It’s quite cold. The Arctic air mass that’s frozen most of the continent solid is breathing down Iberia’s neck. True the day temps are still into double figures – this is the Algarve, after all - and you can doze in the sun streaming through the windows on the south patio.
On the other side of the house, however, the wind from the north is bitter, cutting through layers of clothing. We found the dogs’ water bowl frozen over when we emerged to go walking this morning. Jones looked more like an Eskimo (however they’re spelled or whatever they’re called these days) than an Algarvian.
She hates being cold.
It’s hard to imagine what conditions are like in eastern Europe where scores of people have been freezing to death. Cathy reports from a deep-frozen Berlin that the Gohdeses have turned all their radiators up high for the first time.
Here, the dogs have been huddled around the fire that does such sterling service warming the house. We daily give thanks for the wood-burning stove. It’s brilliant – cosy, comforting and company as well as an economic heat source. The Portuguese Met Office, which sends me its daily forecasts and weather warnings, informs us of “the persistence of low values of the minimum temperature”. If only it were warning us of rain! Our drought grows serious.
Outside, Slavic has kept his leather zip-up jacket on as he works to improve our steps, stone borders and paths. These days I fetch him up from the bus just after nine and drop him back at the bus-stop shortly after five. He used to arrive by car but he damaged it in an accident and says it’s not worth repairing.
I don’t know exactly what happened – he’s not a very talkative guy - but it seems that he came off the road and hit a tree or something – not another vehicle - just as traffic police were approaching from the other direction. And it also seems that he’d had a few drinks beforehand. The bottom line is that he’s lost his licence for six months as well as his car. Fortunately he suffered no injury, nor has the quality of his work diminished.
MARIA & BJ - OLD PICTURE
Jones has trotted up the road to see Maria, who inevitably plies her with cake while Joachim ladles out fig liquor to accompany it. Fig liquor and cake make for a perfectly acceptable tea, especially when consumed around Maria’s kitchen stove. Maria is always pleased to have company. She is semi-housebound, victim of a bad hip and an operation that didn’t improve things. She’s a cheery soul nonetheless and we owe her much. It was she that we bumped into as we sought a new house around the turn of the century, and who pointed us to the property we now occupy.
One afternoon we drove 15 minutes across the hills to Alte to take in an exhibition of cork objects at the local museum cum library. It turned out to be a very small exhibition, occupying just a single table, but worth seeing for all that. The objects were carved by a villager who is apparently recovering from some grave illness and finds his hobby therapeutic.
I can’t show you pictures of Sonia, the museum’s diminutive curator, who declined to be photographed, nor of her husband, Francisco, our former postman, who spends his spare hours sculpting and painting. He invited us to visit his house to look at his works, an invitation I’d like to take up at some point.
I’m taking this opportunity to illustrate a Ferrari that was parked in the street beside the fish market in Alte, the only kind that I’m ever in any danger of owning.
And this is the kind of ad that I can live with – forgive me if you’ve seen similar. It reads: “Don’t break (the glass); In case of emergency, enter and ask for one.”
While I’m on pictures, let me stick up a couple of the Aussie ex-monks with whom I correspond. Tez, the man in the first picture, is a keen photographer who normally posts pictures of birds. But he has also been keen on snakes for years, as he’s happy to demonstrate.
Not to be outdone, Doug, who owns a couple of acres up in Queensland, has his own visiting pythons to deal with and is equally relaxed with them.
He writes: “this species, if handled carefully is harmless. They're plentiful around here. I found one in the rafters of our shed the other day. The wet weather brings them in and they hunt down the rodents. They do tend to defecate etc while sitting high for days and the smell becomes quite pungent.” There you have it.
I have finished The Etymologicon. What a brilliant read! I love discovering derivations such as “bankrupt” – from banca rotta, broken bench, which is what happened to the benches of early Italian money lenders who failed to honour their pledges. In my next life I’m going to be a wealthy eccentric speaking at least half a dozen languages fluently, that’s if global warming and financial crises haven’t wiped us all out.
We went to see The Descendants. We thought it well done although hardly deserving of all the hype. I was interested as much in the Hawaiian scenery as the plot. There are several other films we’ve noted down. One of them was to be The (much lauded) Artist but I’m reserving my position after hearing from Cathy that she and friends found it greatly disappointing.
Otherwise, it’s more of the usual stuff. Jones has been worrying about Maggie and Barry surviving these freezing nights, and has added an old blanket to their kennel.
On the home front, Mary has won her battle to join the upstairs dogs in spite of Jones’s best efforts to keep her downstairs. She said she couldn't handle any more dogs upstairs. We tried blocking the stairs but then the upstairs dogs complained that they couldn’t get down for a pee.
THIS IS THE LIFE
They’d come nosing through into the bedroom at 02.00 asking for us to remove the obstacles. So we gave up. Jones says I didn’t try hard enough. It’s true. Mary is very seductive and I’m a sucker.
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