Letter from Espargal: 24 of 2008

AT LOULE FAIR
There is very little, it seems, that can hold Espargal back from its inexorable march towards the world stage. A few years ago you’d have been hard put to discover us on the map, amidst the sleepy citrus orchards and dusty carob groves. But times are a changing. Following the arrival of (admittedly, an intermittent supply of) mains water, street lights and tarred roads, we are now to have street names – and those proposed have animated the village. In fact, tempers have grown quite frayed.

The names have been indicated on a map set up beside the postboxes. Although residents have a week to comment on the proposals, it would seem that few were consulted beforehand and many are quite displeased, as much by their exclusion from the process as the names themselves.

We heard Joachim Sousa exchange some angry words with old Zeferino on the matter. Just why, I’ve no idea. And, while I was helping Leonhilde clear under her carob trees, she snorted with indignation. She finds it ridiculous that her road is to be called the Rua da Figueirinho – the road of the little fig tree; she also feels that the road up to the trig point should be called by the summit’s traditional name, “farol” (lighthouse or beacon – as in “Faro”) – and not the Rua do Telef, as proposed.

Ours is perhaps the least controversial, the Rua do Cercado (enclosure), derived from the traditional name for our part of the hill. We have no problem with that. If you ever come looking for us, we’re the brown house at the end of the Rua do Cercado.

The fuss has added to the heat and stickiness of a hot and sticky week, marked only by a brief and unseasonal shower that descended on Loule on Tuesday evening. We had just done our grocery shopping and were dropping Natasha off when the first drops fell. By the time we’d parked, real rain was coming down. It lasted just long enough to wash the oppressiveness out of the evening air and wet the tables and chairs at the fair.

It was to the fair that we were heading. One goes there as much for the passing show as anything on offer at the rows of stalls.
The show included a large policeman keeping a tight rein on an equally large Alsatian police dog. At one point the dog caught sight of and strained towards a tiny Chihuahua, which was equally fascinated by its giant cousin. I tried to snap the pair of them as they met nose to nose in an amicable encounter but was frustrated by the delay on my mobile phone camera.

Our routine is to have supper before the crowds arrive, at long tables set up beside restaurant booths. Then we spend an hour touring the stalls – full of knick knacks, cane baskets, cakes, home-made liquor and amateur art. We always try to support Existir, an organisation that assists disabled people. This can be difficult because the items on sale at its stall tend to reflect the abilities of the people it assists. Finally, we leave the crowds to enjoy the amplified entertainment and go off for coffees and baggies at a pavement cafe.

Our neighbours, Sarah and David, were due to join us. But they called off at the last minute after running into a drains problem. We found them hard at work on the problem the following morning. This entailed David’s lifting heavy stone covers and thrusting a hose into the fragrant heart of the problem at one end, while Sarah waited in the field at the other end for hopeful results.

Drainage problems we can speak of with some authority, having had plenty of our own down the years. Like most villages ours has no public drains. Each house has its own. People have long since learned not to put anything artificial down the loo – not even loo paper. Even so, after a time most drains play up, as the result of a fatty lining in the pipes or the invasion of roots.

We found Idalecio scooping out roots from a blocked drain beside his house one morning, just before the arrival of the first guests at his holiday cottages. He’s full; two couples and two kids in each. One group apparently arrived at another destination, to find it choc-a-bloc. They came across Idalecio’s ad in a local paper, phoned him – and arrived very soon after. We try to creep past the cottages with the dogs in the morning so as not to wake the visitors.

Natasha came on Thursday for a second day’s work – needed to pay the bill for a long session at the dentist. I’d warned her to bring garden clothes and footwear. We spent 3 hot hours picking up stones from the fields in the morning, and another 3 shredding branches and clearing under carob trees in the afternoon. Natasha went bright pink from the exertion. At one point she clutched her chest and gave a little scream. I feared that she’d overdone things. But the source of her distress turned out to be a bug that she’d turned up with the hoe. Natasha doesn’t like creepy crawlies.

We noted with regret that the owners of the big new house going up 100 metres below us have blocked off the path that we used to take through the property. We knew it would happen sooner or later. But it’s a pity nonetheless – the price of progress.

I had two phone calls (I lost the first midway) from my internet supplier, Telepac, which always follows up problems with a questionnaire on client satisfaction. This generally comes by email. If one doesn’t respond, one gets a phone call instead. While the principle is admirable, the format inevitably includes a dozen irrelevant questions. I tried to explain to the unfortunate woman who called me that there were all sorts of issues that I hadn’t discussed. I had absolutely no idea how familiar the helpline technician was with Telepac’s product range. But her job requires that every contingency gets a mark from 1 to 10 – and eventually I just gave in and allocated 9 to everything.

The days still start with a doggy outing, and we try to let Raymond and Bobby exhaust themselves in play on the patio on our return. Jones has continued with her interminable cutting back and watering, I with shredding and clearing. I cleared and shredded a neighbour’s cuttings too – and was rewarded with a loaf of still-warm home-made bread. I can’t tell you how good it tasted with thick slices of tomato.


We get the tomatoes, as well as water melons, from Jorge Vieira on the other side of Benafim. Jorge farms both on a big scale. He apologised for the quality of the melons. They were not yet at their best, he explained, because his early production had been grafted on to pumpkin stock, which is more forgiving of bugs in previously-tilled soil than melon seeds. Even so, they taste pretty good to us.