Letter from Espargal: 2 of 2011

It’s a Saturday afternoon almost too pleasant to be inside the house writing a letter. The sun is shining, the temperature is mild, the pups are squeaking, the almond blossom is exploding on the trees around us. We are not freezing as the Calgarians are, up to our necks in water like the Queenslanders, or mud like the Brazilians – nor are we revolting as the Tunisians are.

In general, we have a great deal to be thankful for, albeit that for the umpteenth week I’ve had to write to other members of the Espargal syndicate to explain why we have failed yet again to win the Euromillions jackpot.

Jones has nipped down the road, having discovered in a cupboard some Christmas gifts that she wrongly thought she had given to the neighbours for whom they were intended. Idalecio has gone home, having spent the morning completing the wall that he has been building around the Casa Nada fossa. The wall will serve both to hide the fossa and to hold the sand needed to support it.

Idalecio is a natural wall builder. Although it’s heavy work, he admits to enjoying it – much more than building walls with bricks. Using stones is so much more creative. Each stone has to be selected for its niche – and then trimmed with a hammer for a face or a fit. The end result is always pleasing. Our garden is replete with walls that Idalecio has built and there is seldom a day when we don’t appreciate them.

Also gone home are Pedro and Aurelio, who have spent much of the past week working on two of our projects. One of those is to lay down an electricity feed from the house to Casa Nada. The electrician overseeing the work said we’d need much weightier cables than the one that’s been linking the two buildings. And Horacio suggested (sensibly) that we bury the new feed to render it both safe and invisible.

To this end, Pedro dug up a row of cobbles from the side of the house and spent two days jackhammering a channel along the side of the carport. It was a long, slow job but Pedro is very good at that kind of thing and, unlike me, has a supportive back. Aurelio then laid out a long coil of protective plastic sheathing in which to house the cable when the electrician returns next week.

That done, the pair of them set about constructing the pillars to take Fintan’s old gates at the tractor entrance to the property. As instructed by Horacio, they dug and jackhammered large holes for the foundations (Horacio does nothing by halves) and have since cemented in the iron skeleton for the pillars.

My part in all this was to tractor up loads of sand and gravel for Horacio’s workers from the pile that Paulo, the delivery man, had dumped at the bottom of the property.

Equally, Idalecio and I made 4 trips to the rock-ridden bushveld on the fringes of the village to load the tractor with stones for his wall.

(Note the scorpion that was living under one of the rocks that he removed!) We live in a rocky part of the world. Rocks are free for the taking. Local farmers are delighted to have them removed, although one could spend a year doing it without noticing the difference.

Between the weather, the workmen and the animals, Natasha had a tricky cleaning task – although she managed well enough.

There was one seriously foolish thing I did that I must confess to. At the suggestion of my computer guru I asked for our phone line to be changed from an ISDN to an analogue line. It was simple enough, he said, and would speed up my internet connection.

BJ DAWN

To bring about this change, I had to fill in a complicated form and send it to our phone company which in turn had to send it on to Portugal Telecom, who eventually despatched a man to do the work.

“What about fitting a filter to the line for the internet connection?” I asked him as he finished up. That wasn’t on his instruction list, said he, and he went on his way.

MORE DAWN

So I phoned the computer shop. Could they fit the filter and a new (analogue) router.

Yes, they could, as long as PT hadn’t cut off the ADSL signal.
PT assured me that they hadn’t.

Along came a nice lad from the computer shop to fit the router. But there was no ADSL signal on the line and the router didn’t work.

The lad phoned PT to ask them to reinstate the ADSL link. Although this required only the pushing of a button somewhere, PT insisted on sending somebody around. Would the 21st of January suit me?

LAST DAWN

I supposed that it would, if that was the first available date. Then the PT man (all this over the phone with lots of lengthy pauses) said sorry. He’d just noticed that I wasn’t a PT customer. I would have to ask my phone company to request PT to reinstate the ADSL signal on the line.

There’s more but I suspect that’s probably enough. Welcome to Portugal!

And by the way, our ISDN phones don’t work any more! Jones is not best pleased.

THAT WALL - AGAIN

What else? Old Chico’s goats are back after camping up the hill for a couple of weeks and Chico is pleased.

We went to see “Inside Job” at the cinema, an overly long documentary on the great financial crisis from which we may be emerging – revealing but not for the faint-hearted.

HOW TO MAKE A BED WITHOUT DISTURBING THE CAT

Cousin Jud is due to arrive here on Sunday for a visit of several days. I have acquired several bottles of good red wine. (The previous sentence has no necessary connection with the preceding one.)