Letter from Espargal: 7 of 2009

The sun is shining. The wild daffodils in the hillside are looking glorious. Spring is upon us. We can hardly justify the fires we continue to light in the evenings, as much for cheer as warmth. It’s Carnival weekend. Council crews were busy putting up stands and bunting as we drove through Loule this morning en route to the bank. I’d received a bank email saying that government regulations required us to take our ID documents along to our branch as part of the continuing process of verifying client identities.

This news greatly surprised our account manager, who knew nothing about it and suggested that the email might be part of a phishing expedition. I doubted it, as no information had been sought online. So he phoned Lisbon to check and was very displeased to discover that the bank HQ was contacting clients without first alerting the branch managers.

We had to cut our meeting with him short because I had a mid-morning dental appointment 10 minutes down the road in Almancil. As I arrived at the surgery, crocodiles of gaily-dressed children were making their way along the pavement to the carnival location. I thought the appointment was merely for the dentist to replace a couple of temporary crowns with permanent ones. But he had to complete two root canals first, and by the time I staggered out 90 minutes later, I was starting to feel a little sorry for myself.

I do not mean to cast any aspersions on the skills of the dentist, who was telling me as he drilled away how the steward on a recent flight in southern Africa had taken his (the dentist’s) cabin bag to the back of the plane to store it during the trip. When the dentist left the plane, he found plastic ties had been used to lock the zips. Only later, when he cut the ties off, did he discover that two mobile phones and a camera had been stolen from the bag. He was very displeased. Little wonder.

I reflected, as we shopped in a supermarket after the dental appointment, that Jones has the gift of trans-location, or whatever the proper name is for being able to disappear up a supermarket wormhole. She wheels a trolley up an aisle while I go off to secure one or two items. And when I return, she has vanished into some parallel world. I explore every corner of the store for 10 minutes, generally sweating under a bag of dog-food and feeling hard done by; there’s no sign of her. Then suddenly she re-emerges from the wormhole, and carries on shopping as if nothing has happened. It can be a very irritating habit.

The big news of the week, certainly as far as the dogs are concerned, is that we have completed the fence around the back of the house. Horacio’s men arrived on Wednesday afternoon to attach and tension wires to the posts they’d cemented in a week earlier, and then to attach a wire fence – in fact, two wire fences, one of larger-gauge sheep wire and beside it another of chicken wire. It took them several hours of hard work. I was glad I hadn’t tried to do it myself.

Instead, I worked with Natasha to bring up load after load of “turvena”, a road-surfacing material I had delivered, to build up the road levels under the two gates. Their height above the road would otherwise have permitted the dogs to squeeze underneath. The turvena had been dumped at the bottom of the garden 50 metres away, as close as the delivery truck could get. I left Natasha to do most of the shovelling, although I did make a few gestures in that direction, bending my knees and taking great care not to upset my finicky fusspot spine.

Then I’d reverse the tractor up the steep driveway and around the back of Casa Nada to spread the turvena on the tractor track that leads to the bottom of the property. It was the first decent day’s work I’ve done since putting my back out some months ago – and I felt very pleased with myself for my efforts. More importantly, the dogs now have half an acre to run around in but can no longer take off over the hill each time they feel bored. They sniffed suspiciously at the fencing but haven’t yet tried to test it. That may yet come.


Speaking of the dogs – as ever – since we started driving them down to the valley each day for a walk, the car has started to show the strain. We cover the back seat with a large towel for the little guys and have an old carpet that sits on the rubber mats at the back for Raymond. Even so, things started getting pretty paw-stained and dog-hairy, especially in the wet weather. So we amended Natasha’s once-a-week cleaning duties to include the car. And lo and behold, while doing this, she discovered the missing electric gate zapper. It was tucked down, completely invisible, between the passenger seat and the seat-belt socket.

I wish she’d found it a few weeks ago, before I ordered 2 replacement zappers. (Let me add in my defence that I believe in cleaning my own car but have been driven by bouts of sciatica to avoid such "bendy" exertion.)

DAGMAR's do

There’s been quite an outbreak of OAPism in the area. (OAP stands for Old Age Pensioner, a status one acquires willy-nilly at age 65; it is the preferred abbreviation in all British tabloid newspaper headlines, as in: “Brave OAP fights off thug!”) We attended a 65^th birthday lunch for our Quinta neighbour, Dagmar, on Monday.

BIRTHDAY BOYS CENTRE STAGE

The same evening we celebrated the 40^th birthday of an Irish neighbour, leading up to the 65^th birthday of his father at midnight. We were pleased to note that nobody turned into a pumpkin or looked any worse for the occasion. Other neighbours are about to follow suit, along with Jones in July and me a months later.

At Dagmar’s lunch I met a Portuguese man, an ex-hunter, who said that in retirement, cooking had become one of his hobbies. When I asked him why the locals were busy shooting thrushes, he said they made a most wonderful delicacy. One could consume the birds, bones and all, a real treat. (I recall once being offered such a dish in France and having to decline it.) We understand that the hunting season draws to a close this Sunday - until August, that is, when it opens again.

Midweek I phoned Portugal Telecom to warn them that one of the telephone line posts that line the valley between Benafim and Espargal, was leaning over at an ominous angle. The person who took the call was grateful to learn from me that the post posed no danger to person or property and to note my mobile phone number.

Two days later I got a call from a PT worker who’d been despatched to do something about it. We met him in Benafim and led him to the scene, where we left him. It was only a matter of time before the post toppled over, taking all the local lines (and internet connections) with them.

The post is on our valley walk, close to an orchard where thousands of oranges have fallen to the ground. It always makes us wince to witness such waste. Presumably, the farmer does not think it worth his while to pick the fruit. Jones likes to nip in and pick up half a dozen oranges as we pass by. She’d no sooner done so one evening than she encountered the farmer, who was coming up the road on his tractor. I’d gone ahead with the dogs. Jones said she’d managed to cram most of the fruit into her capacious pockets, keeping one orange-clutching hand behind her back as she greeted the farmer with the other. Not that he’d have minded. But one feels a childish sense of guilt, nonetheless.