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.
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