Now. Cold-ish for Pernambuco, and outside there is a view of the moon hanging blue and cold in a clear black sky, only of course it’s not really cold at all but a balmy enough for sitting in your pants and drinking a beer in the garden (though who would do such a thing?) 20-25 degrees. Anyway - who cares about any of that? Whether the weather be good and so on. What’s really got me thinking, and I don’t know why, is the memory of a small leaf blowing in the wind I wrote some time ago, based on a big trunk of a tree by Stephen King (yes, I know), about how a really great day was not necessarily a day of fireworks and birthday candles and splitting a can of Guarana with Thais Araujo, but simply an ordinary day in which the worth of being alive, and therefore life’s small kindnesses and blessings, are felt enough to be, um, felt. Anyway, the only thing to say about all of that is that probably I was quite wrong, because such days are good but not great, and to be really great, well, generally something terrible needs to happen.

No surprise to anyone that the thing that has brought me to such a conclusion is, of course, Santa Cruz Futebol Clube. Strange (and no doubt annoying to anyone reading) enough, this obsession – I am living in a very foreign country (not that it’s so foreign anymore, in fact it is more home than anywhere else on the planet, but it’s not where I was born and raised and so foreign it is) with no end of very foreign funniness to write about (like why in Brazil do men on long distance bus journeys not only recline heftily back in their seats, but also fling one arm up and over their heads, so draping a meaty forearm and fist down an inch or so in front of the face of the passenger behind?), and am involved in an adult (-ish) relationship, which in turn should provide no end of comedy and life lessons, and I have a dog, and even a small car, and and and… but, well, what can I say? Santa are Santa, all the good and bad and comedy and tragedy in the world rolled into one big happy angry mess, and I’ve hooked my dinghy to this particular trawler, and I’m in it for the long haul.

Last week, you see, as I mentioned, 6,000 tricolores and 30 or 40 odd players and directors and coaches and all the rest of it headed down the coast to Maceio for Santa’s debut amongst the horrors of Serie D. And what a day it was – a raucous bus journey down (plenty of hands flung behind heads, plenty of Pitu, plenty of heads stuck out windows as the convoy rolled through the small towns of southern Pernambuco and Alagoas), a few hours lolling on the pretty little beaches of Maceio, then off to the architecturally challenged Rei Pele stadium. Blue and white flags and smoke bombs going off on one side (CSA, the hapless opposition), red black and white on the other (the glorious Tricolor). Your bog-standard jaw-dropping afternoon in the nordeste – a blue and burnished gold sky, a few cotton-candy clouds idling overhead, a pink and orange glow somewhere along the horizon as the sun brushed its teeth and prepared to bed down for the night. A plot had been hatched between long-term allies and chums CSA’s Mancha Azul and Santa’s Inferno Coral, some of whom, contrary to media headlines and other blog writers who should know better, eat with knives and forks and have learnt to use telephones and email and have conversations and organise things other than rioting and banditry. The plot was simple enough – everyone was to listen to Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle over breakfast on the day of the game - and as a result buses throughout the city and the state would be full of love and acapella renditions of If You Could Only Stop Your Heartbeat For One Heartbeat instead of Inferno Ate Morrer and other more gruesome anthems. And so, thanks to Bill, the world became a glorious pizza topping of beatific smiles and handshakes and huggy wuggys with Santa fans wearing blue CSA shirts and vice-versa, and big Inferno flags over on the CSA side, and a giant Mancha Azul flag draped up behind the Santa goal, and in the second half a wonderful intermingling of supporters that should be the practice at every football game ever, apart from games where a team I like plays a team I don’t like, when such friendliness would dilute all the hatred and make things much too pleasant and American.

And I even remember thinking that Santa were sure to lose, because things just don’t generally work out this way, in fact things are usually rubbish and nothing much that you really look forward to is ever as good as you thought it was going to be. All true enough, except this time things did work out as planned, and Santa caroused and jigged and pranced like drunken ponies and generally had their wicked way with CSA throughout the smoky glistening afternoon, and the galaticos – Juninho, Thiago Laranjeiras, Marco Mendes and Alexandre Oliveira on this peachy day – waved up at the Inferno hordes and jumped on each others` backs three times – which meant it finished 3-0 Santa.

And so on the way back to the bus I said to someone – what a perfect day, knowing, thanks to Mr X, that it couldn’t really end like this. Because Mr X has told me a hundred stories about going to watch football games in places far from home, and how it can seem like a good idea at the time, but how it never, ever, ever is. Mr X’s best story was from when he was living in Manchester, and he and five friends – Moggy, Spoggo, Flossy, Grips and Zesty, we might call them – headed three hours down the M6 in two cars for a Manchester City night game against a team Mr X can no longer remember. After the game Mr X (who was driving one of the cars) waited a long time for his friends. After 45 minutes he decided they must all have headed back up to Manchester in the other car. When Mr X was about an hour outside the city whose name he can no longer remember he idly glanced to his left. Then to his right. Then to his left again, this time with his mouth hanging slightly open, because there was the other car with Moggy, Zesty and Grips in it. And no Spoggo and Flossy. Mr X and the other car pulled onto the hard-shoulder. Mr X and Moggy resolved to go back to the city without a name to look for Spoggo and Flossy (no mobile phones in such sepia tinged days). Mr X and Moggy drove around the city in thick, crusty snow and thick, crusty fog for an hour and a half. Mr X and Moggy gave up and drove back to Manchester. On the outskirts of Manchester Mr X and Moggy were stopped by the police. The police found a cheerful crumb of an illicit substance in Moggy’s pocket. Mr X went to the police station with Moggy. Mr X waited five hours for Moggy to be released. Mr X got home at 7.00 am. Mr X called Spoggo and Flossy the next day. Flossy told him how he and Spoggo had hitched a ride from another, BMW driving, single malt whiskey proffering City fan, and had been tucked up in bed by midnight. Mr X felt very sad when he heard this news, sad for himself, sad for Moggy, sad for all God’s little creatures.

And while the trip back home from Maceio wasn’t quite as much fun as all that, it did involve being the sleeping-with-the-window-open victim of a Young Chap With A Country Moustache standing on the corner of Hicksville, Alagoas with too much time on his hands and too many eggs in his pockets (clue: kersplatt, jesus Ma, I´m hit!). The best comment on such mischievousness, apart from that it’s all part of life’s rich pageant and it doesn’t do to be getting too upset about it, is that at least Young Chap With A Country Moustache had enough sense to throw his eggs at our bus and not one of the Inferno buses, in which case Young Chap With A Country Moustache, Young Chap With A Country Moustache’s Home and Young Chap With A Country Moustache’s Small Village would have been razed to the ground in approximately 47.5 seconds.

And not just that – our wheezing bus began gagging and spluttering even more dramatically somewhere around Ipojuca, and soon gave up the ghost of Tricolor’s past on a small hill surrounded by creaking sugar cane and shattered trees with branches reaching up like some scary kind of skeleton fingers, which prompted one hitherto bullish young buck behind me to moan it’s like a frickin’ horror film out here. Horror film or not, nothing much to do but stand and wait to be robbed or saved, and after three hours in the darkness, and two or three menacing little groups of men on motorbikes out on a deserted country road at 3am driving very slowly and looking very hard at our bus, and one or two disinterested police drive-bys (it’s not safe out here, lads, you want to get yourselves home sharpish / why, thank you officer, we’ll certainly consider it), and lot more Pitu and some carefully rationed Clube Social crackers and a lot of jokes and rain and what not, though precious little complaining, Bus No.2 came rolling out from Recife and we were saved.

And the reason for the telling of all this is that, back on the road again sometime around 4am, knowing we were not far from home, with the rain pouring down in the blackness and the small crucifix and rosary beads of the driver knocking back and forth against the windscreen, and sleep making thoughts and body warm and heavy and slow, and the bus growing silent and drowsy at last, I felt the day already slipping into memory, and in all its adventures and joy and small frustrations, slipping into a kind of fiction too, even though most of it's true, and so slipping into both my past and, in its eventual retelling, my future.

Which is, you see, the point of everything, at least for me.

A (mercifully) quick one, this. And yes, it’s about pissing football again, so sorry in advance. Around a year ago (and yes, Your Life Is An Impossibility is now approximately 15 months old! Happy Birthday, Your Life Is An Impossibility! Vote now, readers, for your least favourite story/bit, and win a big yellow fruit from the garden and a Santa shirt signed by Adilson! (see entry dated 3 May 2009)), the writer of all this nonsense set off on a epic adventure with Santa Cruz Futebol Clube and the infamous Inferno Coral around the nordeste of Brazil. The reason for such meanderings, of course, was O Mais Querido’s bound-to-be glorious campaign in Serie C of the Brazilian Championship. Alas, nothing is as glorious as staying in your own bed, as Oblomov might have said, and Santa proved woeful even by their own rotten standards. Your writer’s quixotic wanderings got no further than Campina Grande, as Santa were knocked out in the second phase, and therefore, dear readers, were relegated to no lesser joy than playing in Serie D in 2009.

And Serie D didn’t even exist until this year! Caramba!

Now. Faust and Robert Johnson (nice photo above courtesy of stealthingsfromtheinternet.com) sold their souls to the devil, the former in exchange for knowledge, the latter for some nifty blues fingers. Fans of Recife's Sport (including Mr Anonymous, our welcome new reader) clearly bartered such flimsy souls as they have in return for winning the tatty bauble that is the Copa Do Brasil last year. My question is, and I bet you’re dying to know yourself – just where can you find a good devil when you want one? (A few flippant suggestions for starters: the Collor family estate in Alagoas, Eamonn Holmes’ house (www.eamonn.tv/static/eamonn_holmes_front.htm), here - http://www.bandacalypso.com.br/, Tony Parson’s house…and you get the idea).

To explain. As a young whippersnapper of 18 I moved from Belfast to Manchester, ostensibly to study something I can’t quite remember, but really so I could watch Manchester City every week. City were in the English First Division at the time. Every week found me on the Kippax in the pissing rain. Within four years a pre-richestclubintheworld City found themselves halfway down the Third Division. I pickedupsticks for London. City improved dramatically.

A poker hand of years after that Brazil beckoned. I lived in Belo Horizonte. I was (and still am) Atleticano - of course, because as everyone knows Atletico are o time do povo in BH. One year later – Atletico are relegated to Serie B for the first time in their history.

Wracked by guilt, I flee to João Pessoa, where thank Eamonn, there’s no football. Until I get to Recife. And I´m not going to tell the story again (see entry dated 4 July 2008). All I need to say is that Santa were sitting comfortably in Serie B when I got here and became tricolor até morrer.

And now look!

So if anyone knows an angry man with a red face and pointy ears and a pitchfork can you please give me his number, please? Because tomorrow morning all this foolishness starts again, and I’m bound for the Tricentenario Hospital around the corner here in Amaro Branco, where in the murky dawn (5am, to be precise. 5am!) we’ll all (the neighbours, or at least the tricolores amongst them) board a battered bus and roll the 265km down to Maceio (a three hour journey at best, and the game’s not until 4pm, but the rest of the bus gang want to hit the beaches for a few hours before the game – not something that happened too often during City away days in Middlesbrough), to see Santa take on (but not lose to, please, Eamonn!) CSA in the first game of the 2009 Brasileirão Serie D.

Santa have done their bit – chewing the ears off Sport and Nautico in the first round of the Pernambuco Championship this year, before fading a little in the second round and finishing a decent enough third, then after a few of their big dogs (albeit that in a global footballing context Santa’s big dogs aren’t much more than Jack Russells) went off to seek their fortunes elsewhere, retooling the cast with promising locals, or more appropriately once promising but now a bit down on their luck locals.

So spectacular were Santa’s signings that this writer became infuriated by the coverage of such minor international events as Real Madrid ponying up for Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká, and the sad passing of Diana Ross’s prettier sister Michelle Jackson Ross, and the regular dessert spoonful of plane crashes and North Korean missile tests – who cares about all of that? When Santa are building a galaticos midfield of not just Anderson, Gobatto, Alexandre Oliveira and Neto Maranhão, but Juninho and Thiago Laranjeiras as well! And favourite beach football star Roger is staying, and that can only be good news, because everyone knows that every Brazilian team has to have at least one player called Roger!

So cancel all that stuff about looking up D.E.V.I.L. in the Yellow Pages or Lista Online, ‘cos I think I’ve found the scamp, and he's not dressed as a big cat or a prostitute and he's not hanging out in 1930s Moscow (that's it! that's what I was studying in Manchester! Books!), but he might well be living well in a seedy worker's motel in Afogados. Because clearly someone in the Fernando Bezerra Coelho camp (see entry dated 5th February 2009) met old Louis Cipher (quoting Mickey Rourke movies – a dark day indeed) at midnight in the Praça Do Derby a few weeks ago, and while this fellow stout of heart might have got a big sack of gold from Fernando for his trouble, he might well be feeling a bit low in the soul department. Or I hope he is, because I really don’t want to be crawling back from Maceio in the dark and the rain after Santa have got their backsides kicked by a bunch of clowns from Alagoas.

PS. And as I write news comes over the wireless that Santos have opened up a can of whup ass on nasty old Sport down in São Paulo (state). Eamonn bless you, Mr Bub!

Bullet headed and thick throated, with stonehenge teeth and apple fat cheeks, Mr X was the girl never asked to the prom. No welcome seat either at The Table Of The World Of Men – a Gripper Stepson of a father leaving him with a life long fear of horny handed builders and oily knuckled mechanics. But as determined as Tensing, Mr X kept on keeping on, and after many years of bar stool therapy, and upping sticks and leaving the past behind at least as often as Baby Jesus`s birthday comes around, Mr X found himself, in his early middle years, being asked to the prom quite often, and able even to pass for um homen que é homen on occasion.

And in Brazil Mr X is a gringo, and as such can never ever be excluded from being a gringo, because every gringo is a good gringo, especially here in the nordeste, where all gringoes – Canadian gringoes, Argentinian gringoes, Irish gringoes, hell, even Porto Rican gringoes, are given a stirring snickers in the street welcome to the gringo club.

All this social acceptance and inclusion should make for a heart-warming tale. But yet but yet. Mr X sometimes, even today, feels that something is not quite right, here in Recife, that he is still, after almost four years of wasting his time in the finest possible way in Brazil, missing something vital from the gringo experience.

When Mr X takes his walks on the wild side, for example, strolling around the whys and wherefores of the teenage prostitutes in burguesinha Boa Viagem, or not as burguesinha Cais Da Santa Rita, Mr X is thoroughly ignored. Even in Salvador’s exploitation capital of Pelourinho, all Mr X ends up doling out is unwanted career advice to one shiny-skinned and shiny-toothed garota da programa (see entry dated 29th August 2008). And during his one potential roll in the type-of-hay-which-normally-costs-a-few-bob, he is told that his partner of choice is off-duty and can she and Mr X take things slowly and maybe become friends. Friends!, cries Mr X. No, no, no, for the love of God, no! Rob me, tie me up, take me hostage, steal my watch, overcharge me, yes, but friends, no, never!

Mr X has never even been robbed in the street, despite the fact that he walks everywhere and when he isn’t walking he takes the bus. Two buses a day, for four years, means nearly 3000 bus journeys, and not a thing, not a jot, not a sniff, not a knife or a gun pointed or a wallet or cell phone nabbed! How angry this makes Mr X! He knows people who have been robbed FIVE times! What´s wrong with me, he thinks, am I not fat enough, not old enough, not rich enough, not German enough? I´ll wear shorts with white socks, if that´s what it takes, but just rob me, please, just the once!

There was one time, a few years ago, a dopy Easter Sunday in downtown Recife, the rest of the population scarfing down big roast chicken lunches or out at the beach rolling fatly in the sand. Mr X walked his way down to the big bookshop in Old Recife, for want of anything better to do. A small boy hunched beside a phone box in an empty street. The boy scrabbled to his feet. Any change mister? he asked. Mr X fished in his pocket. The boy pulled a broken bottle out from behind his back. Mr X looked at the boy. The boy looked at Mr X. The boy was about ten feet away. You’re quite far away from me, Mr X said. I could run away quite easily. The boy considered this for a time. Mr X noted the boy’s stance showed less conviction than it had a few seconds before. Mr X sighed and walked away.

For the love of Neto Maranhão! Mr X has never even been exploited, or fiddled, or malandragemed! When Mr X forgets his change, shopkeepers run after him! Mr X gets charged less than his Brazilian chums! Fifteen reais, the barkeep says to The New Love of Mr X´s Life, after a dish of fried prawns and a few sharpeners. The barkeep spots Mr X, notes fluttering from his bulging wallet. Wait, he says, I added up wrong. For you it’s thirteen.

Mr X feels he is reaching the end of his tether. He wants to write to someone – his local councillor, Ana Maria Braga, Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, anyone!

Until.

Oh happy day!

Mr X decides he can live his life on buses no longer. Not that he doesn’t love buses as he always did, but the 910 Rio Doce–Piedade is a bus that no-one can love – always late, always face-smushingly crowded, then 45 minutes or an hour of grinding through the traffic snarls around Derby and Boa Vista.

Mr X resolves to learn to drive the Brazilian way. Mr X takes lessons – he wants to both drive a car and ride a motorcycle. All goes swimmingly – Mr X soon learns to do the funny reverse parking thing and pilot a bike around the knee-jerky motorbike circuit in first gear without falling off too many times. Mr X even finds a car (or rather his chum in Jordão finds it for him – a 15 year old Fiat Uno bought for a mere r$5000, cars in Brazil generally being as expensive as original Renoirs).

Only one thing bothers Mr X. After a week of motorbike lessons, he has two weeks of car lessons. When he gets back on the bike, he finds that, disorientated, he rides for the first few minutes like old people run across the road – badly. He almost falls off a couple of times, and his foot comes stomping down on the tarmac on both the figure 8 and the ramp.

Mr X asks his weaselly instructor. On the day of the test, will I be able to ride the bike a little before I do the circuit, to get used to it again?

No, the weaselly instructor says, beady eyes glinting.

Hum, Mr X says.

But don’t worry about it, the weaselly instructor says, leaning in closer. I know the meninos at DETRAN. I’ll have a word.

Mr X is cheered.

Just bring along a couple of guaranas, the weaselly instructor mutters in Mr X’s ear, and we’ll get it sorted.

Guaranas? The teeth-gnarlingly sweet Brazilian soft drink? Mr X is confused. How is he going to fit a can of Guarana, or even two, in his pocket when he is doing a motorbike test? And why do the examiners at DETRAN place such stock in Guarana?

Mr X thinks for a minute. A long minute. Then Mr X feels the ficha caindo (penny dropping, non-bi-lingual friends) in his bullet head.

Guarana doesn’t really mean Guarana! It means wonga, spondoolicks, wedge, dough – legal Brazilian tender, the glorious Real!

The weaselly instructor is telling Mr X he can buy his licence!

Dishonesty! Corruption! Crookedness!

Mr X wants to sing, to dance, to skip and laugh, to hug the weaselly instructor!

The weaselly instructor looks alarmed. Of course, he says, only if you want to.

But the damage is done.

Of course, Mr X says, laughing. Of course I want to! Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Mr X wraps the weaselly instructor in a long, loving, but at the same time extremely manly embrace.

Dishonesty! Corruption! Crookedness!

Mr X is home at last!

A bright, blustery Saturday in The Murder Capital of Brazil (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/death-to-undesirables-brazils-murder-capital-1685214.html)*, and good things are afoot. Heavy winter, which is still an average six or seven degrees hotter than the UK basks in 23° temperatures headline I saw somewhere yesterday, but which also means Atlantic storms and weeks of hissing, cloud bursting rain – a pisser for all who like eating grilled cheese on the beach, slurupping down a few cold sherberts in a dark nook of a street corner bar, dreaming of better days at O Mundão Arruda, or generally doing anything at all in Recife, which is a city which lives and breathes out of doors, on its beaches and in its streets and roofless bars and football grounds.

But no rain today, only glimpsy blue skies and cotton puff clouds, and so everyone, it seems, is in a good mood. On the way into town, the bus driver blaps his horn to warn the driver of a careering juggernaut that he is careering faster still - blap blap – blap blap blap – blap blap blap. And has he passes the driver of the juggernaut supplies the punch line – blap blap! And I'm in a good mood too , because it’s Saturday, and I’ve already been up and around the Alto Da Sé with Guinness The Dog and looked down on the city and the white tipped sea and handed out a few cigarettes to The String Man, and last night after teaching the kids in Jordão (exactly the type of “sprawling slum” mentioned in The Independent article, of which more later), I went out and stood in the street and watched a quadrilia junina, or traditional São João dance group, only this being Jordao it was the hip-hop variety of quadrilia, with boys in Inferno and Jovem Sport t-shirts and girls in tiny shorts and tops, all dark skin glistening under the street lights, all spinning and whirling and jumping in a way that would make Beyonce’s video producer offer all concerned a million bucks to relocate to Beyonceworld as soon as possible.

And how not to be in a good mood? The sun is shining, it’s Saturday morning, the bus is speckled with a few smokin’ hot chicks, and I´m on my way to meet The Fanautico Girlfriend, recently promoted from the rank of Potential New Light Of My Life. And a side note - The Fanautico Girlfriend, it seems to me, would not mind the reference to smokin’ hot chicks on the bus, being a smokin’ hot chick herself, and not only that – a smokin’ hot chick who likes football - Nautico (hence the name), not Santa, but at least it’s not Sport - and drinking and lying around on the sofa doing nothing.

It is a good thing to do, to go and meet The Fanautico Girlfriend downtown (another bonus! Downtown is the best of all the good places in Recife – bustling and noisy and ripe and thrilling) on a sunny Saturday, because it stops all the alone time, and while alone time can be good, it can also be bad, because with too much alone time comes too much thinking – thinking about Brazil, thinking about Recife and all the things that are wrong here, thinking about the stupid things people say (a recent favourite: blonde shiny toothed teenage burgher of glittering Avenida Boa Viagem, whose parents have spent a fortune on a luxurious apartment on the city’s most glorious seafront avenue, says she likes the beach, but not the beach a few metres in front of her house. She likes the beaches outside the city, down the coast, because the beach at Boa Viagem is full of negroes, arf, arf), about all the things I have done and not done and said and not said. The prospect of meeting The Fanautico Girlfriend downtown stops most of that (thought not all), and makes one think of other things – carne do sol and macaxeira frita washed down with a cold beer in The Banguê in Patio São Pedro, for example, and maybe a movie-with-popcorn after that.

But before all of this there is more important work to be done. There are many milestones in a man’s life, it seems to me – the first time he refuses to wear the vest his mammy has laid out for him, the first time he spatters the curtains with up throw following too much exuberant sauce guzzling, when he gets his first job, crashes his first car, uses a large bank loan to buy his first overpriced one bedroom apartment, etc, etc, etc.

A relic of 37 now, I have passed through many of these milestones (excluding any of the important ones, obviously, like getting married or having children). Many have brought joy, many sadness, some only sleepy indifference. But now comes the biggest one of all.

A small shopping arcade just off a side street near Avenida Conde Da Boa Vista. I walk up the dank stairs. A rat scuttles away into the shadows. The throbbing music from the street fades to nothing. It is dark inside, and the seven heads – all male, all youngish, all dark skinned – swivel and glare at me as I hover nervously. I go up to the counter. Is it here?, I ask. I have been waiting – long, dreary weeks. Just a minute, comes the answer. I wait some more while he checks. He comes back. It’s here, he says. He gives it to me. I hold it in my hand – a small, white square of plastic. I sense its weight, its warmth.

I walk out of the shop, back into the sunshine. I feel complete. Though also a little foolish – maybe the first almost 40 something member of the Inferno Coral, and certainly the whitest. But now – pennies and pounds, as they say – I´m Inferno até morrer. And who knows what it is - love, sunshine, or a small plastic card bearing the legend Grêmio Recreativo Torcida Organizada Inferno Coral - but my juices, creative and otherwise, have begun to flow again, and that can only be good news for me, if not for the handful of people who read these words.

* A generally witless article, it seems to me, that could have been written about almost any other major city in Brazil or the developing world in general. The central themes of the article are correct but obvious – that (a) there are a lot of homeless children in Recife, (b) there are a number of militias organised by unscrupulous, corrupt police officers, who for a fee can be hired to remove any pests from the streets, (c) Recife is a city that suffers greatly from violence and all the other social problems that arise from poverty and massive inequality of wealth. What is most objectionable is the lurid use of language - death squads, the killables, murder capital (probably not any more, actually, as such title changes hands pretty much every year - my money´s on Salvador or perennial heavyweight Vitoria (ES) to claim back the crown this year), the factual inaccuracies and lazy clichés (Recife is not Brazil’s fourth biggest city, it’s number six or seven, and what the hell has carnaval got to do with any of this?), the probably entirely fictitious conversations with unnamed “sources” - he had a silver handgun in his belt which he took out and carefully ensured it was unloaded before he laid it on the seat between us – oh no he didn’t! oh yes he did! oh no he didn’t! etc.

Most blackhearted of all, I would think, is that this article appeared in the same week as a recent publication of statistics showing that violence in Recife has been declining for the last three years, albeit slowly, since the introduction of various governmental social programmes (Pacto Pela Vida for example) and the general improving of things for the lowest social classes in the city (and the country as a whole) through an expanded welfare state and rising minimum wage. For a truer, more complete picture of how things were and are in Recife and Brazil, read Peter Robb’s A Death In Brazil, and not lazy one-off soundbites by feature journalists on a deadline who, with nothing much else to write about, use the lives and deaths of Recife´s lost souls to generate a few blood soaked headlines.

Turning winter now, which in Recife means slate grey skies weighed down with rain and occasional bursts of blue gold skies and dizzying sunlight. The temperature tips a little lower than in high summer, but it’s still as warm as socks drying on the radiator. The waves break tipped with white out on the ocean and at night as I step off the bus the air tastes of salt and sharp metallic rain. Uau-uau tired (as everybody knows Brazilian dogs don’t say woof woof but uau-uau) I walk up the hill in the blustery darkness, dreaming only of a cold beer or seven in the garden before bed.

Huddled on a step in front of one of the small white houses sit three men, a rangy black Baiano named Moises who lives in the alley that runs beside the house, Manuel, an eager and bespectacled Recifense, and Manuel’s cousin Marcio. (Manuel is also the husband of the famed donator of food, dogs and subsequent unwanted dog parenting advice, Mother Sururu (see entry dated 9th November 2008). Marcio looks a bit like Marcio Barros, famed centre forward of Santa´s almost but not quite glorious campaign in the Pernambuco State Championship.

Manuel is talking, loud and fast and his voice is cracking with emotion, though when I walk over he stops and looks up at me and smiles.

All good, I ask, which is what you ask here, and Manuel and Marcio and Moises confirm that all is good, and then they ask me if all is good, and I say, yes, all is good.

And then Manuel goes on talking. He leans forward as he does so, and the street lights glint orange on his glasses. He is not wearing a shirt and his chest is covered in thick whorls of black hair.

They killed him, he says, they killed him.

He is talking about his father, and there is not much really that any of us can say.

I watched him die, and there was nothing I could do. Moses lights a cigarette and, looking away towards the ocean, makes soft grunts of agreement.

There is a moment of silence, when we all hang, waiting, and then Manuel is talking again, his voice in the half-darkness now becoming gentler and more resigned, and he is telling us how he became friends with an orderly at the hospital, and how he had asked this orderly, finally, what was happening, if they were treating his father well, or, if, in the creaking Brazilian public health system, a world of endless queues and terrible overcrowding and patients beached and groaning in corridors, but one that functions, just, despite everything, and that needs to function, because it is the only option for millions upon millions of people, his father was being pushed aside, forgotten, treated as already dead.

I’m going to do something I shouldn’t do, the orderly told him, and now Manuel seems to be relishing the intrigue of his story, decorating it with pauses and gestures and turning what in less verbose countries would be a functional two minute narrative into something much grander and more dramatic and even beautiful.

Something that had better not come back on me, you understand? Because I’ve seen the way you care for your father, and Manuel branches up another conversational alley, telling us how he spent day and night at the hospital, and took his father to the bathroom and only called the nurses to administer medicine, because it was his father and he owed his father everything.

So I told him, Manuel says, of course it won’t come back on you, I understand. And he pauses again, for yet further dramatic effect, and then delivers his punch line - then the guy told me, yes, they’re screwing with your father.

And there are other stories then, all interlinked and spinning around and fluid and hard to follow, and while I occasionally lose track of the chattering Portuguese subjunctives and medical terms and Pernambuco slang, it is clear that Manuel, an honest man who works in one of the souvenir shops up on the Alta Da Se, is angry and hurting. There are stories of how the wrong medicine was prescribed, medicine that had put his father into a state of toxic shock, and of disinterested and overworked doctors, and of how no-one would give him a straight answer to a straight question.

Manuel’s face grows dark then, and he tells of how he is going to the hospital tomorrow, and he is going to find his father’s doctor, and how he is going to tell him that he is responsible for the death of his father, and how he doesn’t know what he is going to do after that.

Standing listening in the silence we know Manuel is not going to do anything stupid or criminal, for he is too good a man for that. And anyway in Brazil most stories of bloody revenge arise out of sweaty boy on girl action and hot ‘n’ heavy pawing and mucky touching (sex, in other words), and not the incompetence and brutalities of state organs, which are handled rather with a combination of impotent anger and complaining and finally resignation. And so in the end there is nothing really that anyone can do to help Manuel, only listen and maintain a respectful watch in the gathering night, before all decide, suddenly and with an odd mutual understanding, that it is time to go to bed.

The next day I am walking down the high street with Guinness The Dog. We pass behind a car parked on the pavement at a 90 degree angle to the road. The car starts reversing. Guinness The Dog stops and looks at the car. It’ll stop, I think. It doesn’t. I rap hard on the back window. The car stops. I walk on. I hear shouting from behind. The driver of the car, a gordinho, a porky, gloopily sweating man of 50 or so, is gesticulating furiously. I search my immense bi-lingual vocabulary bank for just the right retort before settling on prick. A few hundred yards up the street, I hear a screech of brakes and the car jumps onto the pavement and skids to a halt in front of me. It’s all a bit Starsky and Hutch.

And then it starts. A good few minutes of tedious outrage and shouting and pretending that a healthy scrap is in the offing (though I doubt Starsky (or is it Hutch) could haul himself out the door let alone the window). In the passenger seat lurks Starsky’s thick-necked son (or, as we’re living in modern times, possibly his life partner), clutching furiously at his door handle as if to say one more word sunshine and I’ll be out there before you can say A Puppy Is For Life Not Just For Christmas.

Thing is I’ve not been in that many intellectual debates ultimately settled by a good smack in the mouth but I’ve been in one or two and I’ve seen a few more, and in my humble experience people who are going to hit you generally hit you pretty soon after the event which made them want to hit you in the first place, and don´t sit around discussing the moral rights and wrongs of said event. So I´m not too worried, especially given Starsky’s tremendous girth and the general air of dutiful dullness that surrounds the son/life partner (though this being Recife there is always the slight possibility someone might pull out a water-pistol or two). So I tell them to find peace in the Lord, my children (or something similar though possibly rather more profane), and ease on down the road.

There’s something very Brazilian male about the whole thing – the machismo, the shouting tantrum, the loss of reason, and something especially Pernambucanan about it too, because Pernambucanans are bravo, and get very het up about things sometimes. That’s alright too, because we all get het up about things, though I’m glad to say I get less het up about things than I used to, maybe because the weather is generally nice all the time and I have enough money for food and a few cold sherberts on a warm night and enough friends to keep me from blowing my brains out and of course The Potential New Light Of My Life (Number 464), who is enough of a bundle of fun to make anyone get less het up about things.

Anyway as always it has become apparent that this has nothing very much to do with anything - only that there was something admirable about Manuel’s silence and grace under pressure in the blowy warmth of the night, and not very much admirable at all in Starsky and Son’s ludicrous huffing and puffing the day after.

All is right with the world – or at least if not all is right, then almost all is right. A late summer Friday afternoon, Guinness The Dog pootling around the garden, the sun etching shadows between the trees and the little white painted houses. The trees themselves have turned a smoky kind of green, as someone has lit a bonfire nearby, and the ocean laps idly back and forth a couple of hundred yards away and below. There are even a few sailboats drifting across the milky horizon. I’m smoking cigarettes because after years in the amateur game I’m thinking of taking the sport up professionally. And although if I’m the only one to think so (the national media and my collegas in Boa Viagem certainly do not) Brazil seems to me to be getting better, though agonisingly slowly of course, and in good one step forward three hundred and forty six steps backwards fashion – cocking it’s snook at global economic crises through a dizzying variety of consumer credit and loan schemes and massive government investment programmes (at the same time indebting its citizens to enormous, almost British/North American levels, but who cares about that?). And anyway after the tragi-comedies of Northern Ireland in the 1980s and early 90s Brazil never seemed to me to be as otherwordly bad as some people seem to think – just another very fucked up country in a long list of very fucked up countries.

Santa Cruz are putting to bed another trophy-less Campeonato Pernambucano, but it has been a two months to be remembered fondly – particularly no end of hi-jinks with the Inferno Coral and the otherwise atrocious full back Adilson`s last minute equaliser against Sport at a packed and rambunctious Arruda, sparking the tricolor masses into delirium, volleys of fireworks mingling with the chant of 40,000 people singing o dono daqui sou eu for a very long time without stopping. (The approximate translation of this is: yes, you might be in Serie A and on your way to winning your fourth consecutive Pernambuco championship AND even playing in the Libertadores, and we might be in Serie D and probably the world’s most shambolic football club, but the owner of this house, my friend, has always been and always will be Santa Cruz, and I’ll thank you to show some respect when you come to visit). Then everyone stopped singing that and started chanting ooooh vai morrer, ooooh vai morrer (translation: ooooh you’re gonna die, ooooh you’re gonna die) at the few thousand Sport fans huddled nervously in the far corner of the stadium. Less poetic, admittedly, but a nice throwback to Belfast Big Two derbies and chants of you’re going home in a ****ing ambulance...

And yes, I am thinking about starting another website entitled Your Football Team Is An Impossibility in order to remove such tedious sporting romanticising from this one. If so, it’s fitting to go out on a last tribute to our anti-hero Adilson, perhaps the only professional footballer to have his wife write to his club requesting he be kicked off the team. I love my husband very much, said the letter from Senora Adilson, recently printed in the Diario De Pernambuco, and he is a wonderful father to our children. In our lovemaking he is tender and passionate and gives me much pleasure. But for the love of God get him off the team. He’s a bloody awful footballer – even a blind man can see it – and he’s royally fucking up Santa’s chances in the Pernambucano.*

There is even another Potential New Light Of My Life (Number 464), one that shows no signs of being a surreptitious reader of private correspondence or an occasional eater of small birds (ok, there hasn’t actually been a secret eater of small birds yet, but the way that things have been going it was surely only a matter of time), one that likes the odd sherbert or two, football, and goes like the clappers (NB – that last bit, whether true or not, is an appeasing joke to the Maxim oriented readers of this site, and should not be considered in anyway an appraisal of PNLOML 464’s sexual appetites or otherwise).

The only thing is that, as the cultural output of the south of France in the 20th century confirms, such contentedness breeds sloth and a thorough lack of inspiration. Whither the angst, Mr X? Even The Ex-Girlfriend is safely ensconced in dilapidated suburban Recife, playing house with The Ex-Girlfriend’s New Boyfriend, rather selfishly supplying a disappointing lack of pei pei pei drama and excitement to these pages.

Maybe the trick is to look closer to home for essays on life and all its rich foolishness. Maybe – gulp – the trick is to stop thinking of oneself all the time, and to consider for a while the lives of others. And in the unheard of neighbourhood of Amaro Branco, huddled on the slopes of old Olinda at the foot of the lighthouse, there’s probably enough material to knock out a couple of dozen A La Recherce Du Temps Perdu.

Wander up the hill from the house, for example, and then hang a left as though heading back down again, and in front of the Igreja San Franciso you’ll find a small leafy square with a hefty stone cross plunked in the middle. There are a few crumbling houses perched on the muddy banks around the square, and in the square itself, or maybe in a little wooden hut or beneath a tree behind one of the houses, lives a gentleman known only as The String Man. The String Man seems to be impossibly aged (though he may not be), and his skin is all brown and as dry and wrinkly as old leaves. His hair and beard are ash grey and his eyes twinkle like broken glass and he is as small and hunched as a twelve year old boy (though I appreciate that twelve year old boys aren’t usually hunched). When I walk past him on a morning ramble with Guinness The Dog he comes bounding over and kneels down and puts a small piece of string in front of Guinness The Dog. Guinness The Dog looks at me, as though to ask "What’s all this horseshit, papai?”, for Guinness The Dog is not an easy tolerator of fools. The String Man laughs and pushes the string closer to Guinness The Dog, who has spotted a cat somewhere off to the left and is much more interested in that (though Guinness The Dog is in fact scared of cats and when faced with one simply darts manically from left to right in front of him/her, tail wagging furiously). I don’t think she really understands, I tell The String Man (wanting to tell him that I don’t really understand either). The String Man laughs and pockets the string and in the same movement fishes a half smoked cigarette out of another pocket and offers it to me. I don’t smoke, I lie, and he nods and then we shake hands and I wander off to wherever I am going with Guinness The Dog and he wanders off to wherever it is he wanders off to.

Another day The String Man comes leaping down from the bank with an important mission in mind. He carries a small white piece of wood. Stand on that, he motions (The String Man is a man of few words). I stand on it. He pokes at my foot with a small stick. Measurements of the most bizarre variety are imaginarily taken. Ha!, The String Man shouts after a few minutes, apparently pleased with his findings. He solemnly shakes my hand and wanders off again, thinking hard about impossible things.

The last time I see The String Man is on a rainy day when I am in the bakery buying bread and dog biscuits (dog food and dog biscuits now account for exactly 49.64% of my monthly income). The String Man is at the counter smiling beatifically at the bakery woman (who we might call Iris). Iris is laughing hard, her eyes shining behind her thick glasses. The String Man doesn’t laugh – just smiles. When he sees me he smiles and picks a toffee out of the box on the counter and gives it to me. I eat the toffee. The String Man buys his cigarettes and leaves. I overtake him on the way up the hill – his legs are as thin as twigs and his feet are bare and black and sore looking and progress is slow. When I see him I decide to go back to the bakery and buy him a toffee (The String Man will accept neither bread nor money – and I’ve tried more than a few times). I catch up with him again and give him the toffee. He smiles and puts it in his pocket, and shakes my hand, and when we reach the top of the hill he goes left down to the square and the big stone cross and I go on up the hill, to the Alta Da Se from where you can see all of Recife – all of 3,000,000 or so lives being thickly lived - spreading out in the drizzly haze.

*All a total lie, of course, but a good one, and it was April last month, so it’s still kind of Liar’s Day, isn’t it?

High summer in Recife, or the dog days of summer, and at night the city feels like running a very hot bath in a very small bathroom with the door shut.

Maybe because of all this I had a sexydream last night, something that I have not had for quite some time. And yes – I awoke to find the sheets damp and a little pool of something marshing around my nether regions. The object of my desires was a little heavier in the chassis than normal, but sleek all the same – generous in her affections, wildly libidinous, and not remotely shy. I knew I was very, very far from being her first, but sharing her with others did not diminish the pleasure – indeed may have heightened it. What was she like? Big, white with distinctive blue and green markings, wide windows front and aft, Cidade Alta emblazoned along her sides…..because in this best of all cities the best of all places on such nights might not be the most obvious but it is the place where the best of all things will carry you. The place is the Cais Da Santa Rita, and the best of all things are buses.

And when an idea strikes it often makes one think how it is that the idea has not struck before, and how important something has been throughout one’s life without one ever much thinking about it, and when one does think of it, well, one remembers everything.

I remember a certain son who we might call Little Jamesie waiting a hundred yards down the street while a certain father who we might call Big Jamesie drove his car a ways to check for the remote possibility of ignition wired IRA bombs underneath said car, and then I remember Big Jamesie dropping Little Jamesie, school bag and 20 kilo trombone case by the side of the snowy road and telling Little Jamesie he could walk the remaining mile to school for the exercise, followed by Little Jamesie clambering aboard the first bus that passed, trombone case banging against assorted ankles, many a comment of get that feckin’ thing out of my way or I’ll break it over your head son, everything on the bus clammy and damp and an umbrella-ish rubbery smell.

Buses everywhere – no money for planes in them days, the long bus up from Manchester to Stranraer and then the oily queasy ferryboat over to Larne and another bus down to Belfast. Buses to Maine Road, night buses home in the early hours, and then London, where there were no buses, or not many, only bloody tubes, and only a true hater of the good things in life could ever enjoy the tube.

Maybe that’s why I love this godforsaken place – because there are few countries in the world where the bus is king as much as Brazil. Truth be told I broke up with The First Ex-Girlfriend (not The Ex-Girlfriend) not solely but at least in part because she told me I shouldn’t take the bus in Belo Horizonte because it was dangerous, while all around me buses rocketed up and down Avenida Prudente De Morais and around the Praça Da Liberdade and Avenida Amazonas and Alfonso Pena, and all of it looked so exciting and hectic and adventurousissimo.

And when I broke my public transport cherry (906 Santa Luzia - somewhere I can´t remember, I think) there was no holding me back. Bus journeys of tremendous symbolism – such was my love (or passion) for The Ex-Girlfriend that I once took a mid-afternoon bus alone to the infamous northern quarters of BH, Primeiro De Maio and Providencia, while The Ex-Girlfriend was at work, rattling up the dusty wrecked avenues, to places I had never been before, never thought I would go, the bus hurtling over the hill into the favela in Primeiro De Maio, a tremendous crash following every bounce and jostle and pot hole, everyone in the street staring in as we wound through the tiny streets…and I took this bus just to see where she lived…oh foolish heart….and then later….foolisher still…..after nights of fumbling passion insisting on escorting The Ex-Girlfriend back downtown where she would get her bus out to Providencia, playing the brave knight errant, The Ex-Girlfriend looking at me and thinking well I know I’ll be alright downtown at 2am, but you?

And then the epic bus journeys across Brazil, already well documented here and in Your Life Is An Impossibility – 52 hours from BH to Joao Pessoa, waiting six hours in Aracaju because the bus in front has been hi-jacked and we’re waiting for the bus behind to get here so we can go in convoy, then another six hours in Maceio while the dangerously tilting bus is repaired, 13 hours from Sao Luis to Belem, the air conditioning unit dripping a small waterfall onto my head, 35 hours Belem to Recife, everything a bit blurred now, hard to remember where we are, what my name might be…

And tonight in Recife – at Cais – the buses all lined up like Ayrton Senna's and Emerson Fittipaldi's sleek jalopies, the drivers sleepily leaving the doors open then complaining as a few enterprising souls jump on without paying, same drivers drowning their sorrows in a few pre-journey beers, the terrible brega blaring from the bars across the way. And our destinations tonight – fantasy neighbourhoods known as The Drowned, The Afflicted, Line of a Bullet…

And recently the slapstick open warfare of the bus back to Olinda from Arruda after watching Santa’s latest exploits – shattered windows, broken heads (all a minor throwback to schoolboy Belfast – buses burning on the streets a staple on the nightly news, obligatory duck your head folks as you roll through a few of the choicer neighbourhoods (a big shout out to all our viewers in Short Strand) though this being Brazil the ultra violence is of course cranked up a few thousand notches), all courtesy of Jovem Sport and even a few inter-nacine feuds amongst the Inferno – because after all on this bus we have Inferno Rio Doce and Inferno Maranguape, and probably Inferno Salgadinho and Inferno Peixinhos and Inferno Milagres aren’t always friends with Inferno Rio Doce and Inferno Maranguape, and after all as the song goes…..oooh vai reinar Rio Doce Beira Mar and….oooooh é Maranguape…..

And so, please, no more mythologising of tedious forms of transport like trains (the Orient Express) the London Underground (Mind The Gap? What?) and planes (the Mile High Club). How about I Had Sex on the 910 Rio Doce – Piedade t-shirts (a much more marvelous feat), or rather than 100 Great Railway Journeys, 100 Great Bus Journeys in Recife – for starters I suggest the two-legged 152 Jordao Baixao / Cidade (via Cais De Santa Rita) – 232 Pau Amarelo any time after 11pm…

Because in Recife people throw things from buses, they destroy buses when football teams lose, the more wanton civilians surf buses just for the hell of it, children cling from the sides of buses because they have no money for the fare, and because of all that and more, a last repost to Cathal Coughlin, who once proffered that “only losers take the bus” – Cathal, you big-boned eejit, come and take the bus in Recife.

Small note – the above photo, wonderful though it may be, will be replaced with a photo of, well, a bus, whenever I get around to taking one. Cais De Santa Rita late at night isn’t always the place to be brandishing cameras, no matter how old and battered they might be.