I recently caused some controversy on my Facebook page when I stated that I was sitting in my room freezing with no glass in the window while working on the mother of all translations. But I stand by my assertion - I have never been so uncomfortably cold as I have in Brazil . Now, in terms of absolute temperatures, of course Brazil is not the coldest place I have been, by several packs of frozen produce. Demure debutantes have been known to swoon when gathered around my piano on hearing my tale of when I got off a superheated Soviet train in Moscow one February in the late eighties in a T-shirt, drowsily aware of a bit of a nip in the air, only for the platform display to reveal an ambient temperature hovering around a bracing -20ºC . Here, we rarely get below 10ºC, but with everything geared towards bermuda shorts, sandals and little shame, the stone floors, lack of insulation, tropical humidity and, in our case, shoddy glazing practices all lead me to recall stories of my shirtless ...
Wistful reflections, petty glories.