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.