Letter from Espargal: 37 of 2008

In view of the growing demand for the rescue of vehicles in distress, I am giving consideration to going commercial. You will be aware (if you’ve been diligent) of the recent rescue of Mr Frosty’s lorry after the driver had graunched his differential while making an ill-advised 3-point turn. Well, hard on its heels came a call-out to save a neighbour from a sandy fate on the banks of the Algibre river.

Fintan’s plea for assistance reached me as I was concluding a purchase in the spare parts department of VW in Faro.
In consequence, he and his son, David, had to wait an hour to be rescued while I drove home and fetched the tractor. Even so, when I arrived at the scene I found the pair of them in good humour although I have it from impeccable sources that the air had earlier turned blue. (It’s not that the river was in flood or that there was any danger to life; in fact, there was hardly a puddle to be seen in the river-bed.)

The problem was that their car was firmly stuck in a steep, sandy rut near the ford where the tourist jeeps cross. (We provided a diversion for one of them.) It wasn’t the easiest of rescues. The car’s tow-point was awkwardly concealed behind its low-slung front spoiler and David had the devil of a job trying to thread the thick rope through it. Once he had managed this, Kioti hauled the car to safety with his usual SOS nonchalance.

Another minor adventure called for rather more effort, although not on the part of the tractor. This one entailed the removal, what my wife refers to as a “repatriation”, of a rock – nay, more of a boulder - that had taken her fancy. She had long admired the this particular stone and was thoroughly put out to find it pushed aside during the road making activities of the machines that have been grunting around the area. As we passed by with the dogs, Jones ventured the opinion that the rock would look good on our property (never mind that it weighed half a ton).

The hint was clear. Armed with two large crowbars, I drove to the scene – about a kilometre away. As usual when collecting large rocks (we have a line of them along the bottom of the property) I was able to back the tractor up and wedge the base of the box underneath it. But strain as I might, I couldn’t get the thing on board. Nor could I both lever the rock and hold it up while I tried to slip smaller stones
underneath it.


It so happened, as I was puffing and heaving, that a neighbour, Liz Brown, came strolling past with her dogs. Accustomed as she is to local eccentricities, she still evinced some surprise at my antics. I explained the situation. One has to hand it to Liz. She is not the sort to watch a man making a fool of himself without assisting him, and with barely a comment about some neighbours’ proclivities, she put her shoulder to the boulder. Between us, in a matter of minutes, we’d shoved
that jolly stone on to the back of the tractor.

Getting if off again, at the entrance to one of the fields, was easy by comparison. I’d planned not to say anything to Jones (who was having tea with Maria of the Conception) but she was alerted by another neighbour to my activities and pleased to find the handsome stone now firmly ensconced in a position where it was unlikely to be further disturbed.

Midweek we fetched Natasha, who was unhappy with aspects of her young son, Alex’s, new bicycle, and took her to the shopping centre where she’d bought it on the outskirts of Faro. It was apparently missing a bell and other features. While she confronted the sales staff, we took a leisurely coffee. Back at the car she confessed that she’d had no luck. Other bicycles came with a range of extras but hers
apparently did not. We stopped for an hour on the way back to install an anti-virus suite on a friend’s computer (Kaspersky’s – I really like it); then another hour to attach some more racks to the walls of Natasha’s flat.

JONES WITH HALO

By the time we’d finished, our haloes were burnished to a gleaming dazzle.

On Thursday we took ourselves to the opening a small art exhibition at a fancy hotel near the coast. One of the artists, Liv Wedset, is a fellow pupil in our Portuguese class. Several other class members arrived to lend support.
Jones, who is the family art fundi, was impressed by what she saw and resolved to acquire a number of pictures as soon as we win the Euromillions lottery.

From there we continued to a celebratory supper at the Adega. We are about to mark our 29^th wedding anniversary. I had duck rice, Jones stuck to her usual salad and we shared a really classy bottle of wine. (I needed a small baggy to restore my nerves earlier in the week after hearing from a friend, who’d been on a Scandinavian cruise, of the wicked price of beer and wine.)

One of the two brothers who run the restaurant was comparing building woes with a party of Dutch guests. He’d tried to build his own house, he told them, but was eventually defeated, not by the construction but by the impenetrable wall of bureaucracy that surrounded it.

Friday dawned cloudy. We took ourselves on a long trek through the hills. Half way down the road (now under re-construction) to the river we found our passage blocked. Two large machines were creating a culvert. One of them, a picapau was bashing its way laboriously through solid rock. All the holes that have been drilled for
electricity posts are also into solid rock. We conclude that our hill is a big lump of rock, like several others around us that are now giant quarries. On the far side we ran into more machines and people, erecting poles and running cables through them. All these poles appear to be intended to take electricity to a single remote house. Either that or there's a vast secret project about to unfold.

Fintan and Pauline invited us around to their house in the afternoon to meet son Geoffrey and his wife, Yvonne. Pauline is famous for her teas. We went, of course. At one point I went outside to give the dogs leg-lifters, only to bump into the tractor salesman from Benafim. One of his new tractors, identical to mine, had been incorrectly wired and wouldn't function for more than a few minutes before overheating. So he wanted to check the wiring on mine. I took him home to show him.

I’ve been scarifying our fields in preparation for the showers that are forecast for tomorrow. They’ve turned green, already, after last week’s rain. The weeds grow so fast that they reseed themselves within a matter of weeks. Some villagers are already planting fava beans. That will be our next task. We’ve nearly finished consuming last season’s, beans that Jones has stored in the freezer, and they’re as good as new.

P.S. Take a look at this fruit. Do you recognise it? I'm prepared to bet that you don't. No it isn't a tomato. It's a persimmon, given to us by Leonhilda. My wife tells me that one has to eat them very ripe. The skin is bitter and must be peeled. There you have it.