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.