Letter from Espargal: 15 of 2009

We are home from a visit to family and friends in Britain - home to find the countryside awash with wild lavender and poppies. It was a most satisfactory visit, in spite of the loss of a return rail ticket on the afternoon of our final day. We discovered the loss in a bus taking us to the London railway station from which we were to travel back to our base at Saffron Walden. No amount of scrabbling through my many pockets served to produce the missing ticket.

Jones was all for returning to the National Gallery in the hope that the ticket might have been discovered and handed in. This was a notion that I resisted. At the station, the nice man who sold us a new ticket, explained how we might write to British Rail, which might be persuaded of the merits our case and might refund us the cost of the new ticket. I’m resisting this notion too, as we have no receipts and I shall probably be volunteered as the writer. (Jones denies the latter.)

We flew with Easyjet, a budget airline that, along with RyanAir, has more or less elbowed flag-carriers out of the popular market. I must confess to paying the voluntary premium that permits passengers to board first and choose seats ahead of the scrum. I hate that headlong elbows-flying rush from the bus to the aircraft steps in the scramble for the best seats.

One mistake I’d made was to book the flights and a car with an online travel agency (Expedia), which I’ve often used. That’s because one subsequently has to register online with the airline itself and to pay an additional amount for any hold luggage - or face a penalty at the airport. And it’s not possible to register unless the booking has been made directly with the airline itself. As a result I spent a lot of expensive and frustrating time listening to muzak and wading through menus on international phone lines.

At Stansted airport, Jonesy waited to collect our single suitcase while I went ahead to rent a hire-car. The young lady at the Hertz desk did her best to persuade me to take out additional insurance. For just 100 pounds, she pointed out, I could avoid the 550 pound penalty to which I’d be subjected if the least damage were done to the car. I declined. Also declined was Hertz’s offer of a special petrol deal. If one pays for a full tank of petrol ahead of time, one can return the car with as little fuel in the tank as one chooses. Guess who thought that one up!

Having said that, I should add that Hertz supplied us with a splendid, virtually new car that served us well. We did lots of travelling, a thousand miles in a week. Our first trip was from Saffron Walden (where we borrowed our house-sitters’ home) to Colchester to see my niece, Anita, who is completing her Master’s degree in political science at the University of Essex. Her special interest is women’s rights.

Anita, as usual, was in fine form. She showed us around her digs and gave us a brief tour of the campus before leading us a few miles down the road to the riverside village of Wivenhoe, with its many pubs. We beat the crowd to lunch. It was the first of several excellent pub lunches that we enjoyed. Especially enjoyed were the English ales that one finds in Portugal only at supermarkets and comparatively high cost. My favourite is Speckled Hen. Mind you, at 3 pounds a pub pint, it costs even more to drink the stuff in the UK than in Portugal.

From Colchester, it took us four hours to cover the distance, through the Easter weekend traffic, to Leamington Spa, where Barbara’s brother, Llewellyn (and wife, Lucia), have settled.
BREAKFAST IN LEAMINGTON SPA
The town is also the home of my cousin, Tricia, an academic biologist, and husband, Mark, a professor of mathematics. That evening the couple ambled round to Llewellyn’s house where our host prepared a delicious stir-fry supper. (Llewellyn is a talented cook.) Our animated conversation continued deep into the night, in spite of any jetlag that Tricia might have been suffering after returning from South Africa a few hours earlier.

We spent three days with Llewellyn and Lucia, who rolled out the red carpet for us. The Easter weekend had brought her a welcome respite from her very demanding job at a market research company. The pattern, as in Portugal, was always for us to begin the day by taking the dogs out for a walk, availing ourselves of the many parks and paths in the area.
The dogs are Edgar, a large and (fortunately) affable Rhodesian Ridgeback, and his hairy companion, Hazel (along with cats, Tigger and Charlie Brown). Both dogs operate under Llewellyn’s strict control. Like the English themselves, the dogs share the peculiar habit of being able to mingle with while largely ignoring their fellows in public spaces.

At such times Lucia carried with her a supply of plastic bags with which to scoop up the inevitable droppings. (In Edgar’s case, a shovel might have been more useful.)Whether Lucia had assigned herself this duty or whether it had been assigned to her, we did not inquire. Here in Portugal I have never witnessed anybody removing dog droppings, of which there are plenty, from the streets or parks. Indeed, our country pooches might think we’d gone mad if they saw us collecting their unmentionables in plastic bags.

We tried and were most impressed with the Portuguese café that Llewellyn had discovered in neighbouring Warwick. We visited the amazing exchange where citizens may leave redundant possessions for other citizens to acquire at penny-farthing prices. The mountain of old bicycles, many still usable, is extraordinary. I picked up two fine walking sticks – I have a weakness for walking sticks – at a pound apiece. Lucia had earlier bought a suite of wicker furniture, which she painted blue, for her conservatory – and very fine it looks.

One day we motored over to Croome Park, a National Trust property that had been turned into a fine 700-acre estate for the Earl of Coventry by Capability Brown before being ploughed up in the 1940s to supply the huge demand for food in wartime Britain. The National Trust is now doing its best to restore the estate to its pre-war condition.

We ambled along the river that Brown created for his employer, admiring the follies and sculptures along with the views, before taking the inevitable afternoon tea and cake at the restaurant.

On Easter Sunday afternoon, we bid our hosts farewell and drove two hours north to visit our fellow ex-journalists, Gary and Malcolm, in Newark, where they have settled after spending years on the south coast of England.
LINCOLN CATHEDRAL
We had time to make a brief stop in Lincoln, whose vast cathedral took my breath away. The magnificent edifice has been stealing visitors’ breath for close to a thousand years, easily rivalling the great cathedrals of York and Canterbury!

MALCOLM & US
After treating us to bed and board, Gary and Malcolm took us on a walking tour of Newark, an old market town with much to recommend it. The town sits on the River Trent and is dominated by the remains of a huge castle that played a pivotal role in English history for at least half a millennium.

From Newark we returned to Saffron Walden. As always during these travels, we were guided by Heloise, our satnav. She was fabulous, taking us to the very driveways of the people we were visiting. If she occasionally suffered a rush of blood to the head, by leading us off a motorway and then directly back on to it again, we forgave her. We’d never have managed with maps alone, especially among the maze of villages and tangle of minor roads along which we often had to find our way.

ELECTRIC CAR ON CHARGE
Our last full day we spent in London. It’s just over an hour by train from Audley End station on the outskirts of Saffron Walden. In Marylebone we met Llewellyn in time for a nostalgic visit to a café where Jones had wiled away many an off-day hour in the sixties, when she worked for the BBC. Then the cafe was known as Sagne’s. Now it’s been taken over by a chain. Even so, it retains much of its old world charm, and its croissants are as good as ever.

Lunch was with more former colleagues, Nancy and Brian, with whom Jones worked for years at NBC – and whose two children, now at university, we once watched grow up. Nancy led us to a restaurant in a restored centre close to Russell Square. Like some of London’s old stations, a squalid and depressing old building had been given a new lease on life. If only one could airbrush such colour and life back into other crumbling areas!

ROSA HOTEL, BEREA
I was shocked by a series of photos that I received from a South African contact of mine, showing the state of buildings in much of central Johannesburg and its surrounds. All have deteriorated into sordid, litter-strewn slums, occupied mainly by squatters. I wonder if Mr Zuma will be able to improve matters, when that gentleman becomes state president in due course. I doubt it, not while hordes of desperate Zimbabweans continue to seek shelter there.

In the afternoon – returning to my theme – we went to the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery, an event for which I’d booked online months earlier. Like anyone vaguely interested in art, I was aware of Picasso’s work – we’d seen his stunning Guernica in Madrid - but had very little detailed knowledge of his pictures. The exhibition and a short film on his life didn’t disappoint. One came away with a much better idea of the man’s influences, ideas and women.
The most interesting painting, for me, was a near-conventional portrait of his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, beautifully executed, showing just how accomplished the man also was when he chose to reflect the world as we see it rather than as he generally saw it.

Joining us at the exhibition were old friends, Julian and Ann-Christine. She was at school with Barbara in Johannesburg in the days of yore; the couple moved from South Africa to England shortly before I was sent to London as a correspondent. Over tea in the gallery restaurant afterwards, we caught up on their lives.

And then, returning to the start of my letter, it was off to the station and back to Saffron Walden to catch a few hours’ sleep, ahead of an 03.00 rising for the return flight. Our house-sitters, Ann and Ian, met us at Faro airport, where they had deposited us a week earlier. The weather was wonderfully cloudy, damp and cool. We’ve had about half an inch of badly-needed rain. Espargal looked much as we had left it. The roadside weeds were perhaps a few inches higher.

VILLAGE WELL
Two labourers were building a stone wall around the base of the village’s ancient well, which is being restored as a feature after being re-dug out. It had filled with sand during years of disuse.

NEW SITE FOR POST-BOXES
Around the corner, new supports are being installed for the post-boxes, which are to be transferred from the area of the well, the better to show off the latter. We've been advised that we will have to uproot our post-box and move it to the new site.

BEAN FIELD
We've been picking our beans, what remains of them. For the most part, they've vanished among the most beautiful crop of poppies and a wretched profusion of weeds. I'm in two minds about whether to plough the whole field under, because I'd like to get rid of the weeds sooner rather than later. On the other hand, it would be a pity to destroy the poppies. A little procrastination may resolve the matter.