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.
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