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.