Depression's small black dog sits beside me as a new covid wave prepares to slam into the upcoming autumn.

These last few days, a small black dog of depression has come to sit at my side. He won't budge no matter how much I try shooing him away.

Stress probably let him in my front door because it has played havoc, with my emotions, leaving me sleepless- as well as prone to dark thoughts. Stress certainly weakened my immune system and left me open to illness.

I now have this half-arsed sickness on the skin below my nose, which has made my upper lip look like I went to a back street Botox doctor.

I had a pharmacist look at it because we ran out of doctors some time ago, thanks to our government's greed to sell off public healthcare to hedge funds. I was given some hydrocortisone cream and it has brought the swelling down. Yet, it seems to me a long process for such a simple infection.

The infection has tired me out and left me without much ambition outside of feeling better again. I was working on an essay, for you today about my father and Russell Brand in 2014 but it is not gelling. .

Brand and my Dad never met. But those who were creating the marketing success of Harry's Last Stand wanted my Dad to jump on the Brand bandwagon in hopes some stardust from the faux guru of revolution might fall his way.

 You will have to wait for that essay because writing it gave me more anger than is good for me- at the moment.

Instead, I am revealing more from the journals I kept when Harry and I lived in Portugal from 2008-2010.

The journal is 30k words in length and is an interesting document of our time there and how Harry's Last Stand was formed in the years before its creation.

I've included a small excerpt which is from the beginning of 2009. I do that because that was when my brother Peter was diagnosed with Interstitial Pulmonary Fibrosis and informed my father and me about it. It is a disease similar to the one I now contend with.

We didn't know then that it would kill him ten months later. However, judging from the journal, I had a feeling- the year would bring much sadness to my family. Anyway, here it is. I hope you enjoy it. John.

January 3, 2009-01-06

Still jittery today. Walked to the old town with Dad and watched the sea. At 10:30 PM Noel showed up at our door with his German girlfriend who was pissed on port. They wanted cigarettes from Dad and beer from me.

Dad obliged. The German presented us with a Stollen..." all the way from Germany," they said. "Via Lidl’s, I replied.

What do you do in Hamburg, I ask the German.

"I don’t like to say...people always get the wrong idea."

She was a debt collector.

Later on, Noel whispers in my ear, "Her dad was a copper."

After that, I realised it's time to get them out of our place because a debt collector with a Nazi cop for a father is going to lead to an argument.

January 6, 2009-01-06

Woke to a low-hanging hemisphere with dull coloured clouds overhead. The weather and my mood feel like they are stuck in a eternal November. The night was so damp my sheets were wet from it. I had bad dreams and for the last week or so have begun night eating in half sleep.

Sun came out in the afternoon. The Ali Super across from my bedroom is the depository and repository for the street gossip with the local women. Yesterday, the other inhabitants discovered a dead scorpion in the back courtyard.

Our landlady seemed to think it was not a problem, " dead is dead."

There are now some goldfinches nesting down below the roundabout. Wildflowers are also beginning to dot the cliffs around us. Mostly yellow flowers delicate and small.

The side of the road we use to walk up to Nuno’s cafe is a sharp vertical cliff of clay-like earth. It is held together by large aloe Vera plants whose giant leaves now touch the top of my head.

Yesterday, when i walked up the street with Dad, a Portuguese woman exits her house puffing away on a cigarette with a stench so pungent that I could smell it 50 feet away.

Finally I put up a sketch of Pete’s on the wall above my laptop. It was only weeks ago that he told me his lungs were fucked by fibrosis. "I'll be fine."

I've got a bad feeling about all of this.

I looked out at the ocean in the old town and stared out for home. I miss snow and the way it feels on one's skin. The way it crunches and falls so quietly sometimes. The way snow sits on trees. The way it makes one feel totally alone.

Old town Albufeira is deserted and cold. The ice rink erected for Christmas in the old town square was dismantled today. The ice was frozen on top of a wood foundation, which municipal workers hacked off like it was for drinks.

Tepid bath water tonight because our landlady has been fiddling with the hot water heater again.

January 7, 2009-01-07

Orthodox Christmas, Ukrainian street workers drink in their yuletide at the unheated English style pub. Amongst them are Ukrainian mafia thugs who Rui told me are loan sharks that enslave their migrant brothers and sisters in the chains of high interest rates. Everywhere else the streets are deserted- of both foreigners and Portuguese.

Low clouds again today with drizzle and damp wind. It is like being stuck in a perpetual, hopeless November as there is little sun. At home I read there is snow, and sleet. Here my bones ache from the dampness.

Fixed the hot water issue the landlady had in fact, turned down the hot water heater. I discovered the switch to turn it on high, and presto- hot water again for our showers.

Even the stray cats have upped sticks from the old town. Restaurants are empty of customers- but outside is a hired homeless person with leaflets advertising 6-euro English breakfasts and 6.50 euros for fried sardine dinners or sangria 10 Euros per jug.

Even the weasel ball game is gone from the old square.

There seems to be only one English used bookshop in this town, and their speciality is Clive Cussler and Jack Higgins.

Dad spent most of the night coughing in his sleep.

I don’t know if it is from too many or too few Davidoff’s.

Feoroni’s down the road from us is now shuttered.

I saw them clearing their stuff out of the restaurant, on Monday after New Year’s weekend. The economic tsunami is coming and will sweep everything out to sea.

January 8, 2009-01-08

Deep freeze all across Europe both in climate and economies. Portugal admits, they are in a recession like the rest of the world. Today, the clouds hung low in the sky. Now and then, the sun broke through and played on the ocean waves.

Senor Venda tilled his 3x2 patch of earth outside with the same motivation as a prisoner gardening.

I heard him yelling at his wife upstairs, probably at her inefficiency in stealing and replacing our light bulbs with lower-wattage ones.

I emailed pictures to Peter of our POW Christmas in Malcolm Loweryville. We spent it with men in their 60s or older who read The Daily Mail and, for entertainment, drink cheap Jameson's in local cafes where they are permitted to be intolerant and racist.

Dad and I walked to Pingo Doce. On the way we saw a handful of Brits belligerently pissed before 11 in the morning stumbling on the pavement.

January 25, 2009-01-25

Before sunrise- a great clamour of rain and wind outside.

Gales are storming down the coastline to Albufeira.

Today Bill, our neighbour, was in a terrible state. We ran into him waiting at the bus stop. Bill said he had to find a chemist and get medicine for his chest. He had a hacking and sputtering cough. It has been with him since his return from being on the lash in Cork with Rory. (Bill would be diagnosed with lung cancer 18 months later and die in hospice at home in Scotland.)

Bill 's 67th birthday is coming up which is how he justifies drinking double and treble his normal alcoholic pace. His breakfast is a fried egg washed down- with half a bottle of wine. It holds him over until lunch when he downs six gin and tonics at the Lemon Tree. For dinner he goes to  Nuno's for a sausage roll and half a bottle of brandy before he leaves to watch "Egg Heads," at home. Lower middle-class Britain comes to the Algarve to retire from sobriety and die in drink.

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because your help is really NEEDED. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Even sharing my posts helps the cause. Take Care, John