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.
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