every day I have to drive somewhere. It may be to take the children to their nursery school on the other side of the village, it may be to take the professor to Coina train station which is on the other side of picturesque (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HA) Quinta do Conde, it may be to go shopping or to go to the beach. But, wherever I'm going, I meet IDIOTS in cars in plentiful supply... and quite frankly, I think it's rather off of them NOT to have read Vitriolica Webb's Ite, to realise the error of their ways and rectify their driving habits. This morning I was almost driven OVER by this bastard in his enormous bastard truck because he was on his phone. I then sat waiting to turn out of a junction right next to this man who was SO enormously and morbidly obese that he couldn't even turn his head to see what was coming. He seemed to have to rest his arms on his man-boobs to get at the steering wheel and had only squinting room between his cheeks and his eyelids. I don't care if you're morbidly obese, but if you can't see where you're going, don't drive on the same roads as me, you maniacal fatty.
Then there are the either extremely brave or extremely blind ageing cyclists on their ancient bicycles who don't believe in straight lines:
the multitude of Piaggio APEs that abound outside the cities that drive in the gutter, half because they're letting people overtake, half because they're stuck in the gutter because they've got the enormous wife strapped to the back:
(and I still want one... if we ALL had APEs, no-one could drive too fast)
and those strange aixam mini car things that seem to be the next step up from the APE... you can fit a couple more goats in the back and are just as slow:
and everyone else drives too fast. Oh, the glorious roads of Portugal.
(you may recognise the three last drawings from the early days of the Webb's Ite, you're not just seeing double, I just can't be arsed to draw cars, bicycles and apes more often than once a year, I'm a girl!)
