Letter from Espargal: 13 July 2013

This has been an exceptionally busy week one way and another; so busy in fact that I've missed my siesta most afternoons. At this late juncture I am reduced to adding a few captions to pictures rather than doing a dinkum blog but it's a case of half a loaf. Like most of the pictures that follow, this one speaks for itself. If we are not sharing the bed with a dog, it's a chair with the cat.

This image of my wife was so unusual that her own dogs gave her a good barking. And little wonder. Apart from inheriting one of my old shirts, she had borrowed my working hat on a particularly sunny day. Most days have been stinkers. But temps have fallen 10 degrees these past two days to bring us welcome relief.

Here, if you look closely, you may see a little drama being played out. Prickles, the small white dog, appears to be fast asleep in the sun. But he's actually keeping half an eye on the biscuit that you may be able to see between his front and back legs. It's this biscuit that Mary, the black dog, craves. She is torn between greed and fear, knowing just how fierce Prickles can be when biscuit nickers are about.

Midweek Carlos and assistant arrived to install a new display cabinet, intended to house various televisual devices that had previously stood on a side table - bottom left - wires protruding on all sides.

And this is how it looks. We had Carlos build and install the much taller adjoining cabinet when we first built the house, together with another on an opposite wall. They have proved capacious, attractive and hard-wearing. What we are one day going to do with their contents I haven't a clue.

Slavic spent three days strimming the park and building an artistic rock floor around the pomegranate trees, between Casa Valapena and Casa Nada. My part was to drive him down to the bushveld below the village to search for suitable rocks. And to ferry up loads of rock powder and cement from the bottom of the driveway, which is as close as Cesar, the delivery driver, can get to the house.

Rocks are to be found around here in their tens of thousands. And the farmers are delighted to have you remove them. But flattish rocks are at a premium and take a great deal of searching out. Even so, we returned with half a dozen tractor loads.

And this is how the finished job looks. The logs are for decoration, and standing up beyond them is the rock man that the plough unearthed from one of our fields. He seems to me to the spirit of some past inhabitant.

This fellow was to be seen one evening, squatting on the ceiling. My inclination with such uninvited guests is to rehouse them in the vacuum cleaner. But in view of my wife's spider-saving principles, I let him be. I've no idea where he's gone to.

On Thursday Jonesy celebrated her somethingth birthday. She invited Marie and Olly to join us at a nursery just the other side of Almancil that does light meals and refreshments.

As you can see, the ladies were in their element.

I have to say that we were mightly impressed by the snackbar. Both eats and drinks were superior and the setting was of the sort one normally sees pictured in fancy magazines. The cherry on the cake was the arrival of a porcelain dish with water for the dogs that we had sneaked in - so much nicer than being ejected, which had happened on the patio of another restaurant the previous week.

Here, hot off the press, you get an exclusive view of the party that Jonesy and Pauline threw for the Espargal expats this Saturday afternoon. The party started out on the east patio and later followed the evening sun around to the north.

Jones and Pauline - seen here in conversation - both celebrate birthdays in the first half of July. For some years they have invited the locals to a joint celebration. This year the invitation included new neighbours, Nikki and Len, from the bottom of the village.

And here we are, parked under the carob tree that shades the front patio. It's my favourite spot, the nook where we sit down with a glass of wine, cheese and biscuit in the evenings when the watering's done and the dogs are fed, to reflect on all the good things that have come our way.

No blog would be complete without a Jones sunrise or sunset. So here's the sunset of the week. I have to say that I love to see the orb going down for the evenings are heavenly and the days can be hellish - especially when one has to slave outdoors when one ought to be taking a therapeutic siesta.