#3 Taking a Mental Picture 📸
Taking a Mental Picture is the hastily-named segment where I immortalise moments I wish I’d captured on my film camera. #1 lives here; #2 lives here. #3 is for your perusal below.
After getting my stepmum’s Zimmer frame into the boot, a contented hush descends inside the taxi. We’re all stuffed, to be fair, of delicious tapas, croquetas and beef skirt and Padron peppers and sparkling sangria and a pistachio fondant although that last one was just for me, because I think I’m like a cow in that I always find another stomach for dessert (especially when it’s pistachio fondant.) The driver, Maria, turns the radio up whilst it’s playing an old Calvin Harris song, and we sit in the kind of good-natured familial silence that you have on holiday, when you’ve run out of things to say but it doesn’t matter.
Until the song changes, and the opening bars of Happy Hour by the Housemartins plays. Which wouldn’t be that unusual, if we weren’t in Almancil, Portugal, listening to a Portuguese-language radio station, approximately 1700 miles away from the Housemartins’ hometown of Hull, which is also where we’re from, and where we came from for this holiday. I start to sing, much to my Dad’s initial horror, but even he’s won round by my sensational throaty impression of Paul Heaton and we all start singing; and by the time Maria realises what’s happening she laughs and turns the radio up (to support our singing, or to drown us all out? Unsure.) Then, as if it never happened, the song peters out, segueing into Oops! I Did It Again by Britney Spears (who is decidedly not from Hull, East Yorkshire, for the avoidance of any doubt).
I’ve checked with my resident Portuguese friend, Eva, and she (and her dad) confirmed that the Housemartins weren’t massive in Portugal. So what, then, are the chances of this random 80s indie band from Hull playing on a Portuguese pop & dance radio station whilst a Hull-based family are in the taxi listening? It felt like that was meant for us, made for us. It really was happy hour again…