First Time in Lisbon, Except It Wasn't

Neither of us had been to Lisbon. No family ties, no previous trips, and I had done none of the planning — my wife booked everything, and I deliberately avoid maps on holiday.

Day two, we came out of a tram stop into the Alfama, that famous tangle where every guide warns you will get lost, and my feet turned left with complete authority. My wife had the map app open; I was suddenly walking like a man late for work. She trotted behind, amused. 'Where are you going?' 'There is a fountain with a cracked basin around this corner,' I said — not guessing, reporting. There was.

It kept happening. I knew the alley that looked like a dead end but dog-legged through an arch. I knew which staircase smelled of oranges — I said 'oranges' on the way in, and there was a tree in the courtyard at the top. Then I stopped, mid-street, and said, 'Two more corners and there is a bakery, tiny, blue-tiled, and the woman there is deaf and you point at what you want.' Two corners. Blue tiles the colour of old dishes. Behind the counter, an elderly woman who watched our mouths and pointed back at the pastries, smiling the smile of someone who has won this game for fifty years.

My wife stopped finding it funny at the bakery. She tested me for the rest of the afternoon and my score was imperfect but absurd — perhaps eight in ten, in a district locals get wrong.

Here is everything I can offer as explanation, and it is nothing: my grandfather was a sailor and docked in Lisbon often in the fifties. He died before I was born. The bakery, the current owner told us through her granddaughter, has been in the family since then, and her late mother — also deaf — served sailors from the port. Make of the arithmetic what you will. My feet already have.