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.
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