The third day

Today is terça-feira, which I think means ‘third day’. That makes sense: it’s Tuesday, after all. For some reason in Brazil they think it’s appropriate to name some (not all) of their days sequentially by number, but they start with Monday as ‘second day’. There is no ‘first day’. This revelation was the gist of my Brazilian Portuguese lesson this morning, and it’s doing my head in. Why can’t they name their days after Roman and Norse gods like the rest of us? Naming them sequentially leans towards Esperanto in its lack of imagination, although starting with ‘second’ instead of ‘first’ shows a spark of originality. At least whoever thought of it must have had a sense of humour.

The same can’t really be said of the ancient Mayans, who cleverly decided upon having 260 different days of the ‘week’. That’s an awfully long time to have to wait for a weekend after spending all ‘week’ building pyramids and sacrificing people. Must have been exhausting. No wonder they died out. But I wasn’t studying their numbering system today – I was still working out the details of the Sunseeker yacht that gets stolen in the novel, which involved yet more drooling over luscious photos of how the other half lives. Apparently they can hold three thousand litres of fuel (the yachts, not the rich people) which is enough to heat my house for a whole year (or for a fortnight in Mayan), and is more than enough to get from France to northern Italy.

The word count of The Sphinx Scrolls has now hit 171,000 as I continue to add more colour to the narrative here and there. On the next draft it will shoot up beyond 180,000 words because there are several new chapters to be written.

After lunch I printed out my pages relating to the helicopter ride in the previous chapter and posted them through my pilot neighbour’s letterbox for his perusal. He’s quite excited at the idea of doing some fact checking for my novel, and I’m looking forward to finding out how inaccurate my completely imaginary chopper flying techniques turn out to be. I found an old black and white clip of Whirlybirds online, and it looks pretty easy to me: just waggle a stick around between your legs and maintain a serious expression on your face whilst chasing bad guys.