Letter from Espargal: 25 of 2007

This week I have done most of my good deeds for the year. The principal beneficiaries of my virtue have been David and Sarah, who have been working long hours to complete the new roof over their house before the arrival of their family. I have been sharing duties with Olly, another Espargalian expat. We have assisted Idalecio while David and Sarah have toiled below. Sarah mixes concrete, David pours it into a barrow and then dishes it out into buckets, which he places on a board attached to an electric hoist at the top of the house. I operate the hoist. When the system works, it works quite well.

However, as I pointed out to Ollie when he passed our gate one afternoon, there are other considerations at stake. It was in our mutual interest, I put to him, that he should not over-exert himself and thereby unfairly raise expectations of others. Our chief function should be seen as a convivial one - to entertain our neighbours with good conversation while they worked.

There have been a few ups and downs - and not just with the hoist; Sod’s law is nowhere more applicable than in the construction industry. For instance, lacking mains electricity, Sarah and David depend on a generator to power their concrete mixer. Without warning, their generator packed up last Saturday morning. They tried first to fix it and then to get a spare part. Failing in both endeavours, (with their arriving family in mind) they bought a new generator and carried on.


Then, as Sarah was dumping her umpteenth load of sand, gravel and cement into the cement mixer, with a great gnashing of teeth it gave up the ghost. The cogs of the driving wheel had worn down and no longer gripped the barrel. Nothing daunted, I leapt upon my tractor and went to borrow a cement mixer from another neighbour. After the briefest of pauses, we continued working.

The method of construction is first to throw a ring-beam around the walls.
Reinforced concrete beams are laid across the void and hollow concrete blocks hung between them. Reinforcing rods are tied on top and, after much underpinning and careful calculating of water run-off levels, concrete is thrown over the lot. Of course, I simplify but that's the essence of it. As I was saying to Idalecio, to go the official route - with architects, engineers, plans, approvals and the whole horror story - would probably cost ten times as much and would certainly take ten times as long.

One morning Jones and I sat on our front patio and sliced up plums that she had picked at the house of Maria of the Conception, with the assistance of Maria’s granddaughter, Carina (11). (Barbara has been summoned around there several times, for tea and to provide company for the vivacious young Carina, who also presented a one-act, one-actor play that she had written herself.)

They filled a large plastic bag that I then hung on the tractor link box while Jones, at Maria’s urging, climbed on the back like a good Portuguese wife and clung on for dear life during the short drive back to the house. (Women commonly travel in such fashion, generally to pick crops, often sitting on small stools. Men, naturally, do the driving.)

As we sliced up the plums I thought how blessed a place we live in.
Cicadas shrieked in the trees, bee-eaters chattered as they wheeled
above us and the dogs lay motionless after our walk through the hills.
One evening as we sat on the patio sipping our hard-earned sundowners, a little owl floated across the garden and perched itself on our phone-pole. The bird was too small and distant to be caught on camera. But in our mind’s eye it perches there still.

Coming back to the plums - many of them had been stung by the justly infamous Mediterranean fruit flies. We cut out the bad bits and Jones put the rest into plastic bags to freeze. I slung the rejects into the garden bed in front of us, assuring her that within 3 days they would vanish into nature’s bosom. But she afterwards picked them all up again, saying she couldn’t bear to have them staring at her for 3 days - and she told me off for throwing away bits that she considered quite edible. I’m afraid that there’s often more edible material in Jones’s larder than in mine.

CARINA'S PLAY
We have moved our small freezer from the back patio to Casa Nada – as part of the latest trial rearrangement. Jones is not a person who is easily satisfied with current arrangements. She is liable to feel that a different arrangement might be an improvement and she either shifts things around herself or calls on me to help her. When I came to move the freezer, I noticed that it was not plugged in. This was bad news. It was filled mainly with my precious home-grown fava beans, which were not happy to have spent several days thawing out. Jones promptly put them on the stove to cook, assured by Maria that they could then be safely refrozen.

This latest rearrangement is tied in with the imminent arrival of David and Sarah’s family. In view of the state of their house Jones has offered them the use of Casa Nada to camp for a few days. There are two beds they can use in her room there, plus a table and chairs along with a gas hob in that part of the main section that is not taken up by the tractor.

Spurred on by her tidy-up of Casa Nada, Jones launched herself at the piles of screws, nails, bolts and assorted miscellanea that were scattered around the adjacent wooden shed. Summoning me, she demanded to know the purpose of the Heath Robinsonish collection that I have acquired over the years. Any item whose usefulness I could not justify to her satisfaction was cast out. I suppose I should add, to her credit, that she devised a system of old plant pots to hold innumerable odds and ends that had previously lived in a maze of awkward corners.

It is the case that I find it much easier to discard Jones’s property and she mine than we do our own. We both tend to hoard. She’s forever trying to commit my treasured old clothes to the ragbag. Aware of this danger, I have patched my favourite Tilley hat for the umpteenth time. The crown had almost come adrift from the brim as a result of perspiration-wear - in spite of numerous washings. The brim itself is in good nick. So is the upper part of the crown. It’s just the intervening portion that has worn through. I hope that the repair will extend its life by at least another season.

In-between times I have continued to paint our house, fussy bits of which have remained to be done. To reach the base of the upper patio wall holding the railings, I hoisted up the extension ladder and tied the paint-pot to an upper rung. The ladder had to be moved at regular intervals. During one move, the paint pot hooked on a tile and then came crashing down on to the cobbles below. Although it landed on its base it spat out a wave of paint that flew over the cobbles and patio.

Jones was out and I was able to clear up the disaster before her return. Mercifully, it was a water-based paint that hosed away with little trace. I might add that I had taken the precaution of placing only an inch of paint in the pot. Even so, an inch of paint can make a mile of mess.

For a week or two a large crane has been visible in a dip in the hills some 15 kms from us, above the town of Alte. Beneath the crane in beanstalk fashion a tower has sprung up. We thought that it might be a mobile phone antenna. Jones, I need hardly tell you, was not pleased at this despoliation of her view. I wasn’t thrilled myself although I
appreciated that a lot of mobile phone users might be grateful.


Midweek the tower grew a propeller and manifested itself as a wind turbine to generate electricity. (There is a great farm of these things in the ever-windy south west tip of Portugal.) In the picture I am posting on the blog you can just make out the tower in the gap (if you click on the picture and look very carefully).

Late news: Sarah's family have arrived. Young Kayleigh and Robbie came walking with us on Friday morning. They have now gone off camping. Jones is meanwhile showing Carina around her garden. There's never a dull moment.