The fifteenth of August is a holiday in
many European countries. It is, in my experience, the day of the year with the
least productivity of any; at least in those countries where it is a day off.
Why do I say that? Why not Christmas Day or New Year’s Day? Quite simply
because on those days, everyone is preparing food, welcoming guests, putting on
a show, and so on. But 15 August is right in the middle of everyone’s summer
holidays. The only people working are those in uniform and catering staff.
Everyone else is flaked out somewhere cowering from the scalding summer heat.
When I lived in Belgium, 15 August was a
day for opening a bottle of something and lounging in the garden, a park, or on
a terrace somewhere. In Germany, nothing and nobody moved; the silence was
insistent and almost aggressive to the point that neighbours would call the
police if you so much as put your knife on the plate too loudly after dinner.
In France, in some areas it is a similar story: people go to extraordinary
lengths to enforce their day off, simply out of principle.
So it came as no surprise that in Portugal,
it’s pretty much the same. Add into that equation a near 40-degree heat, and
you have the number one day of doing nothing at all. When I roamed the towns
and villages of Luxembourg, I remember many of the parks and river banks being
beset by Portuguese people grilling stuff on a Sunday. At the first sign of
good weather, the lakeside in Echternach used to be heaving with Lusophone
grillers and their enormous entourages, pouring their bodies out of Peugeot
305s, sometimes six of them, and all their food, and the charcoal, and the
wood, and sometimes even the grill too.
I had booked for us to eat at a restaurant
in the centre of Setúbal, so that I too
could take a day off from cooking. And for a while, the children enjoyed
sitting having a pre-meal drink. They stayed seated through the entirety of
their dinner, which was quite astonishing. But things started to deteriorate
thereafter, especially when Bonny Bee had to rush back to the apartment to
finish off a translation. It started when one of them remembered that the
interactive fountain was just a few steps away.
It didn’t take long for them to get totally
saturated in the water jets, but I decided to just let them go through the
process of understanding how the principle of cause and effect works. It’s
still too early for them to fully grasp such complicated life lessons, such as
what happens if you go to bed too late and get up too early in the morning, or
if you steal a sibling’s ice cream. Clue: they both involve landing in a
horizontal position, one more abruptly than the other.
For that reason, when one came over lamenting about the situation, I just said “yeah, that’s what happens if you play in moving water!” The reply is always denial or a demand for immediate remedial action. “Well sorry sweet cheeks, but we didn’t take three spare sets of clothes out with us in case you decided to go for a shower in the town square!” And besides, being that hot (it was about 37 degrees), their clothes were going to dry out in no time. I usually hang them up the following morning, and less than an hour later they’re ready to wear again.
Concerning the 15 August setup here in Setúbal, it was incredibly easy to find a parking spot in an area that is usually overwhelmed. Someone I spoke to the other day said it was becoming a real problem, as many drivers were just slotting their cars in everywhere as the parking fines weren’t that much more than the tickets from the distributors. The way I look at it is Setúbal has an incredibly unwieldy building layout. There were obviously no town planners around when the first buildings went up – that’s fine, because it makes the city what it is, but nobody has thought about making a rational plan since the beginning of the era of cars.
So what is here now is a mess. To get from
our place to the centre, which is an 800-metre walk, I need to take a
three-kilometre detour that involves me driving away from the centre for a good
kilometre, then I don’t know how it works, but I have to take a flyover which
sets me down on the opposite side of the city. In order to get to a decent
parking area, I take another two right-turns (there are no left turns involved
in the entirety of the trip), and park in a road that faces our apartment and
would take only ten minutes to walk.
(DISCLAIMER: Before you all criticise me
for driving such a short distance, I would walk it on my own, but the children
would never make it there and back in the heat, especially as there are some
slopes involved!)
The kids’ clothes dried more quickly than
they would have done in a drier, and we went back to the car to pick their
mother up. I had seen on a few trips a lovely little place where a river meets
the sea about 10 minutes out of town. Some picnic infrastructure had been set
up, and there seemed to be a beach at the bottom. I took a detour to fill up
with petrol, and followed a narrow road through trees down to the sea. When I
describe it as a road through trees, I really mean it – there were sections where
the trees were in the middle of the road and you had to drive around them.
Then I understood why the centre was empty:
we joined the main road out of town along the coast, which is usually wide
enough to accommodate cars, trucks and buses in two directions. There were cars
aligning both sides of the road as far as the eye could see, and even small
cars were slowing down to make sure they could squeeze their way through. I
mean, it wasn’t exactly the Kumbh Mela, but the number of people under the
trees lining the banks of the river all the way to the beach was pretty
staggering.
And the noise. There were families with men arguing over banal topics like VAR in the pre-season friendlies, there were children chasing each other in and out of all the groups, women raucously laughing at one or other incident, and old geezers turning huge lumps of meat over on the grills. It seemed that it was always the elders who were in charge of the grilling. I don’t know if this was a sincere veneration or an excuse by younger family members not to stand next to a blazing inferno in a near 40-degree heat.
This was just like the banks of the lake at
Echternach, then multiplied by a factor of seven, but the stereotypes were
true: it was a national hobby and definitely one that would be a ritual on the
least productive day of the year. We passed about twenty different groups all
hanging around their grill patch making the most boisterous amount of noise.
There were numerous Bluetooth speakers blasting out different levels of painful
sounds, competing for supremacy over the others in the immediate surroundings.
There were crates of Sagres and Bock beer
bottles and cans everywhere. One person was grilling a huge fish, another had
about 12 picanha steaks, and a third was roasting a huge lump of sirloin, and
one had three spatchcock chickens on the spit. There were bowls of potato salad
and green salad, tomatoes, crisps, peanuts in their shells, olives, fried
peppers in a lake of olive oil, and I maybe saw some aubergines with cured ham too.
Passing this sea of people, all doing
nothing in particular, we arrived at a cooler, windier area with no tree cover.
People were sitting in the shadow of the man-made rock bank and venturing out
to dip their feet in the water every now and again. An old man had rather unthinkingly
decided to put two fishing rods right in the middle of the already short beach,
splitting the swimmers in half.
When I arrived, Livia and Dainoris had already entered the water and Dainoris had tied his surfboard to Livia’s floating ring. The floor of the bay was silt and stone, making it really difficult to get anywhere, so I chose to go in wearing my rubber slippers I had ordered from German Amazon. It’s pointless getting my shoes in Spain as my size (48) is just not catered for. Buying shoes for me is a soul-destroying exercise: most people go in the shop, peruse the hundreds of sorts of shoes they can potentially buy, from stilettos to brogues, house slippers to wellington boots, whereas I go in and just ask “what’s the largest size shoe you have?” Most say 45 or 46, which is the answer I am expecting people to say. When they say 48, it’s usually one or two pairs of clunky black lace-up shoes.
But there are the odd times when a shop
actually caters to people who have my size, and then they have a loyal customer
in me. Back in Germany, I used to go shoe hunting in Trier, because there were
so many shoe shops. Only one, Kempe, had sizes beyond 46, up to 52. I bought
nearly every shoe in there until we left last August. Clothes sizes are also
rather impertinently measured: what is an XXL shirt in an Italian or Swedish
chain store is an XL in a German one. And some shops have huge fat-shaming signs
up saying “XXXL SECTION” or some such disrespectful statement of intent.
In the ladies’ XXXL SECTION are typically
low-cut dresses with various colours that make the wearer resemble a parrot
that’s been hit by a lift. The men’s section is awful – drab plain blue, grey
or white shirts and conservative trousers with a special long belt section
handily placed right next to them. Sometimes the shop will go the extra mile
and provide checked shirts or even striped ones, but that’s it. And when I
glance at the SLIM FIT SECTION or the CLASSICS, there are so many variations to
choose from, that for the larger man, I can only show my indignant feelings to
the poor worker fronting the store, which is pointless.
The main problem with this beach was that
the wind was blowing directly from the land, and each time Livia and Dainoris
lifted up their feet, they drifted further out into the main waters. I had to
keep chasing them to make sure they returned closer to shore. Then when
Dainoris got fed up, I had to contend with Livia and her total lack of
understanding of consequences. So it completely exasperated me when she kept
letting go of the inflatable ring and I had to go retrieving it several times.
Needless to say, this was not a successful beach trip, and I persuaded everyone
that it was time to go home.
On Friday 16 August, the temperature in this area was due to hit 40 degrees, a temperature so frightening to many people who see it as the point where human life and that of the surrounding nature cannot thrive any more. We stayed in practically all day and only well after 5pm did Livia, Dainoris and I venture out to one of the city parks. It contained a large lake and some low-maintenance bushes, with a playground at one end and a café at the other. We had a drink, because even as the sun was setting it was baking hot, then they ran off to play.
A young local lad befriended Dainoris and they along with Livia began throwing Livia’s furry bird in the air, trying to get it in the thing I call the Flying Underpants – that blue thing on a pole.
Heading home, exhausted but fulfilled, the
two of them joined Milda for some food and they went to bed fairly easily. I
decided to go out for an exploratory late-night trip. The air was still fairly
warm so I headed to a promenade and artificial beach on the edge of the city.
The tide was coming in, but I managed to walk a few hundred metres up the beach
before the water got too high.
In the distance, I heard what sounded like
the ravings of a lunatic. As I climbed up from the beach to the promenade, my
bag caught on a branch and some loose coins fell out. By now, the crazed
gibbering of the madman was getting closer, and my physical formation prevents
me from reaching the floor with any ease. This Brazilian guy saw the panic in
my eyes and the pain in my thighs, and bent down to pick up the coins with me.
I was extremely grateful because the nutcase had made it to within throwing
distance of us. I put the money in my wallet and back in my bag.
Just then, he decided to start chasing us
pointing at my smartphone, saying “Hey! Hey! That’s my phone!” This was despite
having a phone of his own in his left hand. We walked faster, and found
relative safety in a group of locals heading back to their cars. After a while,
we reached the car park, the guy was clearly on some kind of substance, and I
was standing at my car. The Brazilian guy was clearly shaken, so I told him to
get in my car, but the cuckoo bloke grabbed the door, preventing him from closing
it and driving off.
He threatened to call the police to get
“his” phone back, the phone with three years’ worth of photos on it from my
recent life – how did that get there so quickly…? And all the cookies, and all
the saved locations on Google Maps, and all my contacts… The kook was clearly,
to use a local London term, three stops from Dagenham (= Barking). One of those
who we walked with stood in front of the car to prevent the guy from
photographing my number plate, but he already had it.
So I was stuck in my car with a stranger
from Brazil. I asked him where he lived, he said Palmela, which was a town
about 15 minutes’ drive away, so I took him home. It was another one of those
incidents that seems to have occurred far too often here in Setúbal.
We have the weekend, and then we can escape
to Seville, the inferno of Spain.
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