All down to perspective

Weird weather day. Looking inland was like this...


...but if you turned towards the sea this was the view.











My fun with subtitles continues. I went to see The Sentinel: there's lots of Secret Service talk about the bad guys' position being "at 3 o'clock, 7 o'clock" etc. At one point Keifer Sutherland is about to burst in to a stairwell, and he tells whassername from Desperate Housewives that the villain is at "11.30 o'clock". Now that's precise!

A plague upon this howling!

Curled up sipping coffee after a night of raging wind storminess. Apparently there were 80km gales, which would explain the Tempest-like quality to the early hours of this morning.

It's lucky I wasn't writing about a Sumerian wind demon, cos that might have been kinda creepy.

Oh wait now...

Afternoon naps rule

I have a CD of yoga from the Om Centre in New York, which ends:

This last yoga pose is not a nap, but a meditative relaxation period.

That's right, you just keep telling yourself that sweetie :)

Creativity plummets as post arrives

Oodles of cryptic crosswords arrived this morning - a treat from Dublin. I adore the Crosaire from the Irish Times.

So I've abandoned writing, and am sitting out on the terrace trying to think laterally. Let's face it, if you had the choice between writing a story populated by a depressive and a Sumerian demon, or doing a crossword designed by 'Guy with brain the size of planet', you'd go for option B.

The sun is creeping across the terrace; in about 45 minutes it'll hit the spot that marks 'beer time'.

Happy happy happy!

Media frenzy

The K Club has taken over BBC World. Every time I turn on the tv there's a special on the club, the course, the double dogleg on the 4th hole (Arnold's favourite). They interview golfers, the club pro, Bertie, random hikers who are just lost in Kildare... what happened to the world news?

I shall go back to relying on The Onion as my new source.

May God help us all.

Fish out of water, and in, and out, and in...

I got some goldfish yesterday. Now, the important thing to bear in mind is that they're still alive.

It may be true that I flaunted every rule for settling in fish; there may have been a couple of deluges in the kitchen; and it's possible that the fish have been taken out of their bowl more times than is entirely healthy.

However, they're settling in now. They like to play in the filter bubbles - which is coincidentally what I do with divers' air bubbles when I'm snorkelling. You position yourself above the divers, and you get this fantastic stream of bubbles; it's like being in a glass of champagne.

Anyhoo, they're ensconced in the kitchen happily pootling around to Athlete. All is well with the world :)

Handle with care

It was stormy here yesterday, which brought to mind a half-remembered poem: a blonde comes in from the rain, lights a fire, and well, there's a surprise ending.

It was driving me nuts, so I went online to hunt it down. It occurs to me that we need to take more care with poetry online. I guess I'm a bit pernickety anyway (why would anyone put Keats in Times New Roman) but shoving a frame of 'sponsored links' into the middle of a poem is just criminal.

Anyway, I found it: Porphyria's Lover, by Browning. It's kinda depraved, but with gusto!

Lost in translation

Portuguese subtitles are good fun.

Numbers are often wrong, which is not much of a problem if it's a phone number in The Sopranos. However, in Malcolm in the Middle the parents were saying that Francis moved 3000 miles to be far from them - the subtitles read that he relocated '5 km' away. Not quite the same effect.

You know in Jaws when they catch sight of the shark and say "20 feet, if it's an inch... 25 feet. And three tonnes of him there". Here Richard Dreyfuss is all scared that the shark is 3 metres long - now, you'd hardly need a bigger boat for that little guppy.

Madeirans must think we're sissies.

Titles of songs have a tendency to go astray as well. Here Nelly Furtado sings 'Manheater', but my favourite is Bananarama's 'Look at the Hoor'.

Then again, maybe someone in Translation Land knows exactly what they're doing...

Absolutely fabulous

Well, it's been a simply heavenly day.

I'm very pleased indeed to say that I finished the latte art short story.

And you know what the prize is for finishing a story...

Seascape

Pretty patterns on the sea today.

It's forever changing colour and texture. Sometimes it seems to be made of ice; other times it doesn't even look like water, more like a wasteland, or a land covered in snow.

I can only imagine the photos that Yann Arthus Bertrand
would take of this place.

Some art with your caffeine?

A guy came to read the water metre today. Sending someone to take readings and issue water bills by hand is just pointless if the bills are only for 2 euro. The water board would be better off setting up donation boxes at regular intervals.


In other news, I'm on to the next story, which is set in a coffee house. My eyes were opened to the world of latte art today - who knew! Man I used to be happy just getting chocolate sprinkles...

Less is Mor(ales)

So I made my peace with the short story, poisoned pope and all. Sometimes, an album fits really well with the atmosphere of a piece, and I end up listening to it whenever I'm writing. With this story, it was an album of early 16th-century sacred music by Cristobal de Morales and Jean Mouton.

There's only so many times you can listen to it in a week without losing your mind.

So today was a Morales-free zone. I revelled in a bunch of different stuff, then investigated what corresponding videos were available online: Counting Crows, Talib Kweli & Mary J., Faith No More, Sugar, Hootie, Hothouse Flowers, and this beautifully-filmed video from Blackstar, with the sweetest melody...

If you knew you were going to sit beside Elvis Costello and play his signature song, you'd learn the lyrics right??? I feel such relief as Elvis takes over the song! Oh Billie Joe...

Perfect pet found for HR Giger's Alien...

Went snorkelling today: the idea was to fin over to the Cristo Rei statue, but the sea was a smidge choppy. I tend to gauge risks by what I imagine my mother would say if I died under those circumstances. Today imaginary-mom was quite scathing:

And are you telling me that she kept swimming farther out with the sea that rough? Idiot. [Stubs out cigarette harshly]. Well, I'm not saying anything.

So I turned back and started my battle against the current. It was very slow going, which gave me ample time to consider scabbard fish. Apart from being a local delicacy, they're one of those fish that live way down under immense pressure. Apparently their entrails are spat out when they're being reeled in because the decompression is too much. Charming...

But my point is, on my slow heaving paddle back along the coast, I was particularly grateful for the knowledge that no scabbards could be tootling around at my level!

So good they named it twice

So apparently it was on this day in 1664 that the Dutch surrendered New Amsterdam, which was then renamed New York.

I've been working away on that short story I was 'practically finished' a week ago. Spent much of yesterday trying to find a suitable pope who had died of poisoning. It's fair to say I was off on something of a tangent.

Anyway, nearly there now, for real.

Have a lovely weekend :)

Anchorless

There are days here where you can't tell which way is up.

The horizon blurs, and there's no longer any boundary between sea and sky.

And when the horizon disappears (in Bagpuss fashion), so too does all sense of distance and space. Perspectiveless, you're left with a floaty feeling to the day which is quite surreal.

And not altogether unpleasant!

Burnin' Down the House

Yesterday some Captain Clever decided to torch a nearby field. It was probably the owner of the field preparing for the foundations of another 10 zillion apartments to be laid, but it just trashed the neighbourhood. The air was filled with burning debris; like something from 'When the Wind Blows'. I can tell you, it was a race to close shutters and protect my precious Liberty bedlinen from the grey sooty bits.

My landlady went to scope out the fire last night (it burned all day & evening). She said the people whose homes were adjacent to the field were just terrified.

You'd think if you were planning such an extravaganza, someone would need to be informed at some point before you started the blaze. Well, them's the super-bendy-stretchy Madeiran version of EU regulations...

Neighbourhood back to normal today. And the dolphins are in, which is stunning.

Hands up!

The counter-espionage folks next door call my place 'the gallery'. That's fair; I kinda do have a bunch of art...

Anyhoo, they were in the other day looking at stuff. There's an embossing by Mike Tingle called 'Art is...', which has lots of people in different stances (art being different to each individual). The neighbours thought the stances looked like semaphore, albeit without flags.

So I went online to where the semaphore folk hang out, and lo and behold, the stances spell 'meaning'.

It certainly helps to have codebreakers next door!

Residency Permit

I tried again to apply for my residency permit this morning. A sweetheart of a guy went through the process with me: first he sent me off to get photos taken, while he started filling out the form. It was a regular photo booth, but members of the public aren’t allowed to operate it themselves: you go to reception, and from there they call an overseer who puts your money into the machine and presses the button for you. You know, just in case…

So I get back, and he’s just getting started on the form. He fills out by hand four pages of personal details, stamping, dating and initialling each page with different combinations of the four stamps on his desk.

When I said that I thought it was going pretty quickly, he said that this was the easy part. The long part was issuing the receipt.

And so it came to pass, the receipt was another form to be completed by hand, which duplicated all of the information already given. So, he writes it all out again and hands me the carbon copies of the form. As I’m about to go he says that the receipt is valid for three months - would I like it stamped? I said ‘Well if you have a stamp, I guess we should use it.’ He then produced a fifth stamp and happily stamped, dated and initialled each page, declaring, ‘This is Portugal, we have many stamps!’.

So the bureaucracy turned out to be fun after all :)

Busy busy busy

This weekend, the world mostly looked like this...

...or this.


In other news, I've decided that if Jamiroquai were a cartoon character, they'd be the blonde from Captain Caveman. Remember, she'd say 'zowie' and little sparkles would appear all around her. I feel she captures that cosmic quality of Jamiroquai's music nicely. Just a thought...

Orlaith in Getting-Stuff-Done Shocker

Yep, this week I am actually accomplishing things. I finished a short story and sent it off on Monday (thanks to my sister, who submitted it for me). And I'm almost finished drafting another short story. Frankly, I'm pretty stunned at myself.

If that doesn't call for a vodka martini, I don't know what does :)