Letter from Espargal: 21 of 2009

En route to the opening of an art exhibition on Thursday evening, Jones and I (Ono and Pricks in the back seat) were listening on the car radio to an impassioned debate in the Portuguese parliament. Speaker after speaker stood up to denounce some dreadful outrage that had rocked the house to its foundations. All we could make out was that someone had resigned as a result. It must have been pretty serious stuff because nobody resigns over a minor scandal in Portugal.

On Friday’s lunchtime TV broadcast the question resolved itself. The resignation came from Portugal’s Economy Minister, Manuel Pinho, whose sin was evident on screen for all the world to see. In response to a challenge from the leader of the communists, Mr Pinho had stuck his forefingers up beside his head in a cuckold gesture.

One has to feel reassured about the priorities of Portugal’s parliamentary deputies. No-one gets too upset about the disappearance of the odd million into the cracks and fissures of members’ interests. But you can’t poke fun at the bedroom antics of members’ spouses. Mr Pinho must be regretting his rashness – at least until the elections in two months’ time and his likely reappointment to another post.

As I say, we were listening to the debate in the car – our new car, that is. (If you’re not interested in cars, you might want to read something else.) On Tuesday afternoon, having cleaned our old CRV, I traded it in for a new model. Jorge Silva, the salesman from whom I bought the first Honda 9 years ago, was delighted to sell me another.

After completing the paperwork, he took me through to the workshop for an hour’s tuition on the new car’s high-tech systems – the Satnav, auto-stabilisation, the radar that monitors other vehicles, the computer itself…..and a lot more stuff.

Later in the week I had another lesson, this time taking in the bluetooth mobile phone link and the audio system. My head is reeling and I haven’t even opened the 300-page guide book.

The technical bumph aside, I have to say that I love the car. It’s a diesel, more potent than its predecessor and a joy to drive, even though it sometimes resents interference from the driver. The lights switch on as you pass under a bridge or enter a parking garage. Ditto the windscreen wipers when it rains. Quite amazing, at least to an elementary 20^th century motorist such as myself.

Jones, who was very attached to the old CRV, regarded the newcomer with mild suspicion, at least until she discovered its benefits. It wraps occupants up in its own snug little world. The moment of her conversion came when she found that she could raise the passenger temperature to warm her toes without affecting the lower temperatures on my side of the console.

The dogs too have given the vehicle their full approval. I’ve rigged up extensive seat and boot protective covers to shield the leather upholstery from their nails.

So yes, it’s a splendid car. What it didn’t have was a splendid place to park. The old car has camped for years under heavy green shade-cloth draped around the skeleton of the car port. To obtain greater protection from the elements, I bought a number of insulated roofing panels from Gilde’s hardware store on the outskirts of Salir. (It’s a great store - well stocked, staffed by really helpful people.)

These panels Isidoro delivered early in the week. Together we manoeuvred them off his truck. They were bulky rather than heavy.
On Thursday Horacio the builder arrived promptly, as promised, with two of his men to secure the panels to the roof of the carport. The job took them barely 90 minutes. The key was having three guys to heft the panels up on to the carport roof and the use of long self-penetrating screws that drilled themselves straight through the panels into the metal struts below.

On the domestic front, life continues as before. It’s hot. The only time that I’m really cool is under the cold tap in the shower at about 8 each evening. Jones labours away at the interminable task of disciplining her unruly garden. It’s not her plants that are problematic but the thousands of invaders that spring up, scatter their seeds and fade away into miserable brown corpses. (Jones says she likes many of the invaders. It’s just that they die off in summer and have to be disposed of.) For my part I've been cutting back and shredding the cuttings.

Several times a week I curse and pluck a tick from my body, one that has evaded Jones’s surface examination of me on our return from walking. Such pests are dropped into the loo and flushed into outer darkness. Their cousins, the flies and mosquitoes, are also around but less of a threat or a pain.

Whenever we can find an excuse, we go up to the Coral in Benafim for a spot of lunch or supper or just coffee. It's a favourite stop and great value for money. One morning I went into the property registry in Loule with the sheaf of papers representing 18 months plodding bureaucracy on the part of our (former) facilities office person in Benafim. In theory, the documents should have opened the way to the formal registration of Casa Nada.

In practice, the clerk concerned peered at them in puzzlement for several minutes before advising me to see a lawyer. I shall probably have to do that anyhow. But first I’ll go back to a local architect who put us in touch with the facilities person in the first place, under the impression that the matter should be fairly straightforward. (I can’t think of anything that’s straightforward in Portugal.)

As for that art exhibition, it’s being held at a fancy hotel in a smart resort. We were invited to the opening by a woman in our Portuguese class; she and her husband belong to a group of some 20 artists, mainly English and German, who organise such events in the Algarve with a view to promoting their work.

We arrived to find 30 or 40 people present and about the same number of paintings strung around the wall of the exhibition room. Prices started at several hundred euros and ran to a couple of thousand,which is expensive for this part of the world.

I was collared by a woman who pointed out her paintings to me and informed me that she was not just an artist but also a teacher of art. I was able to plead complete ignorance of the subject on the basis that I had merely brought along my art-loving wife. While this might have been an exaggeration, it certainly wasn’t a lie.