Wintering in Portugal isn’t conducive to writing regular missives.
Well, not when you have our apartment, anyway.
It’s actually quite difficult to keep up the motivation to write when one’s tiny apartment only has such tables and chairs that, after no more than half an hour’s use, make it feel as though one has been cruelly stretched on the rack in a dungeon. I was semi-crippled for a week after writing the last piece and have only now worked up the courage to give it another go, this time using a plastic chair from the balcony. It seems to offer enough support but I’ll only really know by tomorrow morning.
As usual, the story below is made up of the previous three Merrie England strips and the last one is the latest. Wouldn’t want you losing the drift of the narrative, would I?
Announcement.
In the not-too-distant future, I’ll be seeking to earn a modest crust from my work and so at a point of my choosing, the actual cartoon part of my posts - which is my whole reason for doing this - will be available only to those who are paying subscribers.
I can’t set the price any lower than five dollars a month, as Substack seem to require this as a minimum. It probably has to do with processing fees and the size of their cut, but five dollars a month it will be. At that point, I’ll be undertaking to provide at least one strip per week and if there are any delays, I will pause the payment process, so that you won’t be paying for nothing. I’ll be back in France by then, as well, so my studio set-up will allow me to work without the threat of physical pain!
Naturally, there’s nothing to stop you signing up now and buying me a beer once a month, so if you’d like to indulge me just a little bit, just tap the button below!
Now, about the Portuguese experience..
Everyone knows, of course, that French cuisine is the best in the world. Well, to be more accurate, every French person knows that French cuisine is the best in the world.
The rest of us may have other ideas, especially those of us from the United Kingdom, where the restaurant scene is far, far more diverse than in most of France. I give the big French cities a well-deserved and honourable exception, of course, because most “foreign” cuisines can be found in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyon and all the main population centres.
But we live in rural France. The most exotic grub to be found within a half-hour drive is the ever-present pizza.
Cheese on toast for a silly price, as we all know, but most of us love a nice bit of pizza.
There are some quite modern innovations to the standard pizza from time to time. At our own local pizzeria, the proprietor obviously sees himself as some kind of gallic Heston Blumenthal, as he has taken to offering pizza cagouille from time to time. I can instantly hear you protesting at me to stop using incomprehensible French words just to show off my prowess with the lingo, but do bear with me. As always with french cuisine, it’s a serious matter.
If I had said ‘snail pizza’, it would only have sounded unspeakably vile. Giving it the full French title builds on this disgust by demonstrating that the locals see it as some kind of delicacy. It looks nasty, I have to say. Truly nasty.
The French in the heart of rural France see their cuisine as a sort of cultural trophy, to be held up as the very apogee of global gastronomy, with most small town restaurants vying with each other over their andouilles or their confit de canard aux lentils rather than their mutton vindaloo or their crispy Peking duck , so for us to come and spend a few weeks in a place like Lagos in the Algarve, having lived the last three years in a small French country town, we are being spoilt for options. There are Chinese, Italian, Indian and Thai restaurants dotted around the town, along with those offering the traditional Portuguese fare; you can get a traditional British fry for breakfast if you want, or indeed, almost anything. It’s also very fairly priced, in my opinion. A main course for less than ten euros is not unusual at all.
On top of that, you don’t have to eat lunch between twelve o’clock and two in the afternoon. Oh, no sir! In Lagos, within reason, the customer is fêted and pampered by comparison with most of France. For the French, you see, lunch is at lunchtime, so if you’re hungry and you turn up at five past two, you will be met with a flat palm facing you and a flat “no”. You’ll be turned away hungry, with the miserable propsect of not eating until at least six-thirty in the evening. Again, some places in big cities are different and of course, motorway services will feed you all day but turn up after two for a spot of grub in a little town and you’ll be lucky to even get a bag of crisps!
We’re here in the Algarve for a couple more weeks yet and I have to say, it’s been excellent fun and very good value. Oddly, though, considering all the foregoing, we’ve tended to eat at home, self-catering in a kitchen that has no oven. Imagine a kitchen with no oven! We’ve dined nicely, though and when we have eaten out, we’ve tended to go for those cuisines that we can’t easily get in France.
Here’s a little tale to gladden the heart. It concerns a local chap whose bearing was that of a low-born reprobate. To look at him, he could have been carrying a cutlass, wearing a tricorn hat and sporting a parrot on his shoulder. Which is to say that he was a swarthy, middle-aged Portuguese cove in a hoodie.
I don’t speak Portuguese, other than the phrase “Eu não falo português”, which means “I don’t speak Portuguese”. I was looking for a place to park our car and drove around the little square which our apartment overlooks. I think I circled it about five times, hoping that some casual shopper would drive off and leave me a space. It was that or stick the car in the local car park and spend eight euros for a day. I was on the fifth or sixth circuit, more or less moving at walking pace, when the fellow in the hoodie appeared in front of my car. I stopped and he approached the window, clearly wanting to say something. I wound down the window - a thing we never do these days since the advent of electric windows - and he said something which to me was just a blur of syllables. I smiled and stammered my only bit of the local lingo, as seen above, and he said in return, “You live here?” In decent English.
”Yes, up there”, I said, pointing to the balcony of our apartment above the street.
”Follow me”, he said, immediately turning and striding across the square. Naturally, I did as he commanded. After all, he might have had a cutlass under his hoodie and I wasn’t going to defy him. He led me to a point on the street nearby, put up a hand of command to stop me, then got into his car, reversed out and left me with a perfect parking spot.
When I got up to the apartment, Leona said to me that this chap had been drinking coffee with a couple of pals outside a café on the square and had noticed me circling like a kerb-crawler. I looked out over the balcony and there he was, back at the café table, finishing his coffee. He looked up and gave me a cheery thumbs-up and a flashing smile, which of course, I returned.
His own car was now double parked with the hazard lights on while he finished off his coffee.
What a nice chap. And there I had been, judging this particular book by its cover.
You never can tell, can you?
Here’s today’s link, where you can learn how to draw Esme Gat-Tooth, the principal witch from Merrie England: