For Nick—
if the reader finds this post a tad arcane, just wait till you see his WAM anagrams…
Further to my little Lisbon jaunt, I’m always disappointed at my total lack of success when I try to busk it in Spanish by randomly adapting Italian—but it’s even more futile to further modify my crap Spanish into bacalhau (sorry, I mean cod) [1] Portuguese.
I soon dispensed with my old Portuguese phrase book (less entertaining, and less sinister, than Teach yourself Japanese)—its very opening phrase suggests a similar deep anxiety about even setting foot outside our own green and pleasant land:
There’s been an accident.
I flew TAP (Take a Parachute). Indeed, the flight prefix is further abbreviated by omitting the middle letter, so not for the only time, I found myself flying TP (Totally Pissed).
Aboard TAP flights, with impressive urbanity in the vein of Mots d’heures, the airline regales the traveller with a pithy and somewhat obscure epigram evoking the saudade of fado. It seems to recall a sad incident in the colourful past of an early Lisbon femme fatale, perhaps a widow of French patrician stock (even a refugee from the guillotine?):
Colete Salva-Vidas sob a Cadeira [2]
I’ve added capitals for clarity, but in order to preserve the ambiguity of the original I have refrained from supplying what seems to be a missing apostrophe—indeed, could it even be an exhortation?
Either way, it is far more evocative in Portuguese than in its prosaic English rendition
Life jacket under the seat.
Cf. Airplane:
Airplane is packed with little visual detail like that, requiring as much long-term revisiting as the Ring Cycle. Even the opening sequence is a too, er, deaf ‘orse.
And I’m keen to dally with Mme [sic] Salva-Vida’s [just as sic] enticing daughters
Rolagem, Descolagem, and (black sheep of the family) Aterragem,
also commemorated in TAP’s onboard annotations. Again, their names are so much less elegant in English:
Taxi, Takeoff, and Landing.
For a new addition to the family, Proxima Paragem, see here.
Just had one of those wacky dreams:
In Lisbon, invited implausibly to some suspiciously traditional social event with an old friend, we make our tortuous way there by means of a badly bombed Escher staircase. Arriving unscathed, I mingle suavely with the locals. Pleased with myself for managing to utter a grammatically convincing phase, I exclaim “Progresso!” “Si,” my Portuguese friend nods, “Esta Truro.”
How pitilessly my subconscious satirises my naïve aspirations to insider status.
For another dream, and a Portuguese limerick, see Ogonek and Til.
[1] Altogether Now: The Piece of Cod Which Passeth All Understanding.
[2] Cadeira: twinned with Madeira.
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