30.07.18 - Avere la moglie ubriaca e la botte piena

'Allo 'allo,

A rare Monday e-mail because we're about to head off to the Old Continent and I'll be too busy sipping cappuccinos and gesticulating wildly to write. The gig on Saturday night went surprisingly well considering I could barely speak for the days leading up to it - a steady diet of honey teas, lozenges and lying prone on the sofa did the trick, and I was able to soldier through two hour-long sets with just the one coughing fit.  Videos are slowly making their way online...

Otherwise we've been packing, putting the house in order, plus Gaby scored us a free dinner on a weeknight with a wedding supplier who plied us with vol-au-vents and cocktails, which I could get used to.   I've-a made-a new-a compilation, and my phrase of the week is Italian for "to have a drunk wife and a full bottle", i.e. "to have your cake and eat it too".  That's the plan at least!

Good luck with the wee bairn, and see you soon...

The Man with the Rubber Fred

24.07.18 - Paga lanche

Hallooo,

Hope all well - we're looking forward to our impending travels, researching stuff to do once we're on the road etc.  

On Saturday we went up into the mountains for the wedding of one of Gaby's schoolfriends, who happened to be marrying a guy from London having got hitched on paper the same year we did, so we were taking notes for our own transatlantic party next year. And most fun it was too, with bilingual vows, frolicking in kilts, endless food and drink and a full-on Carnaval parade which appeared out of nowhere around midnight.  And on Sunday we went to Campinas for a BBQ at Claudio's new-look house, featuring a sensational key lime pie.

My phrase of the day refers to the wimps in school whose lunch money you would steal without a second thought, hence the term "paga lanche". During the World Cup someone pointed out that the England squad all had "paga lanche"-esque faces, and since then Gaby has been using it as shorthand for any English person who looks a bit simple, including at the wedding (no one could figure out why she was calling them a "packed lunch").  Oh, and: new compilation!

Best regards,

Fredge Fund

17.07.18 - Trocar seis por meia dúzia

Hallooo,

Hope all well and that you had a whizzy jolly time on Sunday what with football coming home - wish I could have been there for a reprise of the '98 festivities but rest assured I was singing the bits of the Marseillaise that I remember at top volume come full-time... I also enjoyed Ronaldinho's brief cameo on the bongos during the closing ceremony, although I think that was only aired here...

All is well here, with focus shifting from the endless football to our upcoming trip to see the wee bairn (!) - we shall bring this miraculous maté tea of which you speak, and which managed to break the great England penalty shootout hex... Elsewhere, we went to a birthday party on Saturday with a rather fancy crêpe buffet, which was a definite highlight, and rehearsed for our gig in a week or so.  Plus an Olympic record-holder swimmer chap came round our house to shoot some promo videos with Ridaut, which was pretty surreal. 

My phrase of the day is "to trade six of one for half a dozen of the other", or to make a superficial change or decision with no net effect either way; and my compilation of the week is this one.  May it soothe your nerves in this summer weather I hear you're having...

See ya soon!

Frêd de la Bastille

10.07.18 - Mata Mata

Hallo! 

Have greatly enjoyed your various missives from Isleham, Paris and waterlogged Japan.   It's a been a quiet old week with our boss off on his Turkish schooner, just as well given football's coming home...

England-Colombia was an absolute rollercoaster of a match (we won on penalties! For the first time since 1996!), then we had the extended family round for a BBQ before the match on Friday, which was fun despite Brazil fluffing their lines and losing to Belgium.  Then after breezing past Sweden (a World Cup semi-final! For the first time since I was three!) I popped off for a band rehearsal, followed by a few days off.  

Now we're at the "mata mata" ("kill or be killed") business end of the tournament so we'll see what the future holds - Gaby's "it's the Queen wot won it" conspiracy theory still holds, for now, although I'd be happy with any of the semi-finalists winning it. Otherwise I've been busy hand-crafting another two compilations and following the UK's transformation into a banana state from a safe distance.

Speak soon!

Hard Frexit

03.07.18 - Show de bola #2

Halloooo,

Hope you're having a fab time in Italy or what-have-you.  We've been seizing on some down-time at work, hitting the road on Wednesday to see Ridaut give his inaugural motivational speech/TED Talk for the company of one of the guys we play football with (and who turns out to be something of a low-key Brazilian Sean Parker, fingers in lots of digital pies etc), followed by a free lunch and a mad dash to Fabio & Bruna's to watch Brazil brush Serbia aside and qualify for the knock-outs.

(An aside: Now seems as good a time as any to highlight the weird, spinning “Bonecos de Olinda” (Olinda dolls) of Recife, in northeast Brazil.  They are a regional fixture during Carnaval and have been updated for the World Cup to resemble past and current stars of the national team. Globo TV has taken to cutting away to a live feed of them at half-time during Brazil matches, so the organisers made more dolls in the image of the commentary team, including Ronaldo and Galvão Bueno.  The result is about thirty seconds of pure nightmare fuel per fixture, as Neymar’s dead-eyed effigy silently spins round in circles to the increasingly nervous laughter of the commentary team.  Larger-than-life Michael Jackson and Donald Trump are there too for some reason.)

At the weekend we went back to Fabio's for his building's Festa Junina, which involved lots of convoluted line-dancing, musical chairs and churros and was most fun indeed. The next day, Michelle's boyfriend Vinicius invited us to a sports-car summit, basically an excuse for owners of fast cars to take to the motorway en masse and stretch their legs/tyres. We met at the JK shopping centre, which was closed to the public and whose parking garage soon filled up with all sorts of amazing-looking cars and people, hit the complimentary breakfast buffet, and went barreling off down the highway to a country club out of town (a Club Med, no less!) for lunch, free massages and a go on the F1 Interlagos simulator, before heading back for a burger.  Most enjoyable, if a little heart-in-mouth when we were ducking and diving through the traffic in town.

In other news I've made another compilation and today's phrase, while once used exclusively to refer to great footballing displays ("the ball show", indeed), is now used for anything remotely positive or awesome. Some extra blog-only content this week too, covering Gaby's theory about the World Cup and who's going to win it - you heard it here first.

Speak soon!

Fredder at the Far Post