Letter from Espargal: 35 of 2009

It is early in the week. We are sitting, hard-earned baggies in hand, on the front patio at the end of another long carob-picking day. We don’t have much to say. There is little point in trying to talk over the crackling and crunching going on around us. All four dogs, as if pointing accusing paws at us, have raided the almond nut basket in the corner of the patio and are busy demolishing the contents.

As you’re probably aware, the nuts are encased in rock-hard shells. This armoured carapace does not bother the dogs, which roll the almonds around in their teeth until they line them up right – and then shatter them. Even the diminutive Prickles is able to do this. They spit out the shell fragments, leaving them scattered like landmines around the patio floor. (Tramp on them barefoot at your peril!)

It’s almond harvest time; nearly all the carobs have been brought in. The farmers spread nets under the trees before whacking the nuts down.
We came across old Jose heading home with a sack of nuts slung over his shoulder. They weren’t for eating, he explained, not by people; they were for the wild pigs. (His son is the president of the local hunters’ association.) It’s well known that the pigs will go the extra mile for the nuts. The hunters bait known piggy haunts with heaps of them and then wait up overnight in the hope of bagging a porker or two.

Right now, the hunters – who are also farmers - have got it in for the pigs because the animals have been destroying the plastic irrigation pipes in the orchards. The piggies, it seems, have discovered that the quickest way to get a drink is to chew a hole in a pipe.

The authorities, sympathetic to the farmers’ plight, have given the hunters permission to cull the pigs. Whole sacks of nuts have been collected to tempt the piggies within range of the hunters’ guns. It goes without saying that the pigs make fine eating. From the look of things there’s going to be lots of wild boar on the menu.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we were promised rain. We needed it. Temperatures are still mid-twentyish and Jones has reluctantly continued to water her garden. Tuesday dawned heavy with cloud, weighed down with the wet stuff. All muggy day we waited impatiently for the rain. The flies buzzed us; the clouds grew fatter and blacker but barely a drop fell. At 21.45 there was an enormous crack of thunder and the heavens opened. We turned the lights off and took our baggies outside to watch the torrent splashing off the cobbles in great waves of spray.

My plastic rain gauge testified to 15 millimetres in just over an hour. I think the gauge is still accurate after the damage it suffered at Jones’s hands. She knocked a chip out of it while throwing a ball for the dog. Jones says she tested the integrity of the patch she put on it and that the gauge hadn’t leaked. But one never knows. The gauge is cracked as well as chipped. And it wasn’t even our dog she was throwing a ball for! Jones’s aim is not famous. It’s a mystery to me how she manages to win as many boules contests as she does.

Last weekend we went to Salir to hear a flute quartet. Salir is a little town, situated on a hill some 15 minutes away. The Moors built a castle there, parts of which remain in good repair. The concert was given in Salir’s baroque church (most of Portugal’s churches seem to decorated in the baroque style), where the convention is still to sound the amplified church bells or, at least a recording, every 15 minutes.

I don’t know how the townspeople suffer the disturbance, especially as the recording is madly out of synch.
The racket failed to disturb the four young ladies, who gave a performance of “musica antiga”. They might have appreciated a bigger audience but flute concerts are not a big draw in this part of the world. The music was okay although, as we afterwards agreed, 45 minutes had been enough.

Friday afternoon: We are hurtling homewards through the Portuguese countryside on the train, having travelled up to Lisbon yesterday afternoon to apply for new passports. From Entrecampos (Between the Fields) station in Lisbon we walked to the Ibis Hotel. It was a good haul. Jones said she liked being back in the city buzz. I didn’t.

LISBON FROM THE TAGUS BRIDGE

It was our first experience of the Ibis chain (as far as I recall although Jones thinks we might have spent an Ibis night before). Their hotels offer great value for money –55 euros for accommodation plus 7.5 each for breakfast, if you want it. The rooms are minimal; there’s just space to walk around the double bed and to plonk a few items on the worktop that doubles as a desk. Beside it is the usual TV and it costs 3 euros for an hour’s access to the wifi internet link.

Lisbon airport is just up the road. Late into the evening and again from early morning, big jets came whistling low over the hotel on final approach, undercarriages down, lights squirting into the night. I thought as I read my book that it would take only one of them to get it wrong.

I had two disturbing dreams. In the first, after squeezing past two very large friendly dogs in a corridor, I was trying to descend a staircase carrying a suitcase; but the stairs got steeper and the treads narrower until mountain-climbing skills were required to advance further. The final flight was missing altogether. After dropping the suitcase I had to lower myself on to a ladder to reach the ground. There I bumped into a man who suspected that I’d stolen his property and, in spite of my assurances, he rushed off to check whether he been burgled.

In the second dream, we encountered a group of people in our London apartment, one of whom, after speaking to Jones, started to alter the rooms radically. He ripped off doors and pulled down walls, infuriating me no end. He was a bald fellow called Phil. After a confrontation, I grasped him and threw him out. I was mad with Jones for encouraging him. Someone else had spread a thick goo all over the carpets. People were treading it in and making a dreadful mess. I was distraught.

After such a disturbed night we were woken from the deepest of sleep by the alarms in our mobile phones. We struggled to turn them off in the dark. Breakfast was welcome. From the hotel we walked to the embassy. There wasn’t a soul in front of us. The official on the far side of the security window was the most helpful bureaucrat I’ve ever encountered. We struggled with the questions – parents’ ID numbers, their dates of birth, date of marriage – but he made light of it all, filling in the difficult bits himself with lots of “deceased”s and N/As.

DOG TRAINING

We had to say why we’d left the country. Let’s put “family reasons”, the young man suggested. “It’s a polite way of telling them to mind their own business.” He spent ages patiently guiding us through the rigmarole of taking finger prints, all of them. I shall write the most complimentary of letters to the ambassador - using my discretion, of course.