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AND SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS

Just back from the Christmas do at the school where I teach my last remaining English lesson of a Saturday morning. The pupils under my care sang a more or less recognisable Danny Boy (not strictly Christmas, but the only sheet music I had in English), then we sat outside in the sickly humid night chatting until the rain came and we had to pack away all the chairs and move the keyboard indoors.

I'm home now, alone apart from our Lhasa Apso, Shanti, who is lying beside me for a change, but only because I am the only other animate object in the vicinity. Show has gone to Campinas to fetch our niece, and pop-in-law is receiving an homenagem for being a founder member of the local Rotary Club. If there's one things Brazilians love, it's the homenagem - all echoey halls and people in suits that are either a size too big or a size too small for them.

Incidentally, Antarctica have just released a new beer that I've felt motivated to sup on, "Sub Zero", which, the can gushes, is "doubly filtered below 0ºC" - through a Russian miner's underpants by the taste of the sour froth. Another alcoholic equivalent of a car accident hits the Brazilian beer market. But, as my glassy-eyed compatriots used to mumble in the toilets of the Lord Nelson on Poole Quay, while Jimmy Pithe brought the house down with his inevitable rendition of Has Anybody Seen My Cock?, "Gets yer there, dunnit?" - wherever your there may be.

I still can't quite believe I was forty this week. Goes so quickly, seems like yesterday, blah, blah, blah, but it is uncharted territory. At least I've outlived Jim Morrison by thirteen years, by my calculations. Missed my family a lot this time, a couple of continents away. Mater turned seventy-five less than a month ago, another milestone I wish I could have celebrated in her company.

But that's the price we pay for the sickly humid nights drinking piss water, I guess.
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Comments

Gadjo Dilo said…
40 eh? Well done. But "until the rain came"?? - this is surely mid-summer now in Bras right now. And< the beer's shite.
13 December 2009 at 09:35
No Good Boyo said…
Happy belated birthday, sonny. Still you're not in your forties until next year, so cheer up.


Antarctica sounds like a very bad idea. I like my beer like my women - warm, brown and soapy.
13 December 2009 at 20:42
M C Ward said…
Thanks, chaps. The end of the day in summer normally includes a spectacular thunderstorm and subsequent power cut, and more rain than South Wales sees in a month.

Good to hear I'm not in my forties yet - another year will be psychologically priceless.
13 December 2009 at 21:44
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