How to make this week’s letter sound different from last week’s letter or next week’s letter – that’s the question. As ever, the pups have grown, the workmen are hard at it, we’ve been tramping the hills and we’re seven days older. Something different was the hailstorm that rolled in out of the black early one morning.
We were woken by a horrendous drumming on the roof that startled the whole household. A voice on the other side of the bed wondered whether one had parked the car under the carport the previous evening or left it out in the open. As it happens, one had left it out in the open; (no hailstorms had been forecast). 
So one staggered downstairs in vest & shorts, groped around in the hall cupboard for the keys, skidded across a carpet of ice under pelting hail to the car, scrambled into the driver’s seat and then reversed the car into the murk surrounding the carport. The hailstorm promptly ceased. Although the hail stones were the size of marbles the episode happily left the car undamaged. The damage to the driver’s nervous system is still being assessed. Two days after the event, hail was still piled up in little mounds in shady spots.
HAIL STONESThat wasn’t the only disturbance to one’s slumbers. Tuesday afternoon, as one was slipping sweetly into the arms of Morpheus, one’s mobile phone began to perform in one’s pocket. To answer it one had to come back to earth from a distant planet. The caller was a Portuguese gentleman anxious to know whether the house phone was working again – it’s been out for a week. A quick check established that it was back in order. What was the problem, I enquired. An external broken wire had been repaired, said he. Little wonder that Rui from the computer shop had had no luck fiddling around under my desk.
What else? Well Jonesy’s room in Casa Nada is coming along nicely. I spent a day and a half crouched under the ceiling, laying the mezzanine floor. I thought I’d done a pretty good job but Jones promptly discovered a minor gap showing daylight between the planks. I tried to point out that the planks were not completely straight and that some gaps were inevitable. 
Downstairs – in fact, under the stairs – Idalecio has been working on the mini- bathroom. (He was due to assist friends flying out from the UK but they are among the thousands whose flights were cancelled as the snow closed airports.) The bathroom walls are up and most of the pipes have been laid. 
All that lacks is the door, the floor, the electrics and utensils. Jonesy wasn’t pleased to see that we’d used the compressed- wood shelves from a quick-fit cabinet to create a ceiling beneath the stairs. I assured her (honestly)that we could easily get several more cut to size, a service offered by two local hypermarkets. After much measuring of the stair beams and muttered calculations, I drove into Loule to order the stair treads from the carpentry firm there. The stairs are wide and the boss man suggested oak treads. I took his advice. They should be ready on Monday afternoon, he said.
At the bottom of the garden, Carlos has been knitting an iron jersey around the lower fossa. It’s hard work that calls for calloused builder’s hands; the job is finickety and can't be done while wearing gloves. Like Helder before him, Carlos found the work bitterly cold out of the sun and in the wind. 
Temps have barely risen into double figures all week. (Yes, I know that Northern Europe is freezing its butt off!) Even so, the ironwork is almost done and Horacio’s team should be back next week, weather allowing, to put up the shuttering and pour the cement. As it happens, the outlook is actually pretty wet – and the weather may well not allow. On the literary front I have completed Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth, (thank you Cathy) an attempt to convince creationists that they have got it wrong (or at least to convince doubters that creationists have got it wrong). He laments that according to regular polls in the United States some 45% of Americans believe God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years. I wonder whether such people also believe that God supplied Adam and Eve with a house in the woods, a range of clothes and a ready-made declined & conjugated language in which to speak to each other. Maybe they never think about such things. Anyhow, I don't intend to fight Dawkins’ battles.
Speaking of language, I have just started on Guy Deutscher’s Through The Language Glass, highly recommended by the critics. I am far enough only to say that reading his prose is a pleasure. I hope that in due course I shall become considerably wiser too.
The puppies……! the puppies intrude daily ever further into our lives. They now look forward to our arrival on the south patio. They are as anxious to play as they are to pile into their food. When we let them out of their confined area, they dash around madly, alarming the other dogs, which take refuge on the divan, peering anxiously down lest the puppies should leap up beside them. 
The little animals are growing rapidly into real dogs. They are beautiful beyond description and they are very demanding of attention. At least keeping their corner clean is a huge and endless job. Things would be much easier in the summer months when the pups might live outside for much of the day. 
But in the cold wet weather, there is little option but to keep them indoors. They get their waterbottles to cuddle up to and even their own heater at night. I took several short videos on my phone, which I’ve transferred to the computer. But my efforts to upload them to the blog have come to nothing.
Last weekend we briefly had the pleasure of the company of my niece, Erica, whom we last saw while she was a design student at Goldsmiths in London. The student has since become a young working woman; we had several years’ absence to catch up on. She was lucky enough to be with us on the sunniest day of the week and joined us for a long, chatty stroll through the valley as well as a day’s lazy touring. 
She was equally lucky to beat the bad weather on her return - to say nothing of the striking Spanish air controllers who have brought misery to hundreds of thousands of travellers. They earn a fortune already. Greed and power, that's a dangerous combination.
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