Communication Issues

AFTER having to sell my beloved fish when I moved to Portugal almost ten years ago, due to transportation problems, I eventually began to restock my aquarium. One afternoon, therefore, I found myself providing a dramatic, on-the-spot performance for a local pet shop owner in what soon descended into a useless and ineffectual attempt to imitate a water mollusc and, thus, compensate for the increasingly obvious fact that the elusive word 'caracol' had yet to enter the snail-like recesses of my sluggish Portuguese vocabulary.

Unfortunately, the situation was not helped by the fact that my rucksack was a very poor substitute for a shell and placing a wriggling forefinger above each of my ears to indicate antennae was about as effective as handing out pork pies at a bar mitzvah. If it had not been for the fact that there was a pencil and a piece of paper on the counter, I would have been written off as a complete lunatic.