Letter from Espargal: 17 of 2010

PYRAMID ORCHID

It is not often that you might observe my wife clutching a baggy on the Coral patio before lunch but last Sunday you might have. (I had a small medronho myself, to be sociable.) It was one of those days when she needed to steady her nerves.

We had gone walking in the valley with Evelyn, a French woman whose family has been renting a house in the village. We fetch her and drive down to our parking spot under the cork oaks, whence we embark on an hour-long circuit.

Shortly after we’d set out, Jones went back to fetch an item from the car. I pressed ahead with the dogs, leaving her to chat to Evelyn and admire the flowers along the route – the pyramid orchids are out and truly wondrous. As we returned to the car, I asked Jones for the keys. Of course, she couldn’t find them. Recalling that she’d had them in her hand, she retraced her steps. The rest of us waited at the car.

Fifteen minutes later, with no sign of Jones, I summoned help from Fintan – who drove down to rescue us. Evelyn occupied the front passenger seat while the four dogs and I squeezed into the back. I was wedged against Raymond with Bobby on my lap. Fortunately, the journey was short. Fintan waited while I sought the spare car keys, to take me back down.

I found Jones still hunting. She remembered showing Evelyn an orchid that she’d spotted in the grass verge. About an hour into her search, she found the flower again – and the keys. She swore she’d never carry keys again! From there, it was straight up to the Coral – and the baggies with which this account began.

We were back at the restaurant the following evening for an Espargal gang bang, our first alfresco meal of the summer. There’s much to be said for quaffing pints of ale over Brigitte’s excellent chicken and chips.

The French family was also having dinner, clearly at home in Coral’s French-Portuguese environment. The children were clustered around the pool table. I’ve mentioned before that Frank, the father - paraplegic from a skiing accident – comes to Portugal for specialised physiotherapy from Jodi.

Llewellyn arrived from the UK midweek, for a spell of R&R while Lucia is visiting family in Australia. He wasted no time in heading for the beach, only to report that much of it had been washed away since his last visit. Bulldozers were backing into the sea in an attempt to repair the situation.

Nelson has had another busy week clearing thickets, exposing areas that have long been obscured by impenetrable curtains of thorny creeper. I joined him from time to time, mainly to thin out the numerous saplings. Some we have dragged out with the tractor, until such time as the chain broke. Others I have cut out with the heavy secateurs.

The blanket refusal of the Greeks to balance their budget and the fiscal plight of the Portuguese (Spanish, Irish, Italians etc) is worrying. We were hearing about the Irish ghost estates, great swathes of uncompleted and unoccupied buildings, a product the construction bubble. One in five Irish houses is empty, would you believe it, and those newly occupied are worth barely half what they cost? We should be grateful Cathy if you can use your influence to persuade the Germans to bail us all out.

On the positive side, I am pleased to report that our worth is finally being recog- nised, at least by our bank. I have been sent a gold credit card, with the word PRESTIGE emblazoned across it. It’s the kind one waves around before use. At last we are going up in the world. Either that or some rascally company is trying to swell the egos and debts of near-indigent pensioners with glistening bits of plastic. Surely not!

Still on the positive side, our new TV has finally arrived, as has the SKYPE phone that Llewellyn advised us to get. Jones was much impressed on her visit to the UK by her brother’s SKYPE installation and all the money he was saving by using it. Llewellyn was kind enough to set up our phone, hooking it into the router and doing the necessary configuration.

It works like a conventional phone, independently of the computer. (All we have to work out now is how to spend all the money we’ll be saving.) Jones promptly called a friend in the UK to have a free SKYPE conversation. I have yet to take a lesson in its use.

I did, however, take a quick lesson in how to use the new TV. I had sensibly arranged for the shop to do the complicated installation. There’s an array of connections down the back of the set that would suit an aircraft cockpit.

DOWNSTAIRS

Fortunately, Luis, who made the delivery, was both helpful and knowledgeable. No longer does one just switch on the TV. One has to choose which satellite to watch or whether to link the TV to one’s computer or a USB-pen-drive movie or whatever. The picture obtained via the HDMI (as opposed to the SCART) link is just stunning, all the more so when the actual channel is being broadcast in high definition (as several now are).

UPSTAIRS

Luis was good enough to take the old thin-screen TV upstairs and set it up in the study in the place of our (even older) box TV. Once again, I marvelled at the HDMI quality. Jones swears that she can’t tell the difference but she seems content that I am delighted and that’s really what matters.

Letter from Espargal: 16 of 2010

I could start by telling you that the garden is a riot - or that the new postman is simply poking mail into whatever postbox is nearest – or that Ze Carlos has built himself a potter’s wheel. But I should probably start by telling you that Jones is home.

She arrived back Thursday lunchtime, courtesy of “bmibaby”, a budget airline that stands out from the crowd by allocating seats to its passengers rather than encouraging the usual scramble to avoid being sardined in beside the fat lady. Quite honestly, she’d probably have stood if that were the only option. She got a rave welcome from the dogs. Indeed, Ono rushed up to all the incoming passengers, wagging his tail fiercely in anticipation.

Her anxiety to be home was not because she wasn’t being royally looked after and entertained in Leamington Spa by Llewellyn and Lucia – nor because there was any pressing reason for her urgent return. It was simply that she’d expected to spend two days with her family and found herself stranded there with no certainty of when she might get back.

As I write, a selection of pictures of Barbara’s visit arrives by email – thank you Llewellyn – one or two or which you may admire for yourself.

Jones admitted to finding the whole business most unsettling. With the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano’s nearby big brother threatening a really serious upheaval and a blanket shutdown of air travel, we’re feeling a mite nervous about our looming North American trip.

First our house-sitters have to make it down here; then we have to get over the pond; later we have to get back and finally our house-sitters have to get home. A spanner in any of those cogs would bust the whole gearbox wide open.

My wife had barely returned than she plunged into her garden. Encouraged by warm weather and more rain, this is exploding upwards and outwards. Both the cultivated and the wild flowers are a delight but the weeds are winning the evolutionary race. Jonesy can’t pass one without grabbing it by the throat and ripping it out. So it sometimes takes her ten minutes to cover the few metres from the gate to the house, throttling weeds as she goes - their corpses destined for the compost mountain.

She found the house in presentable shape, courtesy of Natasha’s labours the previous day; not that I’d wish to play down my own role in keeping the place ship-shape in her absence. I confess to doing rather more vacuuming (feeding animals, irrigating plants, tending the yoghurt culture) than is my custom. So I was quite pleased to have her back, even if Ono, Dearheart and I have all had to squeeze over to make space for her in the bed at night.

As I was saying, there’s a problem with the new postman. There isn’t a day that passes without our finding a wodge of other people’s mail in our postbox, which we then religiously redeliver to the rightful boxes. One evening I got a call from Leonhilde to say that Albertina had phoned her to ask her to tell me that my bank statement had landed in her box, and that I should go around and fetch it – which I did.

WILD HONEYSUCKLE

At the request of neighbours, I phoned up the post office in my best Portuguese to report the problem. A sympathetic man listened to my tale and promised to take action. We’ll see.

Also unresolved is the problem with the new TV, the one with a broken base. The shop assured me that the suppliers would deliver another from Lisbon “rapido” but “rapido” turned out to mean a week or two. I wasn’t very happy with this and said so.

To their credit, the shop then suggested that I return the old set, saying that they could attach another base to it. But they discovered that it also needed a new column and they didn’t have one. So we wait on that front at well.

A local farmer, Ze Carlos, invited me round one rainy day to view his new hobby – making ceramics. He had con- structed his own potter’s wheel and brought in a load of clay from the fields. This he dumped into a barrel of water that he filtered, assuring me that the material was quite suitable. Certainly, the several pots, bowls and other utensils already on the table looked perfectly professional.

He put a squodge of clay on the table to demonstrate the process. It was harder than it looked, he said; I didn’t doubt it. His dad and another farmer dropped in and we watched the pot take shape. The other pots hadn’t yet been fired. Ze Carlos said he didn’t have a kiln but that he planned to fire them in an old bread oven. Nearly all the old houses have one. Indeed, there’s the remains of one at the back of our tractor shed.

On the way home I stopped at Maria and Joachim’s cottage to pick up a bag of newly- picked beans they were giving us, probably in return for the loads of chicken weeds that Jones is forever taking round. They threw in a bottle of olives as well, soaked in a mixture of oil, vinegar and garlic. They’re delicious. I shelled the beans right away and we had them for supper as part of one of Jones’s mega-salads. Our own beans are also ready for picking.

This morning we went for a trek through the hills with the dogs. It was quite warm. The dogs panted fiercely from their rabbit chases. I flicked a couple of ticks off the dogs and took another off my trousers. Jones plucked one off her neck. I can’t figure why God invented ticks – or mosquitoes for that matter!

Letter from Espargal: 15 of 2010

Saturday morning: I write to you towards the end of a week that hasn’t gone entirely to plan.

Where to start? It’s drizzling. The sky is a patchwork of uncertain blue and grey. We’ve had a decidedly damp few days. Overnight the one-thousandth millimetre of rain this season deposited itself in the rain gauge. It’s only the second time since I started recording the rainfall towards the end of the last millennium that we’ve registered a 1000 mms. By our standards that’s a lot of rain, most of it welcome – by this resident, at least - in a region more often threatened by drought than flooding.

THE 1000TH mm

In one way the showers – and intermittent squalls – have been quite useful because I haven’t had to water the more sensitive parts of Jones’s garden, something I undertook to do when she set off on a flying visit to the UK earlier in the week. She should have been safely home again by this time but like multitudes of other unfortunates she is stranded, courtesy of a plume of volcanic ash from Iceland. At least she’s in the good hands of her family in Leamington Spa. She's rebooked for Monday but whether she’ll get home that day depends as much on the vagaries of Vulcan as on Ryanair.

ADMIRING THE ORCHIDS

Being a cautious fellow, I have assumed the worst and got in a new stock of yoghurt and muesli to see me through the next few days. Fortunately, Jones left me with a large (now depleted) pot of stew, a portion of which I have heated each evening and spread over the rice (that Jones also left me), which I am sharing with the dogs. I have also bought some more rice and, under the guidance of helpful neighbour, rendered it edible by pouring it into some hot water and letting it simmer. Cooking isn’t really my thing.

WHAT TO DO IN THE RAIN?

Another venture that hasn’t gone entirely to plan has been the purchase of a thin-screen TV (cum computer screen) for the lounge. We already have one there but at 26 inches (66 cm), it’s decidedly on the small side and we have to squint to see it form the dining room table. After much research, both online and en situ, I settled on an 80 cm model from a shop in Loule that has previously served me well.

The question was how to get it to the car. There was a private parking spot just outside the store but it proved too small. So I agreed with the young lady assisting me that she would box up the set – it was a display model – and that, having fetched the car, I would pause outside the store for a moment to load the TV into the boot – which I did.

The assistant, seeing me coming, hurried out carrying the box. Declining my help she headed for the car. But with the box in front of her, she didn’t see a lurking pothole, which tripped her up. She twisted her ankle and went flying. So did the box with the TV.

Having loaded the box myself and found parking nearby, I went back to find her shocked, in pain and being assisted by passers by. As there was nothing further I could do, I came home with the TV. Before I could test it, I found that the fall had damaged the plastic column separating the set from the base. So I repackaged it and have ordered a replacement model. This time I’ll let the shop do the installation and remove the damaged set.

MIRROR IMAGE

Natasha came to do an extra day on Friday – designed to present Jones with a sparkling house on her return from the UK. With 30 minutes to spare before the Loule bus, we dropped in on the Coral for a cup of coffee. On the way back I heard an ominous clatter from the front wheel and stopped the car to retrieve a half-inch nail from the tyre. I doubted that I’d make it home before the wheel went flat but I did. And the tyre was still good this morning when we set out to walk in the valley.

THE NAIL

For the rest, life continues: the usual round of cats and dogs, working with Nelson (on our one dry day) and chores - Jones’s as well as mine although I’m not complaining.

Our commuting neighbours, David and Sarah, returned from the Isle of Wight for a month’s stay in their cottage, just across the field. I dropped round with the hounds to see them the afternoon the arrived, only to wake the poor souls up. They’d had virtually no sleep the previous night. Under the circumstances they were quite polite to me as they tried to make conversation and hide their yawns.

As I say, the week hasn’t gone entirely to plan.

Letter from Espargal: 14 of 2010

We are back; back, that is, from Sagres, where we spent a night in the pousada, courtesy of Honda.

Let me take those elements one at a time. Sagres is a popular tourist town set on dizzying cliffs in the south-western tip of Portugal. It was once the home of Henry the Navigator, the site where he is popularly supposed to have set up his school of navigation. A great fortress wall still defends a promontory on the edge of the town.

Pousadas are a group of luxury hotels, once owned by the state, several dozen of which are dotted around Portugal in spectacular and historic sites. In Spain, a similar chain is known as paradors.

And Honda, from which we bought the CRV nine months ago, gave us a voucher for a night’s stay at a pousada as part of the marketing operation.

The problem in using the voucher, as always, has been what to do with the animals during our absence. We decided to take the two smaller dogs with us and to leave the bigger ones behind, having arranged with Marie and Olly (whose dog we sometimes look after when they’re away) to walk and feed them.

The journey to Sagres used to take us the best part of three hours down narrow, busy and windey roads. These days, with the motorway and a vastly improved road system, it’s half that. Making the journey in the CRV is a joy. There’s no hint of its 4x4 engineering.

SAGRES POUSADA

Sagres pousada is situated on a rise with views in every direction. After checking in we took the dogs for a walk around the cliffs. These provide popular fishing spots for athletic anglers (who every so often get swept off or fall in, with fatal results). In the distance we spotted surfers, black specs trying to catch toy waves into the beach.

DISTANT SURFERS
For supper we walked a few hundred metres down the road – past several smart and largely empty restaurants, to a typical Portuguese eatery where, over supper, we watched an enthralling match in the Europa league between Liverpool and Benfica.

I took a generous selection of bones back to the grateful dogs, who spent the night in the car. They were quite happy there, just below our balcony, although they were relieved to lift their legs first thing in the morning. The car is their second home. We seldom go out without them. Their beds live on the (carefully covered) back seats.

If that’s a lengthy account of a night away from home, it’s only because we have some good pictures to accompany it and not much else to write about.

On the way back we stopped off at a fancy new development, Martinhal, on the outskirts of Sagres. Our attention had been drawn to it by an article sent to us by a friend in the UK. The place proved as smart as the article had promised, and was still swarming with builders. Villas – of which there were several categories – started at half a million euros. Whether anyone was buying them was another matter altogether. We didn’t stop at the sales office to enquire. The road to Sagres is littered with lonely developments, flagged with posters promising buyers substantial discounts - largely empty monuments to the good times.

I had a horrible few hours on Friday night when I discovered – on checking the Euromillions betting site – that I’d failed to place the weekly Espargal syndicate bet, in spite of my conviction that I had. Just imagine informing one’s neighbours after a notional megawin that the millions they were celebrating had gone elsewhere. I texted them with grovelling apologies and held my fingers (and breath) that none of our numbers would come up. Happily, none did….none that mattered, anyhow.

The following morning, while checking the account again, I discovered that I had indeed placed the bet. It would appear that once betting closes on Friday evening, ahead of the draw, existing bets are no longer reflected on the site – not, at least, in the “bets pending” area that I check.

The rest of our week has little new to commend it. Jones has continued to pick away in the old sheep pen. With the return of sunny weather she has also taken to watering sensitive parts of her garden once again.

Nelson has continued to clear a heavily overgrown area between two fields. He also assisted me reinforce the timber spars of the pergola above the upstairs patio. The carpenter who erected it used just a couple of screws to secure each of the spars, one of which flew off and landed in the garden during a violent storm.

In the valley below us, farmers are turning over their overgrown fields with scarifiers. I have followed their example, trying to spare the wild flowers that are everywhere in bloom. In one corner of a field our favas (beans) are nearly ready for picking.

It pains me that our modest crop compares so unfavourably with a neighbour’s, whose sturdy plants groan with beans nearby.

I have also sent off by registered post two certified copies of my passport and an application form for a new SA tax number, in the (forlorn) hope that this may actually advance my efforts to extract my modest investments from Liberty Life. I understand from an SA cousin that her emigrant brother’s efforts to do the same were equally frustrating.

Letter from Espargal: 13 of 2010

We are basking in a glow of creative satisfaction. Most of my week has gone on making a long overdue path between the house and the cisterna. Before you snort with contempt at the puniness of this achievement, you need to look at the terrain involved.

It was originally a steep fall of rocks and dirt, created by the levelling of the site for the house. Jones planted the area with trees and shrubs and it gradually transformed itself into a crowded garden, intersected by a line of uneven stepping stones that led down to the cisterna. With the growth of vegetation down the years, the stones all but disappeared. Negotiating them became a hazardous business for the unsure-footed – ditto the task of watering the garden in the dry months. Many a time I stumbled and cursed.

We should long ago have embarked on creating a clear path through this wilderness, were it not for the inevitable damage to Jones’s garden – an analogy in miniature of the conflict between developers and conservationists. Anyhow, Jones eventually gritted her teeth and, with Nelson’s assistance, I set about the task. While he did the groundwork, I took the tractor into Benafim to load up the box with the gravel we needed for the job. Just help yourself from the yard was the advice from the local supplier - which I did.

Digging out the stepping stones and widening the access was the easy bit. It took just a couple of hours. What took the next three days was finding the rocks to make steps, digging foundations for them, cementing them in place and finishing the job with an artistic flourish. The final result has been pleasing to all concerned. Nelson and I posed beside our engineering achievement while Jones took the necessary pictures to commemorate the occasion.

To celebrate the success of this enterprise, we supped at the Coral (still awaiting its “Le France Portugal” plaque), where 20 euros buys an excellent dinner for two, along with a bottle of the house reserve. I tried to fend off the local drunk who, after downing a few, feels impelled to engage all and sundry in slurry conversation. Having said which, he’s harmless, except to his own liver. Brigitte came across with a menu in French and Portuguese that we have agreed to translate into English.

Jones, for her part, has been labouring away with her pickaxe in the old sheep pen. Much of her time has been taken up replanting items that we had to clear from the new path, as well as bulbs that Raymond and/or Bobby have taken to digging up from other parts of the garden – greatly to my wife’s annoyance. It’s hard to know how to stop them.

Of course, we have continued the ritual of morning and evening walks. Last Monday morning the sky was grey with cloud. Weather forecasts were mixed. As I recall, I said to Jones before we left on a long jaunt, that it might be an idea to bring the golf brolly from the car. As she recalls, I told her that the brolly was there but that it probably wouldn’t rain. The long and the short of it is that we got soaked to the skin, all six of us. The rain started at the half-way point. We staggered back utterly sodden 90 minutes after we’d set out.

Midweek I met the postman at the post boxes. He was new and struggling to match up the mail with the indistinct and faded names on the boxes. His biggest challenge was what to do with a parcel addressed to Grandad John, Espargal – no surname or house name. I signed for it in the expectation – correct, fortunately - that it was intended for the only John in the village, a retired army officer who lives nearby and who was grateful to receive it.

Other village news concerns Donna Caterina, a great-grandmother in her 90’s who has continued to totter along the road each day on her exercise outing. At least she did until she lost her balance and fell into a drain, injuring her upper body and face. She’s back in the care of her daughters after being treated in hospital. It’s been a real fear of mine that our dogs might upset her as they rush out of the garden at the excited start of a walk.

Following the saga of our ticket booking exercise with KLM, we have received a letter of abject apology – well deserved, I may add, but also appreciated. I intend to acknowledge it.

JASMINE IN FLOWER

A still unresolved saga is that concerning my attempts to obtain the proceeds of my investments with Liberty Life in South Africa. For months I’ve been filling in forms and submitting them to the company with the assistance of financial advisers in Cape Town. There hasn’t been a conceivable complication that hasn’t arisen.

The latest, just revealed to me, is that my South African tax number (from 25 years ago) is in an obsolete format, which Liberty doesn’t recognise. Thus to obtain my money, I will have to apply to the SA tax authorities for a new number and then begin the process of claiming the investments all over again. It is a great deal easier to give money to Liberty than to get it back again. I’m in some doubt whether the proceeds, should I ever get them, will meet the mounting financial advisers’ bill.

Pause there to pull a tick off my neck and crush it beneath the haft of my letter opener, to which its remains are messily glued. What wretched creatures they are! Jones emerged from the shower the other day to find one still clinging to her tummy. It went down the loo, with a brief, unrepeatable valedictory.

BBC TV has been running a weekly series on sacred music that we have greatly enjoyed. The first programmes dealt with music from earlier composers, much of which we were familiar with. (Faure’s Requiem is in my personal top ten – not that I’ve listed the other nine.) The later programmes have featured the work of living composers, including a Pole, Henryk Górecki, whose music we found most attractive. I downloaded his 3^rd symphony (legally, on iTunes). It’s the kind of music that goes well with the lead-up to Easter.

Speaking of which, our thoughts go out to you far-flung folks this weekend. Happy Easter to us all.