Letter from Espargal: 38 of 2006

This week we sat under a 4-billion year-old moon, in the shell of a two-thousand year old temple, listening to 200 year old music and looking at fish mosaics that were just as fresh as the day they were laid in a Roman wall. The setting (at the Milreu ruins at Estoi) was spectacular, the evening was mildly autumnal and we were at peace with the world. The only drawback was that the audience had to seat itself on the ruined walls of the surrounding Roman villa, anticipating which I’d had the foresight to take along a cushion. The rest of our party declined my offer of more cushions, a supply of which I keep in the car. [ Picture at: http://www.letterfromespargal.blogspot.com/ ]

Afterwards we retired for supper to a café where we’d parked the car and taken refreshments before the concert. There we wined and dined for the princely sum, including a generous tip, of 6 euros a head. It is for benefits like these that we live in a country with a fiendish bureaucracy, horrendous drivers and a medieval attitude towards animals.

Our week has revolved around the fortunes and misfortunes of our occasional workers, Dani and Natasha. We bumped into Dani last Saturday evening as we were setting out to dinner with friends and he was approaching Espargal on his moped to seek our assistance. After a brief exchange, we agreed to meet him in Loulé the following day, which happened to be young Alex’s first birthday. As ever, Dani’s main problem (apart from Dani himself) was the abject state of his finances. He was being threatened with eviction – yet again - for failure to pay the rent and he needed money both to recover his pawned mobile phone and to buy a third back wheel for his elderly moped, having trashed the first two.

We agreed that he should work for us the following week and that he would start at 09.00 sharp each day as a condition of employment. The fact is that Dani has a serious problem getting to work on time. It’s a failing that has cost him a number of jobs because his employers, myself included, find it exceedingly irritating.

In the event, he didn’t make it on time once. He ran out of petrol (twice, even though he gets a daily fuel allowance), he had a mechanical breakdown, he crashed his moped (covering himself in scratches), he overslept, he was stopped and fined for failure to display a licence plate, and he was chased by the police (caught and searched), possibly as part of a crackdown on burglaries in the area.

Each day he would roll up mid to late morning with another tale of woe and each day he would resolve to be prompt next time. Things could have been worse as he doesn’t have a driving licence here in Portugal. It was just his good fortune that the police didn’t demand it on either occasion that they stopped him. (They did check that he had the moped’s papers.)

Wednesday he brought Natasha on the back of the bike. She was cool and organised, as ever. I asked her why we were helping Dani to pay the rent while she was investing in expensive cameras. Surely, I suggested, her priority should be to assist Dani or they might both be on the street.

It was their agreement that Dani should pay the rent, she replied – and shrugged. That’s the way it was. We suspect that Natasha finds Dani as exasperating as we do but, unlike us, she takes no nonsense from him. She won’t even lend him money to buy cigarettes, to which he’s addicted. However, she’s paying back her camera loan as she promised and we have no grounds for complaint.

As we returned from Loulé after the Sunday meeting we encountered a hire-car with strangers at the bottom of our hill. A couple sat in the car, evidently lost. Their companions were talking to a villager but, since they didn’t have a language in common, they weren’t making much progress. So we stopped to offer our assistance.

It emerged that the group wanted to go to Alte for lunch but were seriously short of petrol. They had looked for fuel without success in nearby Benafim, which was on their route. As Benafim has a petrol station that’s open on Sundays, the problem seemed to us to be one of communication. I should add that the they all had strong South African accents and no Portuguese. Rather than describing to them how to find the petrol station, we led them there and introduced them to Gilberta, who runs it with her husband, Denis.

They were very grateful. “We cum from Sow Thefricka,” one of them told me in that unmistakable accent. “Yes, I know,” I replied in Afrikaans, to their astonishment. At this, their compliments and blessings flowed around us, to say nothing of a barrage of questions as to how we came to be in this remote part of the world. Keeping the answers to a polite minimum, we waved them farewell and returned home with all the satisfaction of people who have rescued wayfarers from a miserable fate.

On the work front, Dani has been clearing “the park”, two acres of rocky scrub that climb the hill behind the house. I’ve been assisting him and shredding tractor loads of the greenery that he’s been ripping out. I have also been assisting Jones with cleaning the boxes of grapes that we obtained from Leonhilda’s plot and sharing them out with our neighbours. Jones has been labouring away, as ever, in her garden. Her garden looks wonderful. So does the Banco’s Broadwalk right-of-way at the bottom of the garden. Neighbours wander along in the evening to seat themselves on the log seats that we have placed there.

The two inches of rain that we had last week have set our annual transformation in train. Countless millions of pinhead green dots are heaving themselves skywards and transforming into every possible variety of weed. The fields are losing their brown summer coats and cladding themselves in winter green. Thousands of small black millipedes – we used to call their big South African brothers “shangalulus” – are crawling across the roads, up the walls and down the paths. I’ve no idea where they come from or where they’re going.

This is true also for the family of wild pig that evidently wandered down a dirt road leading out of the village. We didn’t see the animals themselves. We never do. But we followed their prints, of one or two adults and a bunch of piglets, down the muddy road for hundreds of metres. We wondered whether they were watching us from just the other side of the thick green bushy fringe.

On the way back from our walks we have bumped into villagers collecting dandelions. These are apparently highly favoured by chickens. Large snails are also in evidence and will also shortly be collected for the pot. Snails are regarded here, as in France, as a delicacy.

On Friday we took an old friend of Barbara’s to lunch in Alte to mark the latter’s birthday. The dogs and I left the pair of them to chat and went to Luiz’s café for our usual coffee, baggy and fig and almond tart. There’s a cake shop in Alte that makes the best fig and almond tart in the world. The dogs always settle down under the table and glare at the cats that come along to bum a crumb from the tourists. Ono fails to see the point of having cats.

This morning we drove past Loulé and Sao Bras to the tiny village of Santa Caterina to support a fete being held on behalf of the Sao Francisco Animals’ home. We returned with a box of German knives, a stock of jams and chutneys - always useful over the Christmas period - and one or two minor garments. Such has been our week.

Letter from Espargal: 37 of 2006

(The picture shows Ono lying in the new stone bed in front of the house. Jones intends to plant a vine at this spot)


It is Thursday morning and I am sitting at my desk waiting for rain. We have been promised rain on at least three different weather channels. I will be bitterly disappointed if these promises come to nothing. Clouds have been blowing over ever since dawn, with brief sunny interludes that we wish away. We've had enough sun; it’s rain that we need.

This sentiment is not universally felt. Local people tell us that rain will end the tomato-growing season and ruin whatever grapes remain on the vines. From what we can see there are a great many such grapes, not to speak of apples, figs and other fruit. One evening we took Leonhilda, a Portuguese neighbour, to pick grapes at a sizeable plot that she and her husband own near Benafim, where they have planted a grove of fruit, carob and olive trees and a line of vines.

In spite of receiving no irrigation and little attention, the vines thrive and were dripping with grapes when we visited. We picked for half an hour, loading the car till it groaned. Half the booty Leonhilda kept for herself and her neighbours; the rest she left with us. We shall be distributing much of it among the expats. (Maybe Jones will make some grape jam to complement her tomato and fig jams.) Stoopy is also fond of grapes and (unlike me) swallows pips and skin along with the fruit. Ono turns up his nose at them.

We are having difficulty establishing a harmonious balance among our animals. The problem has arisen with the arrival of Squeaker and Squawker, the two young black cats, Nosey’s former brood, who have adopted us. (Jones calls them Paw and NonPaw, Paw having a tiny distinguishing mark on his limb.) They are attractive, friendly animals who come to us for food and affection. They often come ankle-rubbing when we are watering the garden. Part of the problem is that from time to time they pick on old Tommie (aka Fatty Fatcat) who, while he once inspired awe among his fellows, is no longer able to defend his corner. Naturally, we intervene to save his skin.

This exacerbates the other part of the problem. That is Ono’s resentment of the newcomers and his inclination to chase them. Although he has learned to accept Tommie, who has been around for yonks, Ono is baffled by our adoption of more cats and tolerates their presence with ill-disguised reluctance. He is highly sensitive to mood. If we remonstrate with the pair or even look at them askance, Ono takes it as a green light to have a go.

So when I hurled a can of water over them one evening as they ganged up on Tommie, Ono instantly went after them, nipping at their heels as they fled. (No harm was done.) Since then they’ve been a lot more cautious. No doubt they will grow confident again and the problem will repeat itself. Never mind that Jones has expressed an interest in adopting a kitten from Nosey’s latest brood. This six-strong litter gambles in David and Sarah’s garden across the field from us, where we spotted several running around and one peeping out of a watering can as we passed. (My housemaid’s knee is much improved and I’m dog-walking again – rather slowly). Jones is once again sharing their feeding with another neighbour as David and Sarah have returned to the UK.

(It’s drizzling.)

Anticipating rain, I spent some hours with the scarifier turning over the soil on the Casanova field, a steeply sloping plot adjacent to the house. Unless one is going straight up or down, the tractor tends to lurch and drift. As usual, I struggled to make it go where I wanted to rather than where it tended to. To my shame, I bumped into a tree. It wasn’t a very big bump and it didn’t do much damage, except to my vanity, but it did crack the plastic housing on the front of the tractor. I removed the housing and was able to patch it with a metal bracket. It fits and it doesn’t look too bad. My pride will take rather longer to mend.

(Now it’s really raining. I had to dash outside to fetch a ladder from Casa Nada in order to clear a drain pipe that was squirting water in every direction.)

At Jones’s suggestion, I used the tractor to crush an elderly pile of light branches, one of several lying about the property, that I planned to burn once it was safe to do so. (It’s against the law to set fire to such material during the dry season.) The crushing worked quite well and should reduce the twigs to mulch within a month or two. All the heavier stuff has already been cut into firewood and piled high outside Casa Nada. I do hope that we get a cold winter or we shall be left with mountains of firewood for another year (I have got my chain-saw back from the supplier and with it confirmation that the problem I’ve had with it arose from polluted fuel.)

While I was busy with the crushing I noticed a melee of ants dragging an unwilling wasp towards their nest. A second wasp was buzzing the ants. This wasp gave the clear impression that it wanted to rescue its fellow but didn’t know how. When it landed close by, the ants immediately tried to grab it too, and it flew off again in a hurry although it continued to buzz angrily around the group. The first wasp was hauled down, still kicking and squirming, into the ant hole where it was clearly destined for the larder. There is something quite scarily organised and ruthless about ants.

When Natasha came on Wednesday she brought her new video camera to show us the results of her first efforts. We hooked the camera up to the TV to watch. The results were impressive – both the quality of the picture and the camerawork. She had devoted equal time to the antics of her son (seen dismantling the kitchen of the apartment they share) and to a sand sculpture display at a village near the coast. The latter was really something, with giant figures from mythology populating sculpted castles. The sculptors add something to the sand to keep it in place for the weeks that the exhibition continues.

We were guests one evening at dinner in a very smart villa that Irish neighbours have recently constructed with a view to gaining rental income. They live in a cottage in the village but are staying in the villa while the cottage is being refurbished. As they showed us around we admired the handiwork of the local builder, Horacio, who really does a brilliant job. We have often regretted that we didn’t know him when we came to build our own house.

Before sitting down to supper with the rest of the local expats, we played several rounds of petanque. This involves trying to land metal balls the size of oranges as close as possible to a small jack. In the event, Barbara and I won the competition. Given the nature of the ground on which it was played and the unpredictable behaviour of the metal balls on landing, it was as much by luck as judgement. But the others were kind enough not to say so.

We made a trip to Loulé to deposit some pounds in our euro account while sterling is in the ascendant. In a typical year, the two currencies vary against one another by some 7 per cent so there’s quite a lot to be gained or lost. I then walked around with the dogs to the “Senior University” to see when the academic year starts and to confirm my willingness to give English lessons once again. The door was still shut. (There are only 3 staffers. All the lecturers are volunteers.)

With some time on our hands, we sat down over coffees and a baggy to read the two weekly Portugenglish papers. One of them seldom fails to carry irritating letters from two dull correspondents with bees in their bonnets. In the latest issue one of these correspondents threatens to explode if the Crusades are described once more as an assault on Islam. I intend to write to the paper accordingly in the express hope that he will keep his pledge.

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Letter from Espargal: 36 of 2006

If you were to step outside Valapena this weekend you would find the air suffused with the scent of lavender. That’s because Jones has been cutting back her thriving lavender bushes and I have been shredding the off-cuts. They’ve created new crests on the mountain of mulch that is rising across the track from Casa Nada and they smell wonderful.

Even without the lavender, there’s a delicious change-of-season feel to the air. The haze of summer has blown away and we’ve some welcome clouds instead. Temps are down into the 20s and there’s even been a spattering of rain. We sat on the patio, drinks in hand, watching the moisture drift down on the garden and the water stream from the upper patio into the barrels on the cobbles below. It’s the first embrace of autumn and we’re relishing it.

I little thought during our years in London that I would ever want to see more clouds. Then I found the interminable grey skies of Britain mildly depressing. It seemed like a country of faded colours. Now I’d gladly trade our sun-burned days for those grey skies - not that we’re likely to have the option here in the Algarve. We saw a few excerpts of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth - declining rainfall, shrinking glaciers and melting mountains - and we shivered – or should that be “perspired”?

Last weekend we visited Faro for a meal at The End of The World restaurant and a philharmonic (read “brass band”) evening on the dockside. The restaurants in the pedestrian malls were doing good business, serving bustling tables in the walkway outside. At The End of The World, two waiters worked hard to keep diners happy. After the meal I asked our waiter if he could find a few scraps in the kitchen for the dogs. He returned with a plastic bag bulging with leftovers. I could hardly believe the quality of the food. Nor could the dogs. They have dined like kings all week.

From the restaurant we strolled down to the dockside, passing the cycle police – good-looking fellows in shorts on mountain bikes - who patrol the pedestrian precincts. At the dock the music was already underway. Barbara and I found a bench from which to watch the passing scene while we listened to the combined brass bands of Faro and Loulé. There’s a good turn-out for these events, with some of the audience seated in plastic chairs in front of the stage and the rest scattered around the square across the road.

On Tuesday we kept our pledge to Natasha to take her after work to an electronics supermarket to find the video-camera she wanted. When I put it to her that she was investing a lot of her meagre earnings in high-tech equipment she replied that having a video camera had been her dream. I guess we all have to have dreams. In the event, the range available at the shop proved disappointing and Natasha decided that she could do better in Loulé, where she had carefully noted the available models and prices.

Back in Loulé we met Dani, her other half, whose elderly moped had been out of action for several days as the result of a flat tyre and (subsequent) damaged wheel. As usual he was skint so we advanced him the cash to purchase a second-hand wheel and then oversaw the transaction on the pavement outside his apartment block. Unlike Natasha, Dani has holes in his money-pocket and is forever having to mortgage his possessions to secure the loans he seems to live on. He “borrowed” another 5 euros at the same time to replace a lock that he said thieves had broken while trying to steal the moped.

Without particularly wishing to stick our noses in their domestic affairs, we were puzzled as to how Natasha could afford (albeit with a partial loan) to purchase expensive equipment while Dani was broke. As we are their principal bankers, the interest is legitimate. While their responses didn’t really jell, it would seem that they operate separate “accounts”, a reflection of their increasingly separate lives. I suspect that it’s only their small son, whom they both adore, who keeps them together.

Wednesday we had set aside to take Nosey, a neighbourhood cat and prolific breeder, to a vet to be spayed, something that has long been on Jonesy’s mind. Nosey doesn’t belong to us. She doesn’t belong to anybody. But she spends quite a lot of time with our neighbours, Sarah and David. When they’re away, Jonesy shares cat-feeding duties with another neighbour. Two of Nosey’s offspring have moved in with us. Since having that litter last year, she has had at least two others. One disappeared without trace. The six kittens of the latest litter (by now on commercial food) romp around David and Sarah’s garden.

For several days, Sarah had been feeding Nosey inside a cat-box in the hope that Nosey would enter the box as usual on Wednesday morning, and be locked in. Last time David tried to catch her she panicked and scratched him severely. This time the plan worked. After phoning around to ascertain prices we had opted for a vet in a village some distance away. The cost of the operation was 85 euros. When we handed over the cash the vet gave us a grateful nod instead of a receipt. I guess that’s how they keep it cheap. Nosey has since been reunited with her brood and appears perfectly content. She ought to be. Life should be a lot less demanding for her in future.

For Sarah’s birthday on Thursday evening, Jones arranged sunset drinks with the local expats on a hillside in the bush a couple of kms away. The last 500 metres was accessible only to serious 4x4 vehicles. So I was sent ahead on the tractor, with chairs, folding table, snacks and drinks in the link-box, while Jones met the rest of the party and conducted them up the track (left by the electricity-pylon builders) to the appointed spot overlooking the valleys below. The setting was spectacular. If it was a long way to go for a drink and a chat, nobody complained – and it proved an excellent start to an evening that finished up with dinner in Benafim at the Hamburgo (from Hamburg, not hamburger).

Heavy machinery has been in evidence outside the house of a Portuguese neighbour. We understand that his old fossa has clogged up and that he’s digging another. In theory he should be applying to the Department of the Environment for permission to have a fossa (soak-away sewage pit) and waiting to hear from them what type is acceptable in the circumstances. It took us seven months to pry an answer out of them and we landed up with an impractical system because of our supposed nearness to a water source. Never mind that virtually everybody else in the village is closer to the source, and all have traditional fossas. The yawning chasm between theory and practice is wide enough to swallow most of Portugal’s vast bureaucracy.

I hope to be back walking with Jones and the dogs again next week after spending most of this one hobbling around with housemaid’s knee. It wasn’t particularly sore, just stiff and swollen. At least it’s had the benefit for Jones that the bed and coffee are made when she gets back in the morning, and the dogs’ breakfast is waiting. Sometimes she even finds that the garden has been watered. Now that’s not to be sneezed at.

We have hired our first film of the season – “The Weather Man” with Nicolas Cage and an ageing Michael Caine. It was a character study, well done if not uplifting. We have fallen behind on our movies. We always do during the summer. Jones has a little list of those she wants to see and so do I. In the meanwhile, I am gaining some insights into the nature of infinity with the help of Brian Clegg’s book on the subject. (The BBC is about to broadcast a programme series on the same). Jones has taken to reading the Sunday Times supplements, supplied to us second hand by a neighbour. The quality of the writing makes them a pleasure to read, especially after we have waded through the gobbledegook of the Portugenglish local rags.

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