We were in a construction zone, a single lane, with barriers and cones. No way
out. A Cristiano Ronaldo look-alike was driving a Range Rover behind my wee
Nissan Note. Ronaldo gets free Audis, so it couldn’t have been the man
himself, unless, of course, he owns more than one vehicle. Being a foreigner
in his fine country, I was busy obeying the speed limit. His view was that
rules are for chumps and old ladies. He expressed this opinion by way of
gesture and by driving mere inches from my bumper, flashing his lights and
generally behaving like a rat on steroids. I wondered if his girlfriend was
about to give birth, but no, there she was in the passenger seat, very slender,
making calming gestures.
The man had to endure maybe two hundred meters of this intolerable situation
before he was able to turn off onto a side street.
He was an exception. For the most part I thought Portuguese drivers were
unusually polite. His punishment should have been a week behind the wheel of a
Citroen Jumpy, which is a delivery van.
It’s a polite country, with little shops that still sell socks in individual
sizes, kept in boxes behind the counter. There’s charm in this. Less charming
was an attitude to litter. On Oporto’s seafront promenade a lady took out a
tissue to wipe her dog’s bottom after it had finished its business. She left
the whole mess, product and tissue, right there. Just walked away. I saw a a
man who makes his living from the sea, a professional fisherman, finish his
beer and toss the bottle into the harbor’s water. What I shall remember best,
however, were the sardines and green wine in a small restaurant with a charcoal
barbecue outside. When you visit Oporto, skip the Sandeman Port Cellar
tour—even though the founder was a Scot—and hie yourself straight, without
passing go, sardine-wards. That’s my advice.
You’ll gather that resuming “hereabouts” means merging what happened here with
what happened thereabouts. Here we left the second fully-qualified god, E., in
charge. She reported that Cheddar’s brooding continued, as did Pecorino’s
tendency to jump the fence and then to look both puzzled and sheepish. One of
the girls, I forget which, was reported to be lame, but the next morning the
limp had disappeared. E. concluded that the chicken may have ingested a little
too much fermented apple, which she found on the ground. This is just a little
ironic because E. works for an association of cider makers. Imagine the Daily
Mail headline, “Heartbreak Cider Chief Drunk Chicken Incident.”
This morning one of the girls is imitating a rooster again. That
transgendering trend has reached our peaceable kingdom. When jet lag wears off
I’ll go have a word.
Hamish did a little acting out of his own, chewing his bed to bits and then
attacking someone's shoe. When contacted, I suggested buying more frozen bones
from Winco, which seemed to do the trick. He’s now not only mastered fetch;
he’s graduated to the big chucky-stick and speeds around the grass retrieving
tennis balls. He’s also begun to herd other dogs.
What surprised me in the Prado? How small Goya’s disasters of war prints are.
One nineteenth century painting with runny/drippy paint at the bottom—fully a
hundred years before that became a move. A second version of the Mona Lisa
(the inscription said it was painted by one of Leonardo’s pupils). A painting
depicting Joanna the Mad mourning Phillip the Fair. It won a prize.
Practically everything else, including Guernica—which, something I learned
after paying the entrance fee, is not actually in the Prado-- failed to engage.
Art has to be very good indeed to get under your skin when it’s a hundred
degrees outside and everyone and his mother has taken shelter in museums. I
can imagine a world in which people stand before “Guernica” and all go weak at
the knees, but that’s not how we live. In our world people jostle for
position, stand in one another’s way, take photos, tell each other something
they heard on a headset, move on. I decided the answer might be take myself
out of everyone’s line of sight, to sit on the travertine floor at the front of
the crowd and gaze upward for as long as I liked Picasso’s huge painting. A
lady guard went off like the robot in, “Lost in Space” or the klaxon on a
submarine. She pointed her finger up, possibly towards God, possibly towards
Senior Management. Art’s keepers recoil at the idea of transgressive behavior
and I suppose this is right. The keepers are there to prevent mad folk from
attacking what humanity hopes to preserve. But if anyone wants to organize a
sit-in, I’ll join. Docents leading children do it and few thunderbolts from on
high seem to result.
We saw a whole show of Bosch in these crowded circumstances. That man had a
way with small brushes but he was a bit of a curmudgeon. I doubt he would
approve sitting on floors. Actually I doubt he approved of anything that
prevented people going to heaven, where everyone could crowd a big white space
and gaze awfully... until guards instructed them to move into the next gallery.
Did you know the Portuguese were in the First World War? This fact had escaped
my attention. The Gulbenkian museum has sketches of three Portuguese soldiers
staring at the enemy, with their heads high about the trench parapet. My
thought was that in those times this was what was technically known as a “bad
idea." The blurb explained that the Portuguese came into the war about the
same time as the Americans, and suffered a major defeat. That’s where the
description ended. Nothing about what happened next about their part in the
final victory.
In the window of a bookstore I spied a small statue that I thought I needed to
explain to myself. The proprietor handed it over. It was bronze, very heavy,
and depicted a French soldier being killed as he stumbled into the attack.
These were hot items in 1918. I wondered if Portuguese soldiers wore French
helmets. How else to explain the statue’s presence in Lisbon? But no.
Portuguese soldiers wore British helmets, Brodie tin hats.
At the British Museum they had a room which displayed things in the manner of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, all jumbled up by our
standards. I loved it. I also loved finally getting to see the Sutton Hoo
horde, which included this helmet.
I gave a talk about helmets at a conference on the History of Technology. The
subsection was on the social and cultural history of weapons. I learned that
American developed a weapon called the Davy Crockett. An expert explained that
among the (slight) problems with this weapon were two drawbacks—it meant that
you had soldiers wandering the battlefield with the potential to make decisions
about when to use nuclear devices and secondly…the blast zone tended to include
the weapon’s user.
Sometimes giving a talk at a conference is fun; other times you ask yourself,
“why did I bother?” My own talk landed in the first category. People came up
afterwards to ask, essentially, “Why have I not heard of you?” This is a hard
question to answer. Because I’m not Cristiano Ronaldo?
Good wishes,
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
