Page 77 - Wake Up and do Your Thing

NICHOLAS BOOTHMAN
people. Legends like Cat Stevens, Tom Jones, Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney, Lulu, Barry Gibb, Georgie Fame, Ronnie Scott and dozens of other great names passed through the club’s doors in later years.
By the middle of September though, they’d all gone, and I missed the company of strangers. The previous year, the first commercial airport in the Algarve was inaugurated, and what until then had been a five-hour winding drive or train ride from Lisbon was now a fifty-five-minute cab ride from the new airport.
Land was being snapped up by developers, and wealthy local, lowly government officials somehow managed to trade in their rickety motorcycles for the latest Mercedes Benz saloons, and foreign tourists by the thousands, looking for all-day cheap booze, baking beaches, sizzling sunshine and all you can eat “spagbol” were galloping over the horizon waving their flip-flops. The invasion had begun.
Back then though, sitting in a taverna one late lunchtime just off the main street I was feeling sorry for myself and trying to figure out where my curiosity would take me next. I’d polished off a bowl of caldo verde, a traditional thick potato and cabbage soup dished up with slices of chorizo and chunks of freshly baked bread and was squeezing the last drops of red plonk from a carafe into my wine glass.
"That will rot your guts."
I looked up and there was Thomas. He scooped up my glass and set down a heavy carafe of red in its place.
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