Stars.

In the good old days you booked a hotel and that was that. Now a morning is spent trying to communicate with the hotel in Lisbon about arrival times, passport numbers, pillow options and restaurant reservations. You'd think this could easily be done by e-mail but it seems nothing in Portugal is that simple.  This whole process, a young lady at the front desk informs me, is to ' ensure a smooth and seamless guest  experience'. I bite my tongue. The young woman suggests sending a car to meet us but when told the price Angus says we'll take a cab. As an aside TAP, the Portugese airline, is to be acquired by Air France. This, for anyone who tries to make an online reservation for two seats together, cannot come a moment too soon. Their systems have a certain archaic charm.

We look up and the rain clouds have parted. There are stars to be seen ! Our walk from the car to the theatre for the evening performance completed under Mediterranean skies.

When we head back to the car afterwards the streets are wet. That parting in the clouds must have lasted for all of half an hour before the rain returned. The owner of the Italian restaurant remains hopeful that al fresco dining will become a February thing. I'm not sure that even the students are other worldly enough to try sitting outside at this time of the year.

We order an Indian take away. Take aways here are designed for the mega healthy  student appetite. One portion would happily have satisfied both of us. We briefly toy with the idea of eating in the restaurant but it's full, the noise levels are stratospherically  high and the average age of the diners is somewhere well south of twenty - all of whom are conducting conversations with friends six tables away.

A most un-Presbyterian message projected onto the wall of the old town hall.

'The Fonts' favourite store in town is having a sale. Some sales are understated affairs. This is a particularly understated affair.

Life in these northerly parts remains quiet.

Some French history I'd never heard of :https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2797/ball-of-the-burning-men/

All over the news but I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems rather alarming :https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ai-agents-now-have-their-own-reddit-style-social-network-and-its-getting-weird-fast/

Lab grown meat :https://sentientmedia.org/how-to-explain-lab-grown-meat/

More on Ireland :https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/most-irish-foreign-aid-never-leaves

Our local Professor of International Relations remains unhappy :https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/no-the-guardrails-are-not-holding