First, Leon followers might remember this from an earlier email:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Leon has headed off on his own, back to London… He\u00b4s going to try and get things going in the theatre scene, and with a bit of effort and a pinch of
good luck I\u00b4m sure doors will start opening.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, he\u00b4s now working backstage on this thing Ken Branagh is directing. So. Now you know. (The show is called \u00b4The Play What I Wrote\u00b4, check out ——-<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, while Percy\u00b4s funeral was occurring back home I was wandering the streets of Barcelona alone. I was pretty tired from travelling, and I\u00b4d been in a bar with some new hostel friends, and then I just wandered a bit. And I ended up checking my email, and received a flood of messages from people who\u00b4ve been reading these emails. And it was actually a really important thing for me. So thanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ——<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, because email has been so bitsy and inconvenient and quite frankly I’ve had other things on my mind, I\u00b4ve given pretty scattershot coverage of the last several weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u00b4s a flashback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stayed in Lisbon until Thurs Oct 24. You\u00b4ll recall I wanted to see fado, but ended up eating pizza and watching a video with Lisbon native Tanya and hostel-friend Amund. Well, my local contact Rui decided he was going to do something about that, and two nights later he mustered his compadre Ricardo and they went to meet me at the hostel, as arranged by email the day before. So I\u00b4m just starting to drift off to sleep and there\u00b4s a knock and the door opens and the guy says there\u00b4s some people downstairs, and I jump out of bed and get dressed and run down, and along the way I realise what I\u00b4ve done \u00b4- lost track of what day was what. There was a rogue Munsday in there that threw out my calculations, I guess. (Munsday = that day of the week that either should exist or accidentally does.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, Rui and Ricardo are astonishingly gracious, and won\u00b4t even hear my The musicians took a break. Rui and Ricardo told me about the history and And all of this to Rui, Ricardo, myself, two other locals, and the bar staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Astonishing. I recall Tanya\u00b4s words from when I was asking her about her nation and culture – “we are a sad people”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ——-<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks Rui and Ricardo. And I better also point out that the only impression I\u00b4ve given of Tanya is \u00b4don\u00b4t waste your time with Fado, eat pizza instead\u00b4, which isn\u00b4t a very good picture. She was full of love for her country and full of insight about what was around us, and it was thanks to her that Ella and I made our way north from Lisbon to Geres, land of the giant slugs – but that\u00b4s another flashback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ——-<\/p>\n\n\n\n morgue<\/p>\n\n\n\n [waybackmachine link to original<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First, Leon followers might remember this from an earlier email: “Leon has headed off on his own, back to London… He\u00b4s going to try and get things going in the theatre scene, and with a bit of effort and a pinch ofgood luck I\u00b4m sure doors will start opening.” Well, he\u00b4s now working backstage on … Continue reading [morgueatlarge] Flashback to Lisbon<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[199],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morgueatlarge"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-21q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7777,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7776\/revisions\/7777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
http:\/\/www.theplaywhatiwrote.com\/<\/a>\u00a0for more info.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem, of course, was that I had completely screwed up what day I was doing what and had in fact crashed out in bed when he arrived. Rui and Ricardo sat in the bar for what must have been hours waiting for me and finally sent the guy at the desk up to knock on my dorm room door. Guys at hostel desks don\u00b4t normally do that kind of thing, but there you go.
(Actually, the guy at the Rome hostel kept running messages for me as well.
Maybe I\u00b4m a bad hostel guest.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
abject apologies and general feeling of foolishness, and we jump in
Ricardo\u00b4s car and head down to Alfama. Alfama is the real old town of
Lisbon, the part that survived the 1755 earthquake (hope my date is right
Rui). It\u00b4s a hillside crammed with tall and narrow lanes and tiny squares,
honeycombed with small bars and restaurants, full of atmosphere. We enter this little fado bar and order a beer each and sit. There\u00b4s hardly anyone in the place. Things get weirder when three of the clientele reveal
themselves to be the musicians and singer by ending their break and taking
the floor. And then they began. There were two guitarists, one playing a
conventional instrument and the other a portugeuse guitar, and the singer. He was an older man, immaculate in suit and tie, holding himself very straight, and he sang and they played and it was amazing. Throughout I was reminded of the flamenco singer I\u00b4d seen in Barcelona and his dishevelled
appearance, his movement, the wildness in his song. This couldn\u00b4t have been more different, and yet the same in so many ways, deep expressions of
profound sadness, heartwrenching emotion, laying out the truth of life. Rui
and Ricardo said that it was an example of the difference in character between the Portuguese and the Spanish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
importance of fado and soon the musicians returned, this time with a young man singing (yet another of the audience transformed into performer), his voice full and rich, technically brilliant, although perhaps his heart wasn’t old enough to have learned the sorrow of his colleague.<\/p>\n\n\n\n