Friday is half done. It began, like most days, with a leisurely walk around the park with the dogs. Jones then stayed behind with Raymond (who is still nursing an infected pad) while I took the rest of the pack on the Pole Path circuit. (All our animals are “who” rather than “which”, I suppose because they are all personalities in their own right – and it doesn’t feel right to refer to a personality as a “which”.) Jones normally comes with me on the walk but she has stayed behind these past few days as she couldn’t abide Raymond’s agonised howls as we left him behind.
The Pole Path, our regular morning walk, is so called because it follows a line of medium tension electricity poles for 30 minutes around the shoulder of Espargal hill. The route is rocky and awkward, the more so on hot, sweaty, fly-tormented mornings when the puppies are pulling madly every which way and their leads are getting tangled up in the bushes. (Our temperatures are still in the high 20s.) So it’s always a relief to bundle the gang back through the gate in the perimeter fence and to return to the house to change my perspiration-soaked shirt and vest.
From there it was up to Benafim to fill up the car (ouch! - diesel is now bumping up against €1.5 a litre – petrol is even more), recycle the bottles, cans and paper and – most important – retire to the Coral for coffee, toast, jam and medronho. Celso is happy to provide such simple fare although he’s not offering meals while Brigitte, who does the cooking, is back in France.
By the time one gets home, not much of the morning is left. In fact, one is lucky to make it back by midday. We have, as I may have noted before, found retirement to be much more demanding than we anticipated.
That’s the point at which I have to pause and reflect on what news, if any, we have to convey – and on what we can dress up as news if we don't.
Well, Thursday we took off to lunch with Olive at Zé-Maria, our favourite fish restaurant on Faro Beach. Patrons seat themselves beneath the awning on a patio that fringes the sand. We have a favourite table in the corner, beneath which the dogs crouch to keep an eye on any other diners’ pets. Impressive waves were breaking on the beach just below us. The restaurateur, who was hard pressed, found time to ask after John, who had dined there with us shortly before he died. We raised our glasses to him anyhow. His birthday would have been this weekend.
Thence to the Algarve Forum to find out why our neighbour, Marie, wasn’t receiving the SMS messages that Barbara sent to her although Barbara was getting Marie’s. (As Jones and Marie communicate quite a lot by SMS, this situation was more serious than it might sound.) First we went along to Vodafone, with whom Jones and I have contracts. It must be, said the young man to whom I spoke, because Marie had somehow blocked Jones’s number on her phone. She needed to check her message filter. “Oh,” we said, and then tried the same question at Optimus, Marie’s operator, just down the corridor. But the bimbo there didn’t have a clue. In the event, the Vodafone man was right and Jones is once again communicating normally with Marie.
On Wednesday a large envelope arrived from the EDP with a five-page contract for the purchase of electricity from us. All that I was required to do was to sign it and return it – which I did the same day. I am anxious that the EDP engineers should come along to connect up the solar array before Jones and I go to Germany to visit Cathy and family on October 11. Portugal is meanwhile shuddering under suggestions that electricity prices will rise by 30% next year, on top of an electricity VAT hike from 6% to the top rate of 23%.
At the same time I went looking for a sheet of acrylic plexiglass with which to seal off the upper section of the kitchen window through which the cats enter and leave the house. I should explain that our large double-glazed sliding doors make it almost impossible to install a cat-flap short of hacking through the double walls of the house. Instead, Jones leaves the sliding kitchen window open wide enough to allow the cats passage. They typically spend the day in the fields and the night in the house – running Mary’s gauntlet as they commute.
With the approach of autumn, we were keen to block off the upper part of the open window in order to minimize the draught. Plexiglass proved to be available only in large, expensive sheets. Instead I acquired a €2 sheet of polystyrene from which I cut a strip, at the bottom of which I carved an arched doorway for the cats. The cats would appear to be perfectly happy with this arrangement. (I recount this project in some detail in the hope of impressing my home-improvement ace brother in law whose own exploits so often impress us.)
I have been in further communication with a firm that supplied me – via Amazon - several weeks late with rubber gaskets of the kind required to seal glass jars. I discover that the reason for their concern with the mega-bungled delivery is the poor feedback they got from me as a result. They are most anxious for me to remove this black mark from their online copybook. I have responded affably, asking them first kindly to explain how the series of bungles came about.
The best time of day is around 7.30 pm, as the sun sets and Jones, having watered the garden, returns from feeding the stray dog and several cats at the bottom of the village. I have by that time walked and fed our dogs, and settled myself on the front patio with a beer (summer) or a glass of wine to the lullaby buzz of the evening insects in the garden. The puppies engage in prolonged play-fighting, thrust and parry, with pauses for visits to the water bowl.
We have, come to mention it, recently discovered a most acceptable boxed red wine produced by an M J Freitas – three litres for 6 euros. While the majority of boxed wines are aimed squarely at the bottom end of the market, Mr Freitas’s product is distinctly middle class and saves a great deal of hauling bottles in and out of the car. I should be very pleased to introduce any visitors to it.
I endeavour not to consume more than a glass or two because I have to settle down after supper and the ten o’clock news (the dogs scattered around my foam mattress on the lounge floor) to the translations that I have undertaken on behalf of the houseboat outfit on the Alqueva dam. You will appreciate the need for such services if you look at their website, which currently offers in its English section such jewels as:
“Dinamizar the candle as tourist product of excellency….“
“Creation of training offers in the area of the fast candle and cruise”
There are times when online translation sites, wondrous as they are, simply do not do the job.
September seems to have slipped away. How strange! It was just the other day that we were welcoming it.
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