Wednesday night: the house sleeps; I’m about to go down and fetch Prickles, who otherwise comes whining to the bed in the early hours, pleading to be escorted to his favourite chair in the study (in case it’s already occupied by a cat).
WATCHING TV
On TV all sorts of clever people have been debating whether Greece will leave the euro – and what will happen if it does; I am more concerned with any domino effect.
A return to the Portuguese escudo would not be welcome.
My internet is down, for the first time in months. I don’t know whether the problem lies with the router or the line. In the meanwhile I can still log on with a connect pen but I can’t afford the kind of leisurely surfing that generally fills a pleasant hour before bed.
Natasha and Slavic have long since departed. Slavic spent the day working on a stepped path through the south garden. He builds excellent steps. Each riser is made of rocks and each tread dressed with tiles. Mini-barricades of thorny espargo (wild asparagus) bar entry to the dogs, who like nothing more than to inspect developments, stamping their paw-prints into the wet concrete as they go.
After spending the morning cleaning the ground floor of the house (Jones does the upper floor), Natasha joined Barbara in the park to do some cutting back. We don’t plant anything in the park – a fenced hectare of hillside beyond the garden – nature takes care of that. But we do try to keep it trim.
Midway through my English lesson with Natalya on the south patio, Fintan dropped in with 5 litres of moonshine for us; it was a gift from an elderly Portuguese neighbour whom the pair of us had assisted to sort out water supply problems. Jones was delighted to have it as her baggy stock was running low. (My tastes are more expensive.)
Moonshine in these parts comes mainly as either fig liquor or bagaceira (distilled from the grape husks); mixed with coke and a generous squeeze of lemon, they taste pretty much the same; their effect is pretty similar too. There is also a great variety of brandies as well as my favourite aguadente, medronho.
At my weekly English class at the senior university, we talked about a programme to supply guard dogs to goat and sheep farmers in the mountains, whose flocks are threatened by wolves. “O lobo”, whose numbers were severely reduced by shooting and poisoning, is now protected by law and is doing well. Inevitably, the predators are prone to taking livestock. Although farmers are compensated for their losses, the money is slow in coming. The dogs being issued to the farmers are from rare breeds that were once raised specifically to guard the flocks.
As we talked about such things, the subject of wild boar arose. These animals roam the Portuguese hills in their thousands although they are nocturnal and seldom seen. Old Ignacio said he’d seen lots of them. In fact, he’d shot two the previous night. He and his companions put down bait - a substance that the animals love to roll in – before retiring to a hide in the moonlight. When the pigs came along for a wallow, the hunters potted nine of them – or so Ignacio said. I’ve no reason to doubt him.
GARDEN LOOKING GOOD
After the lesson, at the prompting of a neighbour, I went along to the headquarters of the electricity department In Loule to ask what they were doing about our electricity supply. Between six and ten in the evenings it’s simply dreadful. The lights dim, the television blurs and the computer complains. So have we, often enough, without seeing any improvement. One dare not turn on the oven or microwave for fear of tripping the system. We suffer most as our house is at the end of the line.
At the EDP headquarters I was shown into the office of an engineer to whom I explained our predicament in my very best Portuguese. (I’d checked the relevant vocabulary with my pupils beforehand.) After making a phone call to ascertain the situation, he assured me that the EDP were fully aware of it. They were upping the supply from the local transformer asap, he assured me, and planning to install a second transformer closer to the village in the coming months. This good news I was able to convey to our long-suffering neighbours.
Friday pm: It’s clouding over. There’s a remote chance of a shower. It would be very welcome. We are desperate for rain. But ideally, we’d like one after five pm when Slavic finishes. He’s been tiling an area under the trees in the south garden where we like to sit out in the summer evenings. It makes for a little island of shady serenity.
In the meanwhile, the birds have been decorating Slavic’s paths and steps. I suspect the azure-winged magpies although I haven’t actually caught them in the act. The culprits invade the olive trees to feast on the fruit before leaving inky stains all over the tiles below. As the tiles are absorbent, the spots are the very devil to remove. Not that I intend to try. There’s no point in going against nature. Far better to see the effect as an avian Jackson Pollock creation.
Thursday we took Olive and her daughter, Ann, to look at furniture. From a store on the far side of Olhao, where they made their purchases, we continued to the small resort of Fuzeta for lunch in the sun. The place looked sleepy, apart from a randy dog that was honing his skills – from both ends – on a pal (also male) outside the restaurant. Few tourists were around and nobody minded. Fellow lunchers appeared to hail from the motor-caravans parked down near the beach. The restaurateur was German and the food was excellent.
En route, I stopped at the computer shop in Loule to ask Rui kindly to check out my router. When I collected it at the end of the day, he reported that it was working normally. So I took it home and reconnected it – and voilà, my internet link came back. I’ve no idea what the problem was, neither do I care as long as the line holds. What is life without an internet connection?
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