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!