Letter from Espargal: 24 of 2010

To know what dreams look like, you might gaze upon 13 hectares of terraced hillside on Monchique mountain, with views both south and west to the sea. This airy property, including two ruined cottages, has been acquired by our friends, Eddie and Leslie, who plan to turn it into their future home.

If we hadn’t seen for ourselves how Eddie wove his spell on the elderly cottage they acquired north of Messines, we might harbour doubts about the venture. But he knows exactly what he’s in for and Leslie is clued up on Portuguese bureaucracy – vital assets to prevent dreams turning into nightmares.

Once the ruins are restored – and, yes, they acknowledge that will take time – theirs will be among the highest houses in the Algarve. Utilities are few. Water trickles from the earth and electricity will come from the sun and the wind. Their reward will be forever views and a summer several degrees cooler than ours.

Winters are likely to be a mite cold and damp. But they’re prepared for that.

Extensive terracing testifies to the labour of generations of Portuguese, who lived from the land. It’s hard to credit the size of the rocks they heaved into the high terrace walls or the sheer amount of work that went into levelling the earth.

We were reminded of our own dreams ten years ago when we contemplated turning two ruins and two acres in Espargal into our own future home. It wasn’t easy going but we’ve not had a moment’s regret.

Midweek I was introduced by Natasha to her friend, Natalia - the two names appear to be interchangeable in Russian - who wants me to help her improve her English. We met at a pavement café in Loule to assess each other. Natalia is in her early thirties with a young daughter.

In halting English she told me that she and her husband had lived for a time in Germany where she had acquired a degree in economics. She was now studying Business English with the same German university. Her problem was that she had no-one to speak to. She showed me her books – and I whistled at the advanced level of the exercises. I have agreed somewhat tentatively to begin lessons next week. Of course, she already speaks fluent Portuguese.

We’ve been pausing to watch the melon man and his crew each morning as we walk in the valley. Pickers toss the huge water-melons to a catcher, who loads them into a container. This way the plants are trampled as little as possible. I wouldn’t care to do the catching. The melons weigh several kilos each and a miss would prove excruciating.

A tractor equipped with a fork-lift loads the containers on to a lorry and off to market the melon man goes. He’s a generous fellow who always offers us as many slices as we can manage. And when he’s finished picking at the end of the season, he invites us to help ourselves to what’s left on the land. It’s an invitation that Jones takes seriously. I take care to keep the dogs off his melon fields.

I have achieved a goal for which I’ve long been striving, one that gave me enormous if ridiculous satisfaction. The story begins when a niece introduced me to the fiendish computer card game known as Spider Solitaire. My aim has been to complete a game (using 2 suits) in 100 moves or fewer, something that other players claimed online to have achieved.

It is a ferociously difficult target. Three times in three years I hit 101 moves. Then on Wednesday I did it - in 98 moves. Never mind how many thousand attempts this took. As I confided to Jones, I had resolved not to play the game again if I’d achieved my aim. So far so good. It feels like going on diet.

We were delighted to get a call from Margaret in the UK to say that the cast had been removed from the ankle she broke while house-sitting for us in May. To her relief X-rays confirmed that the bone had knitted. She had been warned that surgery would otherwise be necessary.

Thursday evening saw a combined party for Jonesy and Pauline (a neighbour), both of whom celebrate their birthdays at this time of year. The venue was inevitably the Coral (now renamed Snack Bar Le France Portugal), where Brigitte had prepared a feast for us.

Barbara had ordered snacks for ten. In the event the food could easily have fed the five thousand. The best we could do was to share the delicacies and desserts with patrons at other tables; we also brought a load home with us.

Brigitte’s 5-year old son, Joey, then challenged me to a game of pool and was delighted to wipe the board with me. Although he can barely see over the table, he plays a remarkably good game and is only going to get better. I used to be reasonably adept at snooker myself but that was in the Marist Brothers’ colleges where we would often pass an evening around the tables some 40 years ago.

I think (on the basis of a quick phone call to the bank) that I may finally have extracted my cash from Liberty Life in South Africa – policies that matured when I turned 65. You may recall the frustrations I expressed earlier in the year.

Now, after endless form-filling and requests for more information, new documents and even a new SA tax number, I can report success. The key was my introduction by a friend to a SA financial company (Ternary) that took over the process, emailing reams of documents that I merely had to sign and send back.