"Now, having since fallen into disuse, the sublime is a little hard to explain. To explain an emotion that nobody feels anymore is a little bit like describing a color that can't be seen, or a road gone missing between two cities that don’t exist anymore. But here’s my attempt."

(-from the bottom of a dusty drawer #3)

It had been a long week for me stuck in Paradise. Nothing was going my way. I was fighting with my bosses, I was fighting with all of the girlfriends that I had at the time, I was fighting with myself. I was drinking, I wasn't sleeping and I had taken to smoking from a stolen pack of cigarettes.

At the end of one night, I sent the boys to bed, killed the lights, poured myself a couple of drinks and let the music play. I was rinsing the customer's highballs in the dark and watching my two best friends make out on the beach. They had always hated each other and had no idea I was witnessing the start of their affair. I hadn't felt so miserable in a long time than as I rinsed that night.

The next morning, walking to class, under the clear canopy of the African sky, I crossed paths with one of my students: a house keeper, maybe forty, but it's hard to judge. She apologised for missing my class, showed me the heavy bundle of fresh clean sheets with their lavender smell and explained she had to go ready villas Two and Three.

She asked me how I was doing and I said I was okay and asked her back only out of habit I guess and because people seem to be so endeared by these little displays of interest.

"So-so," she said. "One of my children, back in the village" (the mainland, that is) "one of my babies died today. They have just told me over the phone." She shrugged and brought the sheets closer to her chest where we could smell them in the dusty, rising heat. She held back a tear.

"These things happen," she said and went to ready villas Two and Three for the next batch of guests and left me standing there with a new sense of perspective and the smell of lavender lingering light and soft and sweet.

(-from the bottom of a dusty drawer #2)

I was sitting on a corner of a long, white couch and she was sitting on the other corner of the same long, white couch. The couch itself was in the corner of a wide, white room. I don't do serious conversations well, but she had me cornered and surprised. With not even half a pint to hide behind, with no room for maneuver, no cover or distraction: there she was, so very serious, and there I was, a paper shadow at the end of the firing range. She was such a good shot too.

“I’ve been thinking, you know, thinking a lot,” she said. “You’re crazy. You just show up here, thinking I have no life of my own, thinking everything is just like it was so many months ago, thinking there are no more men in the world but you. You just show up here and want me to play along with your silly little games, to drop everything for you, and you don’t listen to me when I say no. You just show up, you’ll be gone soon, gone for months, and then you’ll be back and it’ll all be the same story all over. You’re crazy - and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this, but I don’t think I like crazy quite as much as I thought I did. You know, none of my other friends are like this. They have a life, they know where they are going, they’ll be somebody someday. You’re crazy, and I don’t think I like crazy anymore.”

(-from the bottom of a dusty drawer #1)

Hey there!
I've been having this problem for a few months already: I keep getting some other person's itunes receipts for purchases done, supposedly, with my apple id.
I changed password once, months ago, and the problem persisted.

The person in question comes listed as:

---- ----- Peres
Xxxxx Xxx Xxxx, xxxx xx - xx
XXXX-XXX Lisboa
PRT

I can assure you this is not, despite the common last name, me or anybody I know.
My store credit has been at 1.42 GBP for a while now, and as this account doesn't have (at least to the best of my knowledge) any credit card attached to it, I wasn't too particularly bothered about this.
Whoever he is, he seems to be using his own money for these purchases.

However, I noticed in the latest receipt, number 121053373103, received on Monday, the 27th of May, the fact that the two tracks and one album bought belonged to the artists: Bruno Mars, Justin Bieber and One Direction.
I'm not even joking, these were the three purchases, worth 12€ something.

My friends wouldn't speak to me ever again if they found this receipt.
I am also concerned that sixty or seventy years from now, my future biographer might come across this and lose all faith in me and cut his work short.

Please, is this something you can do anything about?
Best,
Francisco Peres

An American family of four walked into the tube. They marched into their seats in two files like paratroopers. The father had picked up a ragged copy of The Sun from his seat and now opened it. His eyes widened, his hands twitched, his wife leaned over and squealed. He closed it quickly, and folded it neatly.

The kids wanted to see. The parents tried to talk them out of it. Some mild psychological wrestling ensued and the children won. (when do they not?) The kids pulled back the front page. The little girl was terribly confused, her younger brother was horrified.

What a strange place England must seem to an American.

---//---

On the paper today:

Sure, I bet that's exactly what she said.

 At the British museum:

     I saw a lady try to describe and explain what the animals were on the gryphon bowl to a blind man. He was a sixty year old American with long grey hair and his dog smelled around the bird's lion-paws with half a mind at giving them a little polish. It was the most commonplace poetic thing I've witnessed in a long time. 

     I played hide and seek with a little girl in a long red coat all along the Enlightenment Room (to which I'm quite partial, especially during the last minutes before they close down the museum). I think I won.

     A grandfather from India, trying to pose with three of the Nereids, sat on my back and didn't move until the picture was taken.

     An old lady took to talking to me in Brazilian and was quite surprised that I understood her. I'm not very sure why she was speaking in Brazilian to a presumed Englishman. She was very friendly and introduced me to her daughter after that and I wished her happy travelling, which is really the second best thing somebody can wish on anybody else, I think. She was just starting a Classical Tour, like the Innocents of Twain's time. She was happy to be visiting Paris but absolutely hysterical about going to Rome where she was going to see the Pope. I didn't mention the man's nationality. It seemed like the politest way to go about.

     I thought I was going to be attacked by an escaped wild ram. I wasn't.

 Horary by Frederick Muller, Enligthenment Room

Gryphon Bowl, Enlightenment Room

 

What I thought was going to happen, but didn't.

In a Pub at Glastonbury, it was suggested I may be interested in Paulo Coelho. It was more or less inevitable.

"He says, right there in the opening page, that the language is symbolic, so you can't take his stories for their face value. But they're books crammed in with revelations and lessons and he does deal a lot in stuff that you're interested, the bizarre, the occult."

"Sure, sure. But I can't read Paulo Coelho," I excuse myself. "It's like having sex with a hooker. No matter how good it is,  you'll never look at yourself the same way."

"So, where did you come from?" the man who yelled at his phone asked the posh lady.

"Glastonbury," she told him. You wouldn't believe it if you saw her, all poisture and poise, fine gloves, peacock makeup, brand-new pink carry-on, but it was true. She had been getting on and off all the same stations as we were and we had boarded that first bus six hours away.

"Glastonbury? It must be like a nuthouse over there!" He lived half an hour away but he had never been. It's not the kind of place you go to if you're sane and practically sober.

No, it's a town for those who walk with chicken-hats on, for blonde troubadours with tye-dye ponchos, for hitch-hikers and hippy-van owners, for sixteen year old single mothers and their beautiful babies dressed like maharajas in Indian rags, for people who sell crystals to buy drinks, for men who don't believe the Russian beard fell out of fashion after the 19th century and for men who only wear them because it did. England's Berkeley, New-Age, spiritual, crazy Glastonbury: a town for the rest of us.

The busker was sitting on a step, huddled between two buildings, doubled over a three-stringed guitar, in front of one of the many black-beamed, fishermen pub of this fisherman town (more on it in a later post, perhaps). He had almost no hair, except for a dirty mohawk which had collapsed like a breaking wave. He hammered the strings and the guitar wailed out in pain. He yelled in a raven's breaking voice:

"Ding, dong! The witch is dead, the witch is gone!"

If I had known he was announcing old Thatcher's death, like that - somewhere between a medieval herald and a fool - I might have flicked a pound his way. But at the time I didn't think much of it and walked away.

He was the first in the town to know. The news hit the rest of Penzance six hours later, over the local radio news report at the end of the day. It just goes to show, doesn't it, that old Sherlock's sources are still as sharp as ever.

Walking out of the cold and into the railway station's café, to have a cup of hot chocolate just before the first flurry of snow starts to fall: these are some of the little things that make us smile.

At the top of Glastonbury Tor there stands a lonely church tower, the only thing still standing of an old and tragic abbey. It had open doors on both sides and walking up them, these look like gateways to the sky.

There was a red-faced angry child there and he shouted at his mother and he slapped his little brother. A vicious little punk: the kind the Telegraph prints pictures and stories of on its Benefits Scandals witch-hunts.

At one point, this eight year old with anger management issues jumped up and started running down the path. His mother called after him but he kept running, he ran right past us and went straight for the edge of the hill. The ground fell at a steep angle through a herd of sheep to the small brick town.

“Careful,” his mother said. “If you fall, you’ll only stop in town. And the sheep will eat you.”

Hands on his hips, his little eyes shining on his red red face. Don’t be ridiculous, he scoffed at her. “Sheep don’t eat people. They eat bacon!”

Salisbury was empty and closed. Shop after shop, one street after the other. A city after a hurricane and an English town during a bank holiday aren’t as different from each other as one would expect.

As soon as we saw the cathedral, we did what anybody else would have done and set out to find a pub. We found The New Inn, which was really anything but new. It had everything you want in a pub: ceiling beams, good red ale, hot food, and beautiful young barmaids rating solid sevens and eights on the wench scale, with serious revealing tops, and so much to show, the kind that make old men smile behind their pipes in the utmost satisfaction and say: “ah, the English way of life.”

About a quarter of the villagers was there too: the families, a few couples, and a handful of men in shirts and pullovers who talked about rugby and golf. One of the finer pubs so far.

Ah, the English way of life.

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Ernest Hemingway (left) and Joris Ivens, Guadalajara, 1937

"Yes," she said. "I see. The stew; as usual. Como siempre. Things are bad in the north; as usual. An offensive here; as usual. That troops come to hunt us out; as usual. You could serve as a monument to as usual."

"But the last two are only rumors, Pilar."

"Spain," the woman of Pablo said bitterly. Then turned to Robert Jordan. "Do they have people such as this in other countries?"

"There are no countries like Spain," Robert Jordan said politely.

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Tarragona, Day Three

Spanish Sunday ghost town. The bells toll clear across these empty streets - only ghosts and stray cats are out tonight and me.

Tarragona, Day One

I have been warned against the local waters. It is said that by drinking them the locals become crazy and by showering in them they lose all their hair. No es bueno. I have not decided if I should feel scared or right at home.

 (typo t-shirt, SixPack Artists)

”Come,” said the Lord again, “I will make a covenant between me and you. I, I will not measure you out any more distress than you need to write your books.”’

Isak Dinesen, in The Young Man with the Carnation

The three of us stuck in that long, long, southbound train - could we have been more different? Not easily.

Rodrigão, always silent, who knew the capital of Samoa and the typical dish of the Ukraine and which explorers had attempted the northwestern passage. He is a veritable gentle giant - even if he was very tempted to slap the little girl in pink still. Pipa, hiding from the plebs behind purple sunglasses. She was still not sure why we weren't flying to Lisbon instead - it was so fast and easy, and there's always bubbly in first class. And yours trully, of course. I spent four hours trying to figure out what I had left at home this time.

Rodrigo: The three of us, travelling, we could make a reality show.
Pipa: It would be so great. The Brains, the Diva and the Idiot.
YT: Wait a minute. Which of us would be the idiot?

My recent trip to York was marked by two images - or scenes, if you will - that I can not forget.

The fist I saw at night looking through a large bay window. I had just arrived on a cross-country train.  I was walking around with my bags and my books and nowhere to stay, looking for a place.  The street was deserted and the only light I could see was spilling from that one window. Inside, an elderly man with long, white hair, thin as cobwebs, sat with his back being waited on by a not-so-elderly woman. The walls were incredibly, impossibly, tall and they had been completely covered in a crazy jigsaw puzzle of paintings and old photographs, with elaborate, gilded frames.

The second I saw walking to the library from the inn where I'd spent the night. The sun was only starting to rise, everything had that fresh, bright light of Winter mornings and there was a long lawn by the roadside. The dew on the grass had frozen overnight. It looked almost blue: much bluer in fact, than the sky, which was still a sort of pastel tangerine. At the far, far end of these gardens was a large brick building. Very English. Very old.

A parking sign near me indicated it was a hospital. I almost couldn't believe it. I can't quite remember what I said to myself.

"If I ever get really sick, I hope they send me just there," I think was it. Or maybe it was "I have to convince someone to put me in there for a while." Something along those lines.

I described the place to James later; a friend, York local and our guide to the city's churches and high-street shops.

"Bootham hospital? It's a mental institution," he said. "An old asylum."

I really ought to have seen that one coming, I suppose.

(-One flew East, one flew West, one flew over the Cuckoo's nest...)

His face, full of folds and fat, like a friendly badger's is on my shoulder. Behind those round spectacles and his short-sighted eyes, he needs to get really close to see what he's doing with that razor-blade. Really close. His metre-long paunch pushes my arm out of its hold and I have nowhere else to put it.

Maybe he used to smoke, or his lungs are going out, or his shirt's too tight, but I can hear his heavy breathing and it isn't the least bit healthy. It wheezes in and grunts out, wheezes in and grunts out. Right in my ear.

Wheeze in.

Grunt out.

Through the mirrors on the walls, I can see his assistant, a dear old lady, and she sits in the corner with her knees touching each other, her hands folded neatly over her lap and under a nice shawl. She's usually very quiet. She's very quiet today. Maybe it's the weather.

He's quiet today, except for his breathing.  Everybody's too quiet, and his breathing is too loud, and it's right in my ear.

Wheeze in.

Grunt out.

"And how are things over here?" I ask when he turns round to wipe the blade on a towel.

"Well, you know how it is," he says, talking at the mirror. "Everything's pretty much the same. We're all fighting to hold on in this wonderful country of ours. Doing what we can. The usual, really."

It had struck me once before that nothing really ever changes over here. The way I see it, it is Portugal's main virtue, and Portugal's main flaw.

----

(-Songs About Shaving)

There are about three reasons why this year is certainly going to be better than the last. You are two of them.