This is Thursday, a cloudy, breezy sort of a Thursday. As usual, I am upstairs in the study with the dogs scattered around like cushions. The house is full of Natasha's cleaning and hoovering noises. Once she has finished downstairs, she will move across to Casa Nada in preparation for our guests later this month.
Jones and I are newly returned from Alte where I went to get a massage from Jodi. For reasons best known to itself, my back has been out of sorts (a fascinating expression!). I always feel better after one of Jodi's massages although, as I admitted to her, I hardly know whether the improvement is psychosomatic. Jones says it doesn't matter.
I should make clear that Jodi is a physiotherapist and gives only therapeutic massages. Even so, as I confided to her, it is almost worth having a bad back in order to get one.
En route we came across electrical engineers erecting a new reinforced concrete pole in the hole they earlier dug at the bottom of the village. More new poles lie in wait in the fields on either side of the road. Whether these poles are going to bring us new electricity is hard to know. In truth, we can hardly complain.
CAT AND DOGS
When we first arrived here the voltage fluctuated madly; you could hear the vacuum cleaner motor speeding up and slowing down. On winter evenings, as heaters were turned on, the supply barely sufficed for TV and the lights. Turning on the oven would freak out the TV. In those days, the supply would fail whenever we had a storm and frequently when we didn't, often for hours at a time. These days such failures are both seldom and fleeting.
SNAPPED FROM THE PATIO
As you may recall, we make our own contribution to the local supply with our photo-voltaic array. This earns us three times what our usage costs us, which is very useful, especially as it will take us at least six years to recover the installation costs. (Nearly three-quarters of Portugal's energy now comes from renewable sources - quite an achievement!)
What isn't yet stable is the water supply, which has gone down twice this past week. It's not serious for, when this happens, residents simply switch to their cisternas for a day or two. Every house has one. It's only these past few years that water's been on tap. Many villagers were able to get by on what fell from the heavens. Alternatively, one buys water from somebody with a borehole who then trucks or tractors it in. Several of our friends still do.
The real disaster looming over our heads is the imminent loss of British television as a result of the transmissions moving to new satellites. While no date has been set, it will almost certainly be by the end of the year. Until now, like hundreds of thousands of expats across mainland Europe, we have enjoyed all the BBC and commercial stations that are available in the UK. What's more, unlike UK viewers, who have to pay a licence fee, we've had them free of charge. Although various options are being peddled, there's no certainty yet about real alternatives.
We have a contract with MEO, an arm of Portugal Telecom, that gives us several dozen channels including most of the international news broadcasters. But it doesn't give us the domestic BBC channels, whose loss will be sorely felt. Nor will we receive the various UK commercial channels that we fall back on when the BBC lacks. At least, I will be able to stream the BBC radio channels to which we rise and retire each day.
As in much of the world, Portuguese residents have to suffer the importuning of cold callers anxious to plug one or other product. These calls tend to come mainly at supper time, just as one is tucking into a Jones salad. I refuse to get up to answer the house phone. Jones sometimes succumbs, fearful that it might be a personal call. So it helps to send us a mobile message first if you call in the evening.
Slavic has spent the better part of two days with us, working on a range of tasks that we're trying to complete before our guests arrive. One of these was to create a new sandpit for Bobby, who loved the accidental sandpit that we left him while paving a new area.
Another task also involved paving, this time of an area of garden that the dogs were forever digging up, exposing pipe-work that we prefer to remain covered up. As ever, Slavic did a great job. We used up the shaped paving bricks that were left over from a big paving job a couple of years back.
While tractoring down the road, I paused to take a picture of an elderly neighbour of ours who was picking his carobs. It's hard to know how old the gentleman is. But he's certainly been around almost as long as the hills. He and his equally bent wife seem to shrug off the burdens of age. If he's not tending his carobs, it's his lettuces or grape vines. His tractor is of a similar vintage to its owner. He gives one hope for the years ahead.
Hans the baker popped around one afternoon to say that he was once again going to be baking bread. He had more or less given up after being driven out of his old premises by new hygiene legislation. We called around to his house to fetch a few loaves, fresh from his old bread oven. He uses various grains and mixtures. What we can't eat promptly, we freeze.
Friday lunchtimish:
Our plans for the day were thrown into disarray when Paulo the plumber who, (after many reminders) had arranged to call this afternoon, called this morning instead - if only to see what materials he required for the job. He arrived just as we were on the point of heading to town. So, of necessity, we re-arranged our day.
The task in hand is to connect the (newly-repaired) old washing machine to the plumbing in Casa Nada, making the machine available to us as a spare and to any guests.
We still managed to make it to town for haircuts. These had been waiting on the return of Fatima, the hairdresser, from a Caribbean cruise. Fortunately, we had made appointments for she was booked to the gunwales and turning away hopefuls at the door. She was also jetlagged and not in the best of humour. Like I said to Jones, as Paulo's unexpected arrival cast a shadow over her day, "that's life".
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