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