I think the idea of Portugal’s obsession with the three F’s is still doing the rounds in other parts of the world — Fado, Fátima and Football, that is.

I think, though, there’s only one of those Fs left.

I don’t know many people under the age of seventy these days who would consider going to the Sanctuário de Fátima by bus, let alone on their knees, and I have met quite a few people who, in private, will admit to finding Fado quite nerve-janglingly depressing.

It is football that remains large in the Portuguese heart.  So large that you can’t fail to notice it.  Every day.  Every waking moment of every day.

If you are an admirer of football, I can think of no better place for you to live.  Football in Portugal, it seems, is more important than just about anything else.  There are several daily newspapers dedicated to football.  Every proper newspaper, of course, also has its sport pages bulging with the results and the opinions and the signings and the firings and the everything else of football.  Every news bulletin on the TV and on radio carries news of the football.  It is not uncommon, if there’s a “big” game on, one between “giants”, for a main lunchtime or evening news programme to start with the news of that game, pushing down any stories about government or the economy or any meteorite that has just crashed to earth.

Then there are the interminable interviews with managers and players about how well they’ve done, or how ashamed they are to have let their fans down, and when they’ve been exhausted, the man and old lady on the street will be interviewed about whether Benfica are doing their best, or if Sporting should sign Joe Bloggs.  Every year, more and more women seem to be getting into the whole shebang and declaring themselves Benfiquistas or Sportinguistas (forgive me, I live in Greater Lisbon… FCPorto hardly gets a look in) as every man already declares himself when still in the crib.  My girls came home from pre-school, at three and five years old and declared that one was now a Benfiquista, her sister a Sportinguista.  I don’t think they’d ever even seen a football match, on telly or in real life…

You will have guessed by now that I loathe football.  Well, it’s not the game that I loathe… the game means nothing to me.  It’s the weird hold over people, the money, the predominance over everything (I’m talking globally, not just in Portugal, of course) and I can barely disguise my disdain when otherwise intelligent people proclaim their adoration of it.

I was once at the wedding of an important lawyer to an important academic.  The guests, of course, comprised mostly important lawyers and important academics.  I was a plus one, of course.  Sitting at my table was a very important lawyer, very well known, very highly thought of, apparently.  He proudly and importantly informed us that before he could even consider starting work each day, he HAD to sit down with a coffee, a cigarette and read Bola cover to cover (admittedly not a huge amount to actually read) and that if he didn’t, his day would be ruined…. and no-one blinked an eye, except me of course, who probably had an expression on my face displaying enormous pity and quite a bit of horror.

Every time there is a World Cup, a European Cup, or just one of those “big” games between “giants”, I’m afraid I have to go indoors, shut the door and switch the TV off, because, amongst this enormous crowd of 11 millions maniacs, waving their flags and scarves, singing and drinking and enjoying themselves and getting depressed or elated and baying for footballish blood, I am just one tiny voice — “but it’s only football………!”

I have lived in Portugal for twelve years.  In that time the country has changed so much I can hardly remember how it was when I got here.  I’m glad that I wrote it all down obsessively in a blog for a few years, because I can look back now and be reminded how different things are today, just a few years later.   I have a feeling that the rate of change is similar to the rate of change that Britain went through in the sixties… not the same kind of change, but the same rate of change in society and habits and lifestyle.

One thing that has changed is the way people dress. Obviously, fashion changes slightly every year, but the way people use fashion has changed enormously since the beginning of the century.  Dress has become more casual, sloppy, even (unthinkable when I arrived… me and my arch sloppiness), and fewer people give up the quest for looking fashionable as they age.

When I visited the north in 1991, I was in awe of a certain uniform of the working and housekeeping woman, a kind of housecoat.  It was the subject of most of my paintings involving Portuguese ladies from the time.  It was a wraparound affair, mostly in a blue or green geometrically patterned polyester, quite nasty to the touch, and available to buy in the market.  It adorned almost every women I saw.  I bought one.  Just for the fun of it.  Like most things, it disappeared after many house moves.

The housecoat wearing habit in Britain pretty much evaporated in the nineteen-eighties. I remember some older women, when I was a kid in the seventies, answering the front door in a nasty beige or pale green housecoat. I don’t know if you could even find one outside of a catering and medical uniform supplier these days. I have always imagined that they became less necessary and unfashionable with the advent of cheaper clothing; why go to the bother of getting in and out of your sweaty polyester housecoat during the day, when your clothes are easier to clean and easier to replace.  I guess they also just become very old fashioned, for some reason. The only housecoat I remember seeing in the last thirty years was Mrs. Overall’s nasty coloured wraparounds in Acorn Antiques (google it, if you don’t remember).

When I moved here permanently, in 1999, most women who worked at home or worked as cleaners, and some who worked in shops, still wore them.  There were various kinds of housecoat, known here as a “bata” (the name is also used for white-coats etc.).  There were summer batas, and winter batas, and patterned and plain batas.  There were frilly batas and simple batas, and sleeved and sleeveless batas, but the predominant kind was the sleeveless wraparound that I was already in love with.  It shaped the ladies who wore it.  Skinny ones had a certain shape, fat ones another.  I became quite obsessed by the bata. Portuguese women are (generally) extremely house proud and a housecoat is the perfect thing to spare your clothes if you spend your mornings up to your elbows in bleach and your afternoons in the flowerbeds. Many women also do an awful lot of caring for their families, looking after elderly parents, taking care of their children, and then their children’s children, so there’s a lot of getting mucky and sweaty during the day.  The polyester housecoat is cheap, easy to clean and, just as importantly, easy to dry quickly (it is extremely damp here for six months of the year).

Where I live, though, the bata is rapidly becoming an endangered housecoat.  Lifestyle around here is changing, and although some of the very old ladies still do the housecoat thing, the middle aged and downwards don’t care for it.  They’ll wear old clothes to work in (something that just wouldn’t have been “nice” a few years ago) and the whole slaving from morn till night at the service of your entire family things is going out of fashion in a big way… something I think Portugal will discover to its cost too late.  Such amazing women have really been keeping the country ticking over for years, saving families untold money on childcare, nursing homes, cleaners, gardeners and even grocery bills, being brilliantly frugal and clever, feeding large families with quite little.

A long time blog-friend confessed to me the other day that there was one thing from all the stuff I had written about Portugal that she just didn’t get; the bata.  The thing is, she’s a lifelong Lisboeta and it turns out that the object of my obsession was never such a big thing in Lisbon as it is and was in the suburbs and the provinces.  I live thirty kilometres outside of Lisbon and it’s a different world.

I’m going to make myself some batas one of these days.  There’s a “crise” on, you know.

Throughout the summer months, Portugal holds a lot of parties. Each city, town and village has its own festa, firstly dedicated to a saint, then to eating and drinking and dancing. There will be a procession at some point in the weekend that processes from the church through the town, carrying the icon of their saint, but the vast majority of attention is concentrated on the festa itself. Imagine a village fête, but at held at night, and with fewer vicars having sponges thrown at them. One of the things I adore about Portugal is the idea that children aren’t stuck in bed at seven-thirty… our kids are made of hardier stuff than that, and are quite capable of staying up till midnight, partying with their parents, running about with their friends, enjoying the summer.

There are enormous festas, such as the Festas of Lisbon, where during the month of June lots of things happen, including the marchas, a carnival-like parade and a lot of sardine eating, if you catch the right weekend.

Then there are the smaller ones, in towns and villages. The festas often last from Friday until Sunday and if they are in big enough towns or villages they will have a market, hot dog and candy floss stalls, local businesses will have stands to sell their wares and there may even be some bumper cars. The markets used to be filled with Portuguese crafts and industries like pottery but, around here, have recently been taken over by South American market traders, selling Peruvian, Nepalese and Indian clothes and jewellery, and weaving “térérés” into girls’ hair.

Local people who have things to show off, show them off. It might be just the outfit someone bought especially for the festas or it might require the stage. This year, at the festa in the main village, the capital village of all our small villages, I saw some kids doing ballroom, and some ladies doing belly dancing. Then there were the bands; big bands playing jazz standards, rock bands playing Status Quo and Nirvana in quick succession, teenage bands playing limp bizkit (or something. I am old, now), folk bands that play traditional music about fishermen and shepherds and strikes, and the horrible pimba bands playing pimba. Pimba is undescribable tacky, bouncy, low rent, electronic (these days) folky-pop which inexplicably cheers the Portuguese up at parties.

But the festa in our village is my favourite. It is tiny and simple. There is no market, no hotdog stand, nor any bumper cars. There is a bar for drink, one for food and a stall selling “rifas”. “Rifas” are a bit like raffle tickets; you buy a handful and might win a prize (I was a bit shocked once when I first moved to Portugal, when some small children knocked on the front door, asking if I wanted to buy some “reefers”). For four nights in a row, everyone tramps down the road to the chapel grounds, drinks, dances and laughs. Old ladies stare at newcomers, old men drink beer and talk about their work and neighbours and near neighbours catch up on the news and gossip. The music is a one-man pimba act, complete with his own one-man electronic band, playing music so bad it’s funny. Husbands dance with their wives in a most serious manner, and old ladies who are already alone dance with each other. And all the old ladies keep staring at newcomers. The amps blast the music across the village. Last year I didn’t sleep until four in the morning, three nights running, with pimba blaring through my bedroom window. There are bifanas (pork steak sandwiches) to eat, beer, weak sangria and wine to drink. The chapel terrace fills with two or three hundred people and the village becomes a completely different animal for a weekend. Except for the old ladies staring at newcomers. They do that all year round.

 

 

I am sure you think of Portugal as a hot country.  It is, sometimes.  Quite a lot of the time, really.  A normal summer, beginning in mid May, lasting till well into October if we’re lucky, consists of heat, more heat, maybe a couple of thunderstorms, some extreme heat, then back down to heat again, slowly cooling down as we drift into the autumn.  The heat is usually about 28ºC-35ºC, enough to slow you down, make you a bit sweaty, make sitting in a traffic jam with no air-con uncomfortable, and remind you that you really must make friends with people who have a pool.  Extremely hot is when the temperature hits the centigrade forties, turning everyone into gibbering idiots, emptying the streets during daylight hours, and putting an end to a good night’s sleep.  The beaches fill up and everyone is happy.

To survive the summer, you have to suck it up and learn to shut your shutters during the day and live in the dark, so that your house doesn’t become an unbearable greenhouse.  Then you must go to the beach if you live near one and ice your bones in the Atlantic (not the Mediterranean, remember), get stuck in traffic on the way home that will help to undo your Atlantic icing and, on arriving home, discover that, although you shut the shutters, you still left the windows open and all the hot air outside is now inside and you’re never going to sleep tonight, while the mozzies bite you senseless.

But this summer has been awful so far.

Imagine a British summer with its lottery of cold, warm, wet and dry days.  Think of that fatalistic feeling you have about what tomorrow will bring for your day out.  Think of the grey-white skies, dotted with only the tiniest specks of dark blue.  Add about 5ºC to the temperature you’re imagining, and a really cold north westerly wind over the top of that that lasts for a whole month and that’s the Portuguese summer we’re having this year.

It is putting everyone in a very strange mood.  They’re grumpy and confused.  The beaches are half empty. It seems that not only is the financial crisis really starting to bite, but the weather is having its own stab at bringing everyone down.  Has everything changed forever?  Have we lost the summer? Has the gulf stream moved and screwed with the weather? Is this the beginning of the next Ice Age?

This is one of the few places in the world where you might hear that a day that is 20ºC is “freezing!!”…. but it’s not freezing, it’s wonderful and I may be the only happy person in the whole country, because I love a good British summer.

In French lessons at school, we learned that the whole of France shut down in August. La famille Bertillon (stay-at-home slim beautiful mother, handsome douanier father who worked at Orly airport, Claude and Marie-Claire, the textbook children) all downed tools and went to the seaside or campsite for the whole month with the rest of the country, leaving the streets of Paris deserted until the first of September. I thought that sounded like heaven, but wondered who on earth still baked the bread and ran the country.

Every August, parts of Portugal shut down in much the same way. The last weekend in July sees an exodus out of Lisbon. Woe betide anyone who wants to get out of the city quickly on that Friday night. The oldest and, for many, still principal bridge out of the city, Ponte 25 de Abril, gets clogged up as all the main arteries from the city drain onto her and over the insanely wide river Tejo. It can take hours to get out on a hot night in July, but tempers remain unfrayed, as they’re happily on their way to their holidays, to the Algarve for the ones that like people and queues and full beaches, the Alentejo for those who don’t. Companies and institutions shut down, cafés close and the city takes it down several notches for the month. It can be annoying if you have stuff to do with a company or institution, but at least you know they’re not expecting anything of you for a few weeks, either. The toll booths on the bridge close, and you can sail through without paying, zooming into a half empty city. Even on the hottest days, it is more bearable for the lack of people and, more importantly, cars. If I ever have something to go to in Lisbon in August, I jump at it, knowing that I won’t have to queue into or out of the city.

Until this year, that is.

For the first time, August is not the usual August. The “crisis” is finally having visible effects, although we in Portugal have been in “crisis” for far longer than you’ve been talking about the credit crunch and subprime mortgages.

I was driving the family out of Lisbon on last Friday, July 29th after an evening out, heading home to the south of the Setúbal peninsula, 25km from the city. We got stuck in a huge traffic jam at almost midnight, and only then did I remember that it was July 29th. Annoyed that I should have remembered to take the other bridge on a night like this, I hunkered down for the snail-paced hour or so it was likely to take to get from the margins of the city to the other side of the bridge and past Almada.

But suddenly, half way across the bridge, the traffic started to move faster and I suddenly found I was speeding down a half empty A2. The hold up was an accident, not “sheer weight of traffic”, and the police had just cleared it.  Yesterday, I went into town to meet some friends. The traffic was as heavy as any other working day and with the toll booths no longer closed for the month of August (so that the government doesn’t have to subsidise the shortfall anymore, in aid of the crise. It’s €3million a year that will be saved. Sounds a lot, until you remember just how in debt the country is) I ended up stuck in a big jam again. In Lisbon, it was just like a normal hellish traffic day, and leaving the city a couple of hours later was just like leaving at any non-August rush hour — dead slow, making you grateful for remembering to have gone to the loo before you left.

The August exodus hasn’t happened, and the staycation (in the true sense of the word, staying at home, and not “not going abroad, but spending a fortune in Cornwall”) has taken over.

The old Portuguese August has gone, and it won’t come back until Portugal feels prosperous again. That won’t be for very many years.

It is a popular belief in Britain and elsewhere that the British are the only people in the world who seem to enjoy queueing.  I’m sure we don’t really like queueing, it’s just that we don’t have it in us to do anything else.  We don’t like to make an unnecessary fuss about something that we probably can’t change anyway (at least, we didn’t pre-Esther Rantzen.  She gave people ideas beyond their own reasoning power, and so was born the “stroppy cow”).  The British must make standing in line, while grumbling to our inner monologues or having an invisible doze, look enjoyable.

I went to Italy once, and, although desperate to prove to the world that this art student didn’t need to abide by silly social conventions, was horrified to discover that the idea of queueing in an orderly fashion was unheard of.  It was more of a mosh pit, with round old ladies in it.

So, when I came to Portugal, with the ludicrous idea that all the latin speaking nations were probably quite similar (France being the exception in the middle, because we all think we know too much about the French, already and don’t think of them as latin), I was truly surprised to find that the Portuguese do queueing as well as the British.

There are certain places where a queue is almost inevitable: The post office, the national bank, restaurants that are pretty good and *seen* to be even better, the supermarket on a weekend or national holiday.    Queues aren’t exactly Soviet in length, but they can last for a staggering amount of time, with their numbers showing extreme stoicism in the face of the unending tedium.  There is, of course, grumbling and loud sighing, but this only tends to start after a heroic twenty minutes of silence, unless it’s a train ticket queue and there is the added tension of an about-to-be-missed train.   The reason the queues are so slow is that so many of the people in them have really complicated matters to discuss once they get to the cash desk or checkout, and once they’ve got their place at the head of the queue are reluctant to leave.  The complicated matters might be that they have to arrange a difficult payment between banks or buy a complicated train pass.  It might also be that they habitually forget that shopping needs to be paid for, so have left their purse wedged in the bottom of their handbag.  It might be just to have a gossip.  This wouldn’t be so galling if it hadn’t been them in the queue for the half an hour before, huffing and puffing under their breath that “these damned people have no respect for anyone else, this wouldn’t have happened before the revolution, what are they DOING there?”.

But, whenever one is in a queue, there is always one person who comes in off the street, walks straight up to the cash desk, straight past the twenty people who have already been there for half an hour, and asks a question of the person behind whatever counter it is, because they have decided that their question doesn’t merit waiting, (questions of the “have you a form to fill out to send a recorded delivery” kind)… and the person behind the counter always stops what they are doing and attends to that person. Always.

The appearance of ticketed queue in the last few years has helped a lot, but can make the act of queuing more perilous.  I have walked into the bank, taken a ticket that says 110 and the number on the board says 68.  How many of those 42 people are here?  Have some gone for a quick coffee?  Have they left for good, losing the will to wait?  Should I go and get a quick coffee and hope that when I get back there is still time for me to get grumpy in the remaining queue?  Or will so many people have given up that my number disappears instantly.  I think I’d rather a queue that you can’t leave, so I can zone out, go somewhere else in my head, have a little snooze on my feet, and lose a couple of hours of my day.  It’s less stressful that way.

Unless there is a person at the top of it who doesn’t seem sober and may vomit or drop a bucket of whitewash on top of my head, I will make a point of walking under a ladder.  If it makes just one silly old woman shudder in superstitious horror, it’s worth the minor effort of the detour.  Superstition was still rife in Britain when I left, what with ladders, Friday 13^th, shoes on tables, umbrellas indoors, the silly old superstitious ladies having passed their nonsense on to their equally silly offspring.  If you tried hard enough, though, you could ignore it, and, if you were very sharp, spotting and evading a gypsy selling lucky heather was possible.

It takes a while to get to the nuance of what people are talking about when you move to a country with a completely different language.  I was concentrating hard for my first few months in Portugal, trying to understand the very basics, working out how to do things, trying not kill my newborn by mis-understanding instructions on things.  I was concentrating so hard that I forgot about annoying things like superstition and other human defects.  For a while everything was just a latinny-russianish sounding noise with the occasional word that I recognised. Slowly, the language started to filter through and noises began to make sense.

The first things I learned to say in public were “até logo”, see you later, and “até amanhã”, see you tomorrow.  As I began to say this with more and more confidence — in the minimarket, in the supermarket, at the in-laws’ — I began to hear a phrase over and over again:  Sedayooshkeezehr.  Whenever it was said to me, I’d smile. Whatever it meant.

I couldn’t decipher it at first, partly because of the irregular future subjunctive in there; I hadn’t done those yet.  That and the fact that European Portuguese is a really crunched up language when spoken, meant that it took a while to finally split it all into the words “Se Deus Quiser”… oh GOD, it was something superstitious, being said to me several times every day.  Literally, “if God wishes it”… or “God-willing”.

“Se Deus quiser” is like a nervous tic in old ladies.  Say anything regarding the future — see ya, see you later, I’ll pick you up at eight, we’ll meet at the party, I’ll bring you your groceries in the morning — and “GOD-WILLING” will be the automatic response, to counter your hubristic assumption that you will see the next dawn or even the next half an hour, stopping you being punished with some awful fate… maybe being killed by a bucket of whitewash falling on your head.

The language became more comfortable to deal with, and I started to notice more of what people were telling me.  All the rest of the superstitions came crawling out of the old lady woodwork.

Handbags must not be left on the floor. This is not because handbags are easier to nick from the floor — really, it’s easier to steal a handbag hanging from the back of a chair than one secreted between your feet under the table — but because it “keeps the money away”.  All my girl friends adhere to that one, whether overtly admitting superstitiousness or pretending that their handbag is just happier on the table or their lap.

Never wish someone a happy birthday BEFORE their birthday or they won’t make it to their next one. However, you can give them their birthday present whenever you like… if there was ever a perfect way to say Happy Birthday it’s by giving someone a birthday present, isn’t it?

If you hear the cuckoo cuckooing you’re not going to die this year.  I haven’t got to the bottom of “this year” yet, though.  Is it before December 31st? Or before the next spring and the next cuckooing of the cuckoos?

Then, horseshoes.  The lucky (and extremely tacky) horseshoe… we all know that one, don’t we?  The horseshoe in Portugal, though, is not an upturned horseshoe, upturned to hold all the luck and all that codswallop.  It is a downturned horseshoe to keep the bad luck out… or something.  Neither way makes the remotest sense.  I like to tell superstitious old Portuguese ladies that in Britain the horseshoe goes the other way up, thereby disproving the luck giving qualities of the horseshoe, if not everything else in the world bestowed with imaginary magical powers, since it would be ridiculous for whoever doles out the luck to give it to upturned horseshoe owners in one country and the downturned horseshoe owners in another.  The superstitious old ladies tend to look at me pityingly in return, feeling sorry for the English (the British are all English to them) who must have no luck because they turn their horseshoes the wrong way.  I’ll get through to them one day.  Knock on wood.

I was seven when I first visited Portugal. It was a family holiday and my memories are only those narrow dreamy memories of a small child; 2% from reality, 98% from photographs.

We stayed with friends who were working in Lisbon. I remember white walls, narrow staircases, pink bougainvillea and the blaring blue sky, a Portuguese nanny giving me a disgusting vitamin pill and learning that squid wasn’t horrible to eat.  We drove through the dusty dry Alentejano plains, posed for photographs in cork montados, listening to the incessant foreign background music of crickets and cicadas chirruping.   We spent the night in a palace, which must have been one of the first pousadas (this was 1977) where we slept in four poster beds and felt like royalty.  I remember little more, except for my parents’ complaining that Mário Soares seemed to go on a bit on the tv.

I was twenty-one when I visited the second time, by now an art student, here on a field trip with my class.  We had ten days to paint Porto and the Douro Valley. That was 1991. It was still wildly different to anywhere else I knew, was still a very foreign place.  We wandered the streets of Porto and the river valley of the Douro, painting and drawing the decrepit buildings and the old women in housecoats hanging out their washing, the vineyards and the grape harvesters.  Porto was exotic and smelly.  It stank of the end of summer, black goo in the streets and fish and the river and a distant smell of wine.  The Douro valley was the most astonishingly beautiful place I had ever seen.  I fell absolutely and wholeheartedly for Portugal

Eight years later, I moved here for good and only then understood just how foreign Portugal is.