Letter from Espargal: 27 of 2011

Friday afternoon: I have awoken from my siesta. Bartok’s 3rd piano concerto tinkles away on the telly (I can’t recom- mend it). Jones is occupied in the kitchen. The beasts are slumbering. The puppies have been banished to their pen in disgrace after destroying yet another pot plant. They delight in tossing out the contents and chewing up the plastic holder, an act of vandalism that both irritates and depresses my wife as she searches for the victim's remains.

Of course the weather’s hot but not as hot as that in the eastern US and Canada, which sounds truly awful.

ABOUT TO SET OUT TO LOULE FAIR

The week has wriggled along. We have water again. Paulo the plumber approved the new T-junction that Nelson and I had installed in the mains pipe, ascribing the failure of the old junction to subsidence. He advised us to lift the pipe slightly as we packed sand in beneath and around it. This I did as Jones shovelled sand into the hole. Now it remains only for one of Horacio’s workmen to pop around and replace the cobbles. Laying cobbles is one of those jobs that looks easier than it is – laying them straight and level, that is.

Paulo then discerned that the rumbling vibration that accompanied a running tap was due to a faulty water-pressure control-unit attached to the solar heaters. He promised to return with a new one later in the week, which he did, clambering up a double-ladder to get on to the roof where he squatted lotus-like on the tiles. (I am mildly envious of anybody who is able to adopt the lotus position, my own joints being located in the wrong places.) The new unit cost 26 euros and for his two visits Paulo charged us an additional 12 euros – the kind of price a London plumber extorts for answering the phone. We now enjoy vibration-free showers.

We have done our best to be good neighbours. I have three times taken Olly – he rides side-saddle on the tractor – down the hill to collect rocks for retaining walls that he is building at the bottom of his property. I sit on the tractor making light conversation while Olly heaves the rocks into the box. I find this arrangement works quite well. Then we return to the house to unload them. I lower the box and Olly removes the rocks. After the last run he led me down the steep hill below the house to show me the incipient walls, intended to prevent further wash-aways of the kind that accompanied a violent storm last winter.

Before returning home I nipped down the road to talk to Horacio, who is working on an extension to a house nearby. Horacio remains exceedingly busy in spite of the economic crisis gripping Portugal and I wanted to alert him to my hopes of installing a solar voltaic panel. I shall hear at the end of the month whether our application has been accepted by the energy authorities for this year’s quota. If so, I shall need a builder to construct the heavy concrete base required to support the panel. Horacio thought that he could fit me in. Fingers crossed!

We have also been running around once again with Russ, whose abscess failed to respond to the anti-biotics that we’re feeding him twice-daily on the vet’s instructions. (Jones has to hold Mary, aka Crocodile No. 1, while I feed Russ pill-spiked spoons of pate.) So back to the vet Russ went on Wednesday for a second opinion. The young vet concerned called in her more-experienced partner, who sedated Russ and kept him in for the day to drain the abscess.

On our return we employed one of Jones’s vests to cover the two small drains in a bid to prevent the dog from scratching them out again. Strangely, Mary has developed a small swelling in exactly the same place. Another vet, a friend of ours, thinks that both dogs are reacting either to the micro-chip or their vaccinations. On her advice, we have shaved the area and are rubbing in a hopefully helpful muti.

Before leaving the animals and arachnids theme, I can report that Jones screeched as we were folding a sheet upstairs in the study and dropped it with alacrity. (As I have said before, she’s not the screechy sort.) It emerged that Simon the Spider, who had disappeared from his perch on the ceiling, had taken up residence in the folds of the sheet instead. I could just see his hairy feet poking out.

Simon is large as well as hairy, not the sort of company that one wants in bed. I took the sheet outside and shook it over the balcony. But we’re not sure whether Simon decamped en route and is waiting in a corner for his next appearance. (Jones once awoke at the Quinta to find that the crawly feeling she had on her tummy was caused by a passing centipede, an experience from which she has not fully recovered.)

We lunched one day with a visiting former BBC colleague, Anita, who had holidayed at the Quinta. We wouldn’t have recognised her children, who as tots used to run around the garden. I hadn’t seen Anita or, for that matter, virtually any other BBC colleagues since my retirement from the corporation all of – I can’t believe it – 13 years ago. In the interim, like many of the journalists there, she too opted for redundancy and has since settled in Canada. It was interesting to compare notes. The waters flow by so fast.

Thursday we ran Olive and her daughter, Margaret, out to the airport for the latter’s return to the UK. Olive is still awaiting forms from several UK enterprises – to wind up John’s affairs. We did the round of post office and lawyer with little to report for our efforts.

We have spent long hours in spite of ourselves following the phone-hacking inquiries in the UK. Although we both felt that the whole affair had degenerated into a media feeding frenzy, we remained fascinated. It’s not every week that a scandal claims the heads of top cops and media executives as well as closing a popular newspaper and threatening to land a bunch of people in jail – Britain’s Watergate!

As one columnist complained, more attention was paid to the shaving foam that was splattered in Rupert Murdoch’s face as he testified to a parliamentary committee than to the millions of people threatened with famine in the Horn of Africa. The trouble with distant famines is that they appeal to givers’ finer feelings while a good scandal grabs you in the gut. There’s no drama like watching the mighty hanging on by their finger tips and then toppling into the void as the odds mount inexorably against them.

I am making my way through a book, War Games by Linda Polman, on the dispersal of aid to refugees, mainly in Africa – with the inevitable militia rackets, wasteful do-gooder schemes, publicity stunts and inter-agency rivalries. It makes for depressing reading. There seems to be no mission, no matter how lofty or well-intended, that doesn’t fall prey to the baser instincts of human nature or that isn’t exploited by villains for their own ends. I guess ‘twas ever thus.

Let me end with this fascinating picture of a companionable warthog that has taken to bedding down on cold nights in a bar in a Zimbabwean game park. I cannot vouch for the story but the picture speaks for itself. According to the report, the barman hands the animal the pillow on arrival. If he’s absent, it merely fetches the pillow from a couch itself. Why not?