Casca-Blanca

There's always someone to tell me - cynically, or out of sheer exasperation, but never with any perceptible pride - that Portugal is much closer to North Africa than it is to France and certainly than to Germany or the UK.

They are not talking about geographical distance, but they do all tend to urge me to consider physiognomical resemblances, even facial hair. They actually mean (I suspect) intangibles such as indolence and drowning themsleves in past glories. A few of the more irate and irrational have even gone so far as to blame centuries that cultivated passivity and somnolence on Os Moros and a similar climate, particularly as far as the Alentejo is concerned.

Weird.
[But I do now remember how I was up on the plinth of the Marquês de Pombal statue waiting for the start of the anti-war demonstration in March 2003, a few days after the invasion of Iraq, watching the crowds gathering. Suddenly, I spotted a tall man walking amongst them, head high, about 55 years old, with a familar expression of superiority joined with the look of a serial killer behind a big bigode. Complexion and features that the police and press have uniformly described since the first Palestinian acts of international terrorism as "Middle Eastern". That man was SO the spit of Saddam Hussain that it was chilling]

So I popped off these two images, taken a few kms apart, in the 'elegant' resort town that was once Cascais and the magnificence that is still Guincho.

I have already played the trick on my pink-skinned compatriots and they bought it without questioning - accepting that the pictures are postcards shot on my travels in Morroco.........where I have never set foot!