Portugal: Week Two…

Day 8: The woman next-door neighbour and wife of Bigot Cop has a pair of binoculars. She stands in the doorway of her balcony and watches people on the beach. She does this a lot. I am convinced Binocular Lady also has our apartment bugged. Just to be on the safe side. In case anything interesting happens…

Day 9: I am about to embark on Stephen Smith’s Underground London, which as its title suggests is a book about what goes on beneath the feet of Londoners and which bits of the capital are hidden from view and form part of the buried history of the city.

Day 10: The missus is talking to Binocular Lady as our balconies are next to each other. It’s like listening to two chess grandmasters trying to outwit each other and see who can trick the most information from the other.
The missus is well in the lead by my reckoning because Binocular Lady has had to sacrifice big pieces of information (years married, number of kids, the fact her daughter is a major disappointment, etc) to kick the exchange off. But this seems to have worked as the missus is now countering with her own gems. Then I hear my wife say the following:
‘Of course, Paul’s my second marriage...’
So I am now part of the ongoing exchange of information. I am now part of the data being sacrificed in order for my wife to grasp more information. I am a commodity in conversational terms, a piece of linguistic meat. I feel cheapened.
Then I realise there was an ‘Of course’ in the sentence too. In other words it’s as if I am part of some ongoing collection, I may be number two but number three will be an even better improvement. The finished model, perhaps.
I spend the rest of the day preparing myself for the inevitable marital deletion…