Letter from Espargal: 44 of 2011

We’ve been running around and spending money. A little went on repairing minor damage to a prized Ecco boot, courtesy of a pup who nicked the boot from a wicker box where I had foolishly left it to dry. (Anything not locked away is fair game.) I took the boot into the little cobbler who crouches over his last in the corner of a Dickensian workshop in Loule.

“Come back in half an hour,” said he, after assessing the damage. This I did, to find the boot neatly repaired. “That’ll be a euro,” the cobbler told his wife, who minds the small counter opposite the door and the cashbox stashed beneath it. I gladly paid the euro and threw in a grateful 50 cent tip.

The next day I went back with the camera to ask the couple if I could take a few pictures, promising to print some out for them. As you see, they were agreeable. She informed me that her husband had occupied the same perch for over 50 years, with her at his side to attend to the cash and customers.

On the other side of town a similarly bent old cobbler occupies an equally dark little room, with a hand-written “shoe repairs” sign slung from the balcony. This old fellow declined to allow me to take a picture last time I used his services, saying the place was too untidy. Sadly, I fear that cobblers are a dying breed, relegated along with milliners, mercers, tinkers and the like, to history and the pages of dusty dictionaries.

SOLANUM & SHED

A lot more money – returning to my theme - went on bureaucracy. We met Felismina, the lawyer’s assistant, in town one day to straighten out anomalies in our property deeds (which she’d been checking at our request). Felismina was on first-name terms with the officials involved, which helped enormously. To sort things out, the lady in the Land Registry Office explained to us, we’d have to get a certified document from the notary’s office and another from the Financas – and then to bring both of these back to the Registry where the title-deeds would be altered accordingly.

So we trekked around from one office to another, whipping out the plastic each time to pay the accompanying charge, before returning to the Registry. The corrected title deeds should be available next week. It’s not that we were illegal before; it was just that several elements that should have matched up, didn’t – discrepancies likely to cause a deal of grief further down the line.

Such anomalies arise from the time when property records were drawn up and kept quite separately in four uncommunicative departments. Notaries oversaw sales, the Land Registry recorded them, the council authorised projects and the Financas taxed them. In this internet age, everything has to gel when you come to sell.

OLIVES

What really struck us was how few people there were in the usually busy offices. Instead of joining the inevitable queues, we were able to go straight to the counter each time. It’s “the crisis”, Felismina remarked; "nobody is buying property and everybody is feeling the pinch".

ALMONDS

That pinch led to countrywide strikes on Thursday that pretty well brought Portugal to a halt – those bits of the nation involved in education, health and transport. But there were happy exceptions. I met Natasha at the workshop of Vitor, the mechanic, who took a look at her lethargic car and thought that he could energise it. While we were there, a postman delivering mail let us know that he for one had no interest in striking.

JONES SKY

Neither did the two Portugal Telecom technicians who arrived at our gate mid-afternoon to try to sort out my internet access problems for once and for all. They spent an hour testing the line (it was fine) replacing anything replaceable and explaining to me how to check whether the fault might lie with the router.

They are also renewing the cable from the house to the phone post in an attempt to eliminate all possible causes of the problem (intermittent internet access). They really pulled out the stops and I readily forgave them their failure to come the previous Friday afternoon, when they were due.

Another outlay – back with spending money – was on a new pair of spectacles from the optician, Mr Rahmani, a German Iranian (married to a Portuguese) who does most of his business with the Algarve’s large German expat community. We’ve been using his services for a number of years and have found him most helpful and attentive. I’m certainly pleased with the new specs. (Jones says there's nothing wrong with her old ones.)

ANOTHER JONES SKY

I note with sadness that the South African parliament is busy passing legislation that will serve to muzzle the news media, which have been exposing so much embarrassing official corruption. A small reminder of such dishonesty arrived with a bulky letter, running to several pages, that Barbara received from a friend in Johannesburg. The South African post office employee who neatly slit one end open with a razor blade must have been disappointed to find nothing of value inside. I guess we should be grateful that the letter arrived at all. Several friends and family members have lost items from luggage undergoing “security checks” at Johburg airport.

SPOT THE CAT

Friday morning – a lovely, sunny one. We are back from a 90 minute trek through the bush, being tugged this way and that by our powerful pups. We noted lots of wild boar prints; we never see the beasts themselves. (We had an encounter with a herd of them once in a German forest and that was enough.) We did see a ginger cat that had taken refuge in a tree and declined to come down and play with the dogs.

The medronho trees (whose berries are collected to make a popular liquor) are in full colour. Jones tried to pose with the pups in front of one but they wouldn’t sit still. She has gone off to deliver a thank-you note to Pauline for a delicious cake. Time for me to upload this to the blogsite and comb through our pictures.