Letter from Espargal: 19 of 2010

As so often, we are back from the valley and the wondrous wild flowers tossing around in the wind. By we I mean two humans and six dogs. I drive. Jones sits in the back with Ono, Pricks, Ermie and Poppy, our two guest bitches (on her lap); the brothers go in the boot. We find this the most felicitous arrangement.

Jones walks Ermie and Poppy. I take Pricks, the others run free on our hour-long circuit , most of it anyhow. I put them on leads as we pass farmers planting acres of melon seedlings along the route. Ermie dives into every bush she can find, to be tugged out again by Jones. Our procession is something between a zoo and a circus.

Which leads me to think of the Pope’s visit to Portugal. After touring Lisbon in his pope-mobile, he’s been doing his thing at Fatima, where great, flat-waving crowds are in evidence. I have watched the scenes in fascination, wondering how I ever came to spend ten years of my life within such embrace.

It’s like looking in through a glass window from which I once looked out. I wish I could take this guy more seriously - as presumptuous as it is to doubt the credentials of someone who has been chosen under divine guidance.

JONES SUNSET

Another drama that we have followed has been the shotgun romance of the Conservatives and Lib Dems in the UK. I discussed the post-election horse trading with my English class, who are accustomed to Portugal’s system of proportional representation. They found it hard to get to grips with a “first past the post” system or the idea of voting for a person rather than a party.

On the domestic front we are preparing for the arrival of our house sitters this weekend and for our own departure for North America on Tuesday. All being well, we fly via Toronto to the US to join members of Barbara’s family at a retreat on Chesapeake Bay. Then we have a few days each in Washington, New York, Princeton (with Bevan) and Quebec before heading to Vancouver (the Chris Joneses) and finally Calgary (the Bensons).

I hope to be able to check and respond to emails along our route. The next blog will await our return in mid-June. Whether we depart/ return on time may depend on the whims of the Icelandic volcano. There were scenes of travel chaos this week when a plume of ash closed Faro airport for 24 hours.

I arose early one morning on behalf of departing neighbours to check online that the airport had reopened. Happily for them, it had.

There’s a pause as Jones summons me to help find Ermie, who has discovered a hole in our fence and escaped – again! Last time she took off, she made it all the way home. This time we find her gambolling in a field nearby.

Nelson and I spent a day sorting out the north garden, which had disappeared under a jungle of weeds about to go to seed. He built up heaps of cuttings and I of prunings. Jones kept on popping down to ensure that we didn’t rip out the more desirable wild flowers.

It took four groaning tractor loads to shift the vegetation from the garden to the compost mountain. Nelson forked them on to the tractor box and I piled them high.

We could glimpse Natasha on the patio, cleaning the windows ahead of the arrival of our house sitters. The house is full of huge windows that make for as much cleaning as they do light. Jonesy likes big windows even though they’re unPortuguese. The tradition is thick-walled houses with small windows. That way the interiors are cooler in summer and warmer in winter.

I have been to Faro to renew my international driving licence. Although I have never been asked for this document while driving abroad, Sod’s Law says I will be if I don’t have it.

En route I stopped off at Honda to buy a litre of oil, having emptied the top-up bottle that Honda supply with their new cars. I idly took out a fiver to pay for my purchase and nearly fell over when I was asked for 24 euros. It was black gold the salesman assured me. He wasn’t joking. Pity that so much of it is floating around in the Gulf of Mexico.

Twice we have supped with UK friends, Mike and Lyn, who are staying in one of Idalecio’s cottages. They are both keen photographers and have educated us down the years in the Algarve’s wild flowers and birds.

There’s no better way to end the day than with baggies at the Coral, where Jones is arranging a chicken dinner for our house sitters this weekend. Ermie accompanied us to an outside table. She doesn’t like being left alone. The boys wait in the car, impatient for their supper. It’s good to sit in the evening sun and watch the passing show.

This includes, Jose the tractor dealer, who uses one of his display tractors to fetch a piece of heavy equipment from his truck, parked on a vacant lot across the road.

He knows that Jones has harboured doubts about the wisdom of my tractor purchases and he loves to display the text message I once sent him asking what he’d give me on a trade-in. As I point out to Jones, my tractor earns its keep. As she points out to me, the older model I used to have would have done just as well.

Letter from Espargal: 18 of 2010

JONES SKY

This letter, like a neighbour’s car, has a starting problem. The literary engine turns over but won’t catch. One unsatis- factory opening paragraph after another coughs to a halt. Let me pick up the letter half way; I can see no other solution.

LLEWELLYN PICTURE

On Monday evening, Llewellyn’s last with us, we went to the Angolana in Loule for supper. The Angolana is a popular eatery squeezed into the back streets. Most restaurants would count themselves lucky in these hard times to fill their tables once a night; the Angolana does so twice a night. It conjures up good food at the right prices, swiftly served in a pleasant ambience. These days the restaurant is run by its Angolan founders’ children although now the cooks are beefy east European ladies.

LLEWELLYN PICTURE

We had barely been assigned a table than I had to hurry to the loo. Dropping my trousers, I hunted around for what I strongly (and correctly) suspected was a tick trying to have supper on me. I was able to collar the little brute and dispose of him. For the rest of the meal I imagined ticks crawling over my every limb.

Another day, Jones emerged from lunch in town to stand beside the car in the afternoon sunshine. As I followed, she gestured urgently at the car windows. All were up and she feared for the dogs. Taking her by the arm, I strolled a few yards down the parking lot to where our car stood (with windows down to give the dogs ample fresh air.)

THE REAL THING

A woman diner on the restaurant patio had followed this mini-drama with amuse- ment and was convulsed at its conclusion. I was rather amused myself. Jones’s lame excuse for this error was that the other car was the same colour and shape as ours. I could have forgiven her had she not picked a greatly inferior model.

I have warned my English class that I shall be away for several weeks from mid-May, that’s assuming the good will of the Icelandic volcano, which is spewing anew. Our lesson concerned the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with words like rig, gusher and slick, which find no obvious translation.

JONES & BOBBY - LLEWELLYN

As usual fierce arguments erupted about the most suitable choice of words. You would never have suspected that you were in an English class. (I learn as much of our adopted language during these sessions as in our Portuguese lessons.) Portuguese often just incorporates such words as its own, its speakers hardly more away of the English origins than we are of English’s widespread borrowings.

Nelson and I have put in a couple more days’ work in the fields and the garden. I strimmed, mulched and poisoned (the worst offenders) while he took out the wild celery and thorns.

Jones decided reluctantly (because the bees were still busy in the flowers) that the time had come to rip out the ageing wild flowers and borage that always fill the garden at the start of summer. Nelson heaved their accumulated corpses on to the tractor and then forked them on to the weed mountain that grows ever higher on the Casanova field (so-called because we bought it from the Casanovas).

I have my chainsaw back from Vitor the mechanic, who kindly agreed to service it for me when (like this letter) I couldn’t get it to start. He phoned to say that it needed a new blade (as opposed to a chain) as the old one had been damaged by overheating.

GARDEN POPPIES - LLEWELLYN

He later explained that the problem had been caused by the presence of fuel in the oil chamber and oil in the fuel chamber. I could hardly believe it. In my many years of chain-sawing I have never confused the two. I tried to recall whether I’d lent the saw out.

Whatever the case, there was no point in arguing with the facts. So gathering the shreds of my street cred, I paid him and retired from his workshop. I suspect that he will dine out on what happens when estrangeiros get their hands on power tools.

We have picked our fava beans. The yield was disappointing, poor cousins of the fine crop growing in Leonhilde’s adjacent field. Even so, the beans half filled a plastic barrel and took me several hours to shell one night, over TV soccer. Jones has since cooked the beans and frozen most of them. She mixes them into her salads. They’re delicious, all the more so for being the product of our own sowing and reaping.

Friday afternoon we drove to Quarteira for a “bread festival”. This turned out to be half a dozen kiosks offering the public a taste of local breads. None of the bread was for sale. We were not pleased. Jones managed to obtain a fresh loaf and some rolls from a local bakery. Prickles, who wangled his way into the car as ever, turned up his tail at various earthy points and laid a Gran Prix (pronounced "pricks") special on the cobbles instead. To my credit, I scooped it up. This, I should add, is a very un-Portuguese thing to do.

Speaking of dogs, we have six for a few days. Two belong to neighbours who are away, one set whose return is delayed by a few days. Both visitors are bitches that get along with the lads. So far they have also gotten along with each other. Fingers crossed.

I planned to sit up fairly late on the night of the UK elections in order to discern the outcome. But the outcome proved hard to discern and nature soon bid me to bed. Llewellyn, back home, was highly frustrated by the speculation that filled the news channels, to judge by his acerbic text messages. This was, I informed him, the price of free speech. The information was of little consolation.

And finally, we have this picture of Darius, the world’s biggest rabbit. He is featured with our London NBC friends, Nancy and Brian, during a visit to the NBC studio. To get a better idea of just how big Darius is, take a look at the following photo (which I have borrowed)! Now that’s what I call a bunny! I wonder what the boys would make of him, and who'd be chasing whom?