Letter from Espargal: 42 of 2006

Jones is on her cruise. Last I heard from her, she was sitting under pine trees on an Adriatic island, staring across at the shores of the Croatian mainland. She’ll be glad of the peace and quiet. She flew out of Faro on Monday night after much careful preparation and packing. (Each time she left her open suitcase to fetch a garment, Fatty Fatcat would hop back inside.) Together we ticked off her checklist.

The dogs and I saw her off at Faro airport on Monday evening. She arrived at Gatwick shortly before midnight and was lucky enough to be able to recheck her luggage immediately – EasyJet having declined to check it through to Venice. She then killed a couple of hours in the terminal before clearing security and heading for the departure lounge when the place reopened. She doesn’t have my gift for dozing so she was fairly bleary-eyed by the time her flight took off at 07.00. After arriving in Venice she caught the water-bus from the airport as her friend, Maureen, already in Venice, had advised her.

But she caught a public water bus not a private one as Maureen had done and meant Barbara to do. So Jonesy got lost. Her map proved of little use. To make matters worse Venice was flooded by an extra high tide and streets were several inches under water. Not that this discouraged the thousands of tourists who were wading in every direction. Jones had the choice of joining waders in the water or fighting her way, with suitcase in tow, through the scrum using the elevated wooden sidewalk.

She says it took her over an hour, multiple enquiries and several phone calls to find her hotel. It is tiny and not well known. Along the way she stopped to marvel at the amazing sights the city has to offer. I had no idea of her difficulties until I got a text message after her safe arrival. By the time I called her at the hotel she could see the funny side but she must have been shattered.

She didn’t even have a restorative tipple of our neighbour, Jose’s finest fig liqueur with her on her travels – given the latest security regulations. We were presented with a litre and a half of the beverage in a water bottle when we passed Jose’s storeroom with the dogs one afternoon. He wished to thank us for the carobs we’d collected and given him. He was horrified to hear that I intended to mix this nectar with coke. No, it was too good for that, he protested, and should be taken neat.

Jose doesn’t actually make it himself. Local people take their figs along to a hamlet where somebody has a still and exchanges the figs for liquor. Such production is unlawful because the liquor is not taxed. However, the practice is time honoured, the locals would be very dismayed to see it brought to an end and, fortunately, the police generally have better things to do.

Once again the week has been delightfully damp. We’ve had rain for 12 consecutive days, as long a spell as I can remember. The start of the week brought thick mist and a downpour. I had a call from Natasha to say that she was at the bus station in Loulé, having missed her bus after battling to get young Alex to his carer. She was due to work for a friend of ours in Almancil who has little grasp of Portuguese while Natasha has equally little of English. Normally don’t need to talk much. He fetches her from the bus stop in the town and drops her off again. She just gets on with the job.

She asked me to call him and explain that she was taking a later bus. That was cancelled – more phone calls. Eventually it all worked itself out. The friend concerned has a house on a flat piece of ground that floods after heavy rain. When I spoke to him, his garden had vanished under a sheet of water that was creeping into his garage and threatening to invade the house itself. Happily the storm passed over in the middle of the day and the flood resided.

Tuesday Natasha cleaned here. Given the weather conditions she had to take extra care to keep the animals apart. Squeaker and Squawker stay outside. Fatty Fatcat (aka Tommie), who gets harassed by them if he goes out, camps up on the bed all day. The two kittens have to be shuttled between the guest bedroom and the south patio while cleaning is underway. And, of course, they must be kept away from the dogs and the dogs from them. So far, the two pairs have stared in fascination at one another through the glass sliding doors. At some point introductions will have to be made. I’m not in a hurry.

During a trip to Loulé I dropped into a computer store and bought myself another 256 mb of RAM, which doubled the memory on my aging (nearly 4 years old) desktop computer. I reckon that one computer year equals ten human years. The computer has been struggling under the weight of the English and Portuguese dictionaries along with email, browser and elements of Office, to say nothing of virus checkers, firewalls and spyware filters. Although I had difficulty fitting the memory strip into a narrow slot behind a mass of ribbons, it worked. The computer instantly recognised that it had extra potency and now opens my programs with satisfying promptness.

With the restraining hand of Jones out of the way, I also took myself to an appliance store in Loulé and bought a flat screen TV, an appliance of modest dimensions that fits neatly into the space available in the lounge and gives a brilliant picture. Usefully, it can swivel 20* to the right or left. That happened on Wednesday when our Portuguese teacher forgot to turn up (he called me aside during my English class on Thursday to apologise) and I found myself with an hour to kill. The shop assistant assured me that it was easy to set up and so it was. One just has to inform the set what country one is in and it then configures itself. According to the instructions it offers a huge range of different modes and settings that I may get around to one quiet evening.

The quiet evening I had in mind last night was disturbed by a call from the two Dutch women who have moved into a new house in the village. They had run into problems trying to matriculate their car – no surprise – and sought my advice. By the time they came around I had printed off the relevant instructions in Dutch that are available to members of a foreign residents association. The pair confessed that they had tried, with virtually no Portuguese, to begin the process themselves and had erroneously signed an importation form that left them liable for 4,000 euros in import tax – this on a well-used combi type vehicle. I directed them to the Automobile Club of Portugal in Faro to try to sort the mess out. Portugal still fiercely protects the local (heavily taxed) car industry by imposing either punishing taxes or a bruising bureaucratic load on imported cars.

Not that such bureaucracy is confined to Portugal. It so happens that I’ve had dealings lately with both our British and Portuguese banks. Troubles began when Barclays blocked our cash cards on my last visit to Canada. They advised me to inform the bank next time I intended to travel. But when I tried to do so, I found there was no channel. They wouldn’t accept emails or letters. One had to go in person to the branch concerned or involve oneself in lengthy international phone calls. The only way around this was to become a premiere client by keeping 100,000 pounds in the bank. So I wrote and complained. In fairness I got a prompt and sympathetic phone call saying that the matter was being investigated.

In Portugal, on the other hand, because we keep a modest credit balance (as we do in Britain) we find that we have been upgraded from the “mass market” branch (their description) to the personal clients branch where most things can be arranged by simply lifting a telephone or sending an email to one’s account manager. There’s little doubt in my mind about which bank I would chose to deal with.

Before I sign off, let me tell you that Jones has not been encouraged to try the ship’s internet facilities. In an SMS she reported that “email very pricey very busy”. I don’t think that she will be spending much time at the keyboard. I shall be happy to pass on any news by text message at such times that we can communicate. There shouldn’t be much problem for the next week or two while she’s off the European coast. Thereafter it’s a case of fingers crossed.

Letter from Espargal: 41 of 2006

This is quite a big day in our lives, seeing it’s the day we got married, some time back in the last millennium. We both knew that it was imminent but it took a congratulatory email from my sister this morning to remind us that it had arrived. Or, maybe, just to remind me. Not that Jones said anything when we woke, rather late, given the mist and drizzle that envelops the house. Intermittent gaps in the mist give us glimpses of the valley below.

In fact it’s been wonderfully drizzly and grey for most of the week. Astonishingly for us, the next ten days look to be equally damp, that’s if one credits weather.com’s ten day forecast. I’ve often seen ten little sun logos pictured in its forecast but never before ten drizzly clouds. In anticipation of the wet weather, I planted beans last weekend in the upper section of Sarah and David’s field, an area that I’d already ploughed. The field is narrow and sloping, as well as being dotted with awkwardly placed trees, making it difficult to work with a tractor. I was pleased to learn that my efforts had won compliments from one of the local farmers - no small achievement.

Most of the locals are of the view that it is still a bit early in the season to be sowing beans. If I went ahead, they advised, I should plant the seeds slightly further apart than usual. Later plantings could be closer together. I took their word although I missed the finer points of the explanation.

The sun was still shining last Saturday when Jones returned from feeding the kittens at Sarah and David’s – the Old Bakery -, clutching a cat basket containing the small tabby female kitten that she wanted from Nosey’s latest litter. The kitten was promptly named Dearheart and introduced to the spare bedroom where her previously miserable brother, Braveheart, gave her a delighted welcome.

The two of them have settled down really quickly. They now come running each time we enter the room and are happy to be fondled, especially at feeding time. Their appetites are large and, for two small kittens, they make surprisingly generous use of their sand-tray. We have yet to introduce them to the dogs although the latter have come to terms (of sorts) with the kittens’ half brothers, Squeaker and Squawker, who have been designated “outside cats”. Any correspondence regarding cats – the increase of - should be addressed to Jones.

Which reminds me. Jones is off for her cruise on Monday. She flies to the UK that evening and then on to Venice, where she and Maureen will join the ship. The vessel departs on 26 October and arrives in Cape Town on 29 November. During this time Jones should be contactable by phone, fax or email. I suggest email only as the other two options are decidedly expensive. Her ship email address ought to be:

bbenson0614@marcopolo.cruisemail.net

I suggest that you address any emails to her personal address, as well, at:

barbarajbenson@gmail.com

Should you wish to phone her, you will be required to supply details of your credit card (costs $7 a minute), the ship’s name (Marco Polo) and the cabin number (D614).

The phone number is: 00 1 732 335 3295 (although I suspect that the first two digits will depend on the caller’s location. The fax number (at approx £10 per fax) is given as 00 873 330 869 311.

This week saw the start of the “Senior University of Loulé’s” academic year. Serious academicians might suspect this institution’s credentials (in much the same way as people harbour doubts about North Korean democracy). But that’s not the point, given the good work that its voluntary teachers do among Loule’s (mainly) older citizens. We returned to Portuguese classes on Wednesday. My English class the next day brought several welcome and familiar faces as well as a host of new ones, among them that of Natasha, who wants to improve the schoolgirl English she learned in Russia.

Also present was the widow of the man who used to run the small car repair shop just below the Quintassential. To my shame, I failed to recognise her until she spoke. In mitigation I must plead that I had met her only a few times, on the last occasion at her husband’s funeral in Loulé, where dozens of expats joined the Portuguese community to pay their respects to Joe. Joe was simply a guy who would bust a gut to help people out. He loved working on cars as much as he hated working out the bill. If there’s a part of heaven set aside for mechanics you’ll find Joe there.

Midweek I took advantage of a break in the clouds to burn piles of old branches that had been lying around the Casanova field. I know that burning off rubbish is now taboo and I did so reluctantly. Any new prunings get turned the same day into firewood or mulch. But the branches in question were too dry to shred and not worth the trouble of cutting into numerous small twigs (of which I already have a large stack). It took me three firelighters to get a blaze going in the damp conditions and two hours to get rid of the branches, which had to be dragged from the edges of the field. A shower came along as I finished to dampen the mound of ash that was left in the centre.

Wednesday evening we were entertained to supper by friends whose names I’ll omit lest they or their acquaintances read this (now available at - http://www.letterfromespargal.blogspot.com/). Not because we were not handsomely wined and dined but because their cat came in half way through the meal, hopped up on the couch where I had left my coat and proceeded to bring up its supper on the garment. Our hostess was most apologetic for the beast’s unseemly behaviour and, having cleaned the coat, offering to have it dry-cleaned as well. That would really have been abusing her hospitality. It wasn’t the sort of coat that visits dry cleaners. Moreover, as I was able to report the following day while walking in the drizzle, it seemed to work as well as ever.

Thursday we had friends around for pre-lunch drinks, really to catch up on their news and show them all the stone work that Idalecio had been doing around the garden, before going off to lunch at the little village of Nave de Barao. The adega there serves both excellent and inexpensive meals as well as boasting a tempting range of affordable wines. It’s a favourite.

One evening I spent downloading the latest version (7) of Internet Explorer – much improved (although I’ve long preferred Mozilla Firefox) and trying to renew my Norton Anti-Virus programme. With the latter I failed, as the company insists that one supplies a (non-existent in my case) subscription number obtained with the previous purchase. I’ve decided to give up on Norton, which is getting very expensive anyhow, and go with AVG instead. I’m interested in the new Microsoft OneCare, which looks like good value but it’s not yet available outside of North America.

Today, while I was writing this letter, Jones asked me to call a small workshop in the hamlet of Torre, where several women run a business making wooden toys and decorative items. Jones wanted a few small objects to take with her on her travels. The women said we’d have to hurry because they closed at 12.30 on Fridays. So we promised to be prompt and they said they’d wait for us.

We’d never been to Torre before. It’s a tiny village (no café, shop or even children) in the hills on the far side of Alte, one of numerous places that have really only stayed alive because of the foreigners who have bought up and restored the derelict cottages. Half a dozen dogs inspected us as we arrived. The woodworking women, three of them, have turned the old primary school into a carpenter’s shop. They were working away, shaping, sandpapering and gluing bits of wood. Along the walls there was a good selection of machinery as well as dozens of hand tools.

The scene took me back to Dad’s garage, its workshop to one side, and all the lathes, saws and other equipment he loved to work with over the weekend. But I grow unduly nostalgic and, anyhow, my page is up. I might add only that we celebrated our anniversary with toasted sandwiches, baggies and inimitable fig and almond tart at Luis’s place in Alte.

Letter from Espargal: 40 of 2006

Hello from Espargal on a breezy, blue-sky Friday with a grey sky week in prospect. I am at my desk with the black shapes of Stoopy and Ono curled in their baskets beside me. Jones is downstairs in the spare room with a very miserable Braveheart. Outside, Tommie is working on his tan and, no doubt, the remaining felines, Squeaker and Squawker, might be found somewhere deep in the garden.

The week began with howls of a hunting dog that had somehow become separated from Sunday’s hunting parties and sought refuge in the thickets at the top of the hill. Jones saw the dog there on Sunday afternoon and tried to entice it out. The dog wouldn’t come. We then informed the local hunting community who were aware of a missing dog and who made their own attempts to rescue the animal. They too had no success. Midweek, the dog disappeared, leaving us all feeling a bit down. We have no idea what happened to it.

It was also midweek that Jones decided that she wanted to adopt two kittens from Nosey’s latest litter. She decided on the sole female kitten, a tabby, and one of the tabby’s five black brothers. With the assistance of a neighbour, Marie, with whom she shares feeding duties, Jones tried to capture the pair on Thursday morning. But of Nosey and her brood there was no sign. They tried again on Thursday evening. This time, Marie managed to grab the tabby and thrust it into a cat basket but she was unable to close the door on the little beast in time and it made its escape.

After our walk this morning, Jones went off to feed the cats as usual and returned with one of the small black kittens in the basket. She said the kitten had been inspecting the basket so she just put the animal inside and closed the door on it. She decided that this kitten should be called Braveheart. Braveheart is not taking well to his first morning in captivity and has been howling his unhappiness to the world, somewhat to the puzzlement of the rest of the zoo.

Jones now has ten days in which to try to domesticate Braveheart. He will become my responsibility on the 23rd when Jones flies off to join her old friend Maureen on an exotic cruise, at Maureen’s invitation. The cruise begins in Venice. The ship, the Marco Polo, spends a couple of weeks idling around the eastern Mediterranean before passing through the Suez Canal and making its way down the east coast of Africa to Cape Town via the Comoros and Madagascar.

Jones is quite nervous about this cruise and the responsibilities that it entails, to say nothing of the social pressures that she may encounter. She is also not yet convinced that it is really going to happen. However, we have made extensive preparations on the basis that it will. Yesterday we collected her travellers’ cheques from the bank and then put details of every card and document we could think of on the internet where she could access them in the event that anything should be lost or stolen. She is now busy sewing odds and ends for her portmanteau – a very little portmanteau (if this is permissible).

Tonight we are going to a concert in Loulé with four friends. Two of them are Harry and May from whom I shall learn the latest of their kitchen saga. Harry called on me last weekend to translate a couple of Portuguese documents from the Financas Dept that relate to the size of his house. In short, some idiot in the department wrote down the word “kitchen” twice when recording the rooms in Harry’s house and the Financas is now convinced that Harry and May have two kitchens when they ought to have only one. This would be illegal and is being interpreted as an attempt to evade tax. Harry thought that he had cleared up the matter with the Loulé Financas several years ago but it has now resurfaced via Faro Financas.

Of course it would be perfectly simple for an inspector to come and look at Harry’s house and confirm that he has only one kitchen. This however is not the Portuguese way. In Portugal, official letters are sent and received, laywers and accountants get into the act and, after a great deal of expensive kerfuffling, with much backing and forwarding of official correspondence, in due course the matter is generally sorted out.

The other two friends are Malcolm and Gary, ex SABC and London days, who are looking for a house with a view to moving down here from the UK. They are not under pressure and have given themselves several months to take stock of what’s on offer. During this time they are making themselves comfortable with their two (airfreighted) cats in a spacious villa, just down the road from the Quintassential. We have been helpful to them in a number of small ways and in return they have taken us out to dinner at the kind of restaurant that we would seldom patronise on our own account.

That was Saturday evening. On Sunday evening we walked to our neighbour, Idalecio’s house to join him and a number of friends in celebrating his 33rd birthday. Although the group was half expat, half Portuguese, everybody was sufficiently bilingual to be able to chat away to all concerned while consuming prawns from the two huge dishes that Idalecio had prepared.

On Monday we bumped into Maria de Conceicao, whose offer of cake we had refused on Sunday on the grounds that we were going to Idalecio for supper. On Monday she brooked no excuse and summoned us into her kitchen where another neighbour already sat and where she had prepared two delicious cakes, one with pear filling and the other with apple. These were accompanied by Maria’s herbal tea and by her husband, Joaquim’s, fig liquor in roughly equal quantities. The latter beverage managed to be both very good and quite fiery and was best consumed with a large mouthful of cake to quench the fire. We both staggered out an hour later and then went hunting for the mobile phone that Jones had managed to drop somewhere on route. Happily, she found it again.

That evening, Idalecio’s father, Armenio, arrived here in his bakkie with three boxes of food for us. One box was full of tomatoes, another contained a huge melon and the third two large pumpkins. As much as we love the food he brings us, we feel bad that he won’t take any money from us in return. Instead, we managed to persuade him to take away a set of kitchen knives, rather smart German ones, which we had obtained at a fair in aid of abandoned animals a few weeks earlier.

On Tuesday we bumped into Vitor’s old mum as we were walking the dogs back through the fields below the house. She was picking almonds alone, knocking them out of a tree on to a fine green net that she’d spread below – the usual method here. We asked about her husband, who has not been well of late and who has developed a second tumour on his neck after recently having a first excised. She said that he was back in hospital and that she feared for his health. So do we.

We had an episode in the same field one evening at dusk when the dogs spotted some small animal just before we reached the house. We’d already let them off their leads. Yipping and yapping they took off after the unfortunate beast, chasing it down the length of the field. Whether it was a rabbit, a cat or a dog, I couldn’t say. Jones went after them as they disappeared into the gloom still barking, while I hurried home, cussing and blasting their hides, to fetch the car. I found her with the dogs a few hundred metres down the road. The pair hopped into the car looking very pleased with themselves. It was hard to tell them just how wicked they had been.

Wednesday Natasha came as usual. She said Dani was still resting. He was being treated for his bad back by a Dutch woman. Mid afternoon we ran another Portuguese neighbour, Leonhilda, up to the doctor at Benafim before we went along to the pharmacy ourselves. Apart from other things Jones needed some prophylactic malaria tabs for her trip. She is due to stop briefly in Kenya where a day excursion to a game reserve is planned.

That evening we joined English neighbours for a dinner to welcome two Dutch women who have recently retired down here. The ladies are finding it hard to come to terms with the barking that goes on at unsocial hours, especially on hunting days and when there’s a full moon. I told them that the only place to fight that particular battle is in their own heads. They have to come to think of barking as the music of the hills and to assign it to background noise only.

Thursday was a bit of a …… well, of a rush. (I have to choose my words with care these days or some fussy computer language matrons spit my letters back at me.) We started out at the doctor in Almancil in an attempt to discover what’s bugging my joints. That took longer than expected and made us late to fetch Jones’s travellers’ cheques from the bank in Loulé. There’s never anywhere to park in the centre of Loulé, unless one wishes to join motorists who’re using the roundabouts as emergency car parks. And, of course, the dogs were with us and had to be catered for as well.

Then we were later still to get back to the doctor in Almancil for the results of the tests he had conducted – which didn’t throw any light on things anyhow. Thence we drove down the motorway to Guia to conclude some business with our accountants. We stopped for a bite at one of the new motorway service stations that have just appeared on the east-west freeway. The dogs joined us at one of the outside tables. We chose one between two music-blaring loudspeakers whose noise we endured briefly before I went inside and begged the manager to kill the music, which – to his credit – he did. Thereafter lunch was a pleasure. An Englishman lunching at an adjoining table added his thanks to Jones’s.

There’s lots more things I could tell you, like the appearance of a tiny microlight aircraft over the valley in the evenings, with the flyer’s feet dangling from the chair he sits on, but you’ve probably had enough.

Letter from Espargal: 39 of 2006

(The picture shows Espargal hill and Valapena, a brown dot, upper left.)

This has been a thoroughly exhausting week and I shall probably need to take an additional siesta over the weekend in order to restore my nerves.

On Friday we had to get up early to take the car to Honda near Faro for its biennial road inspection. (After checking it over, Honda drive it down to the road to a government-run inspection centre.) I thought as I staggered out of bed, with only Jones’s cuppa coffee and a slice of toast for inspiration, how awful it must be to rush off to work every day. It can’t be very good for one’s health.

The dogs, which believe that they travel in the car by right, were outraged at being left behind. You can’t explain to a dog why it can’t come. We had to return with extra meaty bones to mollify them. The good news is that the car, now 6 years old, sailed through the test.

While the car was being done Jones and I took ourselves to breakfast at Gardy’s pastelaria in Faro and then on to the ethnographic museum in the city. This is a modest institution featuring implements, clothes, utensils, mats and furniture from your typical Algarve home over the past couple of hundred years. Much of the display was familiar to us. We felt at home. The same clothes are still worn, mats and baskets woven, shoes and chairs hand-made. Such products are on sale at the agricultural fairs held in every village and town. It’s really only the pre-mechanical agricultural equipment and transport that’s vanished from everyday life.

Thursday was a public holiday in remembrance of the revolution that overthrew the Portuguese monarchy in 1910. For me it was a strim and spray day. I spent an hour cutting back the old growth in the park with the strimmer until my knees complained and it ran out of nylon cord. Replacement cord comes in rolls. One has to cut off a few metres and then carefully wind it into the head of the strimmer in such a way that it feeds out slowly as one is strimming. It’s finickity and takes practice.

Spraying is with Roundup. Jones agreed that I should zap the new growth that’s exploding on our paths. Having done that I retreated to the park to attack the thorny wild asparagus (from which Espargal gets its name) and a couple of other undesirable characters. The spray is slow-acting and claims to break up completely without polluting the soil. I hope so. It generally takes about a week before the sprayed plants begin to turn brown. If they don’t I take another crack at them. One thorny creeper is particularly invasive and resistant. Spray it here and it comes up there. Still, we manage to keep it in check.

Jones had hardly settled down for a siesta (she’s been sleeping badly as the result of a sore rib) when there was a rattle at the gate. The dogs always explode in a volley of barks at such intrusion. It was a neighbour bearing gifts – figs – in return for the bread we take her from the German baker in Benafim. The conversation developed into a discussion on how best to process olives and, before she knew what was happening, Jones was dragged off into the wilderness to find the appropriate wild herbs. She didn’t get much of a siesta but she now knows exactly what herbs to add to olives during the salting and desalting process. Moreover, she discovered a stunning wild garden, attached to a house on the far side of Espargal, which neither of us had even dreamed about.

On Wednesday I fetched Natasha from the bus, as usual. There’d been no sign of her partner, Dani, earlier in the week and I gathered that he was suffering from a bad back. This was confirmed by Dani himself when he arrived, extremely miserable, on his moped later in the day, as I was shredding branches, to seek consolation and support. His misery was compounded by his customary indigence and the landlord’s demand for the balance of the previous month’s rental. Nor was he able to afford the doctor’s prescription for the partial relief of his ills. I consoled him as best I could and gave him enough petrol to get himself home. Things have not been going well for Dani.

In the evening Jones and I walked around to the house of two Dutch women who have taken up residence in the village. They’ve been visiting Portugal for years and had decided to retire down here. We thought we’d arranged to meet them at their house and walk them back but they weren’t home. We retraced our steps, Jones by the shortcut, I by the main road, and she found them retracing their own steps, equally puzzled, from our house. No harm was done. After they’d admired the view sufficiently we exchanged histories over drinks on the south patio.

We had visitors on Tuesday as well, two old friends from SABC days who have just arrived from the UK to try to find themselves a suitable property in the Algarve with a view to living here. While they’re looking they’ve rented themselves a comfortable villa near Loulé with sat-TV, phone, computer and internet access. To their frustration, the phone isn’t working properly and the internet links haven’t been set up. They were able to conduct essential business via my computer before coming downstairs for the usual south patio conviviality.

With the onset of October comes the bean-growing season. Raising beans, like hunting (an exercise that we avoid) is as close as one gets to religious practice around here. Everybody who is anybody in Espargal grows beans. One’s beans, standing upright in orderly rows, are as much a statement of virtue as a delicious and healthy food. Naturally, we will grow our own beans for all to see. I have already scarified the ground and plan to plough it again in the next week or two before planting.

Speaking of religion, I see that the Vatican is rethinking its teaching on Limbo, a state (of celestial exile somewhere between heaven and hell) of which the nuns who supervised my primary education in the middle of the last century had not the least doubt - ditto purgatory and the rest of the after-life. How times change! I hope that Limbo’s likely deletion does not come as too much of a shock to any of them.

It certainly won’t shock the popular-science author Richard Dawkins, who would happily get rid of heaven and hell as well, given the chance. I’ve enjoyed his many books on evolution and the natural world. I’ve also seen him on TV and heard him on radio. He’s an impressive speaker although his atheism often makes for heated debates. Amazon has just sent me his latest book, The God Delusion. Before I get to it, I have to finish a tome on infinity, little wiser I fear than when I started. I’m happier with finity, which I understand rather better.

Tuesday morning we went down the coast to meet our financial advisers. En route we fielded a call from neighbours who wondered whether my trailer and I could assist them with a little furniture moving in the afternoon. We could. The move entailed parking the trailer in Benafim high street, loading it with possessions and taking them round to an address a few hundred metres away. Assisting us were the neighbour concerned, his friend Steve (an athletic Englishman with 4 lines of poetry tattooed across his naked back) and Steve’s teenage son. In an hour it was done. One isn’t meant to park in Benafim high street but since the nearest police are stationed in the next town and nobody believes in walking any further than necessary, everybody does.

Monday morning was when I scarified the fields. There were scores of wasps hovering over the piles of greenery that the scarifier dragged along behind it and I felt quite nervous. I’ve had a couple of painful encounters with wasps this year. A wasp somehow got caught up in Stoopy’s thick coat, terrifying the poor dog and prompting her to run around in circles until I caught her and got rid of the insect.

On Monday evening we went to a friend’s birthday dinner, held on the patio of an Almancil restaurant. The man sitting beside me turned out to be the writer of lunatic articles in a local paper - my description, not his. We had a long chat. I asked him why he didn’t write a book. He said it was because he would be regarded as a crank. At least he knew it. The waitress managed to spill a whole tray of cold champagne down the back of one of the ladies. The unfortunate woman was not amused. That apart, it was an excellent meal.