It’s Friday night. (That’s as far as it got - brain clog, all slog, no blog.)
Now it’s Sunday. The question is what to say about walks, work, weather and widows that hasn’t been said umpteen times before. Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen et al would surely have thought of something although no doubt they had their off days as well.
The week, like so many other weeks, has been gobbled up by a thousand lilliputian pursuits. While most of them have been useful pursuits, they amount to very little, certainly very little that’s reportable. Is it my lot, I sometimes wonder, to pursue mini-goals for the rest of my life or is there something that I still want to achieve apart, that is, from winning the Euromillions jackpot.
I guess it’s the kind of rhetorical question we face as we come to terms with looming septuagenarianism, when the probability of heroically rescuing grateful damsels grows remote and our best hope is to assist old ladies across the road.
I may bounce these reflections off our group of emailing ex-monks, Australians and South Africans who trained together in a novitiate west of Sydney in the sixties before falling by the wayside – or, at least, tumbling out of the monastery. Our group has recently expanded to take in a Communist parliamentary candidate in Sydney and an atheist research scientist in Queensland. We are nothing if not a heterogeneous collection of ex-monks.
On Thursday night I dreamed that I was introducing Hitler to a conference that he was about to address. As he entered the hall, I put out my hand to shake his but he gave it a dismissive half clasp before setting about his discourse. In my dream it was clear to me that Hitler did not regard me highly. I can only think that my brain was trying – unsuccessfully – to digest the BBC’s excellent series on Putin’s rise to power, the second part of which I’d watched a few hours before.
Then on Saturday night, after attending a lovely if poorly-attended concert of English music given by the Orchestra of the Algarve, I dreamed that someone gave me a cello as a gift, greatly to my surprise. At least he said it was a cello but it was huge, more like a double-base, and it instantly fell into a pool of water. I give up.
Jonesy has been taking lots more pictures. Please admire them if you’ve got this far and are going any further.
Some time ago I installed a new hit-counter on my blog, the one you can see at the top of the page. It is provided free by an outfit called StatCounter and is far the best that I have come across. There is also the professional version for those who are seriously interested in knowing who is accessing their websites.
Even so, the free version tells me how many hits the site has had, how many are repeats, what city and country they came from, the IP address of the searcher, what search term was used, what browser was used and what kind of computer (ipad or smartphone) – plus a great deal more. It’s not that I want to know all this, it just that I find it a bit scary. Little wonder that Mr Google knows more about you than you know about yourself.
Weather: unbroken sunshine. We are heading for a serious drought unless we get rain soon.
Widows: We found May bruised and shaky from a couple of falls. She lives alone in her cottage and isn’t finding it easy. A neighbour has rented a “walker” that we hope May will use.
SOMBRE ORCHID
Walks: Morning and afternoon. The dogs run free in the bush, chasing rabbits (real and imaginary) to their hearts’ content. Jones and I follow along, admiring the views to the coast and the bloom. The first orchids are out.
And while on dogs – we have taken Bobby’s old kennel around to Joachim Sousa, who was happy to have us install it in the place of the barrel housing Maggie and her puppy, Barry. (Barry is actually a she; her name derives from the barrel. Joachim calls her “borboleta”, little butterfly.) Barry adopted the kennel immediately and Maggie has followed suit. Barry now comes sprinting down the drive in the evenings to greet Jones as she arrives with treats – en route to feeding the stray 100 metres further the road.
From London we have received this picture of Llewellyn and his dogs taking the tube. Edgar, as is his wont, seats his rear on the cushion and stands his front legs on the floor. Awkward as it sounds, he appears to find it a perfectly comfortable position.
Work: Slavic has been doing a great job, using the old tiles from the Casa Nada floor to pave the steps I built some years ago from the house to the upper and lower gardens. Until now, they’ve simply been backfilled with dirt and gravel.
On Saturday Slavic and a friend arrived at the Dutch ladies’ house to prune some of their huge carob trees, one of which was threatening a passing electricity wire. I went down on the tractor to supply chainsaw, rope and ladder. Slavic declined the rope I offered him to secure himself, saying it would simply get in the way. He vanished up into the upper branches of the trees with the ease of a primate and branches came tumbling steadily down. The Dutch ladies seemed well pleased.
Natasha spent an afternoon at Barbara’s desk, trying to compose a statement in Russian. This is quite tricky on a Portuguese typewriter – her own – which lacks the letters of the Cyrillic script. But she managed to find a programme that enabled her to do this, albeit with much effort. I was able to help her frame the statement in Open Office org. She’s a quick learner, fluent in Portuguese and competent in English.
WHEN YOU CAN'T FIND A BASKET, USE YOUR INITIATIVE
I have received an assurance from Norwegian Cruise Lines (who continue to bombard us with offers following our cruise last year) that they take every safety precaution and that there is no danger of their ships capsizing. I wonder why!
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