One Year Here.

So, yes, we have now been in Brazil for a year. This weekend we commemorated the anniversary by welcoming a bunch of new teachers (so young, so innocent, so drunk) and wasting a day and then a very late night in a churrascaria and a bar.

What have I learned in that time? Well, I can say what I haven't learned: I haven't learned that more than two caipirinhas in an evening and I talk the most abominable shit, I haven't learned that eating my body weight in picanha makes me hate myself and I haven't learned to avoid ordering desserts which sound awful and look like a caramelised penis breaching a choux-pastry volcano.

Perhaps most annoyingly of all, I still haven't learned Portuguese well enough to prevent me from making a dick of myself in public. For example, I was recently trying to change the battery in my old back-up watch, a twenty quid Swatch which I bought from the stall at King's Cross (IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING), having recently lost my beloved, emotionally significant, thirtieth-birthday present watch doing handstands in the sea near Ubatuba. Like a grown-up.

This is what the beach looked like. 

And in the next image you can see what the watch looked like immediately before it escaped my wrist and set off for a life of adventure on the high seas. If you look closely you can see by my gormless expression and the way my body is pointing out to sea like a basset hound after a quail that I was already preparing myself psychologically for the impending loss. Good bye, watch, I am saying, thank you for the memories. 

Where is it now, I wonder? Whose wrist, if any, does it adorn? Does it comprise one-eighth of the accessories upon the arms of a fashion-conscious octopus? If so, Mr Octopus, you are no longer welcome at my birthday party. Anyway, I have written a poem about this loss, which is here. It is terribly moving. 

But I digress. I was talking about changing my watch battery, wasn't I? Well, in order to do this, I had to go back to the watch shop where I recently got a broken pin in the strap of my beautiful, now lost watch replaced. The chap at the watch repair shop remembered me from my previous visit and we discussed my horological bereavement. I then showed him my back-up watch and observed, bemused, as he gazed upon my Swatch as 'twere some precious gem. His wife joined him and they both smiled at it appreciatively. I can understand why they were behaving like that, though. You see, import duties on electronic and consumer items are 100% here in Brazil, so many foreign manufacturers simply don't bother selling stuff here. As such my old watch was a relative rarity to them. 

But not to me. Perhaps because I was still smarting over the loss of my special watch, I felt compelled to explain that really this watch wasn't all that much, especially not when compared to my old one, now buried in the bosom of the ocean deep. So I pointed at the Swatch and I said, 'Mas, este não e carro'. Which translated, I thought, as, 'but this is not expensive.'

Except the word for expensive is 'caro,' pronounced with a hard 'r' not a soft one. 'Carro,' pronounced phonetically as "ka'ho" means car.

So I was pointing at the watch and saying, well, let's be honest, shouting, 'But that's not a car.' The kindly watchmaker and his wife looked at me, polite, puzzled. 'That's not a car,' I insisted. 'Don't you understand? THAT'S NOT A CAR!'  

Jesus Christ. Was that actually the punchline? To the longest shaggy-dog story ever? Oh, lord, navigate away, quickly. Don't stay to watch! Don't see my mortification!*

* On a serious note, I have learned something this past year. I've learned that Sunday mornings are far more beautiful than the blurry swirl of lights and drunken shouting on Saturday nights; Sunday mornings are when the streets fall empty and silent and the sun reflects gold and blue off the high-rises into shady corners and you can walk out to the bakery and a café and listen to the chime of Sunday bells as you dip between the covers of your novel. Nice.

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[Jonny Legender]

If you're going to lose a watch, lose it doing a handstand in the sea near Ubatuba.