In which Sid and Doris have a properly nice Christmas Day roaming Lisbon’s hills.
Putting the memory of the not-Christmas-Eve dinner firmly behind them, Sid and Doris open their Christmas Stockings, organised by Secretly Santa Sid and ferried over from the UK in Hermann’s capacious boot. 
The stockings contain little gifts of food, silly toys and magazines. The other presents will be opened later in the day.
We start the day by giving Hermann his Christmas Gleaming. We try to buy him nice parking spaces underground whenever possible, and Doris has stashed a big collection of polishes, cleaning agents and specialist colour-coded cloths in a collapsible bucket in the boot. She says you gotta thank him for the work he has done so far, 900+ miles. For some reason Sid finds it amusing to photograph the cloth collection now drying on the bedroom towel rail.
In Portugal, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are museums- (and churches, oddly)-shut day, so we opt for a walking tour round the old castle area.
We start with an easy first candidate for conveyance of the day, one of several funiculars operating on these steep little hills. To show you the steepness but also the littleness of the hills, here are this funicular’s vital statistics. Remembering Anna’s #bestviewedfrombelow mindset, a funicular is usually best viewed from somewhere around halfway up. Fortunately as you can see this is not far, and the doughy duo suck in their tummies to allow the funicular cars past. The €3.80 each saved from the ride goes straight into the ice cream budget.
We get to the top of the hill and find it isn’t the one with the castle on anyway, so down and up through a part of the old town where real people live, where little neighbourhood restaurants are serving cheap tasty food as though this was just another Saturday, and where probably those restaurants served standard grub last night as well. WE SAID WE WOULDN’T THINK ABOUT THAT.
Back onto the more standard tourist trail Sid and Doris are walking past some of the Ten Most Beautiful Churches in Lisbon according to Lisbon Lux. But even the ever inquisitive (see the resonances there?) Sid and Doris have seen enough Baroque interiors covered with gilt.
Here are three young women who have brought gaily coloured berets and a perhaps a determination to find a geo cache nearby. Or a paleteria? It is not far away and serves very good ice lollies.
Of more sinister interest is the Museo Alijube which translates as cistern or dungeon run by the Policia Internacionale e de Defesa do Estado. (Even The Silk can read Portuguese, it’s hearing it that is impossible.) This was the political prison from 1928 until the Carnation Revolution of 1974. 
It might sound like a popular uprising but started with the Armed Forces Movement who were fed up with running the wars against the independence movements in Portugal’s fading empire. Those territories were quickly granted independence and today we celebrate happy democracies such as Mozambique (life expectancy 55 years, literacy rate 60%, GDP per head $1,200) and Angola (62 years, 71% and $6,200 all figures from the CIA), where both country’s Gini co-efficients are in the global top dozen. Perhaps they could grow some carnations? But Sid digresses.
Sid and Doris continue with the uphill downhill odyssey to the Mirador Saint Lucy to be delighted with a tiled picture of the end of the siege of Lisbon in 1147, part of the reconquista. This was conflated with crusades in the Holy Land. The second crusaders as they didn’t call themselves, on their way from Dartmouth to the Med were forced by adverse weather to put in to Porto. They agreed to join the siege of Lisbon on the basis that they could sack the city and would be entitled to the ransom money from the better off Muslim families. Many of the attackers stayed on.
It is not clear when the moustache was added to this bust but it seems that a larger moustache was booked out of the stores than was warranted. But we’re here now, so just braze it on.
The day ends with a triumphal Christmas day dinner at The Tivoli’s restaurant. The waiting team and couvert are tremendous, as is the crab they bring for Sid’s main course. It was billed as a starter. Jules Verne wrote smaller monsters than this.
The meal is topped off with crepes Suzette cooked with enormous panache and surprisingly little intervention from the Lisbon fire brigade. Suspecting that Doris secretly lusts for a helping they make extra which Sid has to eat. It is quite a tough life being a consort.
