Friday: As we set out on a walk this morning, another Garden of Eden morning, I stopped to take a picture in the park with the sunlight slanting down through the trees. The dogs had gone ahead to the gate at the top, where they wait for a biscuit. Jones had paused to put on the washing and feed the cats in Casa Nada. There was hardly a breath of wind; the day required only the lightest of jumpers and I thought, as often before, that Adam and Eve must have first beheld paradise on such a day as this.
Slavic arrived mid-morning to continue his tasks about the garden. Following his wall building exercises, he has been creating a series of stone steps at awkward spots on the property. Next on his list is raising and paving a small walled terrace in front of the house to create additional visitor’s parking. It was Jones’s suggestion, a good one like many (although not necessarily all) of her suggestions. I shouldn’t want her to quote me.
She has been writing thank-you cards to the neighbours who exchanged Christmas gifts with us. On Christmas Day itself we were guests of Marie and Olly, who did us proud. They always decorate their living room to match the occasion. This pleases Jones greatly as it gives her a feel of the Christmas spirit that I fear I fail to inspire at home.
BENAFIM - ACROSS THE VALLEY
We’ve been up to Benafim to recycle the tins and plastic, take morning coffee with Celso and Brigitte at the Coral, nip into the pharmacist to top up on pills, pause at the cash machine to withdraw funds and stop at the grocer for a few odds and ends. We return via the narrow agricultural road through the valley with Russ peering out of one rear window and Prickles through the other. Little is happening there right now, other than a little pruning of vines. It’s too dry and there’s no sign of rain.
A FASHION-CONSCIOUS MAN
A Christmas gift that I awarded myself was a fine body warmer (gilet) that I had admired at the Cortefiel store in Faro a few weeks back – as reported – but was too small for me. Jones persuaded me to wait until after Christmas before securing a larger size from the Guia branch of the shop in order to benefit from the after-Christmas sales. The sales were well underway when we arrived there but sadly the garment wasn’t on them. So I paid the full price. I’m delighted with my purchase nonetheless. The gilet is reversible, brown on one side and blue on the other, with double sets of pockets – just the thing for the fashion-conscious man.
It’s been a sociable week, one way and another, out with our widows, lunching with friends and taking tea with neighbours. (Neighbours and friends overlap, neighbours being the ones who live closer to us.) Social affairs, the arrangement thereof, fall within Jones’s domain, a gender arrangement which would appear to be common among our acquaintance and which suits me very well. Her duties further include washing, cleaning, the kitchen, the garden, watering, cats and strays, phone conversations and one or two other minor tasks. Needless to say, I have my own responsibilities.
What I am sharing with her is an end-of-year cold. This began as a tickle in my right nostril midweek and rapidly and noisily enveloped the rest of me – and then her. Whereas Jones suffers her colds in silence, mine are of the explosive variety, a sort of malady performance-art that rips holes in the toughest tissue.
My wife suspects that my sneezes are, well, unnecessarily demonstrative, and wonders whether I couldn’t contain them a little. The answer is that I couldn’t. That men suffer worse colds than women is well established. A female friend of ours refers to such afflictions endured by her husband as “man-colds”, seemingly infinitely worse than anything she has ever caught. He has my sympathies. Our wives sometimes fail to understand what we men have to bear.
Barbara is off this coming week to spend several days at the newly-acquired London home of her brother, Llewellyn, and his wife, Lucia. I look forward to hearing more and to seeing the pictures in due course.
A break there to check the Friday night Euromillions results. ….. No, not his week. Never mind, there’ll be another draw next Friday and yet another the week after. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
There is some good news to report. My mobile phone is talking once again to my router. Llewellyn suggested various restorative actions that I could take to renew their relationship, one of which eventually did the trick. It’s lovely when technology works. It’s especially lovely when it works after a period of not working.
The same is true for the car’s air conditioner. The car is booked into Honda again this coming week after the AC crashed yet again. But it was back on yesterday and functioned again today. Fingers crossed.
I have decided that it was probably a mistake to think that I could learn German, especially from a book (although it does have an accompanying cassette). I now have German verbs drifting insistently through my dreams, looking for their companion nouns. German grammar, I regret to say, doesn’t really make much sense – except possibly to the Germans themselves. Barbara has always said that life is too short to learn German (which she took briefly) and now I know why.
To console myself, I’ve ordered two books from Amazon that she will hopefully bring back from London, a relaxing theological tome ( A Layman’s Theology, recommended by Martin Winter) and Mark Forsyth’s Etymologicon, described as a Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language. I heard readings from the book on the BBC and was instantly won over.
There, my page is done.
Happy New Year!
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