Blocked up and blinkered

The Nice Cafe Lady comes up to me as I'm reading over breakfast and gives me a scare. I mean, she didn't mean to - I overreacted, let me make that clear.

It's a full-concentration, blinkered-to-the-rest-of-the-world thing: I sometimes get a shock when I notice movement (or someone standing beside me, waiting for me to notice them). It's actually more disconcerting for the other person, who tends to be perfectly relaxed until I jump out of my skin ("Jesus! I just wondered if you wanted a cuppa! You know I live in this house, right?"). I'm all for people wearing tinkley bells.

There were extenuating circumstances this morning: I was submerged in James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere. It was a bit about a corpse whose eyes had been gouged out, and the eye sockets had been... treated very badly indeed.

The Nice Cafe Lady only came over to commiserate with me for having a cold. The word for head-cold here is constipacao - it's one of those words worth learning early to avoid misunderstandings.