Letter from Espargal: 3 of 2007

I had no sooner airily dismissed winter’s rigours in my last letter than an Arctic air mass descended on western Europe and has had us all shivering in our boots. It’s been a button-up tight week, with a dusting of frost here and there and a wicked wind straight from the North Pole. I retrieved our little-used gloves from the cupboard for our dog walks and we’ve been grateful for them. Out of the wind and in the sunshine it’s a different world. Yes, I know that North America has been deep in negative territory and that South Africa has been cooking.

For the life of me I can’t remember a thing about the start of the week except that we wanted to see Flags of Our Fathers on either Monday or Tuesday evenings and didn’t make it because we were running around. Our preferred cinema evenings are early in the week when there are fewest fellow viewers whose chatterings and popcorn chewings have to be endured. In the end we got to the film and were most impressed by it. How the producers concocted the vast naval scenes I’ve no idea. There was no hint of computer wizardry.

Speaking of computers, Natasha asked if she could spend a morning using mine to access the internet. She needs to renew her passport and wanted to swot up on it. I sat down with her for half an hour while she got the knack of using the browser. Initially she pointed to the headings that she was interested in on the website of the Russian embassy in Lisbon. The site was both in Russian and Portuguese. Natasha naturally preferred to read the Russian version. The headings were in Cyrillic script and might as well have been in Japanese for all I understood of them.

Midday I got a call from our lawyer’s assistant to say that she was in the land registry office in Loulé where she was trying to register the plot we’d recently purchased. Before being able to do this, she’d had to go back to the notary to get the deeds initialled in view of the plot’s last-minute transfer by the Finanças from the parish of Alte to that of Benafim. I had to sign the amendment before the plot could finally be registered. So I drove in with Jones and the dogs to append my signature, Ono peering through the windscreen from the centre of the back seat as always.

Hardly had we sat down to lunch when I got a call from our commuting neighbours, David and Sarah, who had arrived down from the UK two days earlier. David said they’d had an accident a few hundred metres from the Quintassential. They’d hit a wall after braking hard to avoid a car that stopped suddenly in front of them. Sarah had been taken to hospital with possible spinal injuries. David was waiting with their car for the tow-away lorry.

I met him a little later at the garage where his vehicle was taken for repairs. The nose had been battered and the car was clearly in for a lengthy stay. Leaving it behind, we continued to Faro hospital to see how Sarah was doing. The information desk at Accidents and Emergencies advised us to come back in an hour or two. So we went to the airport, where David hired a car. Sarah was discharged the same evening, bruised and sore but, from the x-rays, apparently without suffering damage to her spine. She was walking and sitting very gingerly when the couple joined us for supper last night.

(I passed on to her the “trans-act” medicated strips that you left with me at Christmas, Lucia, and she was very pleased to have them.)

I have spending my spare hours finishing off the repairs to the roof ridge of Casa Nada (left). Idalecio had helped me replaced two metres of ridge panels that had been ripped off by the wind. To prevent it happening again, I bought two canisters of foam and squirted foam into all the gaps between the ridge panels and the corrugated roof panels on which they sit. It’s a filthy job. The foam is glue-like until it hardens and flies around in the wind. Once it had hardened, I cut away the excess and then painted the new grey panels the same terracotta colour as the rest of the roof.

Half way through the painting, Jones came to say that Idalecio had called to warn us that the owners of the property we really want to buy were looking around it. This is the property that juts like a slice of tart into the heart of our own property. The plot is both steep and rocky and would be of little value were it not for the ruin that nestles at the bottom of it, close to Idalecio’s house. This ruin, never mind that it’s just a few tumble-down walls around three former rooms, is registered under two separate urban titles. That’s to say that it could legitimately be turned into two new houses.

I hurried down from the roof and went to meet the half dozen people who were wandering around the plot. Idalecio was there too. We introduced ourselves as neighbours who were interested in buying the property; he the urban titles and I the rustic title – assuming that the price were right.

We had a 15 minute conversation during which it emerged that question of the sale of the property (in the absence of some of the heirs) was due to be decided by the court in a few days. Assuming that the court permitted the remaining heirs to sell, the vendors agreed to contact us first. A valuer had placed an initial value of 43,000 euros on the property although this included the land itself and one of the two urban titles. The other is owned by a local man and will have to be bought separately.

Idalecio later confided to me that he had overheard the family expressing their disappointment at the steep and rocky nature of the property and the very poor access. So they must have been delighted at our expressed interest. It’s not so much that we want the property as that we don’t want anybody else (a) building a house right next to ours or (b) carving a road through the bottom of our land to reach it. I still have bad dreams about the way our rural idyll at the Quinta came to be overshadowed by a neighbour’s 3-storey house. (Jonesy says that I exaggerate.)

If my letter contains little news of Jones it’s because she has been doing the usual things – making the bed and the meals, cleaning the glass panels of the wood-burning stove before I make another fire in it, doing the washing-up, taking Serpa for a walk along with our dogs in the afternoon: all the little things that help to oil the machinery of the day. I joined her when she was summoned around to tea at a Portuguese neighbour one evening. We crowded into the little old kitchen, along with another English neighbour and our hosts, and drank herbal tea brewed from local plants and sweetened with honey.

As I conclude my letter, the sun is shining through the clouds over the valley and lighting up the white-walled houses in Benafim on the opposite hillside. This is rather disappointing because we were promised rain today and so far there hasn’t been a hint of it.

Letter from Espargal: 2 of 2007

As I paused for breath in the shade of a leafy carob tree half way up Puffer Hill, I reflected that with ice storms sweeping the US and tempests tormenting northern Europe, there’s much to be said for wintering in Portugal. Jones panted beside me in t-shirt and trousers, having taken off her body warmer and wrapped it around her waist.

The dogs were equally breathless. They’d chased a rabbit on the road and then dragged us up Puffer Lane in pursuit of a grouse that was doing a speed waddle up the path ahead of us. I had Ono and Serpa Fish on their leads. Jones was holding Stoopy, who had flopped down on the ground to recover her breath. Clearly the time had come to shave off a layer of Stoopy’s winter coat. Our winter, such as it has been, seems to be over. We did have one frost down in the valley as a nod to the season and, to be honest, we still enjoy a fire in the stove at night – just to take the chill out of the air.

But the the signs of spring are all too visible. The almond trees are already in blossom and the fields are filling with flowers.

This week has seeped away between the cracks of the days. As so often it’s hard to know where it’s gone. Thursday brought a return of my English lessons. Jones came with me to Loulé with a view to having streaks put in her hair. Instead, she had a regular hairdo from Fatima, whose empty chair was too tempting to resist. Fatima is actually a men’s hairdresser but is happy to do women’s hair as long as they don’t need any fancy stuff.

Twice we’ve dined with a friend, Gary. He and his partner, Malcolm, had considered buying and settling in Portugal. After taking a villa for several months while they looked around, they decided against it. Malcolm has returned to the UK by car, surviving a stormy ferry voyage and the tail-end of the gales that tore across most of Britain. Gary and their two cats are due to follow by air.

Idalecio came around one afternoon to help me replace panels that had been torn from the roof ridge of Casa Nada some weeks ago by our own mini gale. We drilled holes through each of them to take fasteners that grip the supporting beams. As an additional measure I need to intrude expanding foam in the gaps between the panels and the corrugated sheets underneath them.

Another job – one I signally failed to do – was to adjust the catch in one of our large sliding doors to allow it to close properly. I removed what seemed to me to be the obvious panel, with disastrous results. The aluminium firm concerned said it had a worker who could help me but that I’d have to fetch him from Loulé. This I was happy to do. The man kindly undid the damage I’d done and showed me the tiny aperture through which I should have adjusted the catch in the first place. He also checked all our other doors (there are ten of them) and windows at the same time.

Spare hours have gone into the care of our new field. I’ve been picking up the numerous stones that litter it, pruning the growth and reducing the substantial pile of old trees and branches lying in the centre of it. They’d been left there by the previous owner after the last pruning. It’s the custom to burn off such pruned material during the winter months. Most days one can see plumes of smoke arising somewhere in the valley, and then flattening out as they hit an invisible air barrier. (Global warming, I fear, doesn’t figure very high on the priorities of the average Algarvian farmer.)

At Jones’s insistence, I saved as much of the wood as I could, lopping off only the most useless twigs and tossing these on to the fire. The rest went on to the back of the tractor – to be delivered to the threshold of our strange couple, Chico and Dina, for whom it provides both heating and cooking fuel.

Dina had summoned us with loud cries earlier in the week as we passed by with the dogs. In her meaty arm she clutched a 5-litre plastic bottle of locally-distilled fig liquor, known as “water that the birds don’t drink”. This she presented to us, throwing back her head and indicating with her thumb towards her mouth exactly what she expected us to do with it. (Dina, you may recall, never learned to speak – although she shrieks and yells well enough.)

She knocked on the door of her English neighbours this week and made the sign of the cross to indicate that things were amiss. From our enquiries it seems that she is referring to an accident in which, if we have the story correct, a car driver reversed over an unfortunate man from a nearby village, killing him. It was, Natasha told us when she arrived to work on Tuesday, all the talk of the other passengers on the bus.

Returning for a moment to the fig liquor. The deal is that it’s in exchange for firewood that I provide to Chico and Dina and my ploughing of their fields. They absolutely insist on returning any favours and the arrangement was a compromise to persuade them not to turn up on our doorstep with large chunks of slaughtered sheep or goat. I asked for one litre of fig liquor per load of firewood or ploughed field but Chico insists on making it 5 litres.

As we passed the home of another villager, Leonhilda, she popped out with another litre of the same to thank us for the fresh bread that we take her from Hans the baker every second Sunday. When she heard that we were expecting a guest for lunch that day, she baked a cake and then called Jones to arrange to meet her half way to deliver it. A very good cake it was too.

Leonhilda suggested that we try growing some garlic, as well as beans, and explained how to go about planting garlic segments. They have to go just under the surface with their little pointy caps on top. She took a bulb of garlic and showed me which cloves to use, only those on the outer rim of the bulb. When I asked when we might pick the garlic, she said it was traditionally done on St Anthony’s Day (some time in June if I remember rightly).

Down the bottom of the village half a dozen labourers, a lorry and a digger are busy widening the agricultural road that winds down through the valley and up the opposite hillside to Benafim. We suspect that this is being done to facilitate the building of the “rustic” village that is due to arise on the fringes of Birrao, the neighbouring hamlet. Given a choice, we’d prefer to stick with the single-track road and the rocky field where the village is due to be built.

One evening we went to see The Prestige, a strange film about the rivalry that comes to destroy the lives of competing London magicians.

I am reading a book that I acquired in the bookshop at Calgary airport on my departure. The author is James Risen. It’s called State of War and it’s about the events in Iraq and Afghanistan and what led up to them. I am finding it very sobering; in fact, downright scary.

Letter from Espargal: 1 of 2007

'Tis Thursday evening in the departure lounge at Calgary airport, where the temperature inside is 40 degrees (Celsius) warmer than that outside. If I’m lucky, the airliner that I can see through the window will get me to London in time to catch the plane that ought to be waiting there to take me to Lisbon.

The past two days in Calgary have been cold, down into the minus twenties, cold enough to warrant the start to a letter. I mean really freezing-in-a-few-seconds, what’s-happened-to-my-ears depths of cold. When I foolishly stopped at a service station to put in petrol, without first digging out my gloves and scarf, I thought I had lost my extremities. Getting back into the car brought modest relief but the seat still froze my bottom and the steering wheel was too cold to grasp.

Others were having a tougher time of it. As I was leaving my apartment at Lake Bonavista Village one morning I bumped into a group surrounding a woman who worked there. From one of them I learned that her husband had been missing for two days, trapped in his truck by an avalanche and out of cell phone contact. He was back safe and well. I don’t know how near he came to perishing. I found it quite challenging enough driving a few kilometres home one night in a snow storm.

My visit was primarily about seeing mum, who lives in a care home 5 minutes down the road from my apartment. It couldn’t have been handier. Most mornings I would ease down the McLeod Trail around 10.30, sign mum out, wheel her to the car, help her in, park her wheelchair in the back and then take off somewhere for lunch. We enjoyed a few wonderful sunny days, with the temperature just into positive territory, taking leisurely drives into the country.

On colder days we’d head for nearby South Centre, a sprawling shopping mall. There we had the space and the warmth to idle our way around. New Year promotions were everywhere. Mother retains a keen interest in the sales and still loves to run her fingers through the coats and jerseys on offer. Two-for-one or three-for-one offers she found particularly tempting. She would gladly have bought me half a dozen garments had I agreed.

The last few days – the really cold ones - we stayed indoors at the care home, generally seated in the foyer, the only public space. Around us other residents did their morning exercises, still seated in their chairs, lifting their arms and legs in rhythm to the instructions ringing out over the taped music. Like mum, most of the residents are elderly, female and wheelchair bound. I was most impressed by the numerous volunteers who were on hand each day to assist the nursing staff. Some had been coming for years, until – as one volunteer confessed – they were barely distinguishable from the residents themselves.

Most evenings I was a guest at the home of my niece, Penny. I would settle down with her, husband Mike and elder son Jackson for fiercely contested card (or other) games. Where I could, I tried to introduce new rules that I thought should have been obvious to the inventors of the games – efforts that went largely unappreciated. To my Canadian family all may I add a brief word of thanks for their unfailing hospitality. It was all the more appreciated because many of the facilities of the retirement village where I was staying (including the heated pool – woe was me) had been closed in view of a touring tummy bug.

Here the scene changes:

It’s early Sunday morning. I am home. The house is still. The bright lights of Benafim dot the black hillsides. In half an hour or so we’ll hear the impatient cries of the hunters’ dogs and then the countryside will explode with the thunder of their guns.

I was fetched at Faro airport by the same kind neighbours who had dropped me off there a fortnight earlier. Jones was with them. I was the first through, having taken only cabin baggage in the knowledge that I would have a tight connection at Heathrow airport.

What a squeak that was. The plane from Calgary arrived in London late, having been delayed an hour on departure by a passenger who failed to turn up and whose luggage had to be dug out of the hold. I hastened down the long corridors of Terminal 3, caught the in-transit bus to the Connections Centre and there joined the crowds waiting to be searched before being allowed through to the other terminals.

Worse, two Stalinist ushers were refusing point blank to allow through any passengers carrying two bags, no matter how small – in spite of the fact that everybody had carried these bags on to their previous flights. The ushers insisted that one bag be checked in as hold luggage – an invitation to kiss one’s connection goodbye.

As it happened, I was carrying two very visible bags, one a backpack. But, with a measure of desperation, I walked straight past the ushers and wasn’t summoned back. I couldn’t believe my luck. From there it was a doddle. The Lisbon flight was less than half full and the final Faro flight had barely a scattering of passengers. I could have taken 20 bags on board.

And so home to an hysterical welcome from the dogs. Espargal looked much as I had left it. The countryside was dry although the hills remained bright green. There’s been no worthwhile rain since the downpours of November.

(Picture: Shows the somewhat jet-lagged author catching a nap after lunch. Stoopy and Monsieur Tommie lend support.)

Yesterday I took a still recumbent Jones an early cup of coffee and a rather squashed muffin, one that had journeyed at the bottom of my knapsack. It still tasted pretty good. Then we packed a flask and sandwiches and walked 30 minutes to the summit of a favourite hill, where we sat on a rock and contemplated the valleys that crept down to the sea.

I knew that somewhere round the bulge of the earth, ever so far away, under an Arctic air mass, thousands of Calgarian motorists were hurrying up and down McLeod Trail, the green verges tinged with snow and ice. In fact, if I closed my eyes for a moment, I could see them clearly. I have come to believe in parallel universes.

Last night we took ourselves to performance of chamber music by a quintet from the Orchestra of the Algarve, an event to which supporters of the orchestra were invited as a mark of appreciation. Wine and snacks were included. The small concert took place in newly restored function rooms of an old Faro building on the fringes of the city’s new concert hall. For centuries, Arabs passed by here. Before them, Romans and Carthaginians held sway. I have to confess to nodding off once or twice as I considered these things. I hope that Beethoven will forgive me.