Writing this blog on the Silver Coast has opened the door to a language hell that I had heard about but never experienced first hand. It is a place populated by people who are so linguistically challenged I imagine they are barely even able to grunt convincingly.

The trouble is they keep sending me messages – around two dozen a day at the moment – that pretend to be comments on the blog but are actually badly disguised attempts to promote their web sites. I don’t know which twisted recess of their brain decided that an inability to put two words together made them ideally suited for the communication business, but they have taken to it with a crazed and disjointed level of gusto.

“It has touched it! It has reached it!,” was the strange and cryptic message I got in response to one of my blogs the other day from someone calling himself Girard Perregaux. Whatever he was on must have really kicked in after that because I got two more messages as the afternoon wore on. “Number will not pass!” was the next – frankly way too much information – followed shortly after by a single word: “Trifles!”. I have heard nothing from Girard since so I can only assume the medication is finally working.

I occasionally get what appear to be compliments, although I could be missing some deep and sophisticated sarcasm. “It is remarkable, it is the valuable answer – big-big-bags,” was one. I decided to take this as approval because writing is a lonely business in which you need whatever friends you can get. Another was slightly more obscure but seemingly friendly: “In it something is. It is grateful to you for the help in this question. I did not know it”.

Sometimes I get words of comfort which are nice when the sky is grey and they’re playing Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ (recently voted most annoying Christmas song in Bulgaria – I knew there was something I liked about the country) yet again on the radio. “It is very a pity to me, I can help nothing, but it is assured, that to you will help to find the correct decision. Do not despair,” wrote Hot Sale, a made-up name I am sure. He really should be working for the Samaritans.

But it is not all sweet tea and sympathy in blog comment land. I keep getting a message from Uhren Replica who seems to have strong objections to my blogs. I get this from him every day, even when I haven’t written one: “I apologise, but, in my opinion, you are not right. I am assured. I can defend the position. Write to me in PM.” I haven’t written to him yet. I’m not that desperate for friends.

Portugal’s Santa appears to be somewhat more athletic than the chubby bloke I have known since childhood.

My Santa is the kind of guy who struggles to lever himself out of the sleigh after a heavy night of mince pies and beer. I imagine he loves a good party and on occasion has been known to fall asleep in the snow with a goofy grin on his face and a bottle of whiskey in his arms.

Plastic Santas hanging on ropes

But the Santa featured in a popular Portuguese Christmas decoration is a very different character, a lean, mean mix of Rambo and ninja warrior who is shown climbing up a rope ladder with a stuffed sack over a shoulder and a crazy glint in his eye. It’s the kind of look that appears on people’s faces just before they throw themselves off a bridge with a bungee cord lashed to their ankles.

These plastic Santas seem to have bred in the last few years and are now all over the place, climbing the walls of suburban homes and clinging with grim determination to the balconies of apartment blocks. When the wind blows they thrash about in the air and get slammed against the building. When it is calm they hang there motionless like a bug squashed against the wall. Either way there is something disturbing about a Santa on a rope.

What makes it worse it that some don’t make it back into the Christmas decoration box when the whole festive thing is over. They hang there abandoned and forgotten as the seasons pass, their little red coats scraping back and forth across the wall until they are worn to tatters and the manic look has faded from their eyes.

When the wind blows hard enough there is often an additional macabre twist to the story – the rope gets wound around Santa’s neck and he hangs there as if he has decided to end it all after too many lonely nights with the elves. My son’s crèche had a Santa hanging from the balcony and after a particularly violent Silver Coast storm we arrived one morning to find him hanging upside down with the rope around his ankle. This was not a good thing for my son to see. ‘Daddy, look! Father Christmas died,’ he said.

Now I know for sure that I have never read a Christmas story in which Father Christmas climbs a rope ladder. In my stories he does the conventional sleigh and chimney thing. This seems to have worked fine for centuries but I’m happy to see a little innovation. So if today’s Santa is ditching the reindeer transport in favour of a rope ladder then that is fine by me. I’ll just leave the carrots off his plate this year.

There are twenty food outlets in the Leiria Shopping Centre on Portugal’s Silver Coast. Nineteen of them sell food. One sells soup. When I was there the other day the soup place was the only one getting any action.

I can’t say it was fun action. A queue of maybe two dozen elegantly dressed women was waiting to buy the stuff. They had pale and wan faces and a look of vague hunger in their eyes like they knew their appetites were unlikely to be satisfied in this lifetime. Their demand was demure but intense and I could see the soup caddies working up a sweat as they ladled the slop out into shallow white bowls.

Next door at the Leitão com Pão (suckling pig with bread) things were moving at a more convivial pace. Two men in tan-coloured jackets leaned comfortably on the counter while a large and jovial woman poured them beers. She had a ruddy country look on her as if she had spent a lifetime slapping pig cheeks and tossing hay bales about before going indoors to rule over farmhouse ovens stuffed with hot bread and golden meat pies.

Of course it is just as likely that she lives alone in a tower block with a limp poinsettia left over from last Christmas, but I prefer my version. She looked like the kind of person I would put in charge of my food any day, someone who understands that most men don’t ask for much more than a slab of meat in a piece of bread and a cold beer to wash the whole thing down. Chuck in a bit of chilli sauce and easy access to the remote and we’re pretty much sorted.

At the Leiria soup counter there was not much palpable contentment going on. The ladies that sip lunch were forking out €5.80 for a tray of soup, crêpe and a salad. I have no idea where the crêpe fits in with this particular meal concept but it was there, not creamed, not topped, not sugared, just there. I can’t even speak about the insanity of the side order of salad without reaching for my horse sedative.

It’s not soup itself I have a problem with. Soup, like bed socks, is an ugly but inevitable thing and I guess our time with it will come. It is the stuff we turn to when our bodies will take nothing else, stuff that is handed out to those who have nothing else, and stuff that is drunk by those who are determined to eat nothing else until they have shifted a few pounds. Soup is there to be endured, not sold.

The faces on those elegant ladies said it all – to be slim and elegant is to eat soup and know pain. Personally I’d choose to spend my lunch break burning off some calories in as pleasurable a way as is legal for that time of day and then to slam down a beer and steak sandwich in the ten minutes I have left. But that’s just me. I do soup because it gets the five-a-day out of the way and leaves me guilt-free to eat whatever I want the rest of the day. It has to have been a bad, bad night the night before for me to drink it for any other reason.

My time with the soup will come, I know, and then it will just be me and the soup and a vague memory of elegant ladies and lunchtime pleasures while people push trolleys down the hall outside. Until then I’m sticking with the meat and beer.

Like most parents we have been lying for years in order to protect Father Christmas. Last night we were busted when our daughter hit us with the big question at tucking-in time.

Her question was straight and to-the-point, like she already knew the answer and was simply testing to see if we would dare continue with the lie: ‘Mummy and Daddy, is Father Christmas real?’. What followed was one of those pauses that people describe as pregnant as we busied ourselves with stuff to avoid making eye contact. We haven’t yet got around to developing an official response to this question and I guess we were waiting to see which of us would confess first.

How many more lies will we have to tell, Santa?

We bought a bit of time by asking whether someone had told her he wasn’t real and we got a name – some little know-it-all from school who had taken it upon herself to blow the whistle on Christmas and bring the whole Lapland and chimney thing crashing to the ground.

I settled with telling her that Father Christmas is real in her heart which she accepted with a certain amount of doubt in her eyes. I don’t think it will satisfy her for long. Her heart is already occupied by grandma, God, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy and an assortment of angels and very soon she is going to figure out it must be getting fairly crowded in there.

This is going to get complicated because she has a little brother for whom we would like the fantasy to continue for a while longer. So not only will we have to admit to lying about the fat guy who slides down our chimney without getting spit roasted by the fire, we will also have to invite her to join the conspiracy.

And that means explaining that we weren’t exactly giving her all the facts when we said that lying is bad. When she is old enough to know about politicians she will of course realise that our Christmas lies were minor league, but in the meantime we have to live with the fact that in her mind we are the first grown-ups to have told her something that wasn’t true. Thanks a bunch Santa. I’ll be stoking that fire up real hot come Christmas Eve.

For a moment I felt like a character in a road movie who suddenly gets involved in a situation that will turn him from law-abiding citizen into hunted wolf. This generally happens at some petrol station in the middle of a wind-blown prairie when the guy is driven by desperation, love or sheer craziness to help himself to the contents of the cash register and make a run for it.

I wasn’t exactly in the middle of a prairie but I was at a petrol station standing at a deserted payment kiosk. In front of me was an open cash register stuffed with money. To the left of the cash register was a plastic lunch box containing a large stash of used ten euro notes. The station forecourt was empty apart from a couple of guys messing about at the car wash 50 metres away.

If this had been movie land I would have just stumbled on the scene of a crime in progress. I even leaned inside to see if there were desperados hiding beneath the counter or someone lying unconscious on the floor. But this being Portugal the explanation for the money buffet in front of me was far less dramatic, as I realised when one of the guys at the car wash turned and waved to let me know he would be there just as soon as he had nothing better to do.

The notion of leaving a large pile of money unattended just to go help someone get their coin into the car wash would be considered recklessly stupid in every other country I have lived in, but not Portugal. The Silver Coast is not without crime but as this is a petrol station used mainly by locals there was probably a bigger danger of that money being taken by the wind than any passer-by.

I have been told that crime was unknown in Portugal when the country was largely closed to the outside world during the days of the dictatorship. I don’t know if that’s true or whether it is just what the dictator told people but I do know that in traditional communities, especially in the country, no one bothered to lock their doors until fairly recently.

Crime does happen but as it is not something we are confronted with daily we maybe get a bit blasé about it. I should probably lock the car when I go to the supermarket but the central locking is dodgy and I can’t be bothered to go around pushing all the buttons down. Hopefully this is not something I will come to regret, but so far I have had no problems. This might, however, say more about the desirability of my car than the state of crime in Portugal.