Letter from Espargal: 17 of 2008

The most remarkable event of this past week was a walk on which our neighbours, Olly and Marie, led us through the hills. This is really a picture letter - and the pictures must speak for themselves.

Let me preface our outing by talking for a moment about the Algarve countryside. For the most part it’s wickedly rocky. The remains of old walls line the hillsides, evidence of generations of hard labour by subsistence farmers who moved the rocks to eke a living from the land.
Most farmers lived in small communities, often of barely half a dozen houses. The houses were thick-walled, built of mud and rocks and finished with lime plaster. The roofs were tiles laid on canes.

One such community is Estiveira, clearly visible about 3 kms away on the next rise. It was there we started out on a 3-hour walk that led high into the hills. Nary a soul was about – just an occasional bird or lizard.
Three times we passed deserted hamlets, the small houses bereft of their roofs, lying open to the sun. Some of the walls had started to collapse, exposing their rock and mud interiors. In the main though, the plastered walls and the decorated "platibanda" strips along the top of the walls were in good shape.

Within our lifetime, these dwellings would have been home to thriving communities. It's sad to see a way of life come to such an end. From the hilltop, we looked down on the next village, Esteval dos Mouros (the Stable of the Moors) and beyond it to the coast. We wound our way down through lazy carob plantations to the main road. Our dogs panted in the heat, too tired to bother with the village dogs that objected to their passage.

The heart of Esteval dos Mouros is the café. It’s the most welcome café on earth. We set up table in the shade of a tree outside and sipped icy beers, hot coffee and baggies. Jones laid out the last of the marvellous Christmas cake from our house sitters, the Ferretts, which she’s been rationing. The dogs crashed in the shade. The café owners turned out to be cousins of several of our neighbours in Espargal. They were pleased to be able to chat to us. This is a part of the world where just about everyone seems to be related to everyone else.

The return was by a shorter route that climbed steadily back into the hills. We took frequent breaks in the shade of carob trees. Estiveira, when we reached it, looked almost as sleepy as the dying hamlets. Our arrival aroused Tomasia, (a friend of a neighbour) who rushed out of her house to offer us refreshments. There was little other sign of life. Without either new blood or new estrangeiros, Estiveira’s future is not rosy. (Jones says she thinks it's blissful the way it is.)


On our return Jones and I both went out like lights on the bed, in spite of the growl from Natasha’s busy vacuum cleaner downstairs. I was woken by a sudden Jones leap from the bed. She’d been woken herself, she confessed a minute later, by a bite on her tummy, courtesy of a tick she’d picked up along the way. It went down the loo. Jones’s soft heart for bees and butterflies, which she rescues from the windows, doesn’t extend to ticks.

After dropping Natasha in Loule that evening, we went on to Faro for cocktails to mark the opening of a new rehearsal room for the Orchestra of the Algarve – of which we’re minor patrons. Following drinks and a few forgettable speeches, we trooped inside for a little chamber music.
Chamber music is something that mainly I can live without. Even so, I quite liked a piece for piano and cello. (Jones preferred a piano-bassoon - spelled “basson” - duet.) I failed to recognise the cellist, whom we’ve often seen, because for once she had her hair drawn back – and was chided by my beloved for being obtuse. (I think that’s a kind of angle.)

We made another trip to Faro to renew my international driving licence, discovering on arrival that the offices of the Portuguese AA had moved from the outskirts to the centre. So we trekked in and hunted around for somewhere for the dogs to lift their legs. Prominent signs banned 4-legged visitors from the few green spaces. At least I found the new office free of customers and was able to leave with the document 20 minutes later. It’s never been sought on my many visits to Canada. But Sod’s law says that it would be if I didn’t have it.

On the way home, we stopped off at “Honda” to check out a minor intermittent leak that, has irritated Jones by dropping oil on her cobbles. I’d taken the car once before, soon after the service that provoked the leak, but without having the problem identified. While Honda raised the car and Jones walked the dogs, I wandered around the showroom, eyeing the latest models and wincing at the prices. The new CRV costs 45,000 euros plus – nearly half of it tax. It’s outrageous.

The repair took an hour and a bit and felt like three. Honda said they’d replaced a minor part that was damaged. I said there’d been no problem prior to the last service. Honda insisted that it was a coincidence. I had my doubts. So did Jones, who wanted (me) to argue with Honda. But the bill wasn’t large and Honda had fitted us in without an appointment. So we paid up and went home. Two faults in 8 years isn’t a bad record.

I dropped in one morning on the little old cobbler who operates, hunched over his last, in a dark Dickensian room close to the senior university. A handwritten sign, tied to the railings, proclaims his trade. Shoes, bits of leather and scraps of iron lie scattered about the room. I wanted to take a picture but the old man said the place was too untidy. I presented him with one of one of Jones’s shoes, the stitching of which had given way at the heel.

Several days later I went back to fetch the shoe. The cobbler had sewn a neat patch inside the heel, maybe half an hour's work. The charge for this, he said, was one euro. I gave him two and he thought it was Christmas. He, and one other old fellow, are the last cobblers practicing their trade in Loule, and are going the way of Estiveira. The new breed operate in shopping centres, with a range of high-tech “while you wait” equipment. I like the old ones better.

So that’s our news. We are preparing for the arrival of our house sitters on Tuesday evening. The next day we take the train to Lisbon – and the day after we fly to Frankfurt and Calgary. The plan is to spend some time with my family in the Rockies before we drive to Vancouver to meet two of Barbara’s nephews. Then we have a week on the Canadian Pacific coast and the Queen Charlotte islands. We are due back in Portugal on Thursday June 5.

Post Script: Olly received a birthday card from our gifted artist neighbour, Sarah, with her impression of his very bad experience on my tractor, the day the clutch failed and he went whizzing down the hill. The picture is accurate to the extent of having even the right licence plate. Although (and here one must forgive the artist) the treads on the tractor's rear wheels incline the wrong way.

Letter from Espargal: 16 of 2008

JONES GARDEN
By my calculations we are into the second third of the year. Little is known about what happened to first third. It’s hard enough tracing the events of the past week. It started well. I remember that. We went with friends (David & Dagmar and their guest, Anna) to join the festivities at Alte, a small town visible across the valley. On the outskirts, vendors had covered the pavements with an assortment of old agricultural implements and knick knacks. I was interested in a brass bell but wasn’t seduced by its 60 euro price tag, in spite of the vendor’s insistence that it was a bargain.

We lunched at tables laid out in an open tent beside the river. David and I both arrived from different kiosks with armfuls of beer. Jones protested that we should have consulted each other first. But, as I assured her (and soon became evident) the problem of having too much beer has not yet been invented. We were asking Anna how things were going with her husband, a dentist (working back in Germany), when Jones gasped and spat out the crown of a back tooth. She has a habit of doing this although seldom so appropriately. So it was down to her dentist at the first opportunity.

After that, things start to blur (not from the beer).
Jones has spent much of the week gardening and I strimming. To say that I’ve been strimming doesn’t do the subject justice. It’s like Heracles saying that he’d been cleaning the stables – or Sisyphus speaking of pushing a rock up a hill. Strimming a couple of unruly acres is actually more akin to painting the Forth Bridge. The stuff grows almost as fast as one can cut it down. Where-ever possible I use the tractor to clear the earth but the rock-studded, tree-strewn slope above the house does not permit mechanical ingress.

Worthy of mention is the exceptional crop of canes that has sprouted around us this year. Jones tells me that they are actually giant fennel. The canes grow several metres in a matter of a few weeks and then gradually harden during the summer. They’re not tough enough to be put to practical use. For this one has to choose canes from the river banks. These canes, after drying, are still widely used in roofing. Previously, tiles were laid directly upon them. These days, there’s generally a layer of insulation between them.

When I haven’t been strimming (or walking or shelling beans), I’ve been transferring the entire contents of my CD collection to my computer. The inspiration for this came from Barbara’s brother, Llewellyn, who uses a computer, attached to an LDC-TV screen, as a home entertainment centre. I liked it. As I have dusty CDs that I haven’t listened to in ages, I thought it an excellent idea to put all the music together on a hard disk. After much labour, I proudly showed Jones how one could view every single album on a single computer page.

Being Jones, she wasn’t impressed, pointing out that one still had to scroll up and down to see them all. Much easier, she felt, to look at the CD racks and simply choose the music one wanted. Well, I guess you pays your money and you takes your choice. I love having al the music just a finger tip away on the computer, (an area where Jones would probably admit to being a bit of a luddite).

Speaking of which – I have spent a couple of useful hours assisting neighbours, one to get back on the internet and the other with the content of a proposed internet site to advertise his holiday cottages.
The latter, Idalecio, has almost completed the cottage that he has been rebuilding – stone, tiles and canes, with underfloor heating throughout. It looks splendid in its new coat of paint and he hopes to find a few summer guests. He is about to do up a second cottage close by. In an ideal world he would buy and restore an adjacent ruin and put in a pool. Then he would really be in business.

Around us, half a dozen other builders are at work. The village has been heaving with cement and delivery trucks. (Twice we were intercepted by truck drivers trying to make deliveries – hard when there are no road names and few house names.) Below us a Scottish couple is extending. Right beside them a young Portuguese couple is building a house. At the end of our road there’s been a sudden spurt of activity at a house for a young Dutch couple and above them another Scot has added a second floor to his home.

At the bottom of the village, Horacio (the local builder) is completing his latest house, while across the road from him a third team of builders has moved into a cottage that the owner has long tried and failed either to convert or to sell. (We are led to understand that the previous two teams walked out after being left unpaid.) For little Espargal, all this represents major development.

May the 1^st was Labour Day. The locals celebrate the holiday by finding a spot somewhere along a river bank for a picnic. At the end of the day they return up the dirt roads towards Espargal in clouds of dust. I mention this because, as usual, we were out walking and, in order to avoid the dust, we diverted up the hillside and took a narrow contour path back to the village. It’s a route we’ve avoided the past few weeks because of the seasonal host of ticks that lurks in the long grass. Still, we thought better a few ticks than choking dust.

What this is really all about is an awkward spot halfway along the path where one has to step around a bulging bush. I stepped in a place that wasn’t there and disappeared down the slope with a crash. Jones said later that she thought the wild pigs were about. She found me lying head down in a tangle of prickly shrubbery and rocks. It took me all of five minutes to untangle myself and regain the path. Jones helpfully retrieved my specs from a shrub while I extracted thorns from my flesh. My wounds were minor although, as I pointed out to the neighbours, they felt much worse than they looked. I regret that I wasn’t in a position to take a picture for the blog.


During another walk we came across two neighbours tending their immaculate vine plantation down in the valley where, sadly, many of the old vines are straggly and overgrown from lack of attention. When the two ladies spotted me taking a quick picture, they objected. They didn’t want to be seen with their backsides sticking out, they insisted; I should show their faces instead. So I took a couple more snaps and promised to print off copies for them.

Another picture,of lupins,arrived from Jane, an English friend who lives in Benafim. I was much impressed. You may judge for yourself.Just before last month’s rains, I sowed two of our fields with lupin seeds that I purchased in Germany. Will be interesting to see whether the plants turn out as handsomely.

On the social front, it’s been a whirl: to the Hamburgo on Wed with a party of German friends; to a Labour Day lunch on Thur with other friends (we all had to wear something red); to a concert in Faro tonight (after Jones has entertained her Portuguese neighbours to afternoon tea) and out to dinner tomorrow night.

Next week has all sorts of things marked in ahead of our departure to Canada the week after. The pups need their second inoculation; I need to renew my international driving licence; and that’s just the start. The pressure mounts. As I may have remarked before, retirement is not for the faint hearted.