The wooden shed was erected at the same time as the house was built. Its purpose was to contain whatever would not fit in the house. However, the shed soon proved unequal to the task. As one object after another migrated inside it, humans became confined to the small remaining space just inside the door. (The rodents, whose poos spotted the floors and shelves, obviously still managed to get around.) The end result was that 90 per cent of the contents became invisible. If items could be found at all, it was only by tossing other items into new heaps. It was bad news.
This problem, we thought, would be resolved by the rehabilitation of Casa Nada - the Nothing House – so called because it doesn’t officially exist. It was once a dwelling on the property. By the time it came into our possession it had been reduced to four roofless walls over a pile of muck and the remnants of tiled floors. Idalecio and helpers restored it, creating two small rooms and one large room. For me, it’s a storage area – a barn. For Jones, it’s a dream guest cottage to be. She would love to install a small bathroom and other amenities.
We have compromised. One small room is allocated to Jones. The other small room is my tool and paint storage area. One half of the large room accommodates my tractor. The other half has alternated between being an informal barbeque dining area and a space in which to keep my trailer. Jones preferred the former arrangement and I the latter. Well, the trailer has now been covered by a tarpaulin and thrust outside to take its chances with the elements.
What inspired the great clean-up – returning to my theme – was the need to find additional duties for Natasha, our once-a-week Russian maid. As the result of the labour contract the pair of us were led to sign in the erroneous belief that it would help her obtain legal status, Natasha has to pay 33 euros a month to social security ( I have to pay 66 euros). In short, she needed to earn some extra cash and we agreed that she would work an extra day once a month.
Thus it was done. All Friday long the pair of us laboured away, moving stuff in and out. Natasha swept, oiled and vacuumed. She also helped me sling some additional chicken wire over a section of the carport where the outside cats (Squeaker and Squawker) love to rest up on the shade-cloth – to the cloth’s clear detriment. Jones did her thing in the garden, as well as feeding neighbouring cats and taking a neighbour’s dog for a walk as she does each day.
Natasha and Dani were here earlier in the week as well. Dani and I continued clearing the Graça field, turning boughs into firewood, branches into mulch and the useless left-overs into ash. It was a big job and still awaits completion. We also thinned out the many saplings in the upper area of the field, the section that I only recently learned was mine. Most of the saplings were wild olives and almonds. It’s no good just cutting them down as they promptly sprout again. So Dani wound a heavy chain around their base and I hauled them out root and branch with the tractor. We must have extracted at least 30 and there are as many still to do.
On Thursday I fetched an elderly friend of Jones’s and took them to Alte for a catch-up lunch. While they dined, I repaired with the dogs to Luis’s café where Luis was kind enough to allow me to plug my (flat battery) notebook computer into the elderly extension cord that already bore much of his establishment’s electrical burden.
Luis’s is our favourite hide-away, slightly dog-eared and down-at-heel. Luis is to be found behind the bar and his wife in the kitchen. Among other things they serve excellent home-made medronho and the famous Alte fig and almond tart (of which none better). We normally seat ourselves outside under the orange trees. We went there last Sunday, as well, to take in the Alte carnival. Such was the crush that Jones had to carry Stoopy. Participants had gone to great trouble to dress up in exotic costumes (rather than following the example of the bare-breasted Loulé samba dancers whose attractive figures are still leaping about on the front page of this week’s Algarve Resident).
While we sipped our coffees and medronhos I took a picture of a young English girl whose parents were seated nearby and who amused herself by jumping up to grab oranges from the tree. We have recently seen Flags of our Fathers and, you never know, I thought the right picture might lead to fame and fortune.
Some time is passed each day in conversation with the neighbours who stroll this way. Ollie and Marie come past twice a day with their dog, Poppy (and often with a neighbour’s dog in tow as well). Dona Catarina, well into her eighties, uses our road for her twice daily constitutional (it’s the only level road on the upper part of the hill). She never fails to inform us that she is not allowed to sit down for 30 minutes after taking her pills. With her are often to be found her daughter, Leonhilda (a grandmother herself) and Maria of the Conception (her cousin I think) and their various dogs. (Everybody in Espargal is related to just about everybody else.) We generally have a little chat and, if we’re not careful, we get invited back to Maria’s place for cake and fig liquor.
The German builder, who is to construct the new house at the end of our road, has returned to offload a truckful of equipment but hasn’t yet made a start, possibly because the intermittent drizzle this week. The ground is still muddy. Indeed, my tractor has been leaving a trail of mud from along the road from the exit of the Graça field to the house.
Now it’s Saturday, going on for lunch. The sun is shining gloriously across the valley, with a few big black patches beneath the drifting clouds. We rose late this morning after a concert last night to which we took our Dutch lady neighbours. After breakfast we did our “all the way round” walk. It takes an hour plus. We’ve done it in an hour but that’s a real rush and the dogs don’t get a chance to sniff anything. Today we admired the orchids (only the “dull” variety are out yet) and the bloom of the bee-busy hazy-blue wild rosemary that dots the hillside. We live in a lovely part of the world.
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