I write on a fine Friday morning. Through the glass doors of the study, beneath a mild blue autumn sky, the wind is playing in the tree tops. Jones is doing her thing outside (sweeping up the olive pips on the cobbles, she reveals later). I have allowed myself 30 mid-morning minutes on the bed in submission to a cold that I presumably picked up on the flights home from Berlin, this in spite of much careful hand-washing en route.
Life is back to normal – or should that be abnormal? Our house sitters, Ian and Anne, have departed. They enjoyed several balmy days on the west coast before returning here last Sunday. We had warned them of impending bad weather although as we sat down to supper there was no sign of the expected high winds and heavy showers. A doubting Jones, having left the garden unwatered, questioned the accuracy of the forecast.
Her doubts were soon blown away. The storm broke about midnight and rattled around our ears until dawn. There was a welcome 40mms of rain in the gauge in the morning, the first real rains of the season.
IAN'S PICTURES
On Mondays we take May to lunch and I have English lessons. It was at the restaurant that I caught a snatch of a TV report about storm damage to Faro airport – and texted a warning to Ian and Anne, who were flying out that afternoon. But I had no idea just how bad it was until I received urgent inquiries from family in Germany and South Africa.
Ian later emailed me pictures he had taken, showing the gaping holes in the roof of the terminal. Exceptionally high winds – some reports spoke of a tornado – struck around 5am and wrought havoc. Several people inside the terminal were injured by falling debris. The roof at the front of the terminal buckled as well. Anne said that when they arrived that afternoon, the place was chaotic. They were lucky to get away, albeit with some delay.
To add to the misery, electricity supplies to much of the terminal were cut and all the usual shops and snack-bars were shut. For the next two days television reports showed people being bussed around while travellers complained of the chaos, lack of information and absence of facilities. It was a good time not to be going anywhere.
The damage will take months to repair – luckily, at the end of the tourist season.
Wednesday brought another storm and another dump of rain. TV news showed widespread damage as streets were turned into rivers and buildings were flooded. Here in Espargal, I’m relieved to say, apart from the dogs’ muddy footprints on the floor and a scattering of stones that were washed down the road, no harm appears to have been done.
Although the evening temperatures are barely into single figures we have felt ourselves entitled in the circumstances to light the first fires of the season. Our new salamandra has proved an excellent purchase, nursing a few glowing logs for hours and emanating a sense of cosy contentment.
What’s more, after several fires, the glass door remains almost as clean as it was on delivery, much to Jones’s pleasure. She couldn’t abide the little circles that I would clean in the three glass panes of the previous stove (in order to see the flames) and hated the messy business of cleaning them properly.
She and I have spent much of the rest of the week bringing in almonds. We must have 20 almond trees on the property and I feel guilty that most years we have simply left the crop to rot where it fell. The dogs love almonds and spend happy hours crunching the nuts to get at the tasty seeds within, scattering the shell remnants across the patio in the process.
I put down nets and whacked down the nuts while Jones set to collecting them. We were careful to keep the bitter ones separate from the sweet ones. A bucket of almonds is surprisingly heavy and a sack takes the two of us to shift. Some of the locals painstakingly extract the kernels to sell, breaking the shells with a hammer.
Others either sell the nuts whole or keep them for home consumption. We shall have a sack for our farmer neighbour, who arrived at the gate one evening with a generous supply of tomatoes, beans and marrows.
Natasha let us know that she could not work her usual morning as she had to meet a court official concerning the sole custody she is acquiring of her son, Alex. (Nothing has been heard for several years from his Romanian father.) We gathered from the Natasha that the official had visited her apartment to see the conditions in which Alex lived.
ON ROCKS BELOW THE HOUSE
Natasha had asked me beforehand to complete the monthly wage receipts that I’m meant to give her as proof of her continuing employment. The wage book resides in Natasha’s folder in my upper filing drawer. But when I looked it wasn’t there. And it wasn’t misfiled in another folder. Nor was it anywhere else that I looked, upstairs and down. I just about took the house apart, with a growing sense of disbelief. I checked both with Natasha and the accountant in Benafim that neither had their book in their possession.
CHASING MOLES
In the course of this search, I became aware that both of my “mobile connect keys” had also disappeared, which was equally frustrating as my broadband has been playing up for weeks, in spite of several complaints to my provider (who has now promised to fix it).
It was at the end of two days’ searching that I visited the Bijou Ensuite, where Jones and I had spent two nights in May while the Ferretts were house-sitting in the main house. There, in a kitchen cupboard, I found both the book and the missing connect keys. Like the biblical shepherd who returns to the flock with a missing lamb, I felt a great sense of relief.
JONES CLOUD PIC
I am nearing the end of a book - The God Impulse by a neurosurgeon, Kevin Nelson - on the cerebral nature of near-death experiences and similar mystical phenomena. Very interesting, especially as it helps to explain the (auditory hallucination) “voices” I hear as I am falling asleep. (Really just comments, snatches of distant conversations such as: “For thousands of years, this has sufficed”. Indeed, you may wonder!) It apparently all has to do with a misfunctioning Waking-REM sleep switch in the brain stem.
PS. For some time I have been training the dogs to sit while I place a biscuit in front of each of them – and to wait for my command until they eat it. Ian took the following pictures as I went through the exercise. Little Prickles can’t really see the point of either sitting or waiting. The pictures speak for themselves.
Okay, this is nearly the last dog picture. "You have to sit down too!"
PICS FROM IAN - THANK YOU
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