Letter from Espargal: 1 of 2009

We have been sorting out our books. As a reward we have that sense of satisfaction that comes with the illusion of imposing a little order on one’s life. The need to rearrange our reading arose from the hurried transfer of our books from their former shelves to the new ones installed by the carpenter during Jones’s visit to the US last year for the marriage of her nephew. As a consequence of this haste, novels, travel guides and grammars were scattered among my tomes on the nature of the universe. Because my wife is a qualified librarian (among other things) and knows about stuff like Dewey Decimal Classification, I invited her to lead the way.
But she was happy for me to arrange matters to my satisfaction upstairs while she tackled the cookery and garden books that occupy the downstairs bookshelves. And so things came to pass. All my precious Dawkinses, Davieses and Pinkers now cluster comfortably together.

Still on books, I am halfway through P J O’Rourke’s appreciation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. It was among the books I found during an end-of-year perusal of the Griffin bookstore in Almancil, one of two bookshops in the Algarve that specialise in books for English language readers. It’s a great place to wile away half an hour on a dull day. We already have O’Rourke’s ‘Holidays in Hell’, a work that I found greatly superior to his critique of Adam Smith. Still, since I bought the latter, I feel obliged to finish it, albeit in increasingly ill humour.

Another thing we did was to see “Australia” (the film), a meretricious epic that I recommend you avoid. It had a more sympathetic reception from my wife, who said I shouldn’t spoil the film for others and that it had some beautiful photography. That’s as much as can be said in its favour. I felt that it was a little less convincing and a lot less touching than the latest James Bond; it contrives to pluck every string in the orchestra without hitting a single true note.

I have to pause for thought while I consider what else we have been doing, other than the usual walking, snoozing, eating and drinking. Let me tackle this by process of elimination. We haven’t been doing much watering as nature’s been doing that for us; nor weeding as it’s been too wet. Each day I march out to the covered woodpile and bring in enough wood to see us through to bedtime.

THAT'S ICE

It’s been cold – for us, very cold. There’s a bowl of Arctic air sitting over western Europe and stretching its icy fingers right down to the Mediterranean. Mornings and evenings hover around freezing; much of the Portuguese interior is in negative territory. I am grateful for the cocoon of a modern home with double-skin walls and double glazing. First thing I do in the morning, after Jonesy goes out with the dogs, is to clean the stove and build a new fire. Then I vacuum up the surrounding floor and do the washing up. She loves to come home to a warm, clean house. I think she’s beginning to appreciate the modest benefits of having a husband with a lazy leg.

We’ve watched more TV than usual and listened to a lot of radio. Jones has spent hours at her desk, writing her notes and doing her cuttings. She places on my desk such articles as she deems likely to interest or improve me. When we have disagreements, as in whether the man on the radio said the Gaza Strip was the size of the Isle of Wight or half the size of the Isle of Man, we employ Google as an instant referee, often being directed to Wikipedia for a definitive answer.


It’s a favourite site of mine. I heard the founder say this week that it is now the 8^th most popular site on the internet. It employs half a dozen people to run its servers. The rest is done by volunteers. When a bank collapses, Wikipedia’s reference is updated the same day. What hope has the Encyclopaedia Britannica of competing with that? Jones said that in earlier days, when she worked in News Information, she would have consulted Whitacker’s Almanac or The Stateman’s Yearbook. I suppose they still have their place but I wouldn’t bet on their future.

Let me doff my cap to our neighbour, Idalecio, and his amour, Sonia, for the delightful dinner they prepared for us on New Year’s eve. This they served in Idalecio’s newly-restored guest cottage, which is cosy and has the advantage of underfloor heating. While we sat around the table, Idalecio’s dog, Serpa-Fish, shared the couch with his cat (which has an impossible name) and one of Sonia’s dogs, brought along because it hated the New Year fireworks that rend the air around Quarteira, where Sonia lives. In the event, the heavy mist that descended on Espargal that night discouraged the usual revellers from ascending the hill and New Year arrived with barely a peep.

We have taken note of the markedly emollient influence that Sonia is exercising on Idalecio’s bachelor habits. For his part, Idalecio has spent the past several weeks restoring the old house in which he lives, a house that he inherited from his grandparents and was starting to show the burden of its years. He’s replaced crumbling wooden floors with reinforced concrete, exposed stone blocks and renewed much of the old plaster. Of all these developments we have expressed our strong approval.

One morning I took the tractor around to Olly and Marie’s place to help move their old lounge furniture, pending the arrival of a new suite later in the day. This visit occurred shortly after the return from the UK of our commuting immediate neighbours, Sarah and David. Their daughter, Helen, and partner Rob, who are due out this week, have just acquired their own cottage in a village further into the hills, and it’s for this cottage that the old furniture is destined.

I arrived at Olly’s place to find David already on the scene with his trailer in tow. Given my condition (described ad nauseam in preceding blogs) I thought it prudent not to carry anything heavier than cushions. But I gave what useful directions I could to my neighbours, consoling myself as they toiled with Milton’s reminder that: “they also serve who only stand and wait”. In the event, all the furniture fitted on to David’s trailer and the tractor wasn’t needed. So I returned home with little more than the merit of my good intentions.


In view of the disastrous performance of the pound, we have embarked on an austerity programme, (the fine detail of which is still being negotiated). Our first agreed thrift-measure is to buy our wine in bulk instead of splashing out 3 euros a bottle (typically) on the middle range at Lidl’s supermarket. On Olly’s recommendation, we made our way through the hills to the Cafe Paraiso in the village of Barrosas, where one can acquire Ana Maria table wine by the litre (bottle), 5-litre or 10-litre (vacuum-boxes), as one prefers.
We opted for two 10-litre boxes at 18 euros a box. The stuff is quite palatable although I doubt it’s won many plaudits. Nor am I likely to binge on it. Still, one has to start somewhere and this is as good a place as any.

Tuesday evening, after dropping off Natasha at Loule library, where she catches up on her emails before fetching young Alex from a crèche, we continued into Faro with David and Sarah. After supping with a group of friends, we went on to attend our first concert of the New Year. As usual, the performance was given by the Orchestra of the Algarve, a body financed mainly by local councils. The orchestra lacks the public support that we think it deserves – venues are often half empty, or worse - and has built up a deficit that threatens its future. Its closure would be a real blow to us. Sadly, it attracts only an older audience, much of it foreign. Portuguese youth is not into classical music.

The concert was remarkable for Max Bruch’s violin concerto in which the soloist was a young woman, barely out of her teens, who knocked us all sideways. Her name is Alexandra Soumm. She is Russian born and seems to have lived and studied across much of Europe. According to her biog she started learning the violin at the age of five and gave her first public performance two years later. Her list of subsequent achievements is impressive. Her performance, on her personal Stradivarius, was simply stunning. It’s the first time I can recall hearing a Strad in live concert. Certainly, in the hands of Ms Soumm, it sang most passionately.