Letter from Espargal: 9 February 2014

TINY DAFFODILS DOT THE WET EARTH

Friday dawned like the morn of the Garden of Eden, which was delightful, as it's been a grey, damp old week. For the first time this month, we really enjoyed our trek around the hills, in spite of a good deal of slipping and slithering on the sticky ground. I take it slowly and carefully; I have a gift for losing my balance.

Jonesy stopped to admire one of the miniature daffodils that dot the path. After that, we set off for the shopping centre at Guia, of which more later.

Friday afternoon has turned grey with the promise of more rain. With an eye on the heavens we got in an early walk. There's a wet and windy weekend in store. Northern Portugal has been taking a hammering.

We've half an eye on the TV, with the hope of seeing something of the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony but all that Sky is offering us at the moment is floods in Somerset, where the discontented locals are growing webbed toes. Not for the first time, I'm grateful to live up a hill.

During a walk earlier this week I suffered my first bout of hot flushes.

THE WIND HAS SCATTERED THE ALMOND BLOSSOM EVERYWHERE

I've no idea what brought it on. First I started shivering, then perspiring furiously. I stripped off my outer garments. The last kilometre home felt like a dreadfully long way. If that's what girls have to go through, I'm grateful to be a boy. It took a couple of stiff baggies to restore my equilibrium.

Thursday was the day that the world as we knew it ended. As ever, I turned on the bedside speaker when I awoke on Thursday morning to listen to the BBC's Today programme, my daily introduction to the world. Instead I heard just a faint hiss. Jones, who lay awake beside me, said she'd had equally little luck when she'd tried earlier - she gets up a couple of hours before I do. The satellite receiver had shown her just a "NO SIGNAL" message.

Then the penny dropped. D-Day had dawned. The BBC had finally moved its signals to the new satellite, with the commercial channels due to follow suit. Ouch! For 15 years we've woken to BBC satellite radio and gone to sleep with it, as well as enjoying free four BBC TV channels for which UK viewers pay. For hundreds of thousands of us scattered around Europe, it's no more.

Not that this is entirely bad news. The radio channels are still available to us via iPads or other computers. And, like many people, we subscribe to a package of TV channels from Portuguese Telecom, a dozen or so in English. Nonetheless, most of our favourite programmes are carried by the BBC and these will be sorely missed.

That's unless we can get them elsewhere. I spent most of Thursday, with Llewellyn's help, experimenting with the "hidemyass" facility, one of several that enable users to obscure their location with the use of Virtual Private Networks. In our case this is not to avoid surveillance by the NSA but just to access channels that are otherwise unavailable in their countries of residence. Results so far are satisfying. Experimentation continues.

The rest of the week has been pleasantly unremarkable. On Wednesday, while Natasha was cleaning the living room, we went to town to have our haircuts.

(It sounds wrong to say "hairs cut".) All visits to Loule begin with a stop at the Reis do Pao (Bread Kings) snack-bar where we enjoy a coffee and share a rice cake. My proprietary diet permits the consumption of half a rice cake once or twice a week. Jorge, the manager, has got to know us well. To be served, we have only to nod in his direction as we take our seats.

Along with our regular order he brought us a slice of a new product, marble cake, to try. It was very good. Under the circumstances I thought that we were entitled to eat the rice cake as well.

But Jones thought it more sensible to wrap it up and take it home. In the event, she later gave it to May, along with the cat nibbles the latter had requested. That was fine by me.

I parked the car right outside the salon of Fatima, our long-standing (no pun intended) hairdresser, to avoid the worst of the showers that were sweeping across Loule every few minutes. (Not for nothing is it known as the pisspot of the Algarve!) When I informed Fatima that we had invested in a Queen bed that was 1.6m wide, she laughed and said her bed was 2.4m wide and was covered with a really fancy split latex mattress. That was so that she, her husband and their two cats could enjoy a good night's sleep. (He too suffers from a curmudgeonly back!) Clearly, I have not been ambitious enough.

When we got home I got Slavic to help me move our old guest bed and mattress into Casa Nada. It had been standing up against the cupboard in the guest room since we moved our former bed downstairs. The guest bed was really heavy and there was no easy way to carry it. We manoeuvred it as far as the front patio where I left Slavic supporting it while I went to fetch the tractor.

Along with the bed-board and the mattress, it now stands up against the Casa Nada wall, covered with an old sheet to keep the dust off. I have offered the bed to Natasha but she can't accommodate it until such time as she moves into larger accommodation - which isn't imminent. She's still on the look-out.

Now we're back to Friday afternoon. The dogs are letting me know that they haven't been fed. There's a fire in the stove and the remains of a fine whisky in my glass. On charge beside my computer is the pair of wireless headphones that I acquired from FNAC at the shopping centre in Guia this morning.

They're analogue, which means I don't have to go through the complex installation procedure required by the bluetooth headphones I'd first considered. I have plugged them into the back of the computer with a view to listening to our favourite radio programmes while on the move about the house.

They work superbly, which is a great relief. I thought after setting them up that I'd made a mistake as I couldn't get them to function. But the problem seems to have been just flat batteries. Barbara is pleased too. She loves to listen to the World Service early in the morning as she catches up on the ironing or correspondence.

So, there's our week, not a bad one, BBC or no BBC.