Letter from Espargal: 6 of 2013

It’s been raining. Jones has been taking pictures of the raindrops clinging to leaves and petals around the garden. You may admire them for yourselves. I regret that I am still battling with the latest Google Blogger software, which seems to prevent one from wrapping text around them. I have reported these difficulties to Mr Google but whether he’ll do anything about them is another matter. That’s by the by.


We have been very busy. Sometimes I think that if I were better organised, life wouldn’t be so hectic. But then I reflect that we didn’t retreat to the hills in order to be better organised. We came to relax and make the most of our retirement. At least, I think that’s why we came. Yet, somehow, life has got steadily busier – or, at least, that’s how it seems.


It’s no secret that our seven (official) dogs and three (official) cats take a lot of looking after. Apart from the walks and feeding and visits to the vet, there are the time-consuming individual attentions. For example, Pricks likes to settle down in front of the fire at night.


But in the early hours he comes upstairs and whines to be tucked up on a chair. He won’t hop up himself lest the chair is already occupied because he doesn’t want to be whacked, especially by an angry cat.


So he goes on whining until one of us arises and does the necessary. The other morning I found him sleeping happily on a corner of the bed (along with Ono, our regular three-in-a-bed companion). “Did you put him there?” I asked Jones. “Yes,” she replied, “because all the chairs were occupied.” So there you have it.


Of course, we could shut Pricks out on the patio. But then we’d either have to shut all the rest out – they wouldn’t be pleased – or shut them in, which would prevent them from getting out for a pee at night. Somehow it seems easier just to get out of bed at 3 a.m. and tuck Pricks in. Are we mad? Probably! We do cover the chairs, however, and the dogs are not allowed on the leather couch, apart from Mary - but that's another story.


As I was saying, it’s been a busy week. On Saturday, Slavic came to work. He spent the morning painting the pergola with wood preservative and the afternoon repairing the old bread oven. After bumming a bag of cement and a load of sand from Idalecio, I explained to Slavic what we had in mind and left him to it. He did a splendid job, as you see. He still needs to do a bit of rendering and patching but the bread oven, which was slowly disintegrating, once again looks like the real thing.


On Sunday we joined friends for lunch to celebrate a birthday (I think – I’m not very good at birthdays) and the sale of their house. Selling houses for anything like a realistic price is the very devil in the present market and reason for a real celebration. I ordered a bottle of excellent red wine to mark the occasion.


Along with May and the usual English lesson, Monday brought a visit to the lawyer who has been dealing with the ruins at the bottom of our property. When we bought these a couple of years ago, we left them beyond the fence on a quarter-acre of land with a view to being able to sell them on. What we wanted was the land that came with them, not the ruins themselves. However, on paper they are still part and parcel of the original plot.


On Tuesday, after coffee, toast and jam at the Hamburgo (we take along our own jam), we went along to Gilde hardware on the outskirts of Salir. Gilde is a brilliant store. Not only does it stock a huge range of really useful stuff, but Isidoro and Eva, who run it, are really helpful. I needed a new roll of 1-inch hosepipe and a fitting to connect it to my submersible pump. The hose is a bit too small for the fitting and the end needs to be heated to soften it. Isidoro first found me a better (separable) fitting and then got out his blowlamp to soften the hose and force it over the fitting. No charge – it’s part of the service.


Wednesday morning brought our annual meeting with our accountants, half an hour away in Guia. The firm specialises in services to expats. I always send them a spreadsheet in advance. With the bankrupt Portuguese government desperate for money and tax inspectors on every corner, it pays to be careful.


In the afternoon I took Natasha up the road to see the local accountant in Benafim. She too has to file a return each year. The accountant files the details online more or less on the spot. Gone are the huge queues that used to fill the Financas offices at this time of year. The great majority of Portuguese earners now file their returns online.


Jones’s third big appointment with the dentist came on Thursday. Happily, it involved a great deal less discomfort than the previous two. With the assistance of a technician who works in an adjoining room, the dentist prepared new teeth and posts that he has fixed temporarily in place. Jones has a few weeks for them to settle and, if she’s happy, he will cement them permanently into place.


I have followed with interest the reports about the mega-hacking of numerous big firms by (allegedly) the Chinese authorities. It would seem that most of the entries were made via vulnerabilities in the JAVA programme, which I have now disabled on my browsers and stripped from my computers. You may be interested to read the Guardian’s take on the subject.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/askjack/2013/feb/08/java-remove-ask-jack-technology?INTCMP=SRCH)

Letter from Espargal: 5 of 2013

WITH LUCIA IN LONDON
Jonesy came back from London on Sunday evening. She was not very pleased. In fact, she was mad as hell. While in Heathrow duty-free, she had purchased an expensive bottle of whisky for me. Her return flight to Faro was with TAP via Lisbon. As the Lisbon flight arrived late and the connection was tight, passengers for Faro were ushered by a TAP agent from the gate to the departure lounge.

FLOWERS FROM THE GARDEN - MORE TO FOLLOW

At a security point just before it, her whisky was confiscated – never mind that she was in transit, that the bottle was still in the sales bag and that she had the sales slip. In spite of her tearful protests and the intervention of the TAP agent, the security staff would not let her through with it. They said the sales bag should have been sealed.


A PEONY THAT HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY MOVED TO THE GARDEN

We have since written a letter of protest to everybody we can think of – only because it makes us feel better, not because we expect any sympathy. That was £32 – if not the whisky itself – down the drain, a loss that continues to nag at my wife. At least the London visit was a success. She caught up with several friends, attended an exhibition of Manet portraits and achieved her primary object of obtaining a new passport.

BLUEBELLS
This last task proved slightly problematic in that the UK passport authorities rejected the photos she’d had taken for the purpose and sent her off to a machine in the building to obtain new ones. Although she found the photo booths without difficulty, she couldn’t figure out how to start the process in the one she entered.

LAVENDER
After sitting there for some minutes, she gave up and tried another. This second one functioned but didn’t want to accept her money and was anything but simple to operate. Nonetheless, in the end she got her photos and – several hours later – her passport.

ASPHODEL
Speaking of which, we heard of two friends who were involved in dramas during their trips abroad. They arrived this week at Johannesburg airport en route back to London (via Turkey) to find the wife’s EU passport missing. They airline wouldn’t allow her to travel on her SA passport and she missed the flight. Although she managed to obtain a travel document and a seat the following day, she had to pay for a new ticket.

ALMOND BLOSSOM
Her husband, who went ahead, had barely entered his London apartment than the phone rang. His banker wanted to confirm that the man was emptying his six-figure account and transferring the contents elsewhere. This was shocking news to the account holder, who immediately and gratefully blocked the transaction.

OUR GLADE
It appears that his phone had been cloned while he was in RSA and that the cloner was able to get through all the bank’s security measures in ordering the transfer. A close-run thing, as they say. For my part, although I find online banking essential, I don’t do it with my mobile phone.

DAFFODILS
In preparation for Jones’s return home, Natasha and her partner, Slavic, had spent the previous day here. While Natasha removed every speck of dust inside the house, Slavic and I set about the outside. We strimmed, cleaned out drains, sawed up a fallen tree, burned off useless tinder, swept the paths and much more. Slavic is a builder by trade, a no-nonsense worker, and I felt quite exhausted by the end of the day by our labours.

OSTERSPERMUM
On Monday and Tuesday the weather was horrible, as is customary for carnival. Loule has two carnivals, one at the start of Lent (the word “carnival” derives from Italian/Latin “taking the meat away”) and the other in high summer. The weather is generally lovely just before and after the Lenten carnival but not during it. And this year was no exception.

ABUTILON
I had no English class on the Monday but we still took May to lunch and shopping. Before fetching her, we nipped into Loule’s Social Security office to follow up a letter addressed to Barbara. To our great pleasure, we found it nearly empty; it’s generally heaving. Within a few minutes, a helpful assistant had looked at the letter, supplied us with a ream of forms to fill in and a list of documents to present when we returned the completed forms.

SOUTH PATIO
The one document we lacked was a statement from the council that is normally issued to foreigners coming to live in the country. So two days later we reported to the council to request the document. I spoke in Portuguese to the official to whose desk we were directed.

She immediately demanded to know how long we’d been in Portugal and, after ascertaining that we were old hands with residence papers, told us that we were wasting our time there. Show your papers to Social Security, she instructed us, and tell them that’s all you need - which is what we’ll do in due course.

VIEW TO FARO AIRPORT
That was Wednesday morning. There was time for a leisurely sandwich at the Electrico on Faro Island opposite the airport before Jones was due at the dentist for a second mega-appointment. I accompanied her to the waiting room at 15.00 and it was going on 17.00 before she emerged.

IN THE DENTIST'S WAITING ROOM
The dentist had to extract a deep-seated root fragment and then pack bone matter into the cavity in preparation for a bridge that he hopes to fit next week. It was a rough experience, one Jones had not been looking forward to. It’s not often that she is driven to take pain-killers but this was an exception.

Thursday morning Octavio and Manuel arrived to service the solar water-heater, the gas-boiler and the water-softener. They spent the better part of an hour on the roof checking the solar heater before descending to service the other units. All three were found to be in good condition.

Octavio used to work for the company that installed the equipment when we built the house. It had since gone bankrupt, he reported, as had the opposition. There was no longer any firm based in the Algarve doing installations.

JUST FRIENDS
Moreover, he added, he had great difficulty obtaining the spares that he needed to service existing clients. It really comes home to us how severe this economic crisis is, and how it is biting people all around us. According to government statistics, 2% of Portuguese have emigrated since the start of the crisis – inevitably, the majority of them young professionals.

SORRY THAT THIS IS LATE. GOOGLE HAS REVAMPED ITS BLOGGER SOFTWARE AND I'VE HAD THE VERY DEVIL OF A JOB TRYING TO WORK WITH IT. I HAVE YET TO WORK OUT HOW TO WRAP THE TEXT AROUND THE PICTURES

Letter from Espargal: 4 of 2013

JONES FLOWER PICTURE - MORE TO FOLLOW

This week has revolved around Olive’s memorial and her four children, who arrived down from the UK severally to try to sort their inheritance out. So please understand if this is more of a diary than a blog. Olive’s son, Gerry, as reported, was the first to get here - by car last Thursday.

OLIVE

On Friday evening we drove to Faro to meet her daughters, Anne and Margaret, who had travelled down by train and coach. (Anne doesn’t fly.) Their dashes between stations across Paris, Madrid and Seville, were carefully planned and, to their delight, everything worked out. They’d loved the exotic European trains; they even had their own shower. We took the girls home, fetched Gerry and went to supper at a snack-bar nearby.

Saturday morning I joined the three of them to run through the items that I thought needed their consideration. There was lots to think about. That evening, as Jones and I were preparing to go to supper, we got a call from Gerry. He was stranded with a misfiring car half-way to Faro airport to fetch his brother, Gordon.

After arranging with Jones to feed the animals and catch a lift with neighbours to the restaurant, I went to rescue Gerry from the roadside and thence to the airport to fetch Gordon. The question was what to do about Gerry's car. Gerry thought it might be able to limp back home - and it did, which was a relief, albeit a temporary one.

Sunday was the Olive memorial gathering, which had taken a fair bit of planning and lots of communication with Jackie Neville, an Anglican priest, and the family. The day was picture perfect. Fifteen to 20 people came along. We gathered on the patio where Jackie led the proceedings.

After a brief bible reading, Anne tried to recite a poem in Olive’s memory but, in the emotion of the moment, had to hand it to Gerry to continue. I said a few words, Jones played her recording of “God bless thee and keep thee” and then we all set about the snacks and drinks. We thought it went well - our final salute to an old friend.

Monday morning early Gerry, assisted by another friend, took his car into the local dealers for attention. Sorry, they told him, they were booked up for the next three days. So he drove back to the house; the car was performing better, he said and he would chance the return journey.

Mid-morning I fetched the four of them for a session with the lawyer. She explained in detail the complex procedure that was involved in the inheritance, starting with probate from the English courts and various documents to validate it. In the meanwhile she collected and copied the passports, birth certificates and driving licences that I’d warned them to bring along.

As it happens, bureaucracy was the subject of my English lesson that afternoon. A German entrepreneur here in the Algarve is leading a campaign to reduce it. We can but wish him well. I’m not optimistic. The Portuguese know no other way of life and can’t imagine one.

Because I’m going to miss several lessons in the spring, I’ve doubled up on lessons this month, stretching them from one hour to two – with a break midway for coffee across the road.

Tuesday morning we repaired to a fancy new hotel on the outskirts of Quinta do Lago, an “exclusive” resort on the coast. The hotel, the Conrad, was the venue of a tax seminar that I attended while Jones looked around. We’ve seen a few smart hotels our time but nothing posher than the Conrad. Guards at the gate directed us down the long drive and into the underground car park.

While I went to hear how much tax we faced this year, Jones took the two dogs on the briefest of walks. As she was returning them to the car, she was approached by a guard who said he’d been alerted to dogs in the area. Dog poo is clearly unthinkable at the Conrad. Let me add that the guard was perfectly pleasant, confessing that he himself kept chinchillas - as I gleaned from Jones when I emerged at lunchtime.

We dropped by Olive’s house to leave the post-box key with the family and collect the plates and glasses that Jones had taken along on Sunday. The two girls were very pleased with themselves for having worked out a useful access code.

Wednesday I walked the dogs alone while Jones prepared for her mid-morning flight to London. She planned to renew her passport at the same day service that’s now available in the UK, as well as catching up with friends and attending an exhibition or two.

In the afternoon I collected Anne and Margaret from the house and took them into Faro coach station to begin their long road and rail haul back to the UK. Along with their brothers, they’d had a relentless four days sorting out Olive’s belongings and affairs and looked forward to unwinding on the trains.

After supper, I sat down in a chair in the lounge with a glass of wine to watch the news. Some time later I woke up from a deep slumber, knowing neither where I was nor the time of day. Magically, the glass of wine was still clutched in my hand.

Ono and I slept well that night, he on Jones’s side of the bed and I on my own. I warned the cats not to expect their usual 05.00 biscuit handout.

Thursday morning I took Raymond to the vet. Ono, Pricks and Russ came along for the ride.

For a couple of weeks, Raymond has been chewing at the base of his tail, site of certain anal glands and a common source of irritation to dogs. Dermatitis, which started to appear there, gradually spread in spite of our efforts to contain it. As Raymond is big, doesn’t trust vets and doesn’t like being meddled with, we thought it best to tranquilise him first. A course of anti-biotics and a spray should cure the problem.

I gather from Jonesy that she has her new passport and can now relax for the rest of her visit. She is due back Sunday afternoon.

Letter from Espargal: 3 of 2013

Sunday: The week began inauspiciously. My back, which had been well-behaved for months, suddenly threw a wobbly. I have no idea why. So I strapped it up and started taking the usual pills. When out of sorts, my back tends to cause my wife as much anxiety as it causes me discomfort, while she contemplates afresh the prospect of life with an invalid. Happily, the episode has not been a severe one and I am ending the week in a better state than I began it.

PERIWINKLE ON THE VERGE

Monday was as Mondays are. We fetch May for lunch, I retire early for a snooze in the car before returning to the restaurant for coffee and a custard tart. Then Jones takes May shopping while I try to make myself heard in my English class.

We talked about the horrendous nightclub fire in the Brazilian city of Santa Maria. Here in Portugal, at much the same time, 11 people died when a coach, heading for another Santa Maria, tumbled into a ravine. Altogether a bad week for Santa Marias. It occurs to me that half the cities in South America are named after heavenly figures who have done very little from their celestial perches to improve the lives of the earthly inhabitants.

MY BEAN PLANTS

At 23.00 I got a message from Natasha asking if she could work the following day instead of the Wednesday. Why so late, I asked. Because she’d just had the following day’s work cancelled, she replied. So we agreed that she could come a day early. Since Olive’s death, Natasha has lost a substantial part of her former income and we’ve been happy to fit her in around any occasional jobs that she can find. There’s not much demand for maids’ services right now.

Tuesday: Jones was due at the dentist at 15.00 for a session which the dentist wanted before she leaves for London on Wednesday. There was no sign of her at 16.00 when I went back to the surgery to look for her, nor at 17.00. And it was a wan, unsteady figure that finally emerged 15 minutes later. It’s not often that I have to escort Jones back to the car by the arm but this was one. The dental work is on capped front teeth that date back to the 70s.

The drizzle and mist of last week have given way to a welcome series of sunny days, warm enough for sunbathing and cool nights, just cool enough to warrant a fire. The air conditioning in the car is already clicking into life during afternoon outings. I watched one morning as smoke from a fire in the valley rose just a few metres before hitting an inversion and then spreading out as though against a glass ceiling.

Wednesday: We met Natasha at Olive’s house late morning. Jones set to work on an elaborate exterior plant arrangement in an effort to make the place feel a little more welcoming, and then placed a number of flower pots around the front door.

I settled myself beside ONO on a blanket under a pine tree, feeling uninspired. Jonesy said she was doing it for Olive’s sake and, as much as I admire her idealism, I don’t share it. I don’t think there’s anything more that we can do for Olive.

Natasha busied herself inside making beds for Olive’s four offspring, who are due down separately over the next three days. There’s to be a gathering of friends on Sunday in Olive’s memory, followed by a family session with lawyers the following day at which I will join them.

The family is currently going through the complexities of obtaining probate in the UK. Olive’s departure for the next world took everybody by surprise – a valuable lesson on the wisdom of being prepared.

I continued my earlier efforts to transfer to disk a hymn that Barbara particularly wants to play at the Sunday gathering. Here’s a story to be told. Some weeks ago Jones heard a Portuguese choir singing “The Lord bless thee and keep thee” and fell in love with the recording. I was able to access the podcast and listen to the recording but neither of us could make out the name of the choir. And the producers failed to respond to my inquiries.

MOBILE CLINIC VISITS

So we turned to Amazon to acquire a CD with a similar rendition. The hymn in question is the 16th and final item on the CD – not something that I could select on our portable CD player. So I ripped the music off the disk but utterly failed to burn the single item back on to a fresh CD, in spite of trying different disks, different software and different burn speeds. Very frustrating! For some unknown reason, I was successful when I tried with my newer laptop computer. Maybe it's time to update my desktop.

Thursday: After our usual coffee and cake stop, we went across to Olive’s house once again, this time to meet her son, Gerry, and to hand over the keys. He had just arrived down here by car from the UK, a trip that took three days. His two sisters are due to arrive by coach in Faro on Friday evening and his brother by plane on Saturday.

Beside the car in Olive’s grounds I found a small hedgehog that was lucky not to have been run over. Gerry picked it up and took it to a safer spot. He was well acquainted with hedgehogs, confiding that his son runs an informal hedgehog sanctuary.

Jones busied herself once again with flower arrangements while Gerry and I looked around the place. There's masses of stuff that he and his siblings will have to get rid of before the house is sold. We took him to lunch at a restaurant just up the road before leaving him to get on with it. He has a busy weekend ahead. So have we all.