(The Marco Polo arrives in Cape Town)
I have reason to be grateful that I live up a hill because many of those Portuguese residents who live on the plains have spent the week bailing themselves out. It has been a very wet week. Downpours last weekend raised the Douro River, which we so admired during a visit to Porto a few months ago, a total of 7 metres, inundating riverine sections of the city, including the famous port warehouses that line the bank. (During a tour of one of the warehouses, a guide showed us marks high on a wall, indicating the levels reached by previous floods. The staff had cut loose the port barrels, allowing them to float up with the water.) The story was the same for dozens of towns and villages across the length and breadth of the country although the Algarve got off lightly.
On Tuesday, it was the turn of the Algarve to get a dousing. It happened to be the day that I was taking the car in for a service at the Honda workshop on the outskirts of Faro. I fetched Natasha and young Alex on route, as she wanted to buy him a tricycle on a sale that was about to end. In teeming rain the Honda minibus dropped the pair of us off at the Algarve Forum shopping centre. It’s a very smart shopping centre, keenly aware of its upmarket status. But its drainage system was incapable of dealing with the torrents of water falling on its spacious inner courtyard. A large and growing pool lapped ever closer to the shop doors where fashionable merchants were trying desperately with mops and squeegees to repel the tide. There was something pitifully puny about their efforts.
At a perfume store I asked a shop assistant if she would guide me to a couple of 10 euro bottles of spray, explaining that I wanted to give small Christmas gifts to two delightful women who work in the Benafim parish office. The assistant explained apologetically that the cheaper perfumes started at 30 euros. I thanked her and retreated to familiar ground. In the Jumbo superstore I came across rather less expensive products although the two I chose were placed over the wrong price tag and I found myself paying double what I intended. (When I went back to check I found that the products were correctly priced – just misleadingly stacked.)
The rain was dying away by the time the Honda minibus fetched us again at 11.30. I assisted Natasha who was coping with Alex, his stroller, a large box containing a tricycle and several other purchases. How single parents ever manage alone, especially on public transport, is completely beyond me. The car was waiting and I got back home in time to watch the lunchtime news. It was full of the floods in Faro city centre and in nearby towns.
Rain apart, the week got off to a good start. Idalecio came over on Saturday afternoon to try to cure a longstanding problem with the chimney. Because of a gap between the metal chimneystack and the surrounding brickwork, soot has tended to drift down into the lounge. Jones found this extremely irritating. I found it quite annoying myself. I tried blocking the gap at the lower end of the chimney where it emerges through the ceiling but this solution was only partially successful. I feared that Idalecio would have to bash a hole in the chimney in order to reach the stack. Happily he found that the shaped top-section of the chimney was just a heavy piece of reinforced concrete that could be shifted aside to allow him to do the job.
Next we removed the netting that I had draped over the solar heater panels to keep the sparrows out. In spite of my efforts, the sparrows had long since returned, worming and squirming through the netting and building another series of nests in the hollows of the tiles under the panels. With the hose we cleaned the nests out. They were full of muck. I’d already taken steps to stop the water flowing into the cisterna.
Inevitably the sparrows will be back. The technician who came to replace a leaking valve earlier this month said the only solution was to raise the panels on a frame as we did at the Quinta. It means that the panels will be more visible but I think this is the lesser evil.
Between us, Idalecio and I got through a couple of other undemanding jobs that required two sets of hands. Within an hour or two we were done. I had a great sense of achievement and he made some easy money, reluctant though he was to take payment. I pointed out to him what it would have cost me to get somebody in – and that I would otherwise feel unable to ask his assistance in future.
When I bumped into some English neighbours later that day, I was taken back to hear that Vitor’s dad, stricken with cancer, had died and been buried two days earlier. I’d wanted to go to the funeral and was exasperated to find that I’d missed it. The usual practice is for the undertakers to stick up an obituary notice in the local hamlets but for some reason they’d failed to do so. I made my apologies and expressed my condolences to the widow.
I had a poignant moment the following day when, after buying several loaves of freshly baked bread from Hans the German baker, I dropped a loaf off with Portuguese neighbours. The front door to their house was opened, not by the wife as usual but the husband whom I mentioned in my last letter. He’s the fellow who has been stricken with some form of dementia and who recently attacked his wife. To avoid a repetition, his spouse no longer sleeps at home. The old fellow looked at me miserably and wailed: “I have no wife,” clearly uncomprehending of the circumstances. I gave him the warm bread and wished him well. I wish I had a wand.
On Monday I spoke to Jonesy for the first time in a month. She and Maureen were in Durban, being taken on a tour of her old student haunts by a friend. She was frustrated by her inability to respond to my text messages, for some technical reason. She’d tried various configurations without success. This frustration aside, she was having a nostalgic time in Durban and was looking forward to the end of the trip in Cape Town on Wednesday.
Subsequent calls have indicated that she’s been having a ball in Cape Town, where she has extensive family. She is staying with her half-brother, Llewellyn and his wife, Lucia. Jonesy flies back to Johannesburg and on to Portugal on Saturday. The dogs and I are planning a reunion at Lisbon airport early on Sunday morning. [For the two accompanying pictures on my blog, I have to thank Llewellyn (the ship) and Annelize (the dinner party)]
My email correspondence this week included a note from the Portuguese Financas, saying that I should look on their website for a response to our application for a temporary exemption from local taxes (a one-time benefit to the owners of a new house). Let me say that it is now possible to conduct all one’s normal fiscal business with the Department online. Parts of Portugal are rapidly going high-tech. After logging in and finding the response (in spite of misleading instructions) I was pleased to see that we had been given a four-year exemption – from 2006 to 2009. No reference was made to the two-year period during which we have been awaiting the Department’s response. Its conversion to high tech doesn’t seem to have speeded anything up
Wednesday and Thursday brought the usual lessons. Before classes, I went along with Natasha to the Social Security office in Loulé. Natasha had informed me that in spite of her illegal status she was entitled to sign on for social security if she had a valid employment contract. That didn’t make any sense to me, especially in the light of what a lawyer had told us a few months earlier. However, Natasha’s contact at the office bore out her story. The clerk said that recent changes to the law meant that foreigners were eligible to sign on as long as they were employed and had valid passports. Valid visas were no longer required. I was most surprised.
The long and short of it is that we have sought out accountants to draw up the necessary contract. The employer is required to commit him(her)self for a year to pay a modest monthly fee to the office plus 70% of the minimum wage to the employee. This (the minimum wage) is less than 400 euros a month. As a young mother, Natasha stands to benefit from the arrangement. She may even be able to legalise her status, something that she would love to do. Danny, I regret to say, has more or less disappeared off the radar.
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