Letter from Espargal: 31 August 2013

Rain has fallen, great big wonderful wet reviving drops of rain.

Although this is not the kind of news to excite Albertans, it was a gift to the exhausted gardeners of the Algarve.

On Thursday afternoon, instead of spending two hours with the hosepipe, Jonesy sat on the patio with a baggy - so did I - immersing ourselves in the shower that came floating darkly over Benafim and deposited itself all over us.

Although we'd been advised that there might be thundershowers I was sceptical. All too often, they fail to appear.

It's early in the season and I took advantage of the cloudy afternoon to clean the car.

I hadn't noticed what was happening overhead until Jones drew my attention to the skies. We just had time to get things under cover before the rains came down.

It's been a much cooler week - although temps are due to climb up into the 30s again.

At the end of August each year I celebrate the passing of summer - like a mountaineer who has got past the crux.

There has been a dampness in the air for several days and the first ornithogalums have sprung up in the park, a sure sign of autumn's imminent arrival.

The mozzies, meanwhile, are making the most of late summer. Each morning when I top up the bird-bath (cum bee-pond), I check for larvae. And mid-week sure enough, the water was full of them, little black wrigglies getting ready to enwretch our lives. (The OED has come out with a bunch of new words and I reckon it's time I contributed one or two myself!) So I drained the water out through a small (pluggable) hole and left the bath to dry out in the sun.

I sometimes reflect on the ethics of killing other creatures - moths, wasps, spiders - simply because we don't want them around. But the tormentors - mozzies, flies and ticks - don't figure on my morality chart; they are to be blatted out at every opportunity.

And with blatting in mind, I keep a couple of swatters handy both upstairs and down.

The real challenge is to whack the big flies that come buzzing in with an enviable display of aerobatics. They're lightning fast and know you're sneaking up on them. I have about a 50% success rate. A successful whack brings its own glow of satisfaction.

The grateful ants instantly drag the corpses off, sometimes two or three to a fly. On our walks we come across great armies of ants toiling back to the larder, all but invisible beneath their sun-brolly seeds.

I am taking the liberty of putting up a picture of a black bear that, with her two cubs, was raiding a plum tree in the garden of Barbara's nephew north of Vancouver. When disturbed, she scaled the 8-foot iron fence with an agility and speed that amazed our relatives. All we can hold up to Canada's bears are Iberia's wild boar although, in truth, these are nocturnal and rarely seen.

I played good Samaritan to a visitor staying locally, who had wandered up the road with his little dog to dump his garbage in the wheely bins on the corner. Two normally placid dogs that live nearby decided that the strange canine was intruding on their space and were giving it and owner a hard time as I passed on the tractor. So I hopped down and distracted the aggressors with the biscuits that I always carry. In fact, they usually come running up as I pass, hopping up against the wheel to take a biscuit from me.

On the home front Jones has been guarding the gate into the park in the evenings as I set off to find a hiding place. This gives me a bit more time to seclude myself up a tree or in a bush before the dogs (which otherwise cheat brazenly) come haring after me.

Barbara has been trying to get a shot of them as they charge into the park. Below you see the leaders in full cry. That brown blob, tail up, in the middle is Russ in full flight; he bays as he runs in anticipation of the treats that my discovery will bring.

It's the closest thing I know to being a hunted fox - and it's quite exciting, even when you know that you are not going to be torn to shreds.

Slavic spent two days, one helping me to bring in some of the firewood that has lain drying in the sun all summer following our major pruning exercise last year. We stacked six tractor loads and dropped two more off with neighbours. And that's just from one of the three giant piles that dot the property. The second day he cleaned up the cheese-wedge, the extended garden area that we are trying to reclaim from nature.

I waited half an hour on the phone to get through to the British taxman after noticing that Barbara's pension was suddenly being taxed erroneously at source. (We pay all our taxes in Portugal!) Last time I called the UK tax office, a year or two ago, somebody answered within seconds and apologised for keeping me waiting. I was flabbergasted.

No such luck this time. I sat in a queue in which horrible music alternated with a voice informing me: "Just to let you know, you can also find useful information on our website...." Thirty minutes of that amounts to torture. I was on the point of giving up when the call was taken by an assistant who (after speaking to Jones to confirm that I could act on her behalf) noted the error and promised to rectify it.

Making such phone calls falls to me.

In terms of our informal conjugal division of duties, I do repairs, bureaucracy, correspondence and travel - everything at the computer. We both do animals and Jones does....well....the bit that's left.

There's some relaxing gardening, a little light food preparation and occasional washing and cleaning.

One job we did together was to raid Sarah and David's cottage, the Padaria Velha (Old Bakery) for grapes (while they are back in the UK.), taking the ladder across on the tractor.

There were huge bunches of them clustered high on the vine that's meshed with the loquat tree.

We took turns in climbing the ladder to get at them, reaching up through the trellis and the branches to snip the off the fruit.

At the same time, Jones fed Bold (aka Sick Cat), who has chosen to stay over there rather than return to Casa Nada. Little wonder, considering that his food is hand-delivered twice a day.

Bold spends his day in a perch on the vine. To feed him, Jones lifts him on top of a cupboard, a look-out from which he can spot any enemies. And enemies he certainly has.

We think that it was a wound he sustained during a fight that has injured his throat and made it hard for him to swallow - hence Sick Cat.

The news in Portugal is mainly about the fires up north (several people have been killed) and the coming local elections. Because expats can vote in local elections, one of the political parties organised a meeting of expats in the Loule area to canvas their support. Our friends, the Davieses, took the opportunity to enquire why the water reservoir on the hilltop 100 metres away (right behind the Quinta) was not supplying water to residents, two years after completion. It turns out that the construction company went bankrupt shortly after finishing the work and the whole matter had been tied up in the courts ever since. Welcome to Portugal.

Letter from Espargal: 24 August 2013

Here is the news: A huge moon was witnessed rising over Espargal; relieving cloud brought some shade mid-week; a golden oriole was glimpsed in farmer Martins' field; Squinty's paw seems much better but Braveheart is still limping. Other stuff has been happening in the world but most of it is just depressing - so stand by for cosmos and canines. It's all we've got.

One of the things that I do in bed at night, apart from getting leg cramps, is to have vivid dreams. In effect I attend my own private nocturnal theatre. Most dreams I keep to myself or simply whisper to the dogs that come to the bedside at dawn for a reassuring nuzzle-up. But one recent dream I related to Jones, who concluded that I must be feeling insecure.

In my dream, I had carefully locked a bathroom door before seating myself on a bucket to commune with nature. When I looked up, I noticed to my great surprise that the bathroom had no back wall and that a stream of people was passing by.

So seizing my bucket, I opened the door and went through it to continue my session on the other side. No sooner was I was again seated than I saw that this room too lacked an exterior wall and I was just as exposed to the crowd once more.

I can only think that this was a variation of the popular "no pants" dreams.

It is possible that it was occasioned by the sight of my wife floating around the garden, hose-pipe in hand, clad mainly in one of my hand-me-down shirts.

I considered putting up a picture of this apparition but concluded that it wasn't worth the collapse of my marriage, even though she evinced greater modesty than some of the chiffon and bikini-clad shoppers who waft around Apolonia's supermarket.

Jones, for the record, has the knack of looking almost as good in my clothes as she does in her own although she often complains, especially as she frowns into the car mirror, that she looks a mess!

Like me, she has found the daily upper-30s temperatures difficult to cope with. My solution is to spend as much of the day as possible either in the fan-ventilated study or in the air-conditioned bedroom. Hers is to take herself into her garden in a bid to banish the heat from her mind. (It's not from my mind that the heat needs banishing!)

Five-ish, I follow her outside, whether to do a bit of pruning, mulching, carob-picking or whatever. I have again taken the electric clippers to Russ (aka the woolly mammoth) seen below left , careful not to strip him as naked as I left his sister three weeks ago.

She, happily, is looking quite respectable again, ready to be presented to my family, for whose visit next month we are making preliminary preparations.

It's just the twins that really need clipping to survive the summer. The rest of the dogs can get by with a little grooming.

Some time after seven, as the sun starts to lose its sting, I take the dogs into the park (the two-acre expanse of fenced hillside beyond the garden) to play hide-and-seek.

After a great deal of effort, I have taught the dogs to wait while I go off to hide in some distant corner of the park - whence I call them.

WAIT TILL I CALL YOU

That's the theory, anyhow. In practice the dogs quickly grow impatient for the treats they know that I'm carrying.

Either they sneak up behind a rock to see where I'm heading or Prickles barks to signal that the wait is over.

At that point they all come baying after me like the very furies. When this cheating is blatant, I deny them a treat and insist that they wait while I hide once again. At least I try. For they charge down upon me with such clamorous and expectant glee as is difficult to disappoint.

GOTCHA!

Doggy dinner follows around eight while Jones and I sit down at the table on the cobbled patio to reflect on the day over a baggy & coke.

If there's anything to watch on telly, it will generally be at nine. We often view one programme and record another.

Then comes a salad supper in front of the ten o'clock news - followed by a final leg-lifter with the dogs (perhaps that should be "for the dogs").

If there's a breeze, the front patio is the coolest and pleasantest part of the house and the after-supper temptation on mozzie-free evenings is to lie down on the warm tiles to reflect on the nature of the universe.

The dogs make a dive to get in beside me, the successful bidders defending their positions and the others whining and wingeing from the perimeter.

Braveheart (the black shadow behind my head), who must be one of the world's coolest cats, seems perfectly at ease in the heart of the scrum.

Natasha was saying that her household, apart from partner Slavic and son Alex, now includes a cat and rabbit - sorry; no pics. The rabbit was initially confined to a cage but was later granted the freedom of the apartment, faithfully returning to either its cage or the cat-box to do its business. It has become great mates with the cat.

I had rabbits when I was a kid, a buck and two does that rapidly became a family of 20. When I could no longer feed them, I tried to sell them. There were no takers and in the end, desperate, I gave them away.

ALL IN A HOT AND COPPER SKY

Towards the end of the week we will get a copy of the Portugal News, generally free at supermarkets, to see what's relevant to expats. The editor (like the SABC of old) believes in positive news and always comes up with some impossibly sunny headline: Hotel occupancy on the rise, he will inform us optimistically, or Strong drop in violent crime.

I can't think that anybody ever bothers to read the front page but the letters to the editor can be quite interesting and the ads are sometimes useful.

DUNNO FLOWER?

On Friday evenings I try to think of a novel way of informing the syndicate that we have again lost our stake in the Euromillions draw. Fortunately, members' expectations are not high. The Portuguese government now takes 20% of any wins over €5,000; many Portuguese are said to be placing their bets across the border in Spain where they already buy petrol and much else more cheaply.

Jones and I talked about the 9-hour grilling of David Miranda at Heathrow airport. She says that if you haven't done anything wrong, you haven't anything to worry about. I say that depends on who decides what is wrong. But this isn't a subject I should be getting into now.

This coming week promises to be a little cooler. That will be nice.

Letter from Espargal: 17 August 2013

As I may have mentioned before, it's hot. For the last few days we have cut short our walk, doing just the first loop in our customary figure of eight. This shortened excursion takes 35 minutes rather than the usual 60. That's partly so that I could be back promptly to work with Slavic and partly because August is bearing down on us.

Daily I get half a dozen advisory emails from the Portuguese Met Office (to which I subscribe), warning me of "tempo quente" - hot times, or rather, hot weather. (The Portuguese word "tempo" can mean either 'time' or 'weather'. If you find this strange, consider the horrors of the English word "bow".) When there's no relieving breeze, as there hasn't been for much of the week, it's oppressive.

GARDEN WATERING

I find the Ancient Mariner's words: "All in a hot and copper sky..." echoing through my head as we tramp around the hillside, dripping with perspiration. The dogs pause in patches of shade to catch their breath. The only sound to be heard is the amplified rasp of cicadas and the intrusion of an occasional early plane to or from Faro airport.

Not that all have been suffering. From the next-door swimming pool 50 metres away comes the sound of children's laughter and screams as his guests make the most of it. What they may also be making the most of - Jonesy certainly is - are the figs on trees along the public right of way. They are delicious - large, ripe and juicy - and they go down a treat with a generous splash of Greek yoghurt.

In spite of the heat we have been working - mainly. Slavic has continued with our structural garden improvements and pruning in the park, I have tractored him (chain-saw, branches, stones, sand, cement, cement mixer) around and Jones is nearly always to be found crouched in a corner of her garden.

At her suggestion, we have filled the old decorative fountain with water in a bid to entice the wasps and bees away from the dogs' water bowls. She even laid a small plate of honey at the water's edge. A few insects have made the transition but most are happy where they've been and not in a hurry to move.

Today - August 15, Feast of the Assumption - is both a public holiday and the start of the hunting season. Happily the heat has discouraged any potential hunters; we haven't heard a single pop. Long may it last - the absence of pops, that is.

The Feast of the Assumption (which always takes me back to my days in the Marist Brothers) is one of the religious festivals to escape the chop that has been required as part of Portugal's austerity drive - this after discussion between Lisbon and the Vatican. In all, four public holidays have been cancelled, reducing such days-off from 14 to 10.

Workers and unions are inevitably displeased. But then they would be. We "retired" folk hardly know the difference, except that on public holidays there's no postal delivery. To be sure, now that most letters, bank statements and utility bills come by email, we find the post box empty more often than not.

I was on the tractor with Slavic one morning when Barbara rang me. She had taken a call from a neighbour whose printer had run out of ink in the midst of printing boarding passes for his visiting family, who were about to return home with Ryanair. Could I please help?

I could. We knew that Ryanair charged passengers for printing boarding passes - but not how much. So, out of interest, I googled the subject and came across the report of a British woman who'd had to pay the company €300 for printing off five boarding passes at the check-in desk. She claimed that there was no facility for doing this at her Spanish holiday venue and subsequently asked Michael O'Leary to compensate her. But he, charming as ever, scoffed at the claim and said she deserved the charge for being so stupid. Not that his manners have done his airline any harm. It's thriving.

On Monday, leaving Barbara to finish lunch with May, I drove into the Algarve Forum shopping centre on the outskirts of Faro to talk to Vodafone about an SMS they'd sent me. This related to new legislation regarding pay-for services of which I wanted to know more. I was relieved to find no queue at their desks because the underground garage was so hot and thick with fumes that I had hesitated to leave the dogs in the car.

JONES SAID I COULD PHOTOGRAPH THE HEART BUT TO LEAVE HER OUT!

Both on the way in and out, I passed a young woman trying unsuccessfully to persuade passers-by to cough up €5 for charity - in return for one or other bauble. These money-raisers generally don't approach foreigners (who stick out like sore thumbs) because they're not confident enough of their English.

So the woman was surprised when I stopped at her stall and addressed her in Portuguese, and she was delighted to learn that I wanted to contribute all of €10 to her charity. I sympathised with her task. Truly, convincing an indifferent public of the worthiness of a cause is about as thankless as it gets. I wasn't enthused about the baubles but, at her insistence, I came away with a rubber heart and a plastic fan.

Several times, both Jones and I have paused at fairs and fetes to purchase some unwanted item from a young (obviously disconsolate) stallholder whose wares have found no favour with visitors. Life in business is tough.

Two other visits have been to our regular jeweller in Loule (the city has at least a dozen such) to have Barbara's lost-and-found bracelet reduced in size - and to her Ukrainian dressmaker to have a jacket taken in. The woman concerned operates from a shop in the back streets of Loule. She's quick, exact and inexpensive - and always busy.

Jones has made use of her services half a dozen times and never come away displeased.

Natasha is doing a shift with us in the garden. She's a good gardener, and used to spend much of her day keeping the extensive garden of another client in order. We are still cleaning up the garden perimeter, an area that until a few years ago had succumbed to decades of wild growth.

To get up from my desk I shall have to disturb the five dogs that are laid out like stuffed animals under and around it. They like to be with me - and I've no problem with that. I enjoy their company.

The remaining two dogs don't come upstairs. They tried it once or twice in the early days but wouldn't descend the stairs, having to be ferried down again, clutched on my lap as I bum-bounced down a stair at a time.

This is a picture of a gift that Jonesy got from Marie and of my efforts to make it twirl. The idea is that the glass ball sitting in the circling steel frame appears to rise or fall as the frame spins. But the frame won't spin of its own accord.

Thus you are looking at the TB spinner, Mark Four, which catches the breeze (when there is one) quite successfully and spins the device beneath it. After all, one has to find something to pass the time during these hot days.
`

Letter from Espargal: 10 August 2013

We had a policy when we ran the Quinta (and really had to work quite hard) of trying to take a day off each week. In view of our recent endeavours, Jones thought that we might reinstate this policy, for a few weeks at least. And since that was fine by me, we took Wednesday off.

Our first stop on any such outings is always the Barclays pastelaria in Loule, so-called (by us) because it's just around the corner from Barclays Bank. This outlet stocks the best cakes in town, always freshly baked and often still warm from the oven.

Its merits are well known and it's much frequented, not only by Joe Public, but also by the helicopter crew from the local pad and the emergency ambulance services, whose blue-light patrol cars wait in readiness outside. We have only to nod to the staff to receive our standard order, a shared rice-cake and two coffees.

Next we dropped a boot-load of dog biscuits off with Marisa, the woman who runs rescue kennels on the heights of Goldra, overlooking Loule. Goldra's an interesting place, better known for its vistas and villas than the two adjacent kennels near the summit. What the wealthy folk who buy there in summer subsequently discover is that the heights are often encased in fog in winter.

Marisa, as I was trying to say, is always grateful for such donations. Her enterprise lives by her efforts and public goodwill - reminiscent of the Carmelite nuns in Rivonia who depended at least as much on the potatoes that dad used to drop off after Sunday mass as divine providence. I recall once having a conversation (through an iron grill) with the mother superior. She promised to remember us in their prayers but there's no easy way of telling what those prayerful remembrances amount to or how much credit they've won me in Heaven.

For lunch we returned to the superb Garden Cafe in the Natura Garden Centre near Almancil, a sure venue for our family gathering next month.

Most unusually, the waitress looked blank when I addressed her in Portuguese, confessing that she was German and not familiar with the language - presumably a student earning her holiday keep.

Also this week, while Jones continued to shape her garden, I followed the example of the local farmers and began taking in our carobs. The semi-official start of the carob-collection season is the feast of the Assumption, August 15. But the rate at which the beans mature varies from one tree to another. Some pods are still partly green. Others have long since turned black and started dropping, especially in the wind.

At this time of year, however, the majority still cling doggedly to the branches and take a great deal of whacking to be persuaded down. Come September, they will start descending of their own volition. Meanwhile, the novelty of detaching them with a long supple stick wears off as fast as one's arm muscles weary of the task. So I've set myself modest targets.

Slavic has spent most of the week working on the Dutch ladies' project and they expressed their great satisfaction with his efforts when we dropped by. Friday he returned here to continue his path-building efforts. We shall probably be sharing his services for a while.

Monday, as ever, was May day. She likes to visit her bank once a month, staggering in on Jones's arm to withdraw cash. It's a small branch with a single desk to serve clients depositing or withdrawing funds. The cashier is a hugely helpful fellow who's happy to fill in May's cheques and hand over whatever combination of notes she requires. May shows her appreciation each Christmas with some fine bottles of wine.

Tuesday Sergio came to fit the aluminium-framed fly-screens that we ordered for Casa Nada. Some years ago he'd installed windows front and rear but leaving these open tended to invite both insects and animals inside. He had to plane the edges of the frames slightly to fit them in the uneven openings. A generous squidge of silicone all round finished the job - and very smart it looks to.

For the past fortnight, Squinty - one or our two black cats - has been limping, unwilling to put his right front paw down. He will allow Barbara to feel it - and she can't detect any sign of injury. Suddenly, our second black cat, Braveheart, has started limping in identical fashion. If limps were catching, Braveheart has caught one. We're puzzled.

WHERE YOU SEE THE WORDS "JUST HERE"

Let me finish on a bright note. As I was hauling buckets of mulched branches through to the garden one afternoon, I caught sight of a small, gleaming halo of light, lying just off a new path we'd been working on. Catching my breath, I went to take a closer look. And there it was, the gold bangle that Barbara lost months ago and which we'd searched for high and low.

It was lying at the edge of a flower bed, between the path and the thick layer of mulch that I'd been laying down. We must have passed within inches of it dozens of times. I took Jones a celebratory early baggy - and had one myself. She can only think that it came off when she pulled off a glove. It's slightly larger than two similar bangles that she wears constantly. And this coming week I shall have it reduced slightly. It's a very special bangle and one we'd not want to lose again.

Letter from Espargal: 3 August 2013

On Tuesday and Friday evenings, before I check the Euromillions results, I sometimes imagine what we might do if we won the big prize - say €20 million or thereabouts. (We've already won the €20; it's the million that's proving problematic.)

These are idle reflections rather than any lust after money. I don't know that we'd be any happier to become multi-millionaires. What we might be, and this is the point, is relatively cool in summer.

One of my fantasies is that I'd buy a house somewhere up north, maybe in Scandinavia (because they all speak English and it's within driving distance). We'd have to take the dogs along - not sure about the cats. At the end of May we'd pack the whole caboodle into some kind of mega comfy van, done out with 5-star kennels and gleaming widgets, and drive ourselves up to our cool house for the summer. No flies! No mozzies! No ticks! Wouldn't it be wonderful!

The awkward implications, like caring for our hot house and garden in Portugal in the meanwhile, I'll worry about in due course. The great thing about fantasies is that you don't have to concern yourself with the awkward bits. You can lose yourself in the dream, at least until the inflamed heat bumps around your midriff bring you back to earth.

As you see, I'm sneaking these reflections in between the pictures. They're mainly pictures of us working because working's what we've mainly been doing, with the assistance of Natasha and Slavic. It's an accident of fate that we have Slavic. He has recently had his official hours severely reduced and is only too pleased to have the work.

I ran my cement mixer and half a dozen planks down to the house of the Dutch ladies, where Slavic spent a day laying two slabs. He returned to us for the rest of the week to allow the concrete slabs to harden before he has to drill into them.

From the Dutch ladies' house at the bottom of the village, you get a good view of Espargal hill and, if you look carefully, of Casa Valapena (brown walls) towards the top of the hill.

On the home front we continue with all kinds of minor improvements - really just tidying up the garden, paths and walls. This exercise is both timely in view of the arrival of family in September and, I think, to our long-term benefit, for the effort really shows.

JONES ON THE NEW CURVACIOUS PATH

I had a note from one of our old mates the other day in response to recent blogs, pointing out that we're pensioners now and that it's not compulsory to slave away in the midday sun; there's a lot to be said for taking it easy. He had a point, as I acknowledged to him.

One action I took was to clip the hairy twins, Russ and Mary, once again, as the next heat-wave looms. I had taken the clipper to them on our return from holiday in June, impressing Jones with my expertise. This time I really screwed up my attempt to trim Mary after carelessly gouging out a strip along her back.

HOW MARY WAS SUPPOSED TO LOOK!

After considering the damage, I thought it best to shave her evenly. Mary emerged looking like a newly-stripped sheep. I felt really ashamed of myself. There are consolations. She doesn't know how silly she looks, she's the coolest creature in the house and in a month she'll be as hairy as ever. Even so, I feel a proper twit!

Another area where I have failed of late is in barbecuing sausages, just about the only cooking I ever do. For the last decade, we have used an ancient, open barbecue that was passed on to us by neighbours. Deciding that this was the cause of my failures, I purchased one of those oval, lidded jobs, which I assembled half an hour before the arrival of our guests, Marie and Olly, brushing off Jones's warnings about "they say you shouldn't experiment......." or whatever.

BBQ CORNER

I was impressed. The lid turns the barbeque into more of an oven than a simple grill (which you probably knew years ago, but anyhow), gives the chef a measure of control and negates the effects of the wind. The results were consumed with reassuringly approving sounds. Next experiment is to try cooking the chicken wings I bought at the same time.