Once again the week has revolved around the works for the solar panels. On Monday morning, the concrete delivery that was due on Monday afternoon arrived with five minutes' notice. I barely had time to send a warning SMS to the neighbours affected before the huge yellow pump came grunting down the road, scraping the leaves from the trees as it did so.
The vehicle took up station close to the delivery point while the operator sought out Horacio the builder. The former was less than happy. As he pointed out, the narrow road was flanked on both sides by steep banks, which meant that the pump could not brace itself as required by fully extending its feet.
After some discussion, although he was within his rights to refuse, he agreed to put out the feet partially and give things a try. As the crane did not have to lean over more than a few degrees, I felt that there was little risk involved.
Close behind came the concrete truck, hard on the heels of a friend, Desi, and her family, who had arranged to pick up carobs. While they set to picking, the truck nuzzled up to the pump, which gushed a river of wet concrete into Horacio’s heavily reinforced shuttering. The overseer recounted that he’d made a similar delivery to another expat, whose insecure shuttering had burst asunder. Seriously bad news! There’s not much you can do with a lake of rapidly drying concrete.
We had no such problems. The only difficulty was directing the hose, as the concrete began piling up on one side. Horacio clambered up the structure and grasped the hose himself. In five minutes the job was done. The operator indicated that a bonus might not go amiss in the circumstances and the two behemoths trundled back down the road and out of our lives.
On Monday evening Mario returned on his digger to fill in the trench carrying the heavy cable across the field.
On Tuesday, Horacio’s workers were back to remove the shuttering. If it stayed in place more than a day or two, Horacio explained, the planks tended to stick to the concrete and to shatter as they were levered off.
Pedro worked with a big jackhammer to cut a trench across the concrete driveway and up to the electricity box. Horacio is juggling his workers to cater simultaneously for the needs of other clients. He has as much work on his hands as he can handle, which I assure him is a good problem to have.
On Wednesday Pedro returned to finish the job and to patch the holes in the concrete cube where the reinforcing rods had been cut back. The metal ends are then buried in concrete to prevent them from rusting. From time to time I would take the tractor a kilometre down the road to Horacio’s building site, Pedro riding aft, for another bag of cement or box of sand.
On Thursday Pedro and Carlos returned to rebuild the electricity post outside the house to take the new connection. By law in Portugal, all buildings have to have their utility connections at the property boundary to enable easy access and reading. The difficulty arises with unfenced old houses, such as ours at the Quinta, where the original connections are made in the house façade.
Later occupants then fence the property, which means that the meter reader has to brave the dogs, a hazardous venture. The chap who reads our (external) meter here gets such a barking each time that he doesn’t hang around a moment longer than necessary.
On Friday Luis the electrician came along to make the connections. At this point we are all ready for the installation of the solar panels early next week. After that, as I’ve explained to Jones, all we have to work out is what to do with the money rolling in from the sale of our electricity to the national grid. Jones, as ever, is not easy to convince about these things.
While I’ve been running around with the workers, she has been cutting back the vegetation on the recently acquired plot, which is heavily overgrown after years of neglect. It has a number of useful carob trees – we’re still busy picking – as well as small oaks and indigenous bushes. Already the area is starting to look more like a park than a jungle. We sort the cuttings into two piles, one to shred and the other to burn.
For the first time we get a good view of the house from the east, a most pleasant one as you may judge for yourselves.
Tuesday night we went to Fatacil, the Algarve’s big industrial, food and craft fair, held at Lagoa, some 30 minutes away. It’s extraordinarily popular. The roads are parked nose to tail for a kilometre in every direction.
We arrived in good time to find a table for smoked ham and cheese sandwiches. That was the best bit. There were fewer serious displays than usual and more home-craft of the kind one finds everywhere and seldom purchases. We had hoped to come across a new wood-burning stove on one of the displays but came home disappointed. Our only trophy was a bottle of olive oil from a kiosk that, like many, wasn’t doing any business. Jones has several times been moved more out of pity than need to support such ventures.
One evening, Ermenio - a farmer to whom we give most of our carobs in exchange for produce - invited me down to the valley where he grows his crops. Laid out on the valley floor were several hectares of flourishing tomatoes, peppers, melons and watermelons.
What struck me most was the excessive waste of items that did not meet market requirements. Any tomato or melon with the least mark was simply tossed aside. The strips between the crops were strewn with thousands of rotting tomatoes. Nobody would buy them, Ermenio commented; consumers check each item separately and simply ignore anything that's imperfect. I guess it's true but the waste is terrible.
On the tech front my sister, Cathy, in Berlin has managed to obtain a new remote control for our German-made satellite box, which she is posting down. With luck it may cure the problem that we have encountered with radio channels. Meanwhile, my computer and my smartphone are standing in. On Llewellyn’s advice, I downloaded a free Android application (TuneIn Radio) that’s given us excellent smartphone access the to the BBC, whose World Service and Radio 4 channels have long made up our rising and setting audio diet. The phone speaker is strong enough to obviate the need for headphones.
After the failure of yet another page counter on my blog site, I did a lot of research and eventually downloaded and installed a model offered by StatCounter. This offers a useful range of information about visitors to the site. I also discovered what I should have known before, that Google itself gives all kinds of visitor information on the blogspot site if one looks for it under Stats.
PRIDE OF PERU
Thursday’s post brought with it a revised water invoice from Loule council, following my petition to the President for a reduction in July’s bill (as per last week’s blog). The President, God bless him, has seen fit to reduce the bill from €269 to €96, given the circumstances. So it was with lighter hearts that we continued from the post boxes to Benafim for coffee and toast at the Coral.
En route we bumped into Horacio, from whom we were grateful to learn of a speed trap a few hundred metres down the main road. There’s a 50 kph limit on stretches of road that are deemed to be within villages even when there are few houses in sight.
Since this is not a country where speed limits are taken seriously and since Portuguese motorists are always in a hurry, the police do good business. It’s common to see oncoming motorists flashing their lights to warn of speed traps ahead.
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