Letter from Espargal: 12 of 2010

There ain’t much to tell. Dare I say it? We’ve had a bit of sun and a bit of rain. It hasn’t been hot and it hasn’t been cold, except maybe one evening when we ran to a fire. It’s the wind that makes the difference.

The clocks go forward early this Sunday morning. Suddenly we’ll be back into long sunny evenings. The pavement cafes will welcome the change. So will “Le France Portugal” – aka the Coral – which has just reopened after refurbishment. We stopped over for coffee and apple tart after dumping the recyclables in the nearby bins.

LE FRANCE
Jones said knowingly that the licence, stuck to the window, should read “la France” rather than "le France". This we pointed out to Celso and Brigitte over supper the same evening. We should have known better. "Snack Bar" was masculine, they explained; hence "le", as with the ship, Le France. Next time we'll know better.

The dogs have been scratching a whole lot, especially Raymond who seems to do little else when he’s not walking or eating. Jones dropped in on the vet and came back with some anti-flea muti and a receipt for 66 euros. Ouch! The fleas would be a whole lot cheaper. But given that the dogs live in the house and that Ono has somehow wheedled his way on to the bed, it’s a case of grin and bear it.

Jones has been spending a lot of time in her garden, mainly digging out weeds in the old sheep pen. At least we think it used to be a sheep pen. It might equally have held pigs or goats. The dogs look on with puzzled resignation as she wields her pick axe, as if to say that walking would be better exercise.

The other afternoon she exposed a bit of rusty old metal. At first she thought it was the remains of an ancient gate. A little further digging revealed it to be an ancient iron of the sort used to press clothes. I can remember the housemaid using just such an iron as she worked in the kitchen of my uncle’s farm in what was then the Northern Transvaal back in the 50s – the 1950s that is, for any who might be in doubt.

Speaking of gardens, we've been admiring that of our commuting neighbours, Sarah and David, whose flowers have been thriving in their absence. Sarah is one of those people gifted with green fingers. I hope that the flowers still look as good when the couple arrive back down next month.

For my part I’ve been labouring in the park with Nelson to improve the series of steps that lead up the various banks to the gate at the top. Unusually, Nelson is a gypsy. Unusually, that is, in that most gypsies still keep to themselves and don’t run much to manual labour, except for picking crops. Nelson works well. He arrives in his BMW on the stroke of 8. The old car looks good, at first glance anyhow, until one sees the mirror sticky-taped on to the door – and listens to the uneven grunt of the engine.


We went out together on the tractor to hunt for flattish rocks. They have to be big enough to remain in place and small enough to heave into the tractor box. We came back with a couple of dozen that we dug into the banks of what were once a series of terraces. They look good and offer reasonably secure and comfortable passage in both directions.

Afterwards, Jones put Nelson to work for an hour or two to clear a wicked patch of brambles and thorny creeper in the adjacent field. They've spent years establishing themselves and give as good as they get.

MORE GARDENING

We joined our film-going friends, David and Dagmar, at the cinema, the men opting to see “The Edge of Darkness” and the women “It’s complicated”. David and I gave our film good marks, a solid thriller, marred only by the chatterers in front of us who prompted me to find another seat. The ladies were equally pleased with their chick flick.

I’m reading a book that Cathy gave me, Quantum by Nanjit Kumar, on the lives of the people who made the breakthroughs in quantum physics. How fascinating to read that Einstein came fourth out of five in his university class and had the very devil of a job finding employment thereafter. Has to be a moral there somewhere.

At my English class on Thursday – the second of the week – we discussed the downgrading of Portugal’s credit- worthiness by the Fitch ratings agency, and the implications. The government has just passed an austerity budget that's really going to hurt. We had already touched in class on Portugal's membership of the so-called PIIGS’s group in the Eurozone (Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy and Greece).

It’s a most unfortunate acronym. If the UK used the euro, it would certainly be a member too. Then I guess it would have to be the PIIGUKS or the UKPIIGS. As we receive our pensions in sterling and spend them in euros, this is not just academic stuff. We listened with interest to the Chancellor’s pretend budget midweek - and wondered which party would be in government in a few weeks' time.

Okay, as I said, there’s not much to tell.