-         Hey haven’t seen you in a while.

-         Well no I haven’t been around much really – you see it’s all due to the Apple Juice you know.

-         Apple Juice?! How exactly?

-         Well you remember this one episode about 6 months ago when I spilt it on my laptop.

-         Not really.

-         Oh well anyways, it kinda gave me some un-funny problems with my X key Caps Lock and stuff.

-         Nasty!!

-         Yeah t’was but it went away and everything was fine but then the problem resurfaced, with certain keys working sporadically or not at all, including the space bar, Enter, and half of the bottom line of letters, makes it a bit difficult to type anything really. Funny thing is it’d go away and then come back, bloody gremlins.

Hope that explains the absence, I did discover that the ‘missing keys’ would work if I held down the shift button, but with inherent problems. If I put caps lock then held down shift while I typed, it’d work ok, with the exception of punctuation. I’m sure you have probably realised (probably faster than I did) that this is all getting a bit complex and is a pretty frustrating way to use ones laptop. I just thought it might go away like the other problems did, maybe it will, but I’ve got a new keyboard now anyway.

For once I don’t really have a main theme to write about, which maybe a good thing, I think I was in danger of losing a few people with my recent posts. My Mum said she stopped reading the last one as she didn’t really understand it. So I’ll hold back my rant about marginalisation, isolation and ‘the matrix’ for a little while, but the irony of the fact that my reason not to write it, is the subject of the piece is not lost on me.

So what have I been up to? Well its party season in Portugal, which for me started back in May with a trip to Coimbra for the infamous ‘Queima das Fitas’ student party. Other than hearing about it I knew very little of the event, which was a pretty nice way to discover it. So we (I’d gone along with Evora and a bunch of student friends) arrived in Coimbra and headed up to the main square area where the festivities were already in progress. The first signs of the part that greeted us, other than the masses of people heading in the same direction was the dress of the students, formal black and white topped off with a brightly coloured top hat and matching cane (which resulted in one of the party naming it the Harry Potter party, but I thought it was more Alice in Wonderland).

So how does this thing work? I’d heard rumours about free alcohol, but was a little sceptical. So we wondered into the thick of it, to find a procession of float type things decorated in bright colours and manned by students in aforementioned attire. The floats were designed with a kind of service hatch down each side and people from the crowd would approach the float and be handed a beverage. One brave member of the group went up and managed to come back with a pretty disgusting Malibu and Orange combination - Success? Once we’d realised we could request the drink of our choice, it was a whole different ball game, especially as most of the floats came equipped with fridges. So the next couple of hours ran as follows, walk up to float request beer, follow float and serving person until beer is handed over, retreat to friends, drink cold beer in the sun, watching the spectacle continue, and repeat. But, why only a couple of hours? Well in truth it continued through the afternoon and early evening, but after a couple of hours I was getting hungry, I’d seen a few snacks flying around so tried my luck, asked at the next float and sure enough they produced sandwiches and crisps, at this point I was pretty convinced I was in heaven.

At around 9 (I think), we headed down towards the centre and congregated around another square, handily surrounded by cafes as it appeared the floats were all (finally) out of free booze, all good things…

I’d love to finish this story, but unfortunately my memory doesn’t allow me to accurately, but here’s what I remember. Hung around in the square til about midnight, realised I’d lost Evora and friends. Went to find them in a student bar in the old town, found them, drunk some strange cocktail type thing that seemed nice at the time. Left at some point, think I remember walking up a hill and some stairs in front of a church ‘for a bit of a lie down’. Laid under a tree for a bit of a rest (I’m still not entirely sure this happened, or if I imagined it).I decided to head to the bus station after waking up.  The station was closed, but already there was a queue of bodies forming, so I joined it. Evora and the gang turned up. They opened the back doors of the bus station (ie the ones that we weren’t queuing at). Mayhem ensued, we were still in the queue when they announced the first 3 buses had already been filled, the next was at 11am and it was only 7am. In the mean time I’d got talking to an English girl in the line who was also going back to Lisbon and decided she was gonna try the train station. I decided this was a good idea and jumped into a taxi with her. Turns out it was, within 10 minutes of arriving at the station we were on a train and heading back to Lisbon, just time for a bit of a nap I think, possibly my second, but who knows?