Several eminent residents of Espargal have spent much of this week gathered at the end of our road where Mario’s digger has been hard at work. It’s been levelling the middle section of a plot that Mario sold last year to a young Dutch couple. Like other properties on the hillside, the plot slopes quite steeply. Creating a level base for a house represented several days of work. In fact, it is a split-level base, presumably for a house with two storeys on the lower side and one on the upper.
Also present were the Dutch couple themselves, along with their dog (an Alsatiany sort of beast), and their German builder. Everybody kept a close eye on the digger as its bucket munched its way steadily through the soil. From time to time, Mario would reverse the digger and shove a pile of earth towards two hillocks that he had created at the bottom of the plot. One hillock comprised reddy-brown soil and the other a light brown type. All the soil in the area divides itself into one or other type. The reddy-brown stuff, which is what we have, is much stonier and harder to work.
If this seems like a lot of unnecessary detail, you may have little idea of how much excitement is created by the prospect of a new house arising in the village, to say nothing of new neighbours. It is a major event, the subject of much discussion. Such activity can keep onlookers happily employed for hours on end, providing valuable amusement at a time of year when there’s not much work to be done in the fields.
If one should grow tired of watching Mario’s digger, one can take oneself down to the bottom of the village. There, two council workers have been repairing dry-stone walls that were damaged during the road-widening exercise. Although both guys are nearing retirement, they remain impressively powerful. In view of the rocks that they are heaving into place with their bare hands, it’s easy to understand how they came to be such solid citizens. Some of the rocks are at least as heavy as they are. 
From time to time they stop to pound a rock with a sledge-hammer in order to obtain stones they need to wedge big rocks into place. The final result is an object of beauty, a dry-stone wall that rises obliquely and evenly from a wide base. I have tried to build such walls and I can assure you that it doesn’t come naturally. 
These walls are solid, long-lasting and virtually maintenance-free. They effortlessly withstood the earthquake that rattled much of Portugal early in the week (registering 6 on the open-ended Richter scale). We barely felt it here. Elsewhere people are reported to have fled buildings in panic. It was the biggest earthquake to hit the country in several decades, although a mere tiddler compared to the great Lisbon quake of 1755 that laid flat most of the city and much of the rest of Portugal. As I write – Friday afternoon – we have been playing cops and robbers with the weather. There’s a low pressure system approaching from the Atlantic that’s promising us some serious rain. But so far all we’ve had is squalls. Each time we go outside to do a bit of gardening, a squall drives us back inside. As soon as we sit down inside, the sun comes out.
I hope the weather improves before Sunday, when the 3-day Loulé (winter) carnival begins. (There’s another carnival at the height of summer.) Loulé council closes down the main avenue for the occasion and decorates the route with rows of flags and bunting. All the shops close. One has to pay a small fee to enter the carnival zone. Floats - poking fun at politicians and personalities - parade along the route. On these floats shapely young women advertise their assets in spite of the often freezing conditions. No need to tell you how the lads are drawn from all around.
Beer kiosks do a roaring business among the adults while the kids amuse themselves hurling eggs and flour-bombs at each other (and often at indignant visitors as well). Jonesy and I went along once or twice and decided that we’d experienced as much of Loulé carnival as we needed. We are not natural revellers, either of us. On the other hand, we are easily persuaded to go along to the much smaller kiddies’ carnival at Alte, just across the valley.
At my neighbour, David’s request, I dropped into the workshop where his Lada Riva had been taken following a recent accident and arranged for it to be delivered to his house. It arrived a couple of hours later on the back of a rescue lorry – an ingenious flat-bed vehicle that uses a winch to draw damaged vehicles up on to its back. (It is illegal to tow vehicles on a public road in Portugal.)
As David wasn’t home I paid the driver cash and asked if I could have a receipt. The driver looked at me in mild surprise. He explained that if he made out a receipt, I would have to pay VAT – an additional 21%. Clearly, not many of his clients require receipts. We compromised on a scrap of paper that he tore off an envelope, bearing his signature and the amount. David is considering the purchase of another (equally used) Lada and of cannibalising the damaged vehicle for spares.
On the home front, I’ve been working at erecting a new section of fence, using only poles and wire that I had removed from another fence. Jones thought my initial efforts a bit Heath Robinson but she softened as work progressed. The final product, she accepted, was almost professional, even if one of the poles was a foot short and had to be lengthened with a piece of stick shoved into the top of it.
We have both been working in the garden, removing barrows of wide-leafed plants that explode all over the place during the wet months. Each can easily occupy a square metre or more. They are all over the surrounding fields as well. Unless the earth is tilled, it goes jungle green under a waist-high carpet of vegetation. Dani spent a day clearing the wild growth along the fringes of our newly acquired (Graça) field. There’s been no sign for a few weeks of the owners of another adjacent plot, which I want to purchase. They were due last weekend when, I suspect, the rain put them off.
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