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.
No comments:
Post a Comment