In Bica, we stumbled into a tiny whole-food shop and cafe, A Vizinha, still open at 10pm on a Thursday night. A few chairs and tables were assembled at the front of the store, where little groups sat chatting over bottles of wine. We mooched in and ordered small beers, unfolding local freesheets and collapsing onto a little sofa which looked out over our fellow drinkers. The mood could not have been more inviting or welcoming, yet everyone talked quietly, undemonstratively, drinking slowly, taking their time. It was as intimate as any English pub and at the same time utterly different. We sat with our drinks, with the walls lined with tins of sardine pâté, gluten free pasta and tofu. It being only 10.30, no-one was really out yet, so our drink was peaceful and quick – it was perhaps the gentlest, most comfortable thirty minutes of our week away.

There are a million lovely places in Lisbon, so recommending one over another is almost counter-productive; but if you’re in Lisbon and fancy a sit-down, this place is lovely.

A Vizinha, Rua da Bica de Duarte Belo, nº14, Lisbon, Portugal

A good writer can rarely go wrong with a campus novel, and that’s exactly how ‘The Marriage Plot’ starts out; we observe three young undergraduates who seem to immerse themselves in pretty much the typical university experience, with the exception that their thirst for knowledge (and limitless appetite for semiotics) felt a little romanticised (or perhaps Eugenides really was that boring at university). The Barthes quotes aside, it’s a familiar story; the vacillating relationship between 3 people; the naive, romantic lead (Madeleine Hanna), the brilliant hunk (Leonard Bankhead) and the introverted, love-struck friend (Mitchell Grammaticus).

The novel really takes off, however, when the three graduate and begin to negotiate those notoriously horrible post-university years. It’s a trite and oft-repeated observation that people go to university to ‘find themselves’, but the reverse, is true – university is what one does while putting the revelations off. It’s when you’re out, directionless and removed, that the real self-discovery takes place, and so it is for our uncertain, tentative leads. Leonard is forced to face his severe depression; Mitchell his spiritual yearning. And Madeleine slowly learns to define herself as her own person – as a Victorianist (this is a novel studded with literary references) and as a woman. It’s well observed stuff, and Leonard’s manic depression feels extraordinarily well described.

It’s not without its flaws; Madeleine’s literary heroines were so remarkable not because of the ingenious ways in which they resolved their own marriage plots, but because they drew marvellously detailed, revelatory portraits of their young leads. We never quite get to know Madeleine, and Mitchell’s travels are largely fruitless. Perhaps this is deliberate; Eugenides seems to contend that the modern marriage – and perhaps the modern life – can never mean as much when all is no longer at stake; and so there is drifting, irony and indecisiveness where in Austen there is purpose, razor sharp satire and principle. Mistakes are still painful, but perhaps less decisive.

None of that prevents ‘The Marriage Plot’ from being a great coming of age novel, and very readable indeed. Eugenides employs a largely conventional style, with the exception of a few judicious liberties with the timeline, and he knows how to drive the reader forward. I was, personally, just a little disappointed with the ending, despite it making sense in a literary context. Nevertheless, it was a great read, and had one glorious side effect for which I thank it – it made me want to go back to a few literary classics I’d not really considered re-reading (including some stuff I hated at the time). I won’t be reaching for Roland Barthes any time soon, but love of literature bleeds from the pages of this excellent book, and I feel a bit infected.

I’m no expert, of course, but given how much time I spend in second hand bookshops, and given that I probably buy and read more novels by women with old-fashioned names that I do by anyone else, I was a bit surprised that when an obituary appeared recently in The Guardian for an English, 20th century female novelist who achieved a little aclaim for her short, experimental novels (but little lasting fame), the name didn’t ring any bells. The author was Christine Brooke-Rose, who died late in March at the age of 88. The Guardian described her as ‘marvellously playful and difficult’; Stuart Jeffries goes on…

Britain has all but airbrushed one of its most radical exponents of experimental fiction… Many critics hailed her fiction, for all that it was sometimes scarcely comprehensible or pleasurable to those ignorant of the underpinning theory. Ellen G Friedman put Brooke-Rose among those 20th-century experimental female writers – Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein – whose novels “explode the fixed architecture of the master narrative”. Brooke-Rose wrote 16 novels, five collections of criticism and several collections of short stories and poems. Frank Kermode considered that her originality and skills deserved “a greater measure of admiration and respect than we have so far chosen to accord them”.

Well – difficult novels are often a total chore, but her stuff sounds really interesting. I’m just about to start reading her breakthrough novel, ‘Out’ which is ‘narrated by a white character facing racial discrimination in the aftermath of a nuclear war, with pale skin now indicating radiation poisoning and dark skin health’. Will report back.

We stumbled in late on Thursday afternoon and I immediately began planning purchases, fingering my much-diminished envelope of euros. I’ve yet to to tire of discovering record shops; their importance to me throughout my life has been such a reassuring constant that I quickly feel at home whenever there are records to leaf through – writing this I can hear the dull thud of cardboard sleeves thudding against each other as I browse, or the light click-clack of plastic hitting plastic as I flick through shelves of CDs. Posters on the wall, free magazines on the sides, and the high counter, usually pock-marked with stickers. Louie Louie fits exactly into my mental vision of what a record shop represents, and as such I recommend it highly, should you get the chance to go.

(For more esoteric and expermintal music, try MateriaPrima, on Rua Da Rosa, or for a picturesque and old-fashioned traditional fado store in the Baixa, try Discoteca Amália on Rua Áurea – both of which I’ll blog about presently).

Louie Louie, Chiado, Lisbon

Louie Louie
Rua Nova da Trindade – 8-A (ao Chiado)
Lisbon, Lisbon Portugal
1200-302

Happily, we’d already been tipped off that a visit to the nearby Pasteleria Chique de Belém would be just as fruitful – the Pastel de Nata they sell are not served in such picturesque surroundings, but they’re every bit as fresh and had a determinedly sugar-agnostic diner like me marvelling over the complimentary textures; the warm, sweet custard filling and the incredibly light, flaky crust. Really amazing – if you get the chance to visit Belém, be advised that you’d be stupid not to try some. (Not being me, of course, with my quaint reluctance to eat chocolate, cake, pastries or ice-cream, not trying a Pastel de Nata in the town that invented them, would probably never occur to you. Anyway.)

Pasteleria Chique de Belém, Rua Junqueira 524, Belém. (Right by the Belém tram stop – get the 15 Tram from central Libson)

Oddly, he chooses to focus, again, on Damon’s flirtation with hard drugs in the late 1990s, which is neither newsworthy nor terribly interesting, but perhaps instructive when viewed not as a historical detail but rather as the starting point from which Damon embarked on a long period of un-selfconscious musical discovery. Rightly, Harris notes that Albarn, who was raised in a hippy household – always a bead-wearer despite the Essex branding – follows in a tradition of sorts which is “common to a lot of musicians from bohemian backgrounds”. Harris writes.

For all its grave dangers, that drug – perhaps in moderation, if such a thing is possible – sometimes opens up a side of them that they didn’t know existed.

Albarn certainly has little interest in talking up the mind-altering effects of drugs (he prefers the rigours of the 9-5, albeit with the help of an “early morning joint”), so the interview doesn’t dwell. I’m even less interested (in fact, utterly uninterested) in drugs – but I’d gladly hear more about either John Harris or Damon Albarn’s thoughts of un-selfconscious music-making, because it strikes me that that’s exactly what Damon has spent the last 13 years doing – making free, largely unedited rock music with a meandering but always curious emotional and spiritual urgency.

Full interview is here.

I was watching the game on my secondary monitor while I was using my computer on Saturday afternoon; my attention was only half on it, and I had the volume down as I was listening to an old Showbiz and A.G LP. I half saw Muamba collapse, but didn’t make anything much of it until I glanced back and saw that he was face down, with his arms folded underneath him. Only moments later I saw the obvious distress of the players near him, and moments later the fans themselves, who seemed incredibly quickly to ascertain the seriousness of the situation – unsurprisingly given that Muamba was by this time receiving CPR.

Well, I won’t milk it by describing the whole thing, but suffice it to say that in not far off 30 years of watching football games, it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I’m so glad and relieved that his recovery appears to be in progress. Like almost everyone I’ve spoken to, I feared the worst and found that prospect difficult to contemplate.

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When I was about ten or eleven I used to go and watch Barnet FC play every week at the Underhill Stadium behind High Barnet station. In those days a child ticket cost £1.75 and the Bees were on the verge of promotion to the Football League. One week me and my friend Anthony stood by the advertising hoardings at the corner flag at the far end of the pitch. Two players (my memory tells me that Barnet player was Geoff Cooper, but I might be wrong) hurtled towards the flag in pursuit of a loose ball. The pitch was wet and as the opposition player slid in, he went hurtling off the pitch and hit the hoardings hard, right where we stood. We heard a bang and a crack, and him scream. Geoff Cooper, or whichever Barnet player it was, went white.

As we leant forward to crane our necks over the hoardings and see what sort of state the player’s leg was in, the Barnet player turned to us and, very firmly, said ‘Don’t look, boys’.

We turned around and didn’t look again until the player had been removed on a stretcher. I hope he played again.