Letter from Espargal: 30 of 2008

Jones has been home from her US visit less than a week but it feels as though she hardly went away. (She says it feels as though she’s been away for months.) We went to Faro airport last Monday morning to meet her. That’s me (“I” if you prefer) and the dogs, as well as Llewellyn and Lucia, who had arrived the previous day. We were very pleased to see her. The dogs gave her a great welcome too.

Of course we wanted to hear all about her visit. She said her heart nearly sank when she arrived at Newark Airport and an immigration official demanded to see her visa. She has a British passport and, according to the regulations (which I’d scrutinised), shouldn’t have needed one. It emerged that the cabin crew had, for some unknown reason, given her the wrong form to fill in. So she had to go back to the desk and fill in the right one – and that did the trick.

Awaiting her were her nephew, Bevan (the groom to be), together with his brother Lloyd and his parents, newly-arrived from South Africa. Bevan took them to an apartment hotel on the outskirts of Princeton, where they spent the weekend. They loved the town and were pleasantly entertained on the two evenings before the wedding by Bevan’s partner-boss and the bride’s parents.

The wedding, on a Saturday afternoon, was held outdoors, enlivened by the minister’s dropping the groom’s ring and having to retrieve it from the shrubbery. The reception followed in a smart university function room. Lloyd returned home on the Monday, after which Jones set out with her brother, Robbie and his wife, Carol, for Vermont, to join the newly-weds. Bevan had rented a house on a lake near the Killington ski-fields, where they were to spend the next six nights.

The setting was lovely (only “silent” boats were permitted on the lake) and their sojourn was marred, from my point of view, only by the lack of cell-phone reception in the area. Jones managed to get a signal from the top of the ski-hill, taking a gondola up and walking down again.

I knew that she was contented and well and that was really all that mattered. During their stay they saw what they could of Vermont, including the attractive town of Woodstock.


Jones reported a moment that had them rolling about with laughter. As they were travelling, they came across a police car, at right-angles to the road, that was blocking one lane. Inside sat an important-looking policeman, talking on the phone. As they came closer they saw that the police car was resting on its chassis, rocking slowly up and down on the edge of the road. It became apparent that the policeman had chosen the wrong spot to do a 3-point turn. He was going nowhere until help arrived. Jones and co longed to take a picture but thought better of it. So I have to leave the scene to your imagination.


Bevan and Sion dropped Jones back at Newark Airport the following weekend. She had the welcome benefit of an empty seat beside her on her flight home. Ten days earlier, she recounted, as her plane was approaching to Newark, the aircraft had suddenly dropped violently, causing the passengers, herself included, and even members of the cabin crew, to shriek with alarm. All these things considered, it’s nice to have her back.

I wish that she were a little more taken with the improvements that were made to the study furniture in her absence. She pronounced the new shelves to be “fine”, in a tone which indicated that she could live with them, even if she didn’t share my enthusiasm. She was also introduced to Kioti and the pair of them seemed to get on well enough.

LUNCH IN ALTE

On Tuesday we took ourselves to lunch in Alte, leaving the house to Natasha. I sat at a pavement café with the dogs, sipping coffee and a baggy, while the group explored the “Off the Wall” picture gallery. Then we repaired to a riverside restaurant. This has a lounge where lunch is served to “jeep tourists”, groups of holiday makers who are fetched from the coastal colonies and taken for a dusty ride through the valleys, with a meal thrown in for good measure. It’s a useful way to meet people, especially if you’re young and don’t mind getting bounced around and sunburned. It’s also big business, with half a dozen companies competing in the market.


On Wednesday, Jones and I went to Loule to try to further the process of getting Casa Nada regularised. For the past year this process has been going pretty-well nowhere. We had prepared a sworn declaration as the next step and met the woman organising things at the notary’s office to hand it in. She said she then had to go to the Financas and finally to the Registry of Title Deeds in order to complete the process. What progress she made, if any, we wait to hear. Fortunately, we are not in a hurry. Portugal is one of the worst places ever to be in a hurry to accomplish anything.

DINNER IN VERMONT

On Thursday I had an appointment with our lawyer to discover just what I would be in for, were I to act as guarantor for Natasha in the matter of the apartment she wishes to rent. Not unexpectedly, the news was bad. The guarantor has no power to terminate the contract, simply the obligation to pay any bills that the tenant fails to honour. I wasn’t prepared to sign myself up for 5 years of that. But I arranged with Natasha to visit the office of the lawyer where the rental contracts were drawn up, to see if a compromise could be reached.

That we did on Friday afternoon, only to find that the assistant concerned was away until next week. The lawyer gave us the phone number of the landlady but she simply referred me back to the lawyer’s assistant, where the matter rests. I am not hopeful.

PRINCETON LODGINGS

Earlier on Friday, just after I’d turned off the water and removed a dripping tap, with a view to buying a new one, I had a call from the microwave oven man. (The microwave has been out of action for several weeks and I’ve been chasing the manufacturers.) I abandoned my tap mission and led the microwave man to the house instead. We would have taken the oven into Faro ourselves had I been able to extract it from the surrounding framework. This the technician did in a matter of seconds, having first yanked out the semi-invisible plastic clips hiding the screws. So easy when one knows how! He took the oven away with him, promising to return it next week – on Tuesday if we were lucky, on Friday if we weren’t.

In the afternoon, I installed a new tap and turned the water back on. That was shortly before we took the dogs on a short “pee and pooh” walk. For the second half of the walk, we let Ono and Raymond run free. Our mistake was to let Prickles off the lead as well before we had returned home. Under his diminutive leadership, the three of them disappeared over the hill to go rabbit hunting – the third time this has happened in the past week.

They weren’t back an hour later when we were due to leave for a restaurant to celebrate Llewellyn’s 42^nd birthday. Raymond eventually returned but of the others there was no sign. With the evening closing in, we set out for the restaurant anyhow. There we had a splendid if somewhat anxious meal. We arrived back to find the wanderers awaiting us impatiently and hungrily. All was forgiven. But from now on, Prickles stays on his lead. My nerves can’t handle it.

Letter from Espargal: 29 of 2008

I thought it sensible last week not to bang on about new tractors and things, given the limited interest that most people have in agricultural vehicles. To my pleasant surprise, I received a number of enquiries from interested correspondents. So I bow to popular demand.

Yes, I have a new tractor – my first and last. It’s a Kioti (LX500L); like my previous tractor, it’s a South Korean model with a Japanese (Kubota) engine. South Korean tractors sell at a discount to big-name brands. They are also marketed by Jose Raul, the local dealer, who sold me my previous tractor and (a while back, when he caught me on his forecourt), offered me a tempting trade-in.

Forgive me if I get briefly technical. Again, like my previous model, the new tractor has assisted-steering, a 4-wheel drive option (used when “working”), 4 ranges of gears and 4 gears in each range – either backwards or forwards. It’s also about the same physical size – a little bigger. It just fits into the garage with the ROPS bar lowered.

The differences are in the much greater weight and power, the pneumatic seat (that alone was worth the investment) and the sophistication. It has twice the carrying capacity of my old tractor, which would start to tip up when the box was half full, in spite of water-filled tyres and front counter-weights. I am still getting used to sheer potency of the Kioti. It has a 49 HP (37 Kw), 2.5 litre, 4-cylinder diesel (most compact tractors have 3 cylinders). If that doesn’t sound impressive, in tractor terms it represents a lot of muscle. The ride is heavenly - no more spine-jarring jolting down the track. (Tractors have no suspension!) In short, it’s a bit like graduating from a Mini to a Merc.

I took the tractor into town one afternoon to return a spare tractor tyre for the old model to Jose and to get the detachable rear flap of the box (which I had bent – don’t ask how) straightened at the panel-beaters’ shop. I found the shop wide open but bereft of personnel. August is the holiday month. Jose solved the problem by putting a rock under one end of the rear flap and jumping on the middle section. It did the trick. On the way home I loaded up at the suppliers with several 50 kg sacks of fertilizer to treat our carobs in the autumn.

Having said all that, my week has been very little occupied by tractors. In Jones’s absence the days have been busy and demanding. As I said to her in one of our text message exchanges, I'm not finding it much fun being a housewife. The day starts at 7. By then Raymond is getting restless and by 7.30 he’s bashing the front door. The poor fellow generally has to sleep outside his kennel because the diminutive Prickles, who still enjoys superior ranking, has occupied it. I feed the cats on the way down and, most days, meet young Robbie and Kayleigh for the morning walk.

If the pair are not going to the beach, they often stay on for an hour or two of carob/almond picking, garden watering or whatever. The watering takes from one to two hours, depending on whether it’s a tree/ Banco’s Broadwalk irrigation day. Although I put an extensive irrigation system into the garden, we make little use of it, partly because it has simply been overtaken by the flora and partly because the pressure lower down the slope pops the leads off the pipes.

The kid’s least favourite (pocket money-earning) task is to pick up stones from the fields. I’ve continued to collect them, hauling them around to the lower field on the far side of the house where I’m building a ramp between outcrops of rocks up to an upper terrace.
Robbie wondered how long it would take to clear all the fields of all the stones. The answer is a very long time, especially as each ploughing turns up a fresh crop. Even so, the difference is already pleasing to the eye.

As I was unloading stones one afternoon, two mountain bikers made their way down the path. One dismounted and came up to speak to me. When he removed his helmet and fancy spectacles, I recognised him as Sergio, the carpenter who made our bedroom cupboards and study furniture. I’d been phoning him for some time, with a view to pricing more shelves for the study – and getting no reply. Sergio confessed that he’d changed his phone numbers.

NEW UPPER SHELF
He visited me the following afternoon to measure up and discuss the project I have in mind. He was feeling sore because he’d just had two expensive machines stolen from the back of his pick-up during a brief stop over in Quarteira, on the coast. You couldn’t trust anyone in Portugal any longer, he complained. I sympathised. Whatever the case, we agreed on the shelves. You will approve Jones, I promise you.

After fetching Natasha from the bus on Tuesday, I took her to the café for breakfast. (Jones normally gives her toast and coffee.) Natasha opted for a hefty slice of cake with cream, while I had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. Several workers stopped by for coffees and shots of liquor. Two young women lit up at the counter, to my surprise. Nearly all such establishments have outlawed smoking.

From there, Natasha’s day deteriorated. I came into the house at one point to find a stream of water gushing from the upper floor on to the lower, drenching the TV. I yelled. Natasha tearfully confessed from upstairs that she’d knocked over a bucket or, at least, as she put it, that a bucket had fallen over. Happily, the TV was not damaged. Later she broke a saucer (one of the upstairs ones, Jones, which I’ve done my best to glue.) I told her that bad things were supposed to happen in threes, and asked her to keep any more accidents for later.

Natasha is anxious to move lodgings. She’s found a place that’s available close by. The landlady, however, wants someone to act as guarantor for the lodger and Natasha has approached me. She brought a copy of the proposed rental contract, which I have emailed to our lawyer. If the role is really just a nominal one, or can be strictly limited, I’ll be happy to oblige. I await the lawyer’s advice.

SEE BELOW
Sarah and David entertained the neighbours to a slap-up supper on Wednesday. I arrived late (from garden watering) to find the company waiting upon me. I dare say that I was not the flavour of the evening. Even so, it was a meal well worth waiting for, consumed at tables under the trees in the garden on a lovely evening. David later traded two pots of Sarah’s jam for three buckets of sand, a most satisfactory deal.

I’ve heard little from my wife these past few days, following Bevan’s wedding, because she can’t get a phone signal at the rural lodgings she’s sharing with her family in Vermont. I await her report on events - and her brother, Robbie’s. Bevan himself is a notoriously bad correspondent. In the meanwhile, I look forward to the arrival of Llewellyn and Lucia on Sunday.

Late news: the carpenters came and installed the new shelves in the study. Natasha helped me restore the room and gave a final lick and polish to rest of the house. I am delighted with the results in the study. I hope that Jonesy feels the same way.

Later news: I joined neighbours, Sarah and David and family at the Hamburgo for supper. Afterwards, as it filled up, we repaired to a cafe bar on the other side of Benafim, where the kids showed some of us how to play pool. Others watched the bullfight being carried on TV. I've played billiards and snooker before but never pool. Happily, I didn't disgrace myself.

Saturday morning. The dogs went walkabout for over an hour. There was no sign of sound of them, nor did they respond to my whistling and calling in all the hills around. Late morning they came breathlessly down the path, drank thirstily and then settled down on the patio with nary a word of explanation. Bad morning!

Letter from Espargal: 28 of 2008

Jones has gone to the States for the wedding of her nephew, Bevan. Cathy may very well be accustomed to the unwelcome business trips of her husband, Rolf; and Ann for years bore with Kevin’s equally frequent travels. But for the last ten years Jones and I have seldom been apart. (A blog reader challenges this assertion, pointing to my several visits to Canada to see my mother; I can only respond that it's not the same thing.) Her absence sure changes the house dynamics. It feels quite strange not to find her tending a plant in the garden. I’ve been finding out for myself, with the daily watering list, two-daily list and half-weekly list, just how many plants there are to tend.

That’s not to mention feeding and caring for the two official cats, the one semi-official cat and the tree cat (so called because its food gets placed in the fork of a tree). Ditto the dogs, while keeping Ono (who remains painfully jealous) from attacking Raymond and Raymond from teasing the cats, attention they don’t appreciate. We compromised by allowing him to tear apart Jones' old (ex Anita) shoes, a task he performed with relish.

If it’s not work, it feels quite a lot like work and I’ve been glad to have the occasional assistance of (our neighbour’s adopted grandchildren) Robbie and Kayleigh.
The latter have continued to put in a couple of hours of carob-picking a day, which greatly pleases our Portuguese neighbours. It also pleases Robbie and Kayleigh, or at least the cokes and icecream sequel to the picking does, along with the pocket money their labours bring. These earnings, having initially been blown on holiday treats and gifts, are now being saved towards a visit to Aqualand, entrance to which (they inform me) is expensive.

Let me add that after loading the tractor with sacks of carobs, the kids hop on board themselves to help me deliver the goods to the neighbours and to bring back any produce. (We go slowly and carefully, as befits sober citizens.) They take directors’ chairs with them in which to ride back home again.

Jones, returning to my theme, didn’t much fancy travelling alone, complaining that she’s getting too old. In other circumstances I would gladly have joined her but in these I preferred to stay at home. She was booked on a red-eye out of Faro, with a four-hour wait in Lisbon before flying on to New York. We set the alarms to wake at four. As always happens on these occasions, we woke several times in the night with that uneasy awareness of an imminent event. For once, I took her a wake-up cup of coffee.

Before setting out, Jones carefully folded her last items of clothing into her suitcase, disturbing a still-resting Ono as little as possible. Jones is fussy about her clothes, by which I mean particular. She didn’t want them creased any more than necessary. Unlike me, she doesn’t sleep well on flights. Our thoughts went out to Bevan’s parents, who were making an 18-hour trip from South Africa with a stay-on-the-plane refuelling stop in West Africa. No thank you.

I subsequently gathered from Jones that she had been met by all the family at Newark airport. She was overjoyed to see them. One of life’s special joys is being met at an airport rather than having to thread one’s way through its daunting complexities.

After the wedding in Princeton this weekend, the family will be spending several days at a lake-side retreat near Killington in Vermont.
KILLINGTON LODGINGS
Bevan sent us the website address. The place looks lovely. As it happens, the travel page in the last edition of the weekly Portugal English-language newspaper had a write-up on Killington, a part of the world that we’d never heard of before. Talk about coincidences!

In Jones’s absence I have been kindly tended by my neighbours. Marie brought along a lamb dinner for me and bones for the dogs, who fell upon them like the desert Hebrews on manna from heaven. (I hope that’s a politically-correct simile.) For my part, I have been pleased to help Marie’s husband, Olly, bring up from Fintan’s fields several loads of large rocks, which he is using in his garden. My part was to drive the tractor, Olly’s to load and unload the rocks. Several were far too big even for Olly to carry. They had to be manhandled out of the tractor box with care, for fear of rolling down the steep gully beside his house and carrying on down the hill.

It’s now Friday afternoon. I’ve turned off the premiere of a squeaky new work commissioned for the Proms (inevitably, it sounds like the first-timers’ violin lesson) and put on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony for inspiration instead. I’ve also complained for the umpteenth time to Telepac because my line continues to go down with frustrating irregularity. Telepac say they will try to get the line upgraded. I’m not holding my breath.

Ironically, I ran into the same problem while visiting an insurance agent on the outskirts of Benafim yesterday, to take out insurance for my new tractor. The fellow was trying to fill in a form online. He was saying bad things under his breath as his link failed time and again. Eventually, he swapped desks with his assistant and was able to complete the process. He said the problem was chronic. Most of my neighbours have the same complaint. It’s just one of those things – better no doubt that being shot up by the Russians in Georgia – but still very irritating.

Today is the Feast of the Assumption. It was the big annual feast of the Marist Brothers with whom I spent 12 years of my life. Ironically the Assumption (of Mary, the mother of Jesus, into heaven) is an article of faith of the Roman Catholic Church that caused me a great deal of unease in those days. In Portugal, it’s a national holiday as well as the start of the hunting season. The warfare began at dawn - one empathises with the Georgians – and has continued most of the day. I don’t like it but I am reconciled to it. I don’t think it’s possible to successfully migrate urban mores to the countryside. When in Rome…

Letter from Espargal: 27 of 2008

It all started when Jose Raoul was showing me his latest tractors in Benafim a few weeks ago, and suggesting that I might want to upgrade from the (strictly second-hand) model he sold me two years ago. I foolishly indicated that there was a small chance, depending on circumstances. I was careful not to commit myself although I did go back to take a closer look at the Kioti-500L in his showroom and to ascertain what my tractor would fetch as a trade-in. Since nothing was agreed I thought it premature to make my thoughts public.

That’s where things stood until there was a tooting at the gate on Thursday evening while Jones and I were enjoying sundowners in the garden. There stood Jose with another man. Jose explained that his companion was interested in purchasing my (possibly to be traded-in) tractor. As he was shortly to return to France, they’d be really grateful if they could take a look at it. Of course, I obliged. And so the cat was out of the bag, which was a bit of a relief as I’m not a natural conspirator. We’ll see what we’ll see.

The highlight of the week was Benafim’s Festa dos Milhos (mielie festival), the kind of community event that the Portuguese are very good at. What is special is the friendliness and good behaviour of crowds that have easy access to alcohol. Indeed, the beer bill of our own expat group must have made a substantial contribution to the retirement home for which funds were being raised. The whole family turns up and there’s lots of good-natured eating, drinking, dancing and being merry. (The great majority of people, I should add, live within easy walking distance.)


THE GIRLS
Barbecued chicken and salad is the order of the day. Other traditional dishes are available. I opted for xarém(a word of Arabic origins), maize meal porridge with sliced smoked sausage, a dish one hardly comes across in Portugal except on such occasions. It took me back to a thousand maltabela breakfasts, and to braaivleis evenings with “boerewors & stywe pap”.
Jones and I left the party before the arrival of the belly dancers who, we understand, were quite spectacular.

The most significant event of the week was the arrival of a man from the council to install water meters, bringing to an end 18 months of free supply to village households. You might think this a simple matter but here in Portugal very little is ever simple. For one thing the plumber, a really pleasant fellow, spoke only Portuguese and was having great difficulty communicating with some expats. He even had a hard time matching houses with their owners as there are no street names visible in the village yet and no house numbers.

So he was delighted to accept my services as guide and translator. My task was to point out expat houses and explain to those neighbours who hadn’t installed a valve in the water-meter box that they had to do so before the plumber could fit the meter. Most, like us, had no idea of this requirement. At the end of the afternoon the plumber declared me a fine estrangeiro and we parted on the most amiable terms.

Another modest encounter was with a woman who stopped to talk to our neighbour, Leonhilde, while the latter and I were about to start a morning’s clearing under her carob trees near Benafim. The woman – I didn’t catch her name – was struggling down the road with a heavy basket of veggies on her head and large plastic bags of the same in her hands, making her way home from her nearby plot.


VEGGIE LADY
As she evidently had far more than she could comfortably carry, I offered her a lift home in the car, a two-minute journey. Her gratitude overflowed, along with that of her mother, who was waiting at the gate. She tried to press most of the produce on to me by way of thanks. I was able to limit myself to several peppers that I knew would win favour with Barbara.

Later we had a phone call from Leonhilde’s sister, Gilberta, who runs the service station, to say that my passenger had left a bag there for us – and would I please drop by on the way home. We did, to find more fresh food. It is embarrassing when small favours bring such generous returns.

Another of my roles has been to liaise between Portuguese farmers and expat neighbours who are collecting their (own) carobs. Most donate their carobs to the farmers. I collect the sacks from the farmers and distribute them; then I fetch the carobs on the tractor and exchange them for produce. Although this is a minor operation, it brings a great deal of satisfaction to all concerned. If only the parties at the World Trade Talks in Cancun could have reached a similar deal, the world would be much better off.


WALKING STICK

One of the farmers, Ermenio, noting that I always took a stick with me on walks, gave me a walking stick that he had cut and varnished himself. Insects had previously got in under the bark and inscribed a maze of patterns into the surface of the wood. It looks almost as though an artist has done it.

As we walked the dogs one evening, we became aware of an ambulance approaching the village with its lights flashing. It stopped outside the home of Vitor the mechanic. From old Jose next door we learned that Vitor’s mother, who has a gammy leg and uses a crutch, had slipped and fallen. Jose told us that she’d broken a leg. Whatever the case, she was whipped off to Faro hospital – the poor old dear.

Jones, as ever, has spent most of the week in her garden. I brought some flat stones around on the tractor to help her construct a path in the south garden, which is looking splendid. I've continued strimming and clearing under our own carobs in preparation for bringing in the crop.

On Monday we travelled into Loule with Robbie and Kayleigh while their parents went off to the west coast to try to sort out a complex property purchase. One of our tasks was to collect some US dollars from the bank for Jonesy. She flies next Thursday to New York to attend the wedding of her nephew, Bevan, at the weekend. She’ll be away for 10 days.


The next day, after running Natasha home, we went on to the vet to have the puppies vaccinated against rabies – their fourth and final round of injections. From previous experience we went well armed with towels, aware of the pups’ propensity to get car sick. This Raymond well and truly was – twice. Prickles, consigned to the back with Ono, manifested his displeasure by throwing up there – fortunately on my rubber mats. One way and another it was a very yucky journey.

Raymond didn’t like going into the surgery and did a lot of growling. He’s a big boy at 5 months - nearly 19 kgs. Given my back problems I declined to lift him on to the examination table but offered to help the vet, a slip of a girl, do so. She assured me that she could lift him herself – and did.


While we were there I had him chipped. New legislation in Portugal requires that all dogs born after a certain date should have chips inserted. Jones expressed her considerable scepticism that the majority of Portuguese dog owners would take this law seriously. I have my own doubts.

Letter from Espargal: 26 of 2008

ROBBIE,KAYLEIGH & US

I had a moment, when I was picking up stones from the Casanova field and moving them with the tractor to the verges, half listening to the bird calls and dogs yapping in the village below, watching the sun starting to sink over the western hills, its rays catching the blades of the wind turbines, when I thought how happy I felt. It’s crazy. But that’s how it was.

I’ve invited my neighbours to find their happiness shifting my stones as well. Sadly, they are not persuaded.

According to my calendar, August is here. We have survived June and July. Now we have only to get through the next two months to catch sight of autumn. How nice that will be – a few clouds and maybe even a little rain. We hardly bother to check the weather forecast. The days follow hot on one another’s heels, blue sky after endlessly blue sky.

August is the big holiday month, when the population heads en masse for the beach. The numbers are swelled, not only by the tourist hordes, but by the arrival of the French Portuguese - easily identified by their vehicle licence plates. These visitors are the product of the widespread Portuguese emigration to France in the 50s and 60s, in search of work. Many stayed, marrying into their new country while keeping their links with the old. It is still the case that our older Portuguese neighbours are nearly all fluent in French. Their kids learn English instead.

The holiday arrivals include our neighbours’ adopted teenage grandchildren, Robbie and Kayleigh, who turn up on the doorstep at 7.30 each morning to come walking with us. They are very welcome, especially as it reduces us to one dog each. I am able to concentrate on instilling some discipline into young Raymond, whose insatiable appetite and boundless energy show no signs of abating.

As to our week, its content – like mine – continues much the same. Jones labours away, hour after torrid hour in her garden.
AGAPANTHUS

It’s really showing the benefit of her labours, excepting only the unfortunate agapanthus, turned into a wrestling ring by Raymond and Bobby. Jones has tried to block off sensitive areas of the garden and has turned the hose on the dogs a couple of times, usually after the damage has been done.

A neighbour, David, joined me one morning to help Leonhilde and Jose-Luis continue clearing under their carob trees.
LEONHILDE AMONG THE CAROBS

Leonhilde led us a few hundred metres up a rise to show us a small cave where generations of her forbears had dug out sand for building purposes. Leonhilde remembered it being carried back to the villages on the backs of donkeys, to be mixed with lime and used as render. The grain of the sand was fine, more so than river sand, and ideal for the purpose.
OLD PLASTER

The render proved tough and durable. It still covers most older buildings.

I brought back a brimming load of carob cuttings to turn into mulch. The shredder just loves them. Olive branches, on the other hand, give it severe indigestion.

CAROB CUTTINGS

We wondered when tractors had been introduced to the fields in place of animals. It was in the 80s, Leonhilde told us. The popular model then was the big (blue) Ford, scores of which (including Jose-Luis’s) are still working today. They just go on for ever.

We took ourselves one evening to visit a friend, Jane, who has made her home in Benafim, our nearest town. We were interested to see the metal-framed house that she’d built with her husband, Peter. (He died some time later.) Their move into town was unusual. Most expats settle in the Portuguese countryside or in the coastal colonies.

Old Benafim is a maze of little lanes and cheek-by-jowl cottages, many abandoned and slowly crumbling away. Peter and Jane had bought one of these, demolished the remains and rebuilt. The house is lovely. Although the frontage is narrow, the house rises over three floors to give her ample space and lovely views across to Espargal. It was a move she said she could recommend, placing her in a charming part of town, with easy access to services.

Another visit was to Dutch neighbours, Erly and Henke, who have a house about 100 metres below us.
CONSTRUCTION IN ESPARGAL

They have been somewhat alarmed by construction around them. It’s quite scary to find green fields suddenly morphing into masses of grey concrete. Even so, they’re lucky to have an extensive garden as a shield. I told them about our experience at the Quinta, where a villa came to loom over our rural idyll. We’ve tried to buy up adjacent fields to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

I have been making expensive international phone calls – to no useful purpose. Twice I have tried to move modest savings from Barclays to another account by electronic transfer and twice seen the money inexplicably returned to Barclays (where savings receive no interest for 30 days after ANY withdrawal). I cannot discover why this is happening. By the time I’ve waited over 10 minutes in vain to speak to someone at Barclays (“We are sorry but all our account executives are busy; we shall attend to your call as soon as possible” --- muzak ---) my reserves of patience and civility are exhausted.

Still on petty frustrations: I looked up a subject on Wikipedia. The information was useful but the article badly written. So, as a contribution to human progress, I spent an hour carefully revising it before republishing it in impeccable prose. (This kind of edit, I gather, is generally welcomed and often carried out.) Some days later I took another look at the piece, only to find that the idiot author, resentful of my intrusion, had substituted my efforts with his original pidgin. I was tempted to stick my pen into his page once again but thought better of it. What’s the point?

JONES TOMATO BARREL

Jones and I have both been racked by occasional attacks of night cramps. Any practical suggestions on how to avoid it (other than going on the wagon) will be appreciated.