Dear readers I have just ventured home from the baroque metropolis of Lisbon, (the return flight was so turbulent one felt one was in a blender with all the rattling and spew splattering hither and thither.) Exotic Lisboa is a city made fat with pork, salt cod and attractively priced egg based pastries. In 1755 an earthquake struck it's precincts and smashed it to a lumpen mess - and although I have no claim to an expertise in history (and let's be honest, who wants to be associated with a shower of duck-milking historians?) I understand that everyone was killed and the population was replaced by a tribe of Eskimo-Rastafarians who had wandered across the Atlantic pack-ice in search of rancid seal meat and ganja. Three cheers for the Snow-Rastas!
The ruined Cathedral of Carmo looks hungrily down on modern Lisbon, it's gothic rib-cage naked to the heavens. During the earthquake good Catholics fled into the cathedral in the hope God would be their protection - he collapsed the roof on the lot of them - leaving most Lisboans with the suspicion that He is probably a muslim (I feel they did somewhat miss a beat by not using the opportunity to invade Iraq.)
Carmo Cathederal is now a museum - and it was within it's walls I heard an old married couple bicker:
'Why don't we hold hands anymore?' Said the woman's voice.
'Please dear,' said the man, 'we are in a museum.'
'I hate museums,' said she,' why can't we do something interesting. I hear Big Tom and the Boxcar Nudists are playing a tea-dance at the Casa De Alentejo.'
'You know I can't dance, not with my hips,' said the man.
'Your hips don't stop you dancing all over me at four in the morning do they?' Said she. 'You're worse than Berlusconi on a Bunga Bunga night.'
'Please dear,' he pleaded, 'we are in a museum!!'
'You don't have to remind me,' said she, 'I'm not blind . . .'
Then I rounded the corner and faced the two responsible for the chatter - and discovered why they don't hold hands anymore. . .
Sleep tight dear readers . . .
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