Travellers’ Tales. Figueira Day 9. Creating traditions. Words and names.

 This morning I woke up to rain … again. It looks like being a rather dull final day here. Tomorrow we fly to England, to Luton airport, a new one for us, where our son will meet us and we’ll have a couple days at his house. It’s perhaps just as well we are not flying to the Northwest of England as I keep receiving weather warnings about snow and freezing weather all around Greater Manchester! Goodness!

We had a lovely day yesterday, although apparently it did rain from time to time. On several occasions I walked out into the sunshine only to find the pavements wet and puddly. 

We walked down to O Cais Do Heleno, probably our very favourite restaurant here. We used to favour Caçarola 2 but since it had an upgrade it’s gone very posh!

We were having what has become our traditional Figueira Tournament lunch with our friend Kevin. As ever, we had a combination of a fish dish and a mixed salad. We have never yet had a disappointing meal there.

Here are some more random odd words

Hyperphantasia - extremely wild imagination

Eunoia - beautiful thinking

Hiraeth - longing for a place that feels like home

Aboulia - lack of motivation

Sesquipedalian - using long words

The list in which I found these odd words includes perfectly good, not at all unusual words such as :

Cacophony - harsh, unpleasant sound

Autodidact - a self taught person

And even ennui and nostalgia. Maybe the complier of the list had never heard them before.

Most countries seem to have a National Day, celebrating their nationhood.,here’s a link to an article suggesting we should celebrate the establishment of England by king Æthekstan back in the year 927, kicking out the Vikings apparently. Their influence remains in a whole hosts of place names all around the country - 

-by: Meaning “town” or “village” in Old Norse. This suffix is one of the most common in Viking place names. Examples include Grimsby (Grim’s village) and Whitby (white village).

-thorpe: Meaning “village” or “outlying farm.” It is common in regions where Viking settlers established small communities. Examples include Scunthorpe and Wakefield (Waca’s field).

-toft: Referring to a homestead or site of a building. This is seen in places like Roughton(a settlement on a raised site).

-ness: Meaning a promontory or headland. Examples include Skegness (a headland where the Viking settlers landed) and Grimsness.

And here’s a link to article calling for the category of Black English to be included in the census. There seems to have been quite a lot of discussion lately about how one qualifies as English, which is odd when you think about what a mix of genetic factors has created the nation.

Thinking of complexity, here’s a Madeline Horwath cartoon on the complexity of modern politics.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Travellers’ Tales. Figueira Day 8. Problems solved … or not solved. Dylan. And words.

 Another sunny start to the day here in Figueira. The weather forecast even suggests it might last all day today. We shall see.,

Microsoft seems to be up and running again. Astoundingly the world didn’t come to a complete halt.

All flights in the USA were grounded yesterday but that problem seems to have been solved too. If only all the world’s problems could be solved so quickly. However, they are still stopping Palestinians from harvesting their olives, medical facilities in Gaza are still being targeted by missiles and people are still being killed. And people are still being arrested for supporting Palestine Action.

With the sentencing of Russell Brand and accusation coming to light of so many other famous people behaving badly, articles are appearing, such as this one, suggesting that our society sort of sleepwalked into letting it all happen. Risqué jokes were the norm, bottoms were laughingly pinched and a girl could almost be insulted if she wasn’t wolf-whistled as she walked along the street in her ‘provocative’ mini-skirt! Are we any better 

Bob Dylan met the Pope recently, dressed in a strange hooded outfit. In this cartoon, Dylan takes his inappropriate formal wear on the road, in Barry Blitt’s latest Kvetchbook.  

Here is a list of interesting words:

Petrichor - the smell after rain. (Is there also a word for the smell of your hotel ensuite when it’s been badly mopped, as happened unusually this morning?)

Sonder - realising someone has a life as complex as yours.,

Agricity - warmth of the sun in winter.

Clinomania - desire to stay in bed. (Many of us suffer from this!)

Nychtophllia- love of darkness or night.

Photophilia - love of light.

Pareidolia - seeing faces in random things. (Think of all the faces of Jesus in omelettes and the like.)

That’s enough of that.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Travellers’ Tales. Figueira Day 7. The lighthouse. Rainbows. IT problems - everywhere. And other stuff.

Another mixed weather day in Figueira. My weather app promised rain so I ran in my raincoat. It didn’t rain on me. But it did rain later and now, late morning, the sun is shining again.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to risk the chance of rain and walk to the lighthouse.

I didn’t get to the lighthouse as the way was blocked. Whether this was a hangover from the Storm Charles precautions or a general safety thing, I do not know. I’ve not known it to be closed to pedestrians in the past.

I saw some interesting graffiti.

And I did get rained on, but in compensation I got to see a rainbow!

I had a notification on my iPad telling me I had a message from my GP surgery. A new message! Perhaps another reminder to have a flu vaccination. 7I had the vaccination several weeks ago but the NHS still keeps reminding me.) So I logged on anyway. I failed three times to prove I am not a robot. Apparently I can’t recognise enough hats and bags and chairs. However, I am okay at recognising curtains! And the message: the surgery can’t deal with online requests because of the Microsoft outage!

We rely on Microsoft for so many aspects of modern life. Stuff that’s supposed to make life easier, but not necessarily simpler! Both GranddaughterNumber One and her mother have complained about their work being disrupted today - Friday the Thirteenth.

Here’s a cartoon that reflects our modern life.

Granddaughter Number Two told me they had frost on the roof tiles yesterday. Winter is approaching and the season of coughs and colds. Here is something by Adrian Chiles on colds:

“How to define the cold that’s ruining your day? There’s a hierarchy. We start with the sniffle, the mere runny nose, scratchy throat or just feeling a little off. This is the slight cold. The nose becoming more blocked than runny, and a cough coming into play, entitles you to call it a heavy cold. Any of the aforementioned symptoms worsening, accompanied by hotness, shiveriness, aching and general misery, gives you the right to call it a stinking cold. There’s also a malady known as man-flu, but I have no truck with such a lazy, gender-specific categorisation.

The only good thing about the stinking cold is that you have the green light to do sod all and repair to bed. This was me for three days this week, and it has firmed up a theory I have long held that you’re better off getting a stinker because it tends to come and go and be done with more quickly than the other varieties. This theory, I should point out, is based on my lived experience rather than any clinical expertise or any kind of research. Sorry – I felt too ill to bother with anything of the kind.

The kind of cold I really can’t bear is the middle-of-the-road, magnolia, vanilla, neither-here-nor-there type. When you don’t feel up to doing much, but neither, if you’re honest, are you feeling ropey enough to justify doing nothing. And these kinds of colds, for me anyway, seem to drag on for ever.”

There you go. Stuff to look forward to.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Travellers’ Tales. Figueira Day 6. The storm that never was.

 Well, yesterday we waited for Storm Charles to arrive. We followed instructions to keep our window closed. It was raining first thing but not significantly more than on other rainy days. But  we had been advised that the storm would arrive in the afternoon so we were not too surprised.

We ventured out at lunchtime in search of somewhere to eat. The town was quiet as the grave. All our usual restaurants were firmly closed. Eventually we found a place we had overlooked in the past, Tasca Dos 7, a little off the beaten track, ln a side street but definitely open. 

The television news was full of reports of the damage caused by Storm Charles in Greater Lisbon and some places on the Algarve. Faro airport had cancelled flights because of strong winds. We, however, still had just moderate rainfall. Even the winds of the last few days had died down.

So we settled down to a fine vegetable soup 

and some perfectly good fish dishes with a glass of wine.

I even treated nyself to a dessert.

And we returned to our hotel, prepared to sit out the storm … which never arrived! By late afternoon there was even a feeble attempt at sushine, just in time for sunset.

And in the middle evening we went out for beer and snacks with a friend.

I got in contact with my Spanish sister, who lives round the corner of the Iberian peninsula, in El Puerto de Santa María, across the bay from Cádiz. They did have Storm Charles and everything was closed there too. She says that whenever there is bad weather, especially heavy rain, forecast the whole place seems to close down, schools and shops and everything. It’s almost a government decision not to leave themselves open to accusations of neglecting their citizens. 

I suppose it’s a bit like schools in the UK closing because of snow, which happens nowadays. As children we never rememberea school being closed for snow or fog, or excessive heat for that  matter.

This morning has dawned bright and clear, washed clean after the storm that never was. Maybe I’ll get to the lighthouse after all.

In the meantime, here are some of the “best words literally ever”, sent to me by a friend as obsessed with language as I am: 

Bamboozled, Flabbergasted, Discombobulated, Shenanigans, Cattywampus, Lollygag, Malarkey, Kerfuffle,  Brouhaha, Nincompoop, Skedaddle, Pumpernickel.

As far as I am aware, “brouhaha” is a perfectly good French word, but so far ai have no ideas about origins of the rest. 

We were flabbergasted and even discombobulated by the non arrival of the storm. It seemed there was a lot of kerfuffle and brouhaha about nothing much in the end. The proprietors of places that lost a day’s business must be feeling like nincompoops. 

That’s enough of that malarkey.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Travellers’Tales. Figueira Day 5. Storm warning!

 Yesterday I thought about walking out to the lighthouse here. It’s at the end of an artificially constructed breakwater, built I suppose to facilitate boats getting into the port by the river estuary. Every time we come here I walk the mile out to the lighthouse and try to catch photos of the waves crashing down. The waves are singulalry uncooperative, working on a strict no-photos policy. They always crash just before or just after you take the photo.

While I thought about it, the relatively clear blue sky and sunshine disappeared and the rain set in again. So I didn’t walk to the lighthouse.

In the evening we set off for the chess venue, for a game due to start at 7.00. There was a delay to the start as the organisers wanted to make an announcement. Storm Charles is about to strike Portugal today. I had already had a weather update about this on my phone but it seems Charles is more serious than my notification had suggested. The organisers of the tournament had decided to cancel today’s game. Bridges and some major roads are closed. There is a possibility of power cuts. Hotels and other buildings on the seafront are advised to close blinds to protect windows. Wow!

I follow another chess site on Facebook, connected to the chess club in Silves, a place we have visited a couple of times for tournaments. There was a notification on Facebook that their usual Wednesday session was cancelled … because of Storm Charles.

Much later in the evening, after Phil had lost last night’s game, we had a couple of beers in the hotel lounge. The television news seemed completely full of the approaching storm.

Storm Charles means business! Serious stuff! I won’t be going to the lighthouse today … and the forecast isn’t good for the rest of the week. I didn’t even get to run along the seafront this morning.

Will the restaurants be open for lunch or will Charles have arrived first? We shall see!

Thinking of food, here is a link to an article about pizza, and whether pineapple can ever be added to that very Italian food. The Italians are very possessive about their food and feel that it should not be adulterated in any way. I can understand that. We should be prepared to adapt but also protect our old traditions. Long ago, when my mother was taken ill my father took over the kitchen. Now his tastes had been influenced by holidays in Spain, staying with my sister and her Spanish family. He was particularly taken with garlic, something which had never been part of our family’s culinary scene. One day my mother complained to me thatvhe was “even adding garlic to Lancashire hotpot!”. Shocking!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!