Dictation from Espargal: 1 March 2014

EARLY PURPLE ORCHID

I am suffering from tendonitis and trying to avoid typing. this is an experiment tonight, a very wild and woolly windy Saturday night. I received a text from Flewelling asking me if I had been aware of the voice recognition software on the iPad. I haven't been aware of it and I am now using it in an attempt to give you an account of the week.

The following was the draft blog that I had prepared earlier in the week before I spent a day gardening with our new Gardner and Suffered from severe RSI as a result. I need hardly say that it's rough and ready.

BABY DAFFS

"This week has had its ups and downs. Monday began on down. While preparing ourselves for the day with coffee and rice cake at at our favourite snack bar I received an SMS from the senior university to say that the secretary had died. I was shocked. he was a good fellow in his early 60s who had seemed hale and hearty when I chatted to him ahead of my lesson just two weeks earlier.

Over the years I've got to know him and his wife Margarita quite well. true he been absent last week but there was no suggestion that he'd been fatally ill. I wondered whether he suffered a stroke or heart attack, the usual killers in modern Portugal. when I arrived for my lesson at 1500 I found the front door of university locked along with a note of apology saying the classes were cancelled and that his funeral was to take place the next morning.

ALEXANDERS

so on Tuesday morning having walked the dogs and introduced doru, a new worker to the dogs, i set him to work, ripping out the Alexanders swamping the Garden. Jones and I went to Goulet to attend the funeral. Portuguese funerals have a lot to be said in their favour. typically the great majority of mourners wait outside the church in quiet conversation while an immediate family and friends attend the service within.

RIP MOUSINHO

then after the coffin is bought out and placed in the waiting hearse the crowds fall in behind it as it makes its slow way to the cemetery on the outskirts of the town. traffic inevitably piles up behind the procession but for once drivers refrain from hooting as though in silent salute to the deceased persons final journey.

I gleaned from a couple of my pupils that the man had fallen victim to liver cancer. the disease must've been both advanced and very aggressive. as so often we give thanks for our own many blessings.

DORU

doru is the husband of Nadia the Ukrainian seamstress who has often served as well from her workshop in old loule. Jones had heard from her that her husband had recently returned from a construction job in Belgium and was looking for part time work ahead of another pending contract. for any such work I would normally have sought Slavic's assistance but Slavic had recently found himself in high demand and with the invading Alexanders threatening to overrun the garden there was no time to Delay.

so we agreed that Doru should tsckle the alexanders - after his formal introduction to the dogs. and take them on he did, creating great piles of Alexander corpses that he subsequently forked into the back of the tractor to be heaped up on the compost mountain.

Wednesday brought another visit to the dentist, this time for him to rip out last week's temporary crowns and fit permanent ones. paulo the dentist is both thorough and painstaking. the new crowns went next door to the prosthesis technician a couple of times during an hour-long session for fine adjustment before parlour was happy and cemented them into place. James and I celebrated my new teeth with a glass of wine and a sandwich at Farooq beach

also on Wednesday I spent an hour setting up the Apple TV box that Llewelyn had posted down to me from London. the initial phase talk just a few minutes and I was delighted to get the menu up on the large TV screen but I was blessed if I could link it up to my iPad mini in spite of printing of the instructions from the Internet.

BLUEBELLS

I New that Llewelyn had run into difficulties himself while configuring the same equipment for friends in London. he sent me a number of hints but to no avail. several Skype conversations followed as I try to follow his instructions. the problem was that he was seeing things on his iPad that I wasn't seeing on my. finally I hit the jackpot. now we can stream both audio and video from my iPad directly to the TV, in effect to watch TV via the Internet. the audio side works brilliantly amplifying the radio output. television pictures are watchable but can be a little jumpy with occasional buffering. our broadband just isn't fast enough."

That was as much as I had written by Wednesday evening before Garu arrived on Thursday and I spent the day working with him in the garden and screwed up my arm. it's improving after a session with the physio, along with ice packs and anti inflamatories..

I'm now looking down at what I've dictated. apple's voice recognition software is brilliant. it's truly an amazingly accurate, without any training, vastly more so than a program I bought some years ago and gave up because it simply didn't recognise my voice.

I'm now going to to email this to myself to tinker with it slightly and then to put it up on the blog more or less as it stands. I've taken a number of pictures for the blog that I'll try to stick up too.