RECENTLY, as my wife and I made our way to the local café to have breakfast in accordance with our typical Sunday morning routine, we chanced upon the usual troupe of sour-faced Jehovah’s Witnesses who always make an admirable and yet desperately misguided attempt to sell copies of the Portuguese version of Watchtower magazine on adjacent street corners. Having realised that if a pedestrian’s line of vision means that someone is unable to peruse their impressive display of unsold literature from one direction, they work in a classic pincher movement to ensure that you simply cannot fail to miss it from the other.

Initially, I muttered something to my wife about the tireless perseverance of the weekly ‘god-squad’ (or words to that effect) and then went straight into an impromptu soliloquy about a fictitious religious leader called ‘Peter’ who, dejectedly, must trudge-off to the local Kingdom Hall every Sunday afternoon after failing to ‘reel-in’ an appropriate number of fresh souls. My wife has to endure a lot of this unwarranted verbiage, you see, but it does at least provide a welcome distraction from the numerous pitfalls of the modern world.

Where was I? Oh, yes. After weaving some ludicrous tale about this mythical ‘Peter’ fellow being wickedly flogged by his brutal Christian superiors for not having attained the required quota, or helped to swell the ranks of an ever-dwindling congregation, I realised that my use of the name ‘Peter’ had not been spontaneous at all and that all those years spent attending Sunday School in London as a child had finally paid off. ‘Peter’, of course, being the Biblical fisherman whom Jesus famously commanded to become a ‘fisher of men’. My unconscious, in other words, had kindly produced the name ‘Peter’ as a perfect accompaniment to my silly remark about the man who had remained empty-handed (and presumably scarred) in his weekly quest for new souls.

My wife, meanwhile, having developed an uncanny ability to block out the sound of my droning voice, was unconscious throughout. It was only when I was two or three mouthfuls into my pão de queijo that it suddenly dawned on me that ‘Peter’ should have been called ‘Pedro’. Not only does my unconscious assist me during the composition of imaginary rambles, therefore, it can also convert Portuguese into English ten times more efficiently than Google Translate.