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.
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