Letter from Espargal: 28 of 2009

I’m at my desk, hiding from the sun. It’s midweek and the blog is coming in bits. Jones is doing Jonesy things at her desk behind me. Natasha is vacuum cleaning downstairs and the animals are scattered around the house like cushions.

As usual during the day, our phone and the internet connection are down. Tonight they will be up again. There’s a widget somewhere between us and the exchange that fails when it heats up which, in the Algarve summer, means every day - very irritating, the more so as we seem to have been singled out.

A man from Portugal Telecom phoned earlier in the week to say that a team hoped to address the problem this afternoon. So we’re waiting for a call, not exactly on tenterhooks. PT’s last attempt at repairs failed.

The week is following its usual pattern. To the walking, watering and weeding we’ve added carob picking. It’s pretty basic stuff - using a long pole to whack the carobs down and then spending hours picking them up and putting them into sacks, to be given to a neighbour in exchange for fruit and veg. The whacking down is harder work than it might sound. Try waving a 4-metre pole above your head for 30 minutes and you’ll see what I mean.

Tuesday I took my carob-picking assistants (Robbie and Kayleigh) and a friend of theirs to Zoomarine. This is a big marine park about half an hour away. The key attractions are dolphin, seal and sea-lion displays, with swimming pools, picnic grounds, restaurants, funfair stuff, bird-of-prey displays and much else thrown in.

The extensive parking grounds were filling up rapidly when we arrived and joined the queues. We headed first to the dolphin pool where a thousand people or more had filled the stand. The dolphins were still behind the scenes but acres of human flesh were on display, most of it saggy and unattractive. Bikinis were much in evidence, with a wisp of ribbon or waft of netting attached for modesty. A clown warmed up the crowd.

6 DOLPHINS IN THE AIR

When the dolphins and their trainers did make an appearance, they were simply superb. Commentary was in English and Portuguese. The seals and sea-lions, which performed in a different pool a little later, were less acrobatic but just as entertaining.



I went cautiously back to the scene of the wasp episode to see whether my endeavours had been successful. They hadn’t. The insects had given me the finger, opening another door about a foot away from the one I’d blocked. A second assault on their stronghold lies ahead. The question is how many doors they have, or can open at will. In the meanwhile, my carobs lie all around them.

The dogs are barely able to consume their supper for the numbers of wasps that bother them. I have reluctantly set up my wasps’ traps once again. (The BBC reports the death of an English farmer who had the misfortune to disturb a wasps’ nest and died for his pains – of an allergic reaction.)

We took some pictures of Joey, the 5-year old son of the proprietors of the Snack Bar Coral. Joey is just crazy about cars and spends much of his day arranging and rearranging his collection. He had them all lined up around the snooker table. Jonesy counted them - 120-something. Joey is fated to become a rally driver or racing driver, I fear. It's just in his blood.

One afternoon we went to Alte for a consultation with Dr Sergio, the same fellow whose amiable Great Dane had terrorised our lot the previous week. I thought it better not to raise the subject, as I was dependent on his goodwill and stamp for the renewal of my driving licence. I expected just a brief once-over and an eye-test but I got a thorough examination.

While waiting for the consultation, I assisted an elderly English couple into the waiting room. Neither spoke Portuguese and they had difficulty communicating with Isabel, the receptionist. The old fellow sounded in a bad way. After doing a bit of translating, I helped Isabel conduct him through to a consulting room and lay him down on an examination couch. (Dr Sergio, who speaks English, was busy with a patient at that point.)

A few minutes later, Isabel came through to the waiting room to ask me the English word for “cenouras”. Carrots, I told her, somewhat puzzled. She vanished again to impart this information to the couple. They were still there when I left. I hope that the carrots have done the trick and the old fellow is feeling better. I had a vision of Jones and myself some way down the road. It’s never easy to grow old and feeble, the more so in a foreign country. At least we speak Portuguese.

Jones has been hard at work on a section of garden just outside the tractor door to Casa Nada. She’s planted succulents and laid a bed of small rocks over a wodge of (anti-weed) newspapers. As always, it looks good and should reduce the work of forever having to strim or pull out winters’ weeds.

Another project has been to tidy up an area beneath two pomegranate trees. Some years ago I covered the ground with matting and a layer of bark. This cover would work well if Raymond and Bobby didn’t use the area for their wrestling matches, scattering the bark in all directions.

Jones, who likes a neat environment, is addressing the problem. My part is to reroute the plastic piping that carries water to Casa Nada. This task entails mainly lying with my face in the dirt, trying to attach fittings (that seem designed to spring a leak as soon as the water is turned on again).The fittings concerned came from a hardware shop in Loule that we’ve been patronising for some 20 years.

From the store I went to Lidl to meet Jones, who’d been doing the grocery shopping. When we came to pay the grocery bill, I couldn’t find my wallet. Bad moment – not so much the loss of cash as the huge hassle involved in card cancellations and replacements. Fortunately, Jones had her card with her. After searching my pockets and the car – in vain – I called the hardware store. The wallet was there for the fetching, I was assured. And so it was. I’d left it on the counter. I don’t know how these accidents happen but they do, especially when one is distracted.

Stop Press: I’ve had a call from Portugal Telecom to say that the problem with the phone line has been fixed. It evidently has or the technician wouldn’t have got through to me. My internet link is functioning once again, too. It’s almost worth suffering the loss of these things just to get them back again.