Letter from Espargal: 36 of 2012

Sunday:
For once I had left my phone at home as I set out on our morning walk with the dogs. I paused to see what they were barking at, and looked up to see scores of buzzards swirling low over Espargal hill but was unable to call Jonesy to bring the camera; she stops to feed the cats in Casa Nada.

These great birds gather here each autumn to begin their annual migration. They’re a spectacular sight. When Jones later rushed back to fetch the camera she found the birds largely departed, much to her frustration. At our Sunday brunch up at the Coral, our neighbours equally regretted that I’d been unable to alert them.

May & BJ - EARLIER
Monday:
May was saying as we watched the locksmith trying to open her front door that it was only the second time in her life that she had closed it with a key still inside. It wasn’t that she had forgotten to bring her “going out” key. The problem was that she couldn’t insert it because her “staying in” key was still in the lock.

Because May’s house is a bit like Fort Knox, it’s not – nor meant to be - an easy place to break into, even for a locksmith. After a while, I said it might be more sensible to drop May and Jones at the restaurant in town, where we’d been planning to have lunch, while the locksmith continued his endeavours.

By the time I got back, the locksmith had the door open. He asked for €40 for his troubles. I gave him €45 and thought it a bargain. So did May when she repaid me.

We barely had time when I returned from English classes to take the dogs walking before sunset. Since the clocks went back last weekend, it’s been dark by 18.00. Suddenly we’re back into long evenings around the fire and the TV schedule is important once again – of which more in a moment.

Tuesday:
I drove down to the postboxes to await the postwoman who, I hoped, might be bring one of the several parcels I was expecting. Unless the recipient is waiting, the postwoman merely fills out a form to the effect that the parcel may be collected at the post office the following day. To my surprise, after she arrived, she paused just a moment to deliver a single item and then sped off again. Could there be so little mail to deliver to the village, I wondered, even in this electronic age.

The most urgent of the parcels I am awaiting is a new set of transmitter/receivers to beam the TV signal from the upstairs (BBC) satellite receiver downstairs, where we prefer to watch in the evenings. Since one of us destroyed the downstairs receiver some weeks ago by inadvertently wrenching the plug from the wall, we’ve had to bring our supper upstairs to watch our preferred programmes. The old receiver has proved impossible to replace. So I’ve ordered another set online.

Mid-afternoon, to our consternation, the satellite box suddenly lost its BBC radio programmes. It’s been shedding channels for months, a most frustrating habit, and my attempts to redownload them have come to nothing. We can still go online to get our favourite radio channels but we can’t listen to them on our wireless headphones. Jones is most put out and I’m rather displeased myself.

LADY'S TRESSES ORCHID

We had arranged to join David and Dagmar for supper at a small restaurant in Loule, the Cantina dos Sabores, that serves superb inexpensive meals. We left early to give ourselves time to buy Jonesy another mobile phone nearby, to replace that consumed hours earlier by young Barri – her third in as many weeks! This time I caught her at it and let her know just how unhappy it made us.

AUTUMN CROCUS
Wednesday:
Rui Martins, the technician from the electronics shop in Salir, said he could pop in that afternoon to look at our troublesome satellite digibox. So we brought forward our get-together with May, who had asked us to join her to mark the second anniversary of Harry’s death. We took her to our favourite snack-bar in Loule, where cakes are served still hot from the oven.

When we got back home, Natasha said my new wireless keyboard/mouse from Amazon had been delivered.

JUNIPER
I barely had time to set it up before Rui arrived to attend to the troublesome digibox. He was puzzled by its loss of channels, which wasn’t typical of the problems caused by the occasional signal modification. First he tried redownloading the channels as I had. Then, after consulting with other techies, he deleted the existing channels from the memory before downloading them anew. The initial deletion did it. We have all our missing channels back, radio and TV, but the hard disk is still playing up. Bad news!

After he’d left, I set about installing my new wireless mouse/keyboard. These had arrived with absolutely no software or instructions, other than a pointer to Microsoft’s keyboard download site. Twice I tried downloading the indicated software, only to have my computer spit it out. While the keyboard is superbly comfortable and most of the keys function on a plug and play basis, none of the “F” functions or special keys work. I need to do a bit of googling!

Thursday:
November 1 is a public holiday, All Saints’ Day, one of several holidays that the state will be relinquishing in the name of austerity. Vast numbers of Portuguese still share the surname “dos Santos” – of the saints. No, I don't know either.

Down in the valley, the hunters’ guns were popping away. We proceeded cautiously, keeping both Prickles and Barri on the lead. Both are inclined to rush off, ignoring subsequent come-back calls.

I had agreed to take along the trailer to assist the Dutch ladies in the village to move some furniture. Hitching up the trailer is anything but simple. The steps required are as follows: Fetch the tractor from Casa Nada; remove the box from the back; attach the hitch; fetch the trailer from under the trees in the steep Casanova field; take the trailer down to the road; attach the hitch to the car; hitch up the trailer to the car.

These steps have to be reversed later – except that the trailer will in future live with neighbours at the bottom of the village. Will make life much simpler.

Friday
This is an Olive day - bank, post office, shopping, coffee and computer. By the time we'd finished downloading the last program and transferring the last file to the new laptop, it was mid-afternoon, grey and drizzling. From Almancil we nosed our way up into the hills where our wireless transmission set was awaiting us in the remote warehouse of a courier, who claimed he'd been unable to find the house. The weekend looks wet. That's okay with us. FIM