Letter from Espargal: 38 of 2007

Be sure your sin will find you out.” That’s what Jones said after I used the internet to get a little help with a ferocious exercise in (mainly) subjunctive Portuguese verbs, given to us by Antonio, our teacher. (You are blessed indeed if you have had the good fortune of living your life free of subjunctives.) The exercise was actually taken from a Portuguese fable, which Google and I managed to trace, with all the original verbs in place. Thus it was that, when it came to my turn to read a passage in class, filling in the gaps with the correct form of the verb, my effortless erudition greatly impressed Antonio and possibly a few of my fellow pupils.

All would have been well had not Antonio changed a single word in the fable, replacing an old word with a more modern equivalent. Thus he was astonished when I read the original word instead of its replacement. Of course, it was my downfall. The truth rapidly emerged, much (I should say) to everyone’s amusement. I got no sympathy from Jones who, ever diligent, had at least attempted to do the exercise before comparing her verbs with the author’s. Lest you begin to doubt my character, be assured that there was nothing material at stake. There are no tests in our classes, nor are any marks awarded (nice as it is to get things right.)

Antonio didn’t know the Portuguese for the quote from Jones (who grew up in a fervent Baptist household. Google tells me that it comes from Numbers, 32:23) He said the Portuguese have an idiom to the effect that the hiding cat is betrayed by its tail. There you have it.

POMEGRANATES
We arrived back from classes to discover yet another 5-litre bottle of fig liquor deposited at our front door. Chico and Dina had evidently been around during our absence. Maybe Chico felt that the 5 litres he’d presented to us last week hadn’t been sufficient spur. Fearful of accumulating yet more moonshine, I changed the link-box on the back of the tractor for the plough and went around to tend his fields. Chico, who is half blind as well as very old, stumbled down the hill from his cottage clutching a bag that he opened to reveal beer and biscuits intended for me. I declined his hospitality as graciously as I could. Drinking and tractoring is seriously bad news, especially on Chico’s slopes. It was all that the tractor could do to climb to the top of the field carrying the weight of the plough.


With October and its oh so welcome cooler weather (temps down into the moderate 20s) has come the olive harvesting season. Bringing in the olives is generally a family activity. Large nets are spread under the trees and the fruit is whacked down with long sticks. Farmers often trim the trees at the same time, clambering up into the branches, chain saw in hand.

Old olive trees are cut back severely, leaving just a couple of small branches emerging from the trunk. Within a few years these grow into boughs and the tree is ready for another hundred years or so of bearing. This year’s crop is poor. The fruit has been badly stung by the Mediterranean fruit fly. Most of the olives have brown stains on them, an indication of the larvae to be found inside.

Twice we took knapsacks on our morning walk, to stock up on tomatoes. The invitation to do so had come from a farmer who has several acres under cultivation down in the valley. Throughout the summer he and his helpers have been packing boxes and taking them off to market. Now that the demand has fallen off the farmer has stopped picking, even though a carpet of red and green tomatoes litters the field.
(A POMEGRANATE - NOT A TOMATO!) Other fruits and nuts lie rotting on and under the trees that bore them. One becomes very aware that farming is about making a living, not about feeding the hungry.

Our relief that the (latest) stray dog had found a home was short-lived. We spotted the animal on the outskirts of Alte, 10 kms away. He was trotting down the main road, his ribs still showing in spite of the tins of food that we had supplied him during his sojourn in our area. Penny, the neighbour who had taken him in, reported that he had spent just a couple of days with her, possibly stocking up on his energy levels, before taking off once again. I hope he finds a home.

One sees lots of stray dogs in this part of the world, most of them scrawny, frightened beasts, their tails glued between their legs. And as unpleasant as it is, one can come to terms with the fate of most of them in the local pound – if they ever get that far. But every now and then, as when we came across Banco, our boxer, one sees truly handsome dogs looking for a home, and it’s far more affecting, however irrational. I think of the annual hullabaloo over the slaughter of seal pups in Canada - and the comment that if they looked like pigs, no-one would give a damn.

It has been a very sociable week, mostly with our long-standing house-sitters, the Ferretts, who are looking after the house of a friend in the village. We led them to Messines for lunch with (equally old friends) the Vankos before continuing on to the
Vanko home (in the hills north of the town) to show them the amazing work that Eddie has done in converting an old cottage into a magnificent home.

Midweek we barbecued sausages, one of my better attempts. Jones will not hear of a new-fangled gas barbecue and fiercely resists any lazy attempt on my part to light the barbecue with fire-lighters. She hates the smell. So it’s old fashioned matches, kindling and charcoal – a whole brazier full. I have found from long experience that a small fire simply leads to scorched or underdone meat. Tonight we are all going to a concert in Faro, tomorrow it’s supper at Idalecio’s little restaurant and Monday it’s dinner in Alte.

If life sounds like a party, it didn’t feel like one last night after I’d spent a day working with Dani in the “park”. We dismembered several heaps of old branches that had been piled up after our clearing last season, along with dead thorn bushes and other dross. We separated the wood into useful and useless. Dani then used the chain-saw to cut the useful stuff into firewood (we got two tractor loads) while I burned off the useless stuff along with masses of thorns.

Well aware of the evils of global warming, we burn as little as possible in the fields. Nearly all our trimmings get turned either into mulch or firewood. It was hot and the pestiferous flies drove us to distraction. We’ve had a blue-sky October and I fear there’s more of the same to follow in November.

It’s not only the flies that are still about. The odd mozzie still braves the cooler evenings. And the ticks and fleas are present 24/7. As I type I’m aware of a wretchedly itchy bite on my chest, a spot from which I plucked a tick on our return from a walk. I really dislike ticks. Why a loving and omniscient deity invented them to torment us (i.e. creatures allegedly made in his image) is almost as big a mystery as why he gave the Arabs the oil.

We watched two movies at home, The Devil wears Prada, (which I thought a bit disappointing in spite of the leading role of favourite actress Meryl Streep); and, in German with subtitles, The Lives of Others – worthy of its Oscar if not exactly a load of fun. It made me think of the reflections, broadcast on Thursday, of the former BBC Gaza correspondent, Alan Johnston, on his 114 days as a prisoner of a jihadi group, and the joy of finding himself alive and free. It’s crazy, isn’t it, that we so often really appreciate the good things of life only after we lose them.

Letter from Espargal: 37 of 2007

As usual, much of the news in Espargal this week has gone unreported in the international media. For instance, you would not be aware that we heard Dina’s unmistakable shrieks as we were approaching the house after a walk last Sunday. We paused in the hope that the shrieks would go away and Dina with them. But they didn’t. So we continued on home where we found Dina and old Chico seated on a bench on our front patio. Beside Chico rested a 5-litre plastic bottle of fig moonshine. As if to convey its purpose, Dina threw back her head and indicated with her thumb towards her open mouth. Although she lacks the power of speech, she has a way of conveying her thoughts. (The sign of the cross means someone’s sick or dead!)

While Jones served the pair of them with biscuits and apple juice, Chico explained in his usual thick mumble that he wanted to plant beans and peas. In short his fields needed ploughing. He speaks so badly that even the Portuguese can barely understand him. The fact is that I should gladly plough his fields for nothing but Chico is a proud man who trades favours rather than asking them. He continued with a long monologue as they took refreshments. Barely one word in ten was comprehensible to us. We simply nodded at polite intervals.

To show her appreciation of their gift Jones poured herself a drop of fig liquor and took a few sips, sending Dina into fits of laughter, her toothless mouth full of semi-chewed biscuit. Dina is a huge woman with enormous boobs and you really need to see her (or at least the blog) better to appreciate the situation. The niceties of society served, we took the couple 200 metres home in the car – the only way to usher them out – with the dogs relegated unhappily to the rear.

The same day I took away the wooden supports that have been securing our fir tree since we planted it 18 months ago. The supports were beginning to choke the trunk as the tree is growing rapidly in spite of being confined to a small terrace. Within hours a strong southerly wind sprang up, testing the tree’s defences. To my alarm I noticed the ground around the tree moving and cracking as the fir heaved in the wind. I fear that the area simply is not deep or big enough to enable the tree to anchor itself properly. We slung a rope around the trunk to secure it while we considered our options. All that’s clear is that the problem will grow with the tree.

Monday morning we called round at the friend for whom I’d secured VW car parts the week before. A mechanic had gone around to install the parts – sections of water hose - only to find that they didn’t fit. The fault was mine. When placing the order I’d omitted to mention that the car was right-hand drive. So back we went to VW in Faro, this time with the old parts, to order identical ones. The spares attendant was patient and helpful. After cleaning the old hoses he managed to find the part numbers stamped on them and promised to have the new hoses available the following day.

Monday evening we went to see Becoming Jane, a fanciful biography of the youth of Jane Austen. It was our kind of film, even if we didn’t have our kind of viewers sitting in front of us. Coming home that night we saw a large stray dog, a beautiful animal, in the road just outside the village. We’d seen it on the verge of the highway earlier in the day, with three women – obviously estrangeiros – trying to entice it into their vehicle. Clearly, they’d failed.

We turned the car around and went back. The dog – looking a bit like a Portuguese mountain dog - was both friendly and ravenous. From the rear of the car I retrieved a substantial packet of dog-biscuit treats, intended for our own animals, and poured the contents on to the road side. The dog could hardly believe his luck. A few moments later English neighbours pulled up. They said they had given the dog some scraps from a restaurant and had continued on home to fetch some water. The dog was as pleased with the drink as it had been with the biscuits. Jonesy wondered whether we should try to take it home. I thought it better to wait to see what daylight brought.

Tuesday morning we took ourselves for a two-hour trek through the hills, waving away the wretched flies that irritated both man and beast. As we settled down to a cuppa afterwards, we heard a cry from Natasha, who was cleaning upstairs. The cause of her distress turned out to be our hairy spider, sitting up on the wall of the study. Natasha simply can’t stand spiders. Jones was all for trying to rescue it (by placing a glass over it) but the insect was so large and nimble that I persuaded her to allow me to suck it up in the vacuum cleaner. Jones immediately retrieved the bag and emptied it outside in the hope of freeing the unfortunate arachnid but of the spider there was no sign. Sorry spider. I had nothing against you. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jones had a late p.m. appointment with the dentist. After dropping her I continued into Faro to fetch the VW hoses. Natasha came with me. She wanted to buy a book from the Forum Algarve, just over the road. The book, much advertised on TV, cost her a small fortune – a day’s wages, she confessed. It apparently describes all kinds of natural remedies for various upsets and ailments. I hope that she gets her money’s worth.

On Wednesday, we once again saw the stray on the side of the road. We stopped and the dog showed every sign of being pleased to see me again. Or maybe it was the prospect of lunch. I emptied a large can of dog meat on to some paper under a tree. This the dog golloped up in short order. We don’t know what to do about him. I’d like to have him but Ono certainly won’t stand for him. There would be war and Ono would be thrashed. If we call Loule council, they’ll take him to the pound and that will be the end of him. We may be able to entice him into the car and get him to one of the animal sanctuaries.

After lunch I went around to give my regular computer lesson to a neighbour who has just been given a Vista-equipped computer by his family. It is my first encounter with the new Windows platform. Quite impressive! If only it were compatible with my older software programmes, I’d be tempted to install it.

In the evening we took ourselves to the airport to fetch English friends, two couples, who are house-sitting for neighbours in Espargal. One couple will be spending a few days with us at either end of the house-sit.


On Thursday I devoted myself to stabilising our fir tree with stays. (Jones tells me that it's actually a cypress.) I slung pieces of thick rope around trees both north and south of it and then tensioned everything with lengths of strong, plastic-covered wire. The rigging is pretty well invisible. Bits of cloth have been attached to the wire to prevent gardeners from accidentally walking into them. How well the system will work in practice we shall learn next time there’s a strong wind. The last strong wind tore a heavy wooden beam off our pergola and tossed it into the garden. (I have since reinforced the pergola.)

I had meant to spend the afternoon spraying the latest crop of weeds, especially the thorny wild asparagus that is now springing up everywhere. But I had so much difficulty trying to thread the wire stays for the fir tree through a thicket of shrubs and creepers that I attacked those instead. There’s a prickly creeper that goes wild here. It’s tough, invasive and vicious and scoffs at poison. It had climbed into the trees and resisted my efforts to rip it out again. That took up the hour before we had to walk the dogs. English neighbours dropped in for drinks a little later before all, English guests included, went off to supper at the Madeirense on the outskirts of Loule. It serves justly famous kebabs.

At supper one of the neighbours confided that the stray dog has found a home. It apparently wandered up into the garden of an English resident, Penny, and just settled down. Penny was dubious but seems to have bowed to fate. That, if it's true, is the best news of the week.

Friday morning I spent on the roof with a solar panel technician who installed a water pressure reduction device to lower the pressure of our mains water. It seems to have stopped the expansion valve from leaking steadily down the roof. Friday afternoon we took the car into Honda to check out an oil leak.
Honda peered underneath the engine and said not to worry. It seems that a little oil sometimes accumulates in a tray after an oil filter change. Wish that all our problems were so easily solved.

Letter from Espargal: 36 of 2007

This week has been given over mainly to good deeds, a litany of which would put you out like a light. I wonder why it is that we find reports of virtue so soporific and those of vice so entertaining. Why it is that the ecstasies of heaven are infinitely less persuasive than the torments of hell? Whatever the saints, pictured gazing mistily-eyed upwards, are party to, it’s something that passes me by.

Be that as it may - Thursday, our haloes gleaming, we took ourselves to Portimao, a sprawling fishing and tourist town on the banks of Arade River, up which Arab dhows sailed for hundreds of years to the Algarve’s Moorish capital of Silves. (The river is now largely silted up and suitable only for shallow boats.) Portimao is always a confusing place to navigate, more so as the exit from the motorway tips motorists in at the far end, leaving them to trace their way back to the river through the mazy streets of the old town.

Our mission was to discover the St James shoe shop, which sells ECCO shoes, my favourites. This we did in short order. Fatima, to whom I’d spoken on the phone, was delighted to show me her stock and mildly disappointed only that I didn’t buy new boots along with new shoes. I would have if she’d stocked boots with the thick, soft soles that I like.


We meandered home via back roads in order to discover a nursery that Jones had read about. This we did. She voted it a no-no. However, a small café-restaurant a little further down the road that serves lunches has gone on to our list of places to visit. The dogs liked it too. We returned home feeling good about the world.

I have contracted a cold, which is a bit of a pain. My nose is red and sore from overwork. A large roll of kitchen paper and a clutch of tissues are at hand. Jones has complained about my loud sneezing, saying she finds it very irritating and wondering whether there was nothing that I could do about it. There wasn’t.

I told that I found it even more irritating than she did, as well as uncomfortable. I’m not sure that she was persuaded. (Jones says that I paint her as an old witch. I assure her that you know her far too well to be under any such illusion.) Sneezing may not be very sociable but it is hardly a voluntary activity, especially when provoked by a cold. There are times when I think that the suffering induced by a cold is severely undervalued.

A large spider has taken up residence in the corner of the ceiling above my desk. It was there for several days, at least, until it moved we know not where. It is one of those muscular, hairy spiders that are the nightmare of arachnophobes.

It can stay if it gobbles up some of the insects that continue to plague us, for our Indian summer persists, and with it our flies and mosquitoes. I’ve been bashing flies with the last of my Witbank swatters (lethal, leather-ended devices) and feeding their corpses to the ever-grateful ants. (This always makes me feel better, as if I’m getting my own back on my tormentors. I am reminded of the charade adults perform by smacking an object that is the cause of a wailing child’s distress.)

While I was watching TV after a shower, a mosquito sat on my knee. It so happened that I was clasping The Jolt in my hand at the time, and I cunningly lowered it down on to the mosquito until it fried him. In hindsight it was a mistake. Mind you, it burns more than it shocks. I start to understand why the Americans have come to regard the electric chair as cruel and unusual punishment – some of them, anyhow.

After more than a year the road crew that put a first layer of tar on the road that leads from Espargal to the highway, 2 kms away, suddenly returned to finish the job. This was welcome news because in the intervening period we’d had to dodge the manhole covers, which were all an inch proud of the surface. A misjudgement meant that you whacked your tyres painfully on the protruding ironwork.

CASA NADA (RIGHT) AND THE HOUSE
The work was completed in just over two days and we now have a strip of virgin asphalt all the way to the stop street at Alto Fica, an ideal testing ground for the many Portuguese drivers bent on breaking the world land-speed record. Fortunately, in the narrow roads of the village itself, one has to drive slowly and with care in order to avoid head-on collisions with stray tractors.

Speaking of tractors, mine has been employed in bringing two large olive tree-trunk cross-sections to the glade. Jones spotted the timber lying on Vitor’s newly cleared plot and Vitor happily accepted E20 in return for them. Fortunately, Vitor’s land slopes steeply. I was able to back the tractor box under the smaller piece of timber and lever it on board. The larger piece tried our resources, both the tractor’s and mine. With some effort, I got it on to the box and brought it slowly home, my front wheels lifting in protest on the steeper sections.


The two pieces have been placed either side of our bench in the glade. One has to be careful to distract Jones when passing tree stumps because she takes a fancy to them – and the next thing I am despatched to bargain with their owners and bring them home.

The Financas wrote me a letter explaining why it tried to double tax me on the house. While it’s written in the usual bureaucrese I think it says that it was all my fault. The bottom line is that in future I will only be taxed once (a year) on the property. That, at least, is good news. Not that I complain about taxes. Pensioners in Portugal get a very good tax deal, much better than wage earners. That may be because most Portuguese pensioners live on a very small income.

Although the rules are clear for Portuguese pensioners, interpreting them for expat pensioners who derive their income from overseas seems to be something of a dark art. We pay good money to a firm of accountants who interpret the rules liberally in their clients’ favour, greatly reducing the income tax that would otherwise have to be paid. At the same time the accountants warn us that their interpretation of any client’s obligations may be challenged by the tax authorities.

Clients are then invited to contribute substantial amounts to a fighting fund in return for a guarantee that the accountants will fight the client’s corner in the event of a challenge. While I have my doubts about this kind of insurance I haven’t had the bottle to decline it.

Jonesy has just brought me an afternoon cup of tea and a large slice of Marie’s cake (donated to us in thanks for neighbourly services). Jones has been taking some glorious sunrise pictures.She has also, as usual, been doing lots of work in the garden. The south garden comprises extensive areas of rock shelf, with pockets of soil in-between. I fetched her a load of attractive rocks in order to frame the beds that she has created between them. We’ve had a week of blue skies and we are having to water again in the evenings. A little rain would be very welcome.

Letter from Espargal: 35 of 2007

THE VIEW
This week has been about bureaucracy. No doubt you’re more concerned with your own bureaucracy than ours. But since these letters may one day serve as the basis of the book I haven’t yet written, here it is for the record.

If we had thought that our bureaucratic battles were over, we were wrong; for the scourge returned like the devils to the man possessed. We smelled trouble when we received notification of (yet) more registered letters awaiting us in Benafim. I went up to the post office there and came home in a daze, with a clutch of nine tax demands for supposedly unpaid local taxes dating back to our move to Espargal.

Scrutinising them, it seemed to me that the Financas was double-taxing our house under different codes. I pored over their website, spent an hour (mainly waiting) on the phone to tax officials and the next morning visited the Financas in Loule. The man at the desk there tried to assure me that all was normal. Mercifully, his protestations were overheard by the official to whom I’d spoken, who intervened to put things right.

It emerged that our house had been allocated a preliminary tax code while under construction and a final code after completion. The preliminary code should then have been cancelled. But it wasn’t. Four years later the whole caboodle surfaced and with it a host of demands for unpaid taxes. My helpful official presented me with a form to fill in and advised to come back in three weeks when the whole thing should be sorted out.

Our next encounter took place at the conservatory of title deeds in Loule. This office is not one to be visited by anybody in a hurry. As is customary in these situations visitors take a numbered ticket and wait. Lucky ones may be served within the hour. A four-hour wait is not uncommon. A single person may take five minutes of the assistant’s time or fifty. (Lawyers often arrive with a whole file of documents to be processed.) Visitors commonly nip in and out of the office, taking new tickets each time, hoping to strike it lucky at some point.

FRONT GARDEN VIEW TO CASA NADA
To assist us, we employed Suzi, who runs a facilities service in Benafim. Our aim was to register Casa Nada – the Nothing House, so called because there is no official trace of it in the records. In one hand we clutched the Casa Nada document issued to us by the tax department - to prove that it exists; in the other the title deeds of the property on which the building sits.

When we eventually got the desk, the assistant took one look at the papers and shook her head. There was no reference to the house in the title deeds, she said, (which we knew already.) And she couldn’t accept the new tax document as evidence. What we had to do, she explained, was to make another appointment with the notary, who had overseen our original purchase of the property, to get the deeds amended. Once that was done, we could try again.

There’s another complication. There are errors in the tax document because it’s based on old information. Before we see the notary, we need to get these corrected. The parish president has to come to check the property’s boundaries and note the current owners of adjacent properties. Once that document is put right we can go back to the notary. If she (both Loule’s notaries are “shes”) agrees to amend the title deeds, we may return to the conservatory.

As it happens, we are not in any hurry and we think it worthwhile suffering the necessary pain. Eventual registration of the old house will enhance the value of the property and permit us, should we ever wish, to renovate it (officially). It will also probably be necessary in order for the property to be sold.

To calm our nerves we took ourselves to lunch in Alte (where Jones wanted to find a replacement item for Maria of the Conception, who had accidentally broken a favourite jug in Jones’s presence the day before). We chose an outside table at a restaurant. The dogs, as usual, lay at our feet. However, they were upset by two practised bummer cats that arrived to beg scraps from us. For a while I bounced olive pips off the intruders’ heads to keep them at a distance. But the cats grew steadily bolder and the dogs more outraged until there was a sudden hissing and confrontational scrabbling under the table. The cats retired, we soothed the dogs and peace was restored.

On the subject of dogs: Penny, an expat neighbour, came round last weekend to talk about computers and the internet. In the course of our conversation, she mentioned that there was a new stray in the village, a brown and white dog that had come looking for food. The same afternoon we bumped into the animal right outside our gates, just after we’d released our three from their leads at the end of a walk. Ono and Prickles promptly decided that the newcomer was surplus to requirements. Ignoring my yells, they set about hounding him out of town. Receding squeals could be heard from the field into which they’d disappeared, as I went after them, cursing their hides.

I found our pair down on the main road and shared my breathless annoyance with them. I was still panting by the time we got back home. Also, my right Achilles tendon, which has been playing up, was protesting loudly. The following morning, it was inflamed and sore. I hobbled to the loo and back to bed. It was clearly going to be a hobbling kind of Sunday.

Jones wasn’t pleased. (She never is by my intimations of mortality.) The setback coincided with the parish walk, for which I’d entered the pair of us. What’s more, I had been the moving spirit in persuading most of the other expats to sign up. To complicate life further, last Sunday dawned black and damp. Drizzle had fallen overnight and there was the promise of rain in the air. The neighbours decided against joining the great walk and called round to take Jones and the dogs on a local circuit instead. It was suggested to me that I get on with the ironing, on the basis “that you might as well do something useful”. (Which I did.)

Monday evening we went to see the Bourne Ultimatum. It was well done, although the stream of hand-held shots left our heads reeling. Tuesday it rained. We’d postponed Natasha to spend the morning at the Financas. Afterwards I dropped in on Honda to get two new front rubber mats for the car. My heel had worn a hole in the old driver’s mat. Must surely be time to look for a new car.

Wednesday brought my first English lesson of the new academic year. (4 pupils so far, with several more likely.) Before the lesson, I sat in on a lecture about the basis of Portuguese law. I’m interested to learn more but have my doubts as the lecturer never gets up to use the blackboard and doesn’t much like being interrupted.

On the way home I met the TV man who had sold me the card that was supposed to give us access to several encrypted UK channels. (It did but with severe break-up.) Like all such operators, he arrived in a hurry. After some preliminary checks he informed me that our dish was too small to give us a quality signal. I agreed reluctantly (read “expensive”) to let him install a bigger one. It seems to have done the trick. Neighbours subsequently informed us that in their case a new LNB had sufficed. (I conclude that there is more profit in big dishes than new LNBs. We live and learn.)

One of Jones’s plants has burst into stunning flower. We have never seen the likes. Jonesy called me outside one evening to see it. The pair of us oohed and aahed. The garden is looking lovely after the rain, and it's such a pleasure not to have to water it each evening.