Letter from Espargal: 4 of 2008

DAWN OVER ESPARGAL

It grows warm. We were tempted to turn on the car’s air-conditioner as we travelled to a nursery near Loule midweek for a sale of plants. Our mild winter seems to be behind us. I can’t remember seeing frost in the valley even once. You good folks in Canada and the US would not recognise our sunny days and chilly evenings as winter. Some evenings we don’t even light a fire to warm the house. When we built, we put in gas-fired central heating but we’ve made so little use of it that the original gas bottles are still in place.

Around us the almond trees are in blossom and the countryside is splashed in glorious pink and white. We’ve been snapping away with the camera and will stick our best efforts up on the blog. In the valley below us Ermindo’s citrus groves are groaning with fruit, which we sample each day as we pass. Some branches are bent to the ground. In the trees one hears the voices of the pickers, who never run short of conversation.
The fruit is piled high in large plastic boxes and stacked on Ermindo’s truck. You can hear its engine struggling to drag the load up the dirt road to the village.

My walks are growing more vigorous as my sciatica recedes. (Notes of sympathy remain acceptable.) We again did our Sunday trek around the lagoons at Quinta da Lago, dodging the cyclists who were out in force. I am really only telling you this as an excuse to stick up some of Jones’s pics. She’s been snapping more sunrises as well. She’s a real sun-worshiper; loving to watch the orb’s appearance over the eastern mountains and its descent into the western sea.


And while I’m on pics, Jones accompanied me to Alte (I for a physio session with Jodi), both to inspect an art gallery that has opened there and to photograph the geese that inhabit the stream. The stream arises from two perennial springs and, after making its way through the town, tumbles down a waterfall before meandering off through the valley.


Last weekend we watched a documentary on a project called Buskaid to encourage children in Soweto to learn classical music. It’s run by an English woman who teaches kids there to play the violin. It became clear that the work consumes her life as well as enriching the lives of many under-privileged children. We were impressed. Afterwards, I looked up the Buskaid’s website with a view to making a modest donation.

The website offered various options to donors, including the use of credit cards to donate online. After checking that the site was secure, I tried to make a donation. The transaction was secured by the “Verified by Visa” programme, to which I’ve subscribed (and which gives one an added level of security). At my first attempt the screen came up with an error message. Thinking that I’d made a slip, I tried again. Once more, I got an error message. So I decided to send a cheque.

Great then was my surprise (fortunately, before I’d posted the cheque) to find an email acknowledgement of two online donations. Both transfers had gone through. I hope that Buskaid is grateful. For my part, I’ve emailed “Verified by Visa” to explain the problem and I await their response. I am also going to be very careful with any such future online transactions. The experience could easily have been very painful.

WITH NEIGHBOURS
All this, I might add, was before the stock market went completely insane and frighteningly bananas at the start of the week. Speaking of which - Jones is persuaded that she will die after me and she occasionally expresses the fear that she will be left to grow old in poverty. I have assured her that our means, after my presumed death, ought to be sufficient to maintain her in modest comfort unless (I added as an afterthought) the western financial system should collapse.

I shouldn’t have added the rider. For when the Footsie lost £80-billion in the course of a day’s trading, Jonesy feared that the day of financial Armageddon had arrived. If the truth be told, I was alarmed myself. The only good thing to come out of this financial storm and the slide of the pound, from her point of view, has been my reluctant acceptance that this is not the time to invest in a new CRV.

Coming back to the subject of inspirational documentaries, we saw another on an English teenager who won a scholarship to Eton and subsequently to Cambridge on the strength of his musical genius. He is a most remarkable young man – because he also suffers from cystic fibrosis. His regime includes the daily consumption of several dozen pills, being hooked up to tubes in bed and having the mucous build-up in his lungs literally beaten out of him several times a day. In spite of the intensive treatment his health remained precarious. The documentary followed his (successful) efforts at Eton to achieve his ambition there - leading the school orchestra and choir in Bach’s Magnificat.

Our elderly Portuguese neighbour, Zeferino, greeted us excitedly as we passed by the other day with news that an official from the Camara had been around to inspect a ruin adjacent to his house. The inspector had not known exactly where to find the plot and Zeferino had been pleased to show him, a point that Zeferino made to us several times. The significance of this is that the ruin lies at the foot of a small piece of land that juts into our own property and which we have long wanted to acquire. The owners have equally long wanted to sell it but have been struggling through a lengthy court procedure because of the complexity of the title.

The inspection implies that the title has been sorted out. We assume that the owners are trying to register the ruin with the Camara before putting the property on the market. Our interest is only in the land but I fear that we will have to buy the ruin as well, which will make the transaction much more expensive. We await developments.

PROFESSOR ANTONIO
At our Portuguese lessons we have been learning one of the more complex grammatical constructions, a feature of which many Portuguese themselves are unaware. (I don’t mind if you want to skip this paragraph.) It fascinates us both. Like most European languages, Portuguese verbs change their endings to denote person and tense. “To speak” is “falar”. “I will speak” is “falarei”. You will speak is “falara”. And so on – a system familiar to any students of Latin.

That’s pretty run-of-the-mill. The unusual bit is the way the verb divides itself around personal pronouns in the future tense. “I will tell you” becomes “falar-te-ei (using the moderately familiar form of “you”).

Things get more complex in sentences such as: “I will give it to you”. The “it” and the “you” combine in a single word (a bit like “we’re” or “you’ll”), which is then inserted in the split verb as above. The possibilities are endless, a veritable minefield for students of the language.
The Portuguese pupils in my English class are most impressed when I try out such constructions, as indeed they ought to be. Although this kind of language is common in print, one seldom hears it spoken as there are easy alternatives.