Fishballs
Balls and Balls Sonnet
At the posh supermarket in Albufeira, it sells Icelandic fishballs harvested from
ten- year-old codfish. They are white, and round just like other balls in size, say,
meatballs, but they taste salty and tangy, perfect with chilled wine, almost like
eating the Portuguese dish baccallao de nata the way they make it in Alentejo.
The wine at this supermarket is overpriced, but some of them have fancy names
on colourful labels as to make them more appetizing like we were going to eat
the labels too. 99% of the shoppers are British and struts around patronizing us
locals who came to gaze at the wonderful frozen food one can buy here as
the English housewife cannot cook and take great pride in her incompetence.
Men are hopeless too, that is why they go to British restaurants to eat pie with
chips and mushy peas.
I had friends, British – can you believe it- who lived here for years, when they
needed cancer surgery they went to Britain to have it done, the waiting list was
so long, that both died; the Brits do not like being prodded by foreigner.
So what was I doing here at this posh place? I had been told they sold smoked
ox testicles here it was good for my flagging potency when I asked around
the shop fell silent. No one knew. Insipid fishballs, but I saw men putting on their
reading glasses for a closer look at shelves that sold foreign food.
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