Letter from Espargal: 13 of 2012

Here's the week, backwards. Friday: We have had rain – lovely, luminous, glorious, glistening manna from heaven, more than 30mm, drumming off the windows and spattering off the tiles. I can’t tell you with what joy we watched it slanting down, ending a four-month drought. Winter’s meant to be our wet season but you wouldn’t have known it. The earth had cracked, our beans were drooping, the wild flowers were thin on the ground and even the weeds were half-hearted.

We took May to lunch after introducing her to a new mobile phone. We chose it for its large keys and the button on the back that sends out a distress message to selected contacts in the event of an emergency. But it’s a recent model that still lacks a user manual, either in Portuguese or in English.

Lunch, as usual, was at Campina, where Cristina runs an efficient operation. When I complained that her tuna salad had dripped on to my jacket, she fetched a cleansing spray and gave me an instant dry-clean, somewhat to the surprise of other diners.

May likes a leisurely lunch; 90 minutes to two hours suits her well. Fifteen minutes is adequate for me. After that, I excuse myself to walk the ever-accompanying dogs and take a refreshing siesta in the car – or go off to do a little banking, leaving Jones to hold the fort.

Thursday: The wind was wicked, making it hard for us either to relax or concentrate. I started and stopped half a dozen jobs without getting anywhere. The dogs were equally unsettled. Nature’s restlessness penetrated our very souls.

Outside, Manuel and Antonio worked hard to finish the last of the cobbled patios. Each cobble had to be trimmed before being tapped into place, guided by a string or length of wood. Antonio brought up reinforcing loads of stone dust and cobbles as Manuel set each stone into place.

Beyond the fence I spent two hours scraping the last of the stone dust into buckets and dumping the contents on the track into the fields. The looming storm otherwise threatened to wash the remains down the drive. Once it’s wet and compacts, the dust is the very devil to clean up.

In the evening black clouds rolled in and rain – wonderful rain – began to fall.

Wednesday: I set about repainting the newly repaired sections of the tractor gate and gate-post, damaged the previous week by the builders while reversing the tractor up the driveway. True to their word, the builders had patched up the gate post as well as getting the gate repaired. “That post won’t take two minutes to fix,” Manuel had assured me when I complained about the consequences of his bad driving. And in fairness it didn’t.

The main advantage of the repair was being able to close the gates and put the dogs back in the pen after their morning walk. The pen was incomparably smarter as a result of the new paving and bordering walls. At the same time, the builders had widened the entrance sufficient to allow the passage of small vehicles. Previously, it had been pretty much limited to the tractor. All in all, we’re very pleased.

We lunched in Almancil with Mike and Lyn, who were on their way home after a holiday based in one of Idalecio’s cottages. There’s a café-restaurant there that has captured the public mood. As well as baking its own products, it serves up inexpensive and delicious hot lunches. Mike and Lyn are fans. So are we. Smokers (we are not) and dog owners (we are) like to eat out on the patio, where one can choose sun or shade according to the weather.

Our temperatures have been creeping steadily upward. Although it’s homely to light a small fire in the evenings, we hardly notice the absence of one. And already the air conditioner is being employed most days in the car. Summer looms large.

Tuesday: The forecast is for rain on Thursday. We can hardly wait. The builders are setting about the last area to be paved. The preparatory work involves building low retaining walls and getting the levels right. Pegs are hammered in and strings tied between them. When they’re not reversing into the gates, they do a really good job.

Monday: I had arranged with Natasha to clean in the afternoon in order to present Jones with a sparkling house that evening. The dogs were locked out. They can reduce the house to chaos in minutes.

En route to the airport I stopped at Staples to return the computer monitor that I’d bought the previous day. My aim had been to hook a larger monitor up to my desktop computer, and I’d found one with built-in speakers. But, like all the new monitors available, it was of a different ratio and I simply couldn’t get a decent image, possibly because my Windows XP computer lacked the new dvi connection. Worse, the speakers were hardly audible, even at full volume. Staples gave me my money back, as promised.

CHEWED DOG BLANKET

Jones got a warm welcome from dogs and me. She looked very smart, as ever. She has the knack. We supped at the Coral on toasted sandwiches. Celso is awaiting Brigitte’s return from France, where she’s undergone surgery, before offering cooked meals once again.

Letter from Espargal: 12 of 2012

This isn't really a blog - more of a late and hasty record. Jones has been visiting family and friends in the UK, whom I have to thank for these pictures. The first shows her seated with Lucia in Trafalgar Square.

The second was taken at St Martins in the Fields, where she agreed to hold up the sheet music for a member of the orchestra.

And finally you see her pictured with Malcolm on the banks of the Trent, taken during a visit to Newark to visit Malcolm and Gary, friends who hail all the way back to our days at the SABC.

Here in Espargal, the builders have nearly finished paving the tractor entrance to the property. They are not in my best books. I discovered on Friday that they'd backed the tractor into the gate, damaging it. All that was evident was the chipped gatepost for they'd removed the gate to be repaired.

I can't complain about the quality of their work. They do a fine job. Here they are cutting bricks to fit into the uneven gaps along the side. Note the cloud of dust. If they have a fault, it's being blind to everything else around them.

I shall be glad to have the paving finished and the gate replaced, if only so that I can put the pups back in the pen while we're busy elsewhere. Barri got into the house one afternoon and had a wonderful game with the cushions and flowers. Fortunately, the damage looked worse than it was.

Most of my week has gone into domestic chores, mainly garden and animals - including Jonesy's waifs and strays run each afternoon. Our neighbours are remarkably patient about the treats that she hands out to their dogs as well as to the strays. Here you see Lucky awaiting his.

In truth, it hasn't been a great week. I trapped Russ’s paw in the car window while driving. He shrieked. So did Prickles, who was underneath him. I thought they were fighting. Finally figured out the problem and lowered the window. Russ had crapped all over the show in fright. The car looked a mess. I felt bad. Otherwise no harm done.

I made the mistake - should I be relating this? - of taking a prescribed dose of laxative shortly before setting out with the dogs on a walk - puppy on the lead, the rest running free. Never mind!

After dropping Olive off at Faro airport, I made a small high-tech investment that turned out to be a disaster. It's going back to the shop before Jones returns.

My watch (Citizen EcoDrive – I love it) is playing silly buggers and won't change back to summer time.

The wind has scattered leaves everywhere and the forecast morning of rain served up half a millimetre that did nothing but filthy the windows and outside furniture.

As I said, not a great week. You'll understand why the blog's a bit late. I'll probably see the funny side of it in due course.

Letter from Espargal: 11 of 2012

If I were to offer any advice to newcomers to these parts, it would be not to say anything that they do not wish to become public knowledge. One arrives here under the illusion that everybody else is a stranger. In fact the only stranger is the new arrival. The rest have known each other for generations and have a relative plus numerous acquaintances in every village. News and gossip travel at the speed of light. And everybody knows everyone else's business.

This was borne in upon us as we ran Leonhilde, a Portuguese neighbour, into Alte this week on a minor bureaucratic mission. “The tractor parked there belongs to old so-and-so,” she informed us as we entered. “He always leaves it on the outskirts because he doesn’t have a licence and he’s scared of being involved in an accident.”

THE ASPHODELS ARE OUT

Thousands of Portuguese, who earn their livings on their tractors, lack the literacy to obtain licences and are not supposed to be on the road. Leonhilde’s former husband would refuel his tractor early on a Sunday morning when the likelihood of bumping into the law was minimal.

SELL YOUR OLD GOLD HERE - AUSTERITY GRIPS PORTUGAL

We arranged to meet her, once she’d finished her business, at a café opposite the parish offices in Alte. She knew it well, ditto the owners, as well as the woman emerging from the grocer, to whom she chatted. And so on. It was an informative morning, seeing familiar scenes and people through local eyes. Most of us estrangeiros tend to live in a culturally separate bubble, being in Portugal rather than of it. From time to time it’s enlightening to bridge the bubble gap.

I have been bridging the gap with Manuel and Antonio all week. Theirs is an interesting relationship. Manuel’s the builder; Antonio the labour (known in Portuguese as a “servente”) They chat away much of the time but when Manuel wants something, it’s “fetch it and put it here”. No please or thank you.

He’s the boss and he doesn’t waste time on niceties. I have observed exactly the same relationship between the brickies and the gophers on Horacio’s workforce. They chat over coffee but not over construction. Formalities have to be observed.

On Monday, Manuel and Antonio finished remodelling the filtration fossa. Manuel showed me how he’d gone about it, guaranteeing that it would give us no further problems. The results certainly look good. They looked even better after I’d given the fossa a lick of green paint. Fingers crossed!

On Tuesday the workers began to pave a considerable area between the house and Casa Nada, using interlocking grey bricks. Laying the bricks is a cinch. It’s clearing the ground, establishing levels, anchoring the kerbstones and bringing in/levelling the stone-dust base that takes the time.

The tractor made numerous journeys out of the gate and down to the main entrance to fetch the materials, which had to be offloaded on the level. I tried to declare the work area off limits to the dogs, who just love stirring up the stone-dust – to little avail. In the end, I had to call on the builders for help to raise the fence another metre to keep the pups on the far side.

It had taken young Barri all of ten seconds to discover how to leap it, following hard on the heels of Russ and Mary. The older dogs, although well capable of sailing over in similar fashion, are not into learning new tricks. As to Barri, she’s clever, courageous and assertive, engaging in mock battles and tugs of war with the big guys. She also very destructive and I grimace with each despairing Jonesy cry at another broken pot or destroyed plant.

Tuesday evening we went to see Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”, much acclaimed and awarded an Oscar for something or other…..interesting, unusual, very long and, I thought, somewhat contrived, as though it paused every so often for applause.

Jones, checking my script (all complaints to her desk please), said she also thought it rather self-indulgent, although well worth seeing for all that.

Wednesday Natasha and I visited the accountant to submit our annual bumph to the Receiver. This is an event now conducted online. It should have taken the pair of us no longer than 15 minutes. But I had made two of Natasha’s online social security payments late and it took the accountant an age on the phone to establish that something under 2 euros was owing in interest payments as a result.

On Friday I took Olive to the post office to sort out her postal affairs prior to her departure for the UK. We were lucky enough to encounter a really helpful clerk, who willingly assisted us through a sludge of bureaucracy. At the counter beside us, a middle-aged English woman, who discovered that she had to go elsewhere to pay a bill, threw up her hands with an exasperated “shit”. Since I was the translator for Olive, I offered to translate the woman’s frustrations into Portuguese as well but the post office staff assured me that it wouldn’t be necessary.

Jones will make a flying visit this coming weekend to Llewellyn & Lucia in London. Monarch, the airline on which she is booked, this week sent her three emails. The first invited her to check-in online but, as we discovered, in order to do this she had to select a seat, and to select a seat she had to pay extra. We declined. The second drew her attention to all of Monarch’s related services. And the third warned her of the huge charges awaiting her should her cabin bag – one only, mind you - exceed size or weight limits by the tiniest fraction.

Do you remember when one just had to buy a ticket and board the aeroplane at an aerodrome – and how exciting it was as the propellers fired one by one?

I tried to explain to my English class this week why the diphthong “ou” can be pronounced in a dozen different ways – why bough sounds like bow unless the latter comes with an arrow, when it rhymes with sow (seed) but not sow (pig). No wonder they tell me that English is difficult. On researching the subject I discovered from the ever helpful Wikipedia site that “ou” is really a digraph rather than a diphthong. If I can find a good English teacher, I may seek a few lessons myself.

Letter from Espargal: 10 of 2012

OK. Here’s the week’s news.

Friday: Manuel and Antonio got elbow deep in yuck, I raised a fence and we lost our money on the lottery again.

Thursday, en route to brunch, we saw a large porker hoofs-up on a table in a restaurant yard, about to be carved up. It was beyond caring – unlike Jones.

Wednesday we got a new bench and chairs to go with the table that had arrived on Tuesday.

On Monday Barri (born in a barrel) came to stay, bringing our canine collection to seven. As I wrote to our house-sitters, who are due down here in two months’ time:

“We have somehow acquired another dog. It is just a little dog and we hope that you will hardly notice it when you come to stay.”

Fortunately, the house-sitters have grown accustomed to the unplanned expansion of the zoo and didn’t seem too put out.

It’s no good telling us “you’re mad”. We know it. And it’s not that we wanted Barri; circumstances conspired against us and left us with little choice.

As you may know, Jonesy – en route to feed the stray at the bottom of the village each evening - has been dropping in on Maggie and her puppy, Barri.

Some weeks ago, after catching one of Joachim’s chickens, Barri was chained up, like her mother. The chain kept on catching on objects, stranding Barri and alarming Jones, who several times rescued her.

Monday evening, when Jones went to feed the stray, she was alarmed to find no sign of Barri. Searching for the little dog, Jones came across Maria-Joao clutching the end of Barri’s chain. The puppy had broken free and chased the chickens again. Maria-Joao, who had injured her foot the previous week, was semi-immobile. Her husband was out and she hardly knew what to do.

And so, to cut things short, three-month-old Barri came to stay with us.

We spent an awkward hour introducing her, one at a time, to the other dogs. Then we enclosed her in the pen – a substantial fenced area - put down food, water and her blanket in the wood shed and bade her good night. Barri arrived back at the front door as we did, having leapt the metre-high gate (as we later discovered). Reluctantly, I took her back to the pen, secured her with a long chain to a tree and retired once more.

After supper, we went back to check. The poor beast had wound her chain around the trunk, nearly strangling herself. After battling in the dark to free her, we scratched our heads. We tried locking her in a bathroom for the night but she nearly battered the door down. So Barbara settled down with her in front of the fire. That suited Barri just fine. She got rather more sleep than my wife but it was just for one night and it served the purpose.

Tuesday morning we walked all seven dogs in the park. Barri was thrilled to join the zoo. The zoo, while dubious, were not overtly hostile – although the puppy’s getting inevitable lessons in manners. That afternoon we took her to the vet for her first inoculations. On the way home she was sick in the car. I had armed Jones with old towels in anticipation.

We arrived home just in time to take delivery of the table we had ordered the previous week. It looks very smart with its companion chairs on the newly cobbled patio extension.

Wednesday we dropped in on Olive, who is preparing to rent out her house for several months to holiday-makers while she returns to the UK.

Anybody who wants to stay in a fine three-bedroom, three-bathroom villa with pool, near the beach, will find details on holidaylettings.co.uk – home 204626 – Casa Jolvin. Manuel (the builder) and his sidekick, Antonio, were working hard to improve the entrance, where years of rain had washed away much of the sandy soil.

Thursday we enjoyed brunch in the sun with our neighbours, Marie and Olly. I warned them to park near the front of the restaurant to avoid views of the pig being butchered around the back. We talked about lots of things including the drought. Everybody is talking about the drought. Portugal is parched. We’ve had no real rain since November and the situation is getting critical.

Friday Manuel and Antonio rolled up to take a look at our middle fossa (septic tank). It’s an open filtration tank, filled with gravel below and sand above. For months the pups have been playing cowboys and Indians in the luxuriant reeds that we planted there ten years ago. Regrettably, they were the wrong kind of reeds and over time their matted roots have strangled the fossa, frustrating its purpose.

So out the reeds came, snipped at the base, followed by their fiercely resistant roots. Antonio and Manuel sweated in the sunshine as they thwacked mightily away. Once the roots were clear, they unblocked the fossa’s entry and exit pipes, leaning over the fossa wall to delve deep into its interior. This was a very yucky job. I stood upwind, taking pictures and giving them encouragement.

It took three tractor loads to remove the stricken vegetation and dump it on our compost mountain. Afterwards the two workers hosed themselves down and I rewarded them with a couple of beers. They’ll be back on Monday to finish the job, once the necessary materials have been delivered.

Letter from Espargal: 9 of 2012

Saturday night going on Sunday morning: I’m late; the week has run away with us. Jones has gone to bed, taking with her the cold that she picked up from me, that I picked up from … well, never mind! Ono has gone with her, as ever. Mary and Raymond are sprawled on their pads in the study beside me; the rest of the zoo is downstairs. I sat down in my easy chair to watch a film, “Wanted”, billed as an action adventure. But it turned out to be just an exercise in CGI, better suited to the athletic Angelina Jolie’s adolescent admirers.

The dogs are in our bad books. They bumped into our neighbour, Idalecio, while we were out walking this morning and laid into his young dog, Lucky. No harm done! All dust and din. But I was madder than hell and let them know it. Problem was that I was running slow with a creaking hip and was well behind when the action started. Jones piled in and got nipped for her troubles. Little bastards! Happily, Idalecio was understanding.

The irony was that his second pet, Serpa, is the mother of our two big dogs. She often joins us for a biscuit and a cuddle and is regarded by our six as one of the pack. But no such courtesy has been extended to the unfortunate Lucky. He got his name from Idalecio's other half, Sonia, who found him injured in the street and had him tended by a vet.

Still on dogs, half the village – the expat half – is outraged that a heavily pregnant bitch has been dumped at the council pound because the owner didn’t fancy looking after her brood. She’d been with him from puppyhood; we feared the worst a few months ago when she came into season; a line-up of shaggy lads paid court in the middle of the road while the owner conversed indifferently with his neighbours.

Last night we attended a charity dinner to raise funds for a dog shelter. The moving spirit was Sonia who, like Jones, cares deeply about the fate of the many abandoned animals in this country. The venue was a crowded country restaurant on the far side of Sao Bras, with most of the diners keeping at least one eye on the screens showing a critical football game between two of the top Portuguese teams. Our conversations with our neighbours and a German couple accompanying them were interrupted by frequent roars and/or groans.

As important as the game was – the controversial winning goal was the lead item on the national news – it was less important than the 3.5mm of rain that fell on Thursday. I wish it had been 35mm, which is what we really needed. For the first time in months, big black clouds came floating promisingly over the horizon, followed by half an hour of real rain.

Below us, the newly-laid cobbles looked their best under a glistening mantle. Manuel and his sidekick, Claudio, rolled up promptly last Monday morning to set about the work. Slavic and I – mostly Slavic – had already prepared the ground with a deep foundation of stones and turvena (a surfacing compound for dirt roads).

THE BASE

Laying cobbles is an art form. First job is to take levels and lay the guide rows.
Each cobble is packed in a scoop of stone dust. The workers spin the stones around in their hands until they find the best upper surface. If the cobble is too big, as is often the case, they tap the base with a hammer,

flaking off the bottom inch or so, before tamping the cobble gently into the dust. Once the whole area is covered with cobbles, a mixture of dry cement and stone dust is brushed into the centimetre-wide cracks.

The mixture is then gently hosed down and finally tamped with a machine that looks a bit like a lawn mower and sounds like a machine gun.

That’s it. The result looks splendid. All of Portugal’s public squares and pavements (read “sidewalks”) are made in this fashion, using heavy and medium cobbles for traffic and light cobbles for pedestrian use.

Wednesday we took Manuel around to Olive’s place to see if he could improve the entrance to her property.

MIST OVER THE VALLEY

There’s a decided slope down from the gates into the grounds and years of rain have washed away a good foot of sandy soil from the entrance area. Manuel, Olive and I put heads together to discuss the options and agreed a solution. Manuel is due to start there this coming week.

Slavic had a furious last day here on Wednesday before starting a big job for his regular employer the following day. Between painting, wall-building, collecting stones and laying turvena, he hardly had time for a fag. I had issued him with gloves and warned him to beware of scorpions under rocks and indeed he soon came across one. It was waving an angry tail in the air in protest at the sudden removal of its house.

So was another that had made its home under a small rock that I heaved into the tractor. The creatures are brown, looking like small crabs, and virtually invisible against the soil. As they’re nocturnal they generally don’t present a threat – unless one is collecting the rocks under which they live.

Tuesday evening we joined David and Dagmar at the cinema in Faro for The Iron Lady. If you’ve seen it you’ll know how well merited Meryl Streep’s Oscar was. Apart from the occasional give-away glimpse of a Streepian cheekbone, one could easily credit that one was watching Maggie herself. Simply brilliant! It's a must-see for her performance although the film itself fails to win rave reviews.