Letter from Espargal: 12 of 2009

Had you been sitting in the study with me now, you might have seen me thrust a hand up a leg of my trousers and scrabble about furiously, before leaping up to rip them off. There’s only so far that one can insert one’s hand up one’s trousers while wearing them and it wasn’t far enough to reach the tick that was sharing them with me. The dogs looked on inquisitively as I danced about, anxious to get rid of the insect before it got hold of me. There is something peculiarly unpleasant about ticks and even unpleasanter about providing a meal for them.

I am feeling rather aggrieved about ticks at the moment, having detached one from my wrist a few days back. The little bug had enjoyed a good suck before I came across him and the scene of his meal has itched fiercely ever since, in spite of the muti I’ve applied to it. I suspect that, like mosquitoes, ticks may inject some protein that desensitises the skin while they feed.

The bottom line is that the tick season is upon us and will remain with us well into autumn. We pull several off our clothes and the dogs each day, especially Prickles with his terrier coat. He's just had his first haircut of the season and is looking very cute. The tick collars, which the dogs now wear all year round, are effective but they don’t prevent ticks from attaching themselves. It’s impossible to avoid the little bloodsuckers as virtually all of our walks involve a measure of negotiating grassy paths and bushy terrain.

During one of our outings this week Jones offered to guide me along a new path up the side of our hill. She had been shown it by Marie and Ollie, who had learned about it in turn from Idalecio. I was a bit surprised as I thought I knew all the hillside paths already. I was wrong.

Jones led me up a rough tractor track that the farmers have worn into the hillside down the years to access their carob trees. After some time, the track ran out. We hunted about but could find no path through the thick bush that surrounded us. Jones confessed to having led me astray. So we scrambled back down, looking for openings and envying the dogs, which were dashing about, having a whale of time searching for rabbits.

AFTER THE WALK

The following day, at our request, Ollie and Marie led us along the correct route. It winds steeply up the side of the hill, edging around boulders and creeping over rocky walls, before joining our regular paths around the koppie. Jones had missed a key, almost invisible turn-off. We marked several such turns by placing small rocks on larger ones. It’s a lovely walk, although somewhat overgrown. I have resolved to take a pair of clippers to it, to fend off the wretched ticks that inhabit the undergrowth.

I note from the pictures of Kevin & Ann’s new house taking shape in Calgary that snow still lies heavy on the ground in that part of the world. Here we are heading steadily into summer, as dry as a bone and praying for a shower of rain - (Miracles! we had a wondrous shower overnight!) not that the dry weather has retarded the weeds.
FIELD OF FLOWERS

I’ve spent hours turning over the fields (ours and neighbours) with the scarifier, and using the strimmer to clean under the trees. Some areas I haven’t had the heart to cut back because we are shortly promised a glorious show of poppies. Jones gave up weeding our beans for the same reason; at least that’s what she said.

Since the hot weather arrived, I’ve been making use of a gift from Llewellyn and Lucia, two extendable plastic grids that are designed to fit over half-open windows in the car’s rear doors. They prevent the dogs from leaping out and people from leaning in, while permitting a flow of air through the car.

A neighbour, Armenio, to whom we give most of our carobs, turned up one night with a box of pumpkins and 5 litres wine, made in his own wine press. He knows that we’re hooked on pumpkin soup. On warmer evenings, Jones adds bits of pumpkin to the large (very) mixed salad that usually makes up our supper.

Armenio showed us a Roman coin that he had found recently, one of three that he and his sons have turned up in the fields. It fascinates me to think of the generations of farmers that have laboured in these parts down the centuries, in whose dim tracks we follow. The Romans were by no means the first; the Arabs were here for hundreds of years after them. Our older Portuguese neighbours can remember when all the hills around us were cultivated (as the crumbling terraces attest), when people lived off the land or, as often, emigrated in search of a better living elsewhere.

In our lifetime the country has changed out of all recognition. In my last English class we were talking about life under the military dictatorship. One woman recounted that her boyfriend had fled to France to avoid conscription to the armies trying to contain the rebellions in the Portuguese colonies. To join him, she applied for a passport. It was not a document that the authorities issued lightly and before she received one, she had to undergo hours of questioning by the police, who wanted to know why any citizen might wish to travel abroad.

Our Portuguese teacher said he remembered times when any conversation between more than two people was outlawed. Three was not only a crowd, it was an illegal crowd, and the Portuguese police that enforced the law had a reputation for brutality. It’s a reputation that has not entirely disappeared. Following numerous complaints, an EU committee has recommended that video cameras should be placed in all Portuguese police stations to record how prisoners are treated.

Returning to my theme - Armenio had a storeroom packed to the rafters with carobs, the fruit of the past two years of production. He’s been hanging on to the crop in the forlorn hope that the price would rise. It’s fallen instead, to around 33 cents a kilo. So he sold the lot. The price of fertilizer, unlike that of carobs, has been rising steadily and he’s had to spend several thousand euros buying stocks to fertilize his trees. If it wasn’t for the fact that he and his family do all the picking, he said, there would be no profit whatsoever.

Tonight we are joining the gang for supper at the Snack Bar Coral, ten minutes up the road in Benafim. We walked the dogs up there early in the week to lunch out on the patio in the sunshine – on fresh bread, strong cheese, local olives, salads and the dish of the day, washed down with the house wine. I cannot pretend to be a gourmet but I thought it as delicious a meal as anyone might hope for.

Beside us, Jose (the tractor salesman from the shop next door) was busy removing a sporty steering wheel from his son’s car and replacing it with a conventional wheel, with airbag. The car was about to go for its annual health check and the authorities would have failed it without the airbag. I need to take the tractor up to him this coming week to have rapid release grips attached to the rear arms, and a revolving yellow light to the safety bar.

The traffic police were pulling cars over just outside Benafim as we drove up one afternoon. I was grateful that they stopped the car ahead of me rather than mine. As ever, the two smaller dogs were riding on the back seat. People have been fined for carrying unsecured dogs – lest they fly forward in the event of an accident. One of these days we’re going to be penalised. In the meanwhile, we drive with great caution and do our best to avoid the police traps.

One morning we visited Almancil to renew our annual travel insurance policies – the last year we can do so before hitting the pay-more 65 limit. We have – touch wood – never had to claim on them. But we know a fellow who was unfortunate enough to suffer a stroke while visiting the US, a misfortune that cost him a fortune as well as his good health.

Another annual ritual is taking out an international driver’s licence – our North American trip is now less than two months away. Again, I’ve never had to present one to the authorities. The AA say they receive numerous requests from travellers who fail to take them out and discover after the event that they’re required.

I’m reading “The Goldilocks Enigma”, by Paul Davies, an attempt to explain why we inhabit a life-friendly universe. (We obviously wouldn’t inhabit an unfriendly one.) I have a number of his books. He’s a fine writer, able to explain obscure cosmological concepts in language that the layman can follow. I feel fairly comfortable with the Big Bang and black holes although I have to confess to struggling with “multiverses”.

Re last week’s letter, Jones tells me that the cute little animal I was thinking about was a meerkat - not a mongoose. She’s right, of course. She often is. But given that both creatures are furry little animals that run around the countryside and begin with the letter “m”, I don’t think the distinction is really worth quibbling about.

Letter from Espargal: 11 of 2009

Late morning – it doesn’t matter which one: Jones is doing a bit of ironing behind me. The dogs are strewn around the study, feeling the effects of our 90 minute jaunt into the hills. It’s the last mile back to the village that’s the killer. The stony track up the side of the hill gets steadily steeper. I’ll swear that tectonic plates are shoving up Puffer Hill at the rate of at least a metre a week. By the time we stagger in the front door, I’m bushed. I often lie down on the study carpet for a spot of recuperative meditation. The dogs generally take that as an invitation to join me.

This morning I am at the computer instead, resisting the temptation to play Spider Solitaire and getting on with the serious business of correspon-dence. Spider Solitaire is something else, a variety of cyber cocaine to which I was introduced by one of my relatives, who had better remain nameless. If you haven’t heard of the game, count it as a blessing. It doesn’t actually harm one’s health, except possibly with an occasional stab of back-ache, but it does promote bouts of severe procrastination.

The aim of the game is to get all the cards down with the smallest number of moves. On average I get out one game in seven, typically with a score of about 1170. On a good day I might achieve a score in the 1180s and once a month in the 1190s. I have resolved to give up the game entirely when I achieve a score of 1200 or better. My highest score was 1194 – until recently, that is, when I got a tantalising 1199. I am reassured that 1200 is possible if not actually in sight.

Midweek we heard the renewed grunt of heavy trucks making their way up the hill as Horacio prepared to lay a cement floor on the foundations of the house is building on the brow of the hill.

Jones returned from her Portuguese exercises with Marie and Olly to report that the huge cement trucks could barely squeeze between the cottages on a bend in the road. She grabbed the camera and set off to take pictures while I accompanied the dogs on their customary late afternoon leg-lifters around the koppie. As you can see,the truck drivers had barely centimetres to spare on either side.

CATERINA

Speaking of dogs - old Dona Caterina came clip-clopping down the road with her stick one evening, just as we were setting out. To our embarrassment, two of the dogs rushed down the drive to bark at her, scaring the old lady silly. She tottered around on her octogenarian pins for a couple of seconds, waving her stick at them, and jolly nearly toppled into the bushes.

The irony was that neither of the offenders belonged to us. They are neighbours’ dogs that love to come walking with our lot. They’re not at all dangerous but you can’t tell that to old ladies. I went round afterwards to apologise to her and her daughter, Leonhilda.

Leonhilda understood only too well. Her own small dog, who’s completely harmless, loves nothing more than to rush out into the road and bark at passers-by or passing cars – something he did several times as we chatted.

We wandered up the road to look at the roof-beams that have just gone up on Dries’s house. He must be thrilled to see such progress at last. Forgive me if these house building reports are tedious; in a small community such as ours, a new house and the prospect of new neighbours is big news. What’s more, all this construction is gradually changing the face of our community.

I think of Cruz da Assumada, where we bought the Quinta 22 years ago. At that time, our little cottage was situated in the country, close to a small country road. The country road became a highway and the whole area, where we and the sheep once wandered through the veld, has gradually turned into a plush suburb, studded with vast new villas. Some of them must cost millions.

One morning I took the tractor down to assist our Irish neighbour, Fintan. His new holiday villa is nearing completion at the other end of the village. It’s the second of two such villas that he and his wife, Pauline, have built in their retirement, each with three bedrooms en suite and a pool. (I can heartily recommend them to any prospective holiday makers.)

With the assistance of their neighbour, Ollie, (much in demand because he doesn't suffer from back problems) the couple have started planting shrubs and trees around the new villa. To facilitate this, Fintan asked me to clean up the weeds and level the ground a bit with the scarifier. In the event, this proved an all but impossible task. Pockets of soil vied for space with outcrops of bedrock that fiercely resisted the heavy steel prongs of the scarifier. Sparks and shards flew in all directions; the shards ricocheted off the back of the tractor. All I could usefully do was to drag a couple of heavy poles around to flatten the greenery.

During a visit to the Modelo hypermarket in Loule we were approached, as we wheeled our cartload of goodies back to the car, by a gypsy boy aged about ten. This is not unusual. Families of gypsies habitually bum a living at the supermarkets. The usual arrangement is for mother, clutching a baby in one hand, to hold out the other hand at the door. In the car park the kids, pleading hunger, beg for the empty carts in order to recover the 50-cent or one-euro coins from the slot. And, if you look hard, lurking somewhere nearby, you’ll spot dad making sure that his brood doesn’t slack.

The kids are often grubby. In our case, the lad was quite presentable. Taking us (quite-rightly) for foreigners, he performed a little me-hungry and can-I-have-the-cart mime. When I asked him in Portuguese why he wanted it, he said it was to buy bread. Little surprise there. We gave him the empty cart to return and he went off – only to reappear some moments later, clutching the coin, which he indignantly returned to us.

The coin seemed to be a one-euro piece from an EU country other than Portugal – there are small differences in the coinage – but on closer examination it turned out to be an old French ten-franc piece in the same silver and bronze format. So we took it back and found him a genuine one-euro coin instead, which pleased him no end. I guess that daddy wouldn’t have been very happy with a useless coin. For all that gypsy children may lack education, they are born with a keen commercial sense.

The last of our seasonal orchids, the tongue orchids, have finally made an appearance. There’s a tree on the far side of our hill, half an hour’s walk away, where they rise each year. We keep a lookout for them each March. There are usually a few dozen but so far we’ve seen only a disappointing four. As you may see below, other wild flowers are now in their glory.

NICOLINE & ANNEKE

Our Dutch neighbours, Nicoline and Anneke, took us to lunch at the Snack Bar Coral, to thank Jones for walking their dog. Nicoline scolded me for misspelling the animal’s name in my blog as “Herme” rather than Ermie, waving away my excuses. So where-ever you may have read “Herme” in the past, kindly assume “Ermie” instead. Our neighbours were quite surprised that I had referred to their little pet as a bitch. I had to assure them that even the sweetest pure-bred lady dogs may be referred to in this manner without causing offence.


ORNITHOGALUMS

It was a good lunch. The place was full, which we were glad to see. We wish the owners every success and the fact is that it’s meals that make the money, not drinks. There is little profit in selling coffees, beer or whisky, especially to folk who can make any of the above last an hour of casual conversation. I’ve been following with interest the debate in the UK about imposing a minimum price per unit on sales of alcohol to discourage binge drinking.

GRAPE HYACINTHS

Here in Portugal alcohol is cheap but I can’t think, with the exception of the local alcoholic, when I last saw any drunk Portuguese. I felt weak-kneed on hearing from Llewellyn that he had paid £20 for a bottle of average wine at a favourite Portuguese restaurant in London. That’s enough to drive a soul to sobriety which, I suppose, is what the whole debate is about.

LAVENDER & CISTUS

On a totally unrelated subject, some time ago I saw a low-slung, otter-like animal running across a road. Recently I saw another and then, much to my surprise, a third – each time crossing a road late in the day. When I described the creature to Idalecio, he said it was the same animal that had been taking his chickens, scaling the wire fence with ease. In Portuguese, he said, it’s called a “saca-rabo”. This was identified by the dictionary, as well as a neighbour, Mike, to whom I described the beast, as a mongoose.

ROCK ROSE

My idea of a mongoose was a cute, family-proud little guy, often seen on TV, who stood up on his hind legs on an anthill to scan the world around him. I had to change my image radically. The mongooses I briefly witnessed were a good deal bigger and beafier although very fast. According to the Wikipedia account, there are more than 30 species, ranging up to 4 feet in length, and spread over several continents.


SORRY - NO MONGOOSE PICTURES

The local variety is shy and with good reason. It’s not popular. Unlike chicken farmers, I count myself lucky to have come across them. Another animal that I have glimpsed here is the fox, a most beautiful creature which is, regrettably, equally unpopular with hunters and farmers. Anneke, who is training to do a pilgrimage walk from Porto to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, said she too had spotted a fox, a beauty.

Letter from Espargal: 10 of 2009

This letter starts on Thursday - nearly lunchtime. Jones has trotted down the road and come back with Poppy, a little dog who will be staying with us for a few days while her human companions are away. She has stayed with us before and seems to approve of the arrangement.

Having deposited Poppy in my care, Jones set off in the other direction to walk Herme, a bitch who belongs to the two Dutch ladies down in the village. They have gone off for the day, as they do from time to time, to work with a Portuguese group that assists people with learning difficulties. On such occasions the Dutch ladies are grateful to Jones for giving Herme an outing. The rest of our domestic ensemble is scattered around the house, recovering (as I am) from a long hike through the hills.

We returned home to the grunt of heavy cement trucks, arriving to fill the foundations of Silvia’s house to be, and promptly made our way to the brow of the hill to behold events. The site is about 150 metres away, with the most wondrous views, south to the coast and north to the mountains. For the moment there’s just a network of trenches, lined with reinforcing-rod grids and filled with cement.

I watched in fascination, snapping away with the camera from the upper patio of David and Sarah’s house nearby. One member of the crew controlled the huge pump with a small radio apparatus while another wrestled the cement-spilling elephant’s trunk of a hose along the trenches. It took hardly ten minutes to empty eight cubic metres of wet cement from the delivery truck.

In answer to my questions, the cement crew said the trucks were capable of carrying 10 cubic metres and more but had been restricted because the access road was so steep. We saw them struggling to get the trucks around the corner and up past David & Sarah’s cottage to the site. In-between deliveries – I think there were four altogether - we conversed. In spite of the recession, they said, their trucks were as busy as ever, although demand for cement had moved away from the coast into the hills.

After years of booming construction in the tourist areas along the coast, property sales have dived, badly hit not only by the general recession but by the slide of sterling and the near-collapse of the Irish economy. Brits and Irish have been the big buyers down here. The newspapers have been full of the huge discounts now available for villas and apartments in coastal areas.

While we were over at the building site, I took the opportunity to scarify the field that belongs to David & Sarah. It was deep in winter growth. To protect my hat (and head) I snipped off a couple of low branches from sprawling olive trees. One of the cement truck crew was grateful to borrow my secateurs – I always carry a large pair on the tractor – to prune a tree that was restricting the passage of the trucks.

All this has been happening under deep blue skies. For all practical purposes, summer has arrived. So have the flies and the swallows, the latter ever so much more welcome than the former. Temps hardly dip into single figures at night; by day they’re up in the twenties. Jones still keeps her dawn vigils, providing you with vivid images of the new day.


I am tipped out of bed by 08.00 to go walking before the heat of the day. There’s no more rain in sight. As our Canadian cousins thaw themselves out, we are already resorting to the car air conditioner. I fear it’s going to be a hot summer.
YELLOW BEE ORCHIDS

We’ve been delighting in the orchids that have been appearing along the edges of our paths. (Jones says there are fewer than usual.) There’s a variety: early purples, naked man, dull, sawfly, yellow bee and woodcocks, together with our other spring flowers. Idalecio took some fine pictures of them for his website, the better to promote his holiday cottages.
EARLY PURPLE ORCHID

Jones and I have taken some more.

Midweek we took ourselves to O Papagaio (The Parrot) in Salir for a neighbourly dinner. The occasion was partly to celebrate the erection of David Massey’s fence – around the old house he bought and had restored five minutes away at Alto Fica.

David, the son of our Irish neighbours, spent a great deal of time and effort – as well, by his own admission, of money – turning the house into a superb “des res”.
DAVID'S HOUSE & FENCE

David is the drummer with (and manager of) the band, The Commitments. Between gigs, all over Europe, he now retires to Portugal to catch his breath and relax around his pool. He didn’t do much relaxing this week, however, because he, his dad and Olly spent most of it putting up the fence and covering it with shade-cloth for added privacy. My part was to lend the group my set of socket spanners to help tension the fence. I try to be helpful where I can.
FINTAN AND SON, DAVID

The Parrot, which is run by two sisters, provides homely and inexpensive fare. We were sorry to see the restaurant half empty (as a result of the downturn, the sisters said). Our bill ran to 13 euros a head but one can easily dine well on 10.

DULL ORCHID

Speaking of which, I had to take Natasha back to the accountant in Benafim to pick up her tax return and to get a statement to the effect that I was her employer. This is among the documents required when she returns to the SEF (foreign ministry) offices in Faro next week to get her son, Alex’s, documents, now that she has obtained her own. The accountant spent 20 minutes sorting things out and, when I asked him for the bill, said a fiver would cover it. I told him that in London one couldn’t knock on an accountant’s door for a fiver. That made him smile, along with the other folk in his office. But it’s true.

NAKED MAN ORCHID

I remind myself of such advantages during times when my patience is severely strained by Portugal’s bureaucracy, as on Tuesday when I returned with our agent to the Financas as part of the continuing saga of registering Casa Nada.

From 10.00 till 11.30, we kicked our heels, awaiting our turn. One selects a ticket for the section concerned – whether cars or houses, VAT or income tax. More experienced visitors often calculate the waiting time and take themselves off for an hour to do other things. But this is hazardous. The queue can move unexpectedly fast because some waiters take multiple tickets; others simply give up and go away. At other times, lawyers or accountants, who have precedence over common folk, arrive with a fat file and butt in just as one’s number is about to be called. That’s infuriating.

MIRROR ORCHID

Our turn eventually came, we handed in the modifications to the Casa Nada file and hung around for 15 minutes more while they were entered. Now we have only to return to the Register of Properties to complete the process – if we are lucky that is….. we think ….. maybe. We’ll see.

At home I’ve been cleaning up our own fields with the scarifier while Jones weeds our beans and peas - as well as collecting dandelions for the neighbours' hens. The weeding, with a hoe, is really hard work. I’d do it myself but my back has made it plain that I might as well commit suicide. So I sit on my tractor seat instead and tell Jones that ploughing on sloping, tree-studded fields like ours is much harder work than one might think.

As we labour we can hear Joao, the picapau (woodpecker) driver, who did the work on my tractor entrance, hammering away on Horacio’s new property, 100 metres below us. He has spent days at it, much as we had to do before we could build here ourselves. The hills around here are solid rock, as the two vast quarries in the district testify.

We dropped around at Horacio’s property to take a look. Joao has more or less levelled the area where the house is to rise. There’s a mountain of rock below it. Above it and to the side, Horacio’s team has been building the most splendid stone retaining walls. Horacio has taken to looking at my blog and thought it would be an excellent idea for me to stick a picture up. If you want a dreamy villa with pool in a sleepy little village in the Algarve hills, now’s the time to talk to him.

Letter from Espargal: 9 of 2009

If this week has been anything, it’s been windy. Algarvian winds are not like your common-or-garden winds. They blow with a certain malicious intent. As I write, my hat is somewhere in the garden below, having been whipped off my head as I stepped on to the upstairs patio. I could have sworn that I heard a windy chuckle as it vanished. That’s typical of an Algarvian wind. What’s more, this wind comes armed with a lot of wet stuff. It chooses its moments, permitting us to walk down to the river in brilliant sunshine before soaking us on the return journey. That’s the kind of thing we’ve had to put up with.

Most days we drive around to Zeferino’s house to fetch Bobby before we begin our walk. I find it hard to stay up with Jones on these outings because she’s a fast walker and I’m still burdened with a lazy leg, courtesy of my last bout of sciatica. I'm frustrated to find myself the tail-end Charlie, not a role I’m accustomed to.

Jones finds it as difficult to slow down as I do to speed up. Fortunately, she’s always on the lookout for glittering pieces of quartzite, to adorn the crystal path that she's building in the garden, and frequently stoops to dig one out of the verge. Talk about Atalanta and the golden apples.

A large truck arrived one morning at the edge of the village with lengths of safety railing. These railings the workers set about installing along the verge of the newly-tarred road to the river. The team filled in a large hole that the recent rains had exposed in the verges and they erected a sign informing drivers that the speed limit on the new road was 40kph. We’ll be lucky. The only speed limit acknowledged by most local drivers is the speed at which their vehicles will travel with the accelerator flat against the floor.

During a break in the showers, Joao turned up with his picapau digger, as promised, to widen and level the tractor entrance to the property, just above Casa Nada. It took him an hour to demolish a couple of boulders and level the bedrock at the point where I want to erect gates. My neighbour, Fintan, has already given me two fine wrought-iron gates, which he no longer requires. Joao’s skills were impressive. I pointed out to him several of Jones’s flowers that were planted among the rocks, and asked him to do his best to avoid them. And he harmed not a single one – although Jones did complain that the rocks he shoved to one side had landed on a desirable weed.

In spite of these trying conditions, we have kept ourselves industriously occupied. One of our occupations has been to press on with our efforts to register the Casa Nada.
CASA NADA

When we bought the property nearly a decade ago, Casa Nada was a roofless old house whose floor was thick with the weeds of ages. The people who built the house and lived in it had never registered it, presumably to avoid paying taxes on it.
So as far as the Portuguese authorities were concerned, it didn’t exist. That’s as much as I can state with authority.

WAITING AT THE FINANCAS

The rest I write with caution because I now venture into the murky world of Portuguese bureaucracy. To exist in Portugal a building must have a triple presence – at the Financas (which tax it), at the council (which approves construction and supplies services to it) and at the Registry of Titles (which keeps track of the owners). The building doesn’t actually to have exist in fact because the bureaucratic world invests a parallel paper (now cyber) universe.

The easy part in registering a former ruin, such as ours, is with the Financas, who are delighted to be able to tax it. (The Financas are pleased to tax anything!) The hard part is getting it recognised by the council and accepted by the registry. Last summer, after much form-filling, oath-swearing and document-submitting, we thought we had it cracked. With the help of a local agent, we updated all the relevant documents, submitted them for approval and awaited confirmation that all was in order.

This approval never came. We are led to understand that the documents vanished into a bureaucratic black hole. Matters came to a head on Wednesday morning when I met the agent to sign a new sheaf of papers that she undertook to complete and resubmit. Stay tuned.

After signing the papers, I dropped around at Natasha’s flat to give her our old vacuum cleaner. Natasha, who’s not backward in coming forward, had seen that we were making little use of it and wondered if she might have it. Afterwards, she returned with me to upload several hundred pictures, mostly of herself and her son, Alex, from my computer to the internet, so that her family and friends could enjoy them. Natasha normally makes use of the computers at the public library but she had no way of transferring her pictures to them – so I made an exception and allowed her to use mine for the purpose.


I’d suggested to her that she should use the free picture facility (PicasaWeb) provided by Google. As I wasn’t familiar with the site, I fiddled around sufficiently to able to show Natasha the basics. She instantly discovered a faster way of doing things (this in English, her 3^rd language) and had all 430 pictures in place by the time we set out a couple of hours later for the bus-stop on the main road, five minutes away at Alto Fica.

As often happens, we stopped at the Madrugada (Daybreak) Café, beside the bus-stop for a coffee and baggy, as well as a chat with Natilia, the owner. Natilia’s a widow in her sixties. She spent a decade or more in Canada, where much of her family still live. She’s says she’s forgotten most of her English but she understands it well enough when she needs to. We speak to her in Portuguese. Seven days a week, Natilia opens Madraguda’s doors at 7.30 and closes them when the last patrons leave. As usual during the winter months, we found her seated with the locals in a semi-circle around the wood fire at the far end of the room.

The café occupies the site of an old dance-hall and, like many such establishments, doubles as an informal social centre where people go to converse, play cards and pass the time.
NATILIA

Natilia, like her sister, Fernanda, was clad in black. It’s a garb some older widows adopt permanently after the death of their husbands. In her case, Natilia said, it was to mark the recent death of her mother, aged 93. There was no rule about how long one should wear mourning dress, she told us. She would continue for some months until she felt comfortable about resuming normal dress.

THE FORD

There was great excitement one morning when Jones returned home with the dogs after a short outing while I was putting the finishing touches to my English lesson. The dogs nosed their way in through the front door to find an intruder in the kitchen, the Squaller - one of the numerous black cats that bum a living around the village. The Squaller looks to me very much like two of our official felines,

DOG WITH OFFICIAL CAT

with which the canines get on fine. But the dogs knew him instantly for an impostor.

From upstairs I heard a shriek from Jones, an outburst of barks and a skidding of paws on the tiles. With Jones’s assistance, the Squaller made it to safety, leaving a very bad smell and three outraged dogs in his wake. While Jones tried to mop up the smell, I gave the hounds a finger-wagging talking-to, followed by a discreet biscuit. I’ve nothing against the Squaller but we’ve enough inside cats already – plus he never fails to spray during his thieving visits to the patio.

Before retiring inside the house and lighting a fire this evening, we went looking in the garden for my wind-swept hat. There was no sign of it there, nor in the park beyond, nor the adjacent field. Jones eventually spotted it clasped in the branches of a wild olive tree. I was glad to get it back. It’s my working Tilley and I’m very fond of it.