January is almost over

Good, because it sucks

January - Lucy Pepper

January rather drags me down, hence why I haven’t really surfaced for most of this stupid month.

I did buy an extra table for my office, so my huge desk is now only my painting desk, and the new smaller one is only for my computer and assorted accoutrements. No more having to shove my digital stuff out of the way so I can paint, and no more shoving my paint away so I can digital. This has helped the doldrums a little.

But January always sucks. It’s not the weather. This month has seen about 87 named storms pass over us. It used to be just “January is really wet and windy this year”. Simpler and no unnecessary names. A friend texted me the other day. “I was passing, but I didn’t knock, Ingrid was being difficult”. Who the fuck is Ingrid? Stupid storm names. I love all weather, or rather, I love that weather changes all the time. Last week I was a raging green ball of envy. There was snow in the northern half of the country, and I love me a bit of snow. Last time I remember it snowing on the Margem Sul was about 20 years ago. I propped the girls up at the window. “Look!! it’s SNOWING!!!”. They were underwhelmed, as I had introduced them to their first snow as sentient toddlers in Devon the previous Christmas and they found it unimpressive, because it wasn’t room temperature candy floss, but just really cold, unpleasant and flavourless stuff full of grit.

January sucks because after finishing all the marathons of work by the end of the previous year, everyone in my various industries seems to sleep for the whole of January, and I get the unpleasant sensation that no work will ever come my way ever again and that this is THE END. This hasn’t happened yet, but the ghoul that is AI may make that come to pass one of these days, so I really do have to arm myself in preparation. It is already having an effect on how work gets to me and my colleagues. We’re already seeing people trying to do it themselves with AI tools. Where they used to come to us to get actual professional humans who know stuff and create stuff, fine tuning products until they were exactly what the client wanted, they’re now using AI to make un-finetunable things with six fingers and no way to ease a keyframe, but hey, it’s cheaper for them, and the audience doesn’t give a fuck about what they’re looking at, anyway.

So I’m starting a cult. That seems like a good way of earning money.

Not sure of the deets yet, but there will be absolutely no camping in the woods, not even in luxury yurts. There will be no uniforms, no flowy dresses (unless you want to wear one), no flowers in anyone’s hair (ditto), and definitely no sexy time with the cult leader (that’s me).

There will be no finding yourself “finding yourself”, no ayahuasca, no purging, no enemas, no dieting, no “clean eating”, no witchcraft, no made up spiritual nonsense, no chanting. There will be no circles of trust, study groups or seminars. Most importantly, there will be no Kool Aid at the end, ain’t no aliens or spirits coming to get us.

At the moment, all I know is that there will be a lot of pencils, paint and paper, and three meals a day with vegetarian and vegan options, and great wifi. It’ll be dead good.

Stay tuned.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what I write in here.

When I started writing over 20 years ago, my blog had one theme: taking the mickey out of Portugal to deal with my immense culture shock (for the first 5 years, I lived in a village, the only foreigner I knew, and complicated¹ people around me). Since then, I really haven’t had a single theme. I write and draw about almost anything, although, these days, it’s not the issues. For my “online presence” (barf) I write, draw, paint, and animate whatever I feel like in the moment, whatever amuses me. Sadly, that doesn’t really work for the world we live in. People like knowing what they’re getting next, and not even I know what I’m doing next. This hasn’t been a great help in my career, nor my being followed by millions on the internet, because of the people liking knowing what they’re getting ad nauseam thing. However, there’s nothing I can do about that, because that’s how I function so yah boo sucks to being an international phenom. I still think I’m doing ok.

I admire people who take a topic or a thread and make that their thing, delving into the depths of a subject for years on end. I’m far too much of a flibbertigibbet for that.

One of my many themes, though, is still Portugal. I write about it because it’s my home of almost 27 years, that’s pretty much half of my life. There’s no other place I can write about. Apart from my one or two visits back to the UK each year, I am nowhere else. So, when I write about my life in Portugal, it’s really just writing about my life and my home, the good bits and the bad bits.

I have become wary of doing it.

For most of my time writing blogs, books, and newspaper chronicles, Portugal was on nobody’s list and I used to rail against the world’s lack of interest in it. Then the tourism boom happened, and then the digital nomad boom and the immigration boom, and things changed, and the world still isn’t really interested in Portugal or the Portuguese, unless it involves the “great” weather or custard and how many clicks it can generate, but it is now on the map.

The other day we were clicking around Netflix or Prime or something, and came across a film called “A Pinch of Portugal”. Oh lord, I thought, what hellscape is this? My fears weren’t allayed when the “Hallmark Films” ident appeared. At least it was going to be a risible hellscape.

AND YES IT WAS. It was quite something. I’m not going to give you a synopsis because it was a Hallmark Film, i.e. really fucking inane, but I am going to tell you that the opening river shot of Lisbon, was actually Porto (I know because by the city, the Tejo is between 2km and 6 km wide, the Douro about 250m), and a fishmonger in a market had a plate of fresh oysters to give the woman who was there to do something something and then she danced in the streets of Cascais, in not-a-musical, because that’s what the young Portuguese people do, and the cherry on the top, a scene in which she is given a carcaça (bread roll - air on the inside, leather on the outside) to eat, which, after nasty plastic sliced bread, is the worst of bread, often with the sweet aroma of chemicals. She tore it in two and sniffed it and said, dreamily, “oh, and your bread is AMAZING!” We didn’t stop laughing for five minutes.

I wondered if it’s this kind of thing that some people are seeing before moving to Portugal, having never set foot here before, because those people exist, and they are mental. I know, because facebook keeps serving them up to me. What did I ever do to you, facebook?

Today, I feel that whenever I write about Portugal, it is taken either as an advertorial when I write something nice, helping the apparently lucrative trade in enticing more people who’ve never even been here to move here, or, when I write something not nice, I get passed around facebook expat forums to rile people up, because I’m not describing THEIR Portugal, when I’ve been here for half my life, and they came on a fact finding trip for a fortnight. I find it all quite odd and a little disconcerting, so different to how it used to be (I’ve always annoyed people, but this is new territory, and it’s bugging me), and I’m not really sure what to do about it.

I don’t want to stop writing about stuff that happens to me in the country where I live, where my children are from, where I work, where my other half, who does mad shit that I have to tell you about, is from, where 95% of my friends and colleagues are from, and where I will die, i.e. my life, but maybe I should, and just tell you which pencils I use.

If you have any thoughts… (this is me being momentarily vulnerable)

Anyway, kumbaya and out. Details on the cult coming soon! Join me!

1. Complicated, or rather complicado, the most overused euphemism in Portuguese for everything from a bit crap to fucking hell, a tsunami!