Letter from Espargal: 48 of 2008

The year staggers towards the finishing line. Or, maybe, it’s me who’s doing the staggering, having caught a seasonal cold, and indulged in a fit of coughing that’s put my back out again and given me a renewed bout of sciatica. So, coughing and spluttering upstairs and limping downstairs, I haven't been the world’s happiest bunny.

As our friend, Nancy, has wisely pointed out, these ailments afflict men in a form infinitely more severe than the mild doses that their spouses occasionally suffer. This is indisputably the case, as little as we may be heard to complain. My laying low (as opposed to "lieing low") has left Jones to cope. She has been working overtime to feed the cats (neighbours’ and our own) exercise the dogs, prepare the meals, tend the fire, clean the house and – of course – nurse her ailing husband. Letters of sympathy should be sent to the usual address.

My state has limited my mobility. Before my latest setback I’d been driving down to the valley each afternoon for a gentle hour-long amble with the animals along the agricultural road and a return via the parallel tractor track. There’s very little traffic and it’s a lovely area to stretch one’s legs. Jones keeps the two smaller dogs on the lead. Raymond we allow to roam free. He needs the extra exercise if he’s not to drive us mad by chewing up everything in sight, including his basket. Also, unlike his fellows, he’s obedient and comes back when called.

But he got a little overwhelmed by the imagined attractions of a friend’s bitch, for which we cared over Christmas. In her attempts to dissuade Raymond from these unwelcome attentions, Jones suffered rope-burns before being tobogganed along behind him down a grassy field. The experience left her feeling sore and very displeased as well as knocking her confidence. She now knows, she ruefully admitted to me, that she can’t hold him against his will.

Such travails did not prevent us from joining neighbours for an intimate Christmas dinner. Our hosts were Mike and Liz, retired medical workers who occupy a cottage at the bottom of the village. Their dogs, like ours have clear ideas of their rights and role, and tend to share the furniture with their humans. This sharing is done in a tasteful and charming manner, as you may judge, and seems to come naturally to all concerned.

We appreciated the great care that our hosts had taken to prepare a Christmas table and cook a Yuletide dinner. Jones, for her part, spent the better part of a day preparing goodies that we took along to complement their efforts. It made for a pleasant and delicious evening. The cherry on the top was the model tractor that I received from Mike and Liz for Christmas.

Jones had spent a good deal of time selecting and wrapping seasonal gifts and writing appropriate cards. Her kindness was returned with interest. This exchange of Christmas tokens is a process in which I paid little part, other than to drive my wife down the road to drop off some of the gifts. However, I was touched to receive a sack of pumpkins and several litres of wine from one Portuguese neighbour, and a plate of fishcakes, along with more wine, from another.

For Christmas I gave Jones a fine Cashmere jersey. She loves Cashmere and was very pleased with the gift. As it happened, the jersey had been sent to a neighbour by relatives in the UK. It proved to be too small for its recipient, who suggested to me that I might be interested in a deal. I was, as I subsequently confessed to my wife. She was not at all put out. Why should she be? Cashmere, after all, is Cashmere, and gift horses are not to be looked in the mouth.

With night falling early (we’ve passed the solstice already), we’ve been listening to lots of radio and watching a fair bit of TV. Much of the time I settle after supper on the dog mattresses in the lounge, an action that prompts the dogs to snuggle up on all sides.

The TV schedules at this time of year are full of old movies, mainly bad Santa movies that we’ve avoided. But there’ve been a few gems as well. One of them was scheduled to start at 21.30, about the time that Jones might consider an early retirement. However, she thought she could stay awake for it. The demands of the day proved too much for her. I found her in bed, still in her nightgown, with her head against the headboard. Feebly, she told me that she was determined to watch the film. She didn’t have a hope. I watched the first few minutes before deciding that an early bed was the more inviting option. In fact, I've had more early beds this past week than in the preceding year.

There, you can see that I really don’t have much to say – and I’ll cut myself short before you do. The New Year arrives on Thursday. We’re due to join Idalecio and his namorada for dinner on New Year’s Eve. After that we may wander up to the top of the hill where the villagers traditionally gather to watch the firework displays over the coast. Or we may just head for another early bed. Whatever, the case, may 2009 treat us all kindly.

Christmas 2008

We shall let the pictures say it.

Letter from Espargal: 46 of 2008

Thursday 18 Dec: We are both occupied in the study on one of those dawn-of-creation mornings, Jones hunched over her desk doing Christmassy tasks and I….well, you can see what I am doing. There’s a rim of cloud poised over Benafim hill. It can stay there. Espargal and the valleys around it are bathed in bright, windless winter sunshine. And very welcome it is too after several days of stormy weather. We were woken one night by loud bangs as a shutter broke free from its wall moorings and clattered mightily first against the frame and then the wall. I could hardly pull it closed against the strength of the wind.

Today’s cheery weather comes as an antidote against yesterday’s frustrations, when the dogs took themselves off for a romp through the hills and I woke to a most unwelcome bout of lingering (left leg) sciatica, courtesy of some injudicious back exercises, to complement my (right leg) twisted knee. It is hard to know how best to limp. Fortunately, we’d arranged with Natasha to do an additional day, distracting me from our misfortunes as Jones went off fruitlessly looking for the dogs (which returned of their own volition six hours later to a pretty frosty welcome).

I tended small brushwood fires around the property (one at a time) to which Natasha dragged the useless summer cuttings - useless, that is, for firewood. Anything of any substance had already been cut into lengths and stacked. Well, sort of stacked. I don’t try to emulate Olly’s artistic woodpiles.

Natasha asked me to make an additional DVD copy of several hundred photos that she wants to send back to her family for Christmas. I also printed off a couple of copies of a picture of her son Alex (3) with Santa Claus and a rather attractive elf. (Jones wondered what the elf was doing. Seems clear to me that her job was to attract the dads to the grotto.)

Natasha has acquired both a digital camera and a video camera, and makes frequent use of them, but she doesn’t have the means to transfer the pictures. She is frustrated by the limitations placed on internet facilities at the public library, where pen-drives and DVDs and not permitted. She’d love to make use of my computer (she doesn’t hesitate to ask) but I’ve hardened my heart as I can only see that leading to trouble.

Christmas looms, not that you would need any telling, and with it our first thoughts about the New Year. It’s a subject, I confess, on which we’re doing a fair bit of head-scratching. As Bernie Madoff knows, it’s bad form to discuss one’s personal finances in public and I don’t intend to. But it’s safe to say that I hardly know how to begin preparing the (fairly flexible) budget that I always draw up in late December for the year ahead.

Earlier this year the pound in which we’re paid bought 1.40 euros; at the start of the week it fetched 1.10 euros and this morning buys 1.05. (Passengers changing their money at Heathrow airport were getting less than one euro per pound!) That’s the bad bit; mind you, people being paid in euros and spending in pounds will hardly believe their luck. The hard bit is knowing what it will fetch next week and the week after.

This is not a devious plea for sympathy or support (not yet - although any sympathetic responses will be well received). Thousands of British pensioners settled all over France and Iberia will be wrestling with the same uncertainties. For the expats of Espargal it will be a case of cutting their cloth accordingly and fairly carefully. By typical Portuguese standards we remain well off. Portugal’s news media, like most, are full of redundancies, unpaid workers and closing factories. I really don’t know how I would cope with being made redundant for Christmas.

As to our Christmas plans, they’re pretty simple. We intend to go to a Christmas concert in Quarteira this coming Sunday evening and to join neighbours for a festive meal on Christmas Day. I will give Jones an additional loving squeeze that morning and, sciatica permitting, I may even bring her the coffee and toast that she daily brings me. On Boxing Day we’ll gather at the Snackbar Coral. That’s it. I don’t think I could take any more supermarket carols.

Friday 19 Dec: This morning dawned even more beautiful than yesterday. Jones went off early with the dogs while I slept in. I woke to see what seemed like mist hanging over the valley. A closer look established that smoke from a couple of fires had hit an inversion and simply spread out horizontally. It was quite spectacular, like the table cloth that used to hang over Table Mountain.

On days like today, we repair to the enclosed south patio. It's a suntrap so inviting and so cosy as to seduce the heart of a cardinal. (Come to think of it, various cardinals have had their hearts seduced down the years, if not always by suntraps.)

Jones suggested a walk along the agricultural road in the valley. So off we went in the car, with the three dogs barking madly at the canine competition. The valley itself was supremely peaceful – a day made in heaven. We stopped off at a tomato field (no longer being picked) to stock up on supplies.

Afterwards we went to the supermarket in Benafim, newly taken over by a chain and very smart. Parked incongruously outside beside an elderly tractor was Benafim’s only Ferrari, the possession of an Englishman whose father, we understand, either owns or owned a football club. We saw him working once, stripped to the waist, with a poem tattooed on his back. (I should add that Ferrari, like Lamborghini, is much better known in these parts for its tractors.)


Inside the supermarket we met a distant neighbour, Graciet, who lives in a hamlet half way between us and the town. She was glad of a lift home, explaining that the only family vehicle was a tractor and her husband, Joachim, was using it to fertilise Leonhilda’s carob trees. Jones rode in the back with the dogs, with Ono snuggled up beside her as always and Prickles peering out of the window in search of enemies. Prickles is the world’s greatest sissy but you’d never guess it from the ferocious, pint-sized insults he hurls from the car.

Graciet pointed out a house owned by a German neighbour, saying it had just been burgled. She didn’t know how much had been taken but she’d heard that the owner had lost a computer and other electronic equipment. It was unsettling news. We subsequently heard that a much closer neighbour, who'd just moved in, had also been burgled. Burglary is a huge problem in the Algarve although it’s more common in the urban developments closer to the coast. We shall have to take more care. We have grown careless, sometimes forgetting the keys in the door when we go out - and it’s not wise.

Letter from Espargal: 45 of 2008

The weekend has turned up and caught me unawares. It looks like sun and showers. Jones has gone walking with Llewellyn, Lucia and the dogs. I tried a gentle amble around the koppie above the house midweek but got an unmistakable thumbs-down from my knee and have reconciled myself to another inactive week. Mind you, my sufferings have been quite tolerable. I’ve grown attached to the sleep-in benefits of my valetudinarian state. One could almost be tempted to delay one’s recuperation.

After a smattering of toast and coffee around 07.30, consumed in bed with one hand while I fend off Raymond’s affectionate approaches with the other, I turn on the BBC’s morning news programme and drift off again. Given the latest depressing financial developments, there’s much to be said for sleeping through the news.

Llewellyn and Lucia flew in yesterday morning for a Portuguese long-weekend, having caught a red-eye from Birmingham. It would have been nice to have them for Christmas but ticket prices didn’t permit. L&L got a great welcome at the airport from the dogs, which know that’s where we meet people and went rushing up to couple after surprised couple to inquire whether they were the lucky guests.

En route to the airport I stopped at the big Staples store on the outskirts of Faro and bought myself a comfortable office chair on which to seat myself at my desk. For years I’ve alternated between a wretched swivel chair (topped up with sponge cushions) that must have come from a CID interrogation suite, and a kneeler. As part of our efforts to end the recession, I thought it was time to invest in some more suitable seating. It’s a splendid chair, even if it’s made in China, one of those padded leather types that allow the occupant to lean back in occasional contemplation of higher things.

Another acquisition is our new camera, hand-delivered by Llewellyn because Amazon UK wouldn’t post it down here. It’s a Canon Ixus 85, smaller and neater than the Ixus 400 (with a failed charged-couple-device) that it is replacing. Regrettably, the new camera takes a different battery and memory card from the old one. For the rest, we are delighted with it. We promptly tested it at Faro beach, where we sat down in the sun to coffees and ham’n-cheese sandwiches at the “Electrico” (tram), so-called because the little café was housed in an old tram until it burned down some years ago.

A little later: The walkers are back. I have made an early fire to ensure their comfort. The aroma of fresh toast invades the study. Little Jonesy squeals are coming from the breakfast table, where Lucia has handed over some Christmas presents; just little ones, she says, to thank us for having them. Jones particularly likes a scarf that Lucia has given her – “just my colours”.

Last night we took them to the Snack Bar Coral, a small establishment in Benafim, where we joined neighbours for supper. It is run by Celso, a Portuguese who spent much of his life in France, and his French wife, Brigitte, who struggles with the Portuguese language. The Coral boasts a billiards table and a brisk turnover of locals who drop in for a drink and a chat.

Brigitte has started adding cakes and quiche to the menu. We’ve often had snacks there, generally out on the patio in the sun, but never a meal. So last night was an experiment – steaks in mustard sauce – and most acceptable too, even though Jones (speaking to Brigitte in rusty French) had got the day wrong. Jones wants to expand the number of local venues available to us. She likes a bit of variety in her eating. My preference is to eat as locally as possible, with home just a short drive away down quiet back roads.

I’m reading a book about protecting one’s identity. I recently heard an interview with a man who had his identity stolen and spent painful years recovering it. The steps he has now taken to prevent a repetition by becoming virtually anonymous are startling. When he described what he’d been through, I understood why. It’s a destructive experience suddenly to find that there’s another you who’s been running up debts and signing contracts in your name, at your expense.

As to the rest of the week, it’s very hard to know where it’s gone. It seems to have just drifted off into corners and vanished. There are a few useful things that I’ve done, apart from giving my final English lesson of the year and some limp-around shopping (tick-collars for the dogs, a new zapper for the gates).

One is to take Bobby’s kennel on the back of the tractor around to Zeferino’s yard and set it up beside the run to which Bobby is generally chained. While his owners appeared grateful for our efforts, Bobby has not been. So far, he has shown the greatest suspicion of his kennel and confined himself to peering in just far enough to secure the biscuits that we have tossed in as an enticement.

The other useful thing – at least I hope that it will be useful – is to start going through the hundreds of letters that I have written to my family over the past 15 years since acquiring my first computer. They are really a diary of our lives – work at the Beeb, the development of the Quinta, our move to Portugal, our tenants, our hassles and our holidays – all chronicled in a great deal more detail, and sometimes rather more florid and verbose style, than I suspect any readers appreciated.

I’m converting everything to the same WORD format, font and style, before I print out a draft. It’s slow work and is going to take months. So many memories come tumbling back, of people and incidents that I’d long forgotten. I also have a record of my fax exchanges with Barbara during the summers she spent the Quinta looking after guests for several years before I retired from the BBC. I plan to arrange all the material in chronological order first, for the record. Then I might think about any possibilities it offers.

Friday night we joined our friends, David and Dagmar - former Quintassential neighbours - for drinks, followed by supper at the local. Dagmar has the knack of giving her home a warm, Christmassy feel. We tried out our new camera in their lounge. Llewellyn's camera is giving up the ghost as ours did, with a failing CCD. What does one do with cameras that are not worth repairing? It seems crazy just to throw them in the bin.

The moon is supposed to be extra large tonight, at least as seen from earth, as its orbit brings it particularly close to us. Mmmmm! I'm not sure, beautiful an orb that it is, that it looks any different - maybe because it was so high when I snapped it.

Letter from Espargal: 44 of 2008

This has been a jumbled up, tumble down sort of week, most of which I’ve spent clanking around on crutches (and hating it) or limping around without them (and rueing it). My muse has fled and my prose may prove more pedestrian than I have been. The problem about crutch-motion is that it requires the use of both the mover’s hands. It’s one thing to be aware of this restriction and another thing, vastly more frustrating, to live with it. Doing anything useful, like carrying firewood or cleaning ash from the stove, becomes awkward, irritating and time-consuming.

The bottom line is that while I have concentrated on recuperating (from a twisted knee) the burden of the week has fallen on Jones. After bringing me knee-improving coffee and toast in the morning, she has taken the dogs on the mandatory walk, often in damp weather. (It’s been wet and unusually cold; loads of snow has fallen over the interior.) She’s avoided the main roads as she has to leave Raymond off leash, making for muddy outings. We place a large towel on the hall floor to retain up the worst of the returning paw marks.

Bobby, Raymond’s brother from next door, often arrives for a romp in the garden. Although we welcome him (as well as feeding him) he’s noisy, nervous and excitable, with the habit of jumping up on one’s clothes. In spite of these failings we have bought him a kennel in the hope that we can persuade his owners not to keep him overnight in a damp, dark hole of a shed. The kennel came flat-pack. I shall assemble it with a little neighbourly help as soon as possible, and plan to insulate it with a polystyrene panel.

While I’m on my canine theme – it emerges that our dogs have been treated by our dermatologist’s son – rum as it may sound. For some years now we’ve been making an annual visit to a dermatologist in Faro, the last of them this week. The lady operates with a magnifying glass/torch instrument in one hand and a canister of icy gas in the other, employing the former to seek out any dermatological imperfections and the latter to zap them.

She likes to talk as she works, and was telling us proudly that her son had gone to Glascow to do a post-graduate veterinary course. We made her afternoon when she learned that our dogs had enjoyed the benefit of his services at the veterinary clinic in Loule. As we emerged, much zapped and somewhat tenderly, from her rooms, I was doing a little mental arithmetic on her likely income. She sees patients only in the afternoon, typically for 20 minutes, and charges 85 euros (upwards) for a consultation. There's much to be said for being a consultant. She says she tried working part-time at the local hospital but couldn't handle the confusion. Patients there who are diagnosed with melanoma are now sent to Lisbon for treatment.


Monday was a public holiday, Independence Restoration Day, celebrating the overthrow of Portugal’s Castilian rulers in 1640. To celebrate it ourselves we arranged to have lunch in the town of Messines with Eddie and Lesley, friends who live nearby. It wasn’t the best plan. On public holidays, three quarters of the restaurants in Portugal close and the other quarter are filled to overflowing. We eventually found a vast chicken eatery (600 parking places) and joined the (happily, fast-moving) queue. The cavernous interior was choc-a-block with chicken eaters. Within minutes we were assigned a table. There was no menu. Diners could choose between chicken piri-piri and just chicken. Even so, it was good chicken and there were no complaints.


Tuesday Natasha again the missed the morning bus and several hours’ work. (She's asked us please to phone her at 7.30 in future to ensure that she's up.) We fetched her from the 13:00 bus and dropped her off at the house, then took ourselves to Loule. After a bite of lunch Jones went shopping while I gave my Portuguese pupils an additional English class to make up for the class they’d missed the previous day. (We talked about the elderly British woman who sued her barrister daughter for alleging in a book that her mother had abused her as a child. The mother lost.)

I plan to do the same thing next week when Monday is another public holiday, the Immaculate Conception (a dogma that, in the arcane world of religious beliefs, I have found particularly puzzling). I need to get into credit to make up for the several lessons I’m likely to miss next year when we are hopeful of a family reunion in Canada.

Wednesday evening we joined David and Dagmar at the cinema in Faro. I clanked my way upstairs feeling like a fool, wanting to explain to people – not that anyone cared a damn – that this wasn’t really me and I didn’t belong on crutches and would soon be off them again. Yes, I know that it’s stupid. It makes me think of the buck that “pronk” when they flee a threatening carnivore, as if to demonstrate their virility and the futility of chasing them.

We bought tickets for a chick flick, Nights in Rodanthe. (Don’t bother.) Behind us there were chewers and chatterers, in front of us mobile-phone consulters. I’ve got too many of my daddy’s genes to enjoy a film in such a contagion (he could never abide interruptions) and cranked off at the interval to read in the lobby instead. It’s a comfortable lobby with a bar, a lounge and an internet café, and I was perfectly content there. Jonesy, who likes her happy endings, reported afterwards that the film didn’t have one. She wasn’t best pleased.

After years of making do with MS Office 97, I have upgraded (via Amazon) to the student and home version of Office 2007. It becomes clear to me that Microsoft’s programmers have not been idle these past ten years. The possibilities of the new WORD and EXCEL programmes are just mind-boggling. Strangely, however, these programmes lack a HELP menu. The only way to reach help is via F1, which takes you to Microsoft’s online help. If you’re offline, you’re sunk. A little googling indicates that Office 2007 is beset with problems in this area. That aside, I really like it.

On the reading front, I’m midway through Michael Moore’s “Stupid White Men” – a different and interesting (if somewhat repetitive) book. I’m not surprised that he had such difficulty in getting it published. Like me and most of his countrymen, he is not an admirer of the current US administration and one can only be surprised that none of its members has taken him to court or sent him to Guantanamo.

Friday evening we visited Loule’s Christmas fair. We like it. It's always much the same, a melange of food, art, jewellery, pottery, basketry, leatherwork (I bought two new belts) and what have you, all set to music by local choirs. We always fall for the puppies that the Sao Francisco kennel uses to separate passers-by from a little money. In the food hall, the local VIPs cluster around their dedicated (free) refreshments table. They're welcome. I can't remember when last I wore a tie or wanted to.