Letter from Espargal: 28 November 2014

This hasn't been an easy week, what between the weather, the damage it's caused to my devices and a nervous tic from the car. The weather began with the wicked storm last week and continued with mighty downpours interspersed with showers most other days.

I thought we'd got off lightly from the storm when our TV set survived the lightning strike, as reported. But I subsequently discovered that my uninterruptible power supply and my router booster had fallen victim to it, along with our twin Skype phones. (Barbara bumped into neighbours whose electronics had also been whacked by the bolt.)

THE HYENAS WAIT TO POUNCE ON PRICKLE'S LEFT-OVERS

After obtaining a new UPS and Devolo booster, with Llewellyn's assistance I spent hours vainly trying to resurrect the Skype phones; they would take incoming landline calls but wouldn't Skype or dial out.

It would seem that the base station has given up the ghost. (We are still able to Skype via our iPads but they're not as convenient.)

On Sunday the car, which has behaved impeccably for the first five years of its life, suddenly flashed up a warning of an engine fault. The handbook said take the car to a dealer asap. The warning sign persisted.

So we phoned May to cancel Monday lunch and I presented myself bright and early that morning at Honda in Faro. In fact, when I arrived, there wasn't a soul around. The receptionist, whom I knew, was the first on the scene. I explained the situation. She didn't think it critical and booked me in for attention the next morning - the first opening.

SMALL OLIVES FROM UNGRAFTED TREES STAINING THE STEPS

As I left Honda the warning image disappeared from the instrument panel and didn't return. So I cancelled the appointment. My fingers are still crossed.

That afternoon I asked my English class whether the cells at Lisbon's police HQ were comfortable. The question provoked some lively conversation.

Portugal has been agog all week at the arrest, interrogation and confinement of its last socialist prime minister, José Sócrates.

Mr Sócrates was detained last Friday on his return from (his luxury apartment in) Paris, charged with financial crimes relating to his period in office. Also confined are his driver, who moved suitcases of money out of the country, and a business friend.

Nobody is surprised that the ex pm might be thought corrupt. He's long fended off credible accusations of pocketing brown envelopes. The surprise is that he has been nobbled - and then denied bail. His lawyer was outraged at the judge's ruling - at least for benefit of the media. The week's events may restore some confidence in a sceptical public who have witnessed a spate of high-level financial malpractice.

Tuesday we went up to Benafim to pay for the latest delivery of sand to the bottom of our driveway - with a view to continuing our stone wall build at the weekend.

The suppliers, Quim Quim (pronounced Kim Kim), know me well by this time. I have only to pick up the phone and mention Valapena to be sure that I'll find the sand, cement, gravel or whatever in place within a few hours.

It's very handy. They're happy to take payment in cash a day or two later or by bank transfer.

The latter is now our principal method of settling debts (although many local people still trot along cash in hand to the pay-shop).

I hardly use cheques any longer. An issue of five lasts me the better part of a year.

May called in the evening to say that her electricity was still tripping in spite of the higher potential that the EDP was now allowing her. We promised to look into it the following day.

At May's house on Wednesday I turned on both lounge heaters and a couple of kitchen appliances to see whether the electricity tripped under the load. It did.

So I phoned the EDP again to ask them to raise May's potential yet again - something they should do next week.

Meanwhile we have once more turned off the big pool pump.

We lunched with May at a snack-bar we have come to like. May insisted to me that she wanted to pay (we take it in turns).

I left first to snooze in the car, as I usually do. May and Jones followed. The waitress, a delightful young lady, came running out after them to say that the bill had yet to be settled.

Jones was under the impression that I had already paid and May had clearly forgotten her intentions. No harm done!

THE HEAD TORCH (BELOW) IS IN PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT STORM-INDUCED BLACK-OUT

That evening it poured down. Radio and TV reception failed. I blamed the weather. But Marie, who shares the same "backdoor access" to UK channels, correctly suspected that the encryption had been changed. It had! I received the new code from the supplier in time to enter it in the digibox for the 10pm news.

Thursday morning I got a series of email warnings from the weather bureau about a severe storm due to hit us overnight. Certainly the radar picture showed as deep a depression offshore as I've seen. With a view to scattering fertilizer granules around our carob trees before the rain arrived, I took the tractor into town. Quim Quim loaded it with fertilizer and cement.

As soon as I got back, I slit open the bags of fertilizer and we started scattering it under the carob trees. I gave the fruit trees and nut trees a few handfuls as well.

The trees reward us for our efforts. The new carob crop already hangs green and heavy from the branches along with the remnants of the old.

And the almond trees, which used to bloom in January, are already coming into blossom. Times are a changing.

Letter from Espargal: 21 November 2014

Tuesday, where this blog starts, dawned sunny, warm and still - the only day of a dull, damp week to do so. Having walked and settled the beasts, we set out to a hospital near Faro airport where I needed to sort out a confused bill for treatment I'd received earlier in the year.

That done, we carried on to Faro Beach for lunch at a snack-bar that looks across the estuary to the airport, always a good spot to spend an idle hour over a light meal out of season. With me I took the camera and Jones took the pictures that dot the blog, a change from our usual fare.

Such lunches out typically consist of a glass of red wine and a toasted sandwich.

I should add that the high calorific value of red wine has recently been impressed upon us. The BBC carried a story comparing the consumption of a typical glass of red wine to that of a doughnut.

As the reporter pointed out, most of us wouldn't dream of downing three doughnuts at a meal but might well consume three glasses of wine. (I take the fifth your honour!)

HELLO, WHAT'S LIFE LIKE IN FRANCE?

The snack-bar served exceptionally generous glasses - 300ml - of perfectly acceptable house-wine, cold - as is often the case.

Having cut down radically on my wine consumption this month and having impressed the scales with my discipline, I felt entitled to enjoy my glass to the full - and did.

(To be honest, one might wonder whether I'd bribed the scales, so successful were my efforts. The device is electronic and I suspect a fault; I'm not inquiring too closely.)

Apart from a fellow sitting nearby talking at length to his mobile phone, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. And, excepting the occasional fisherman and dog-walker, the same was true for the beach. Across the water only Ryanair seemed to be using the airport.

On the national front Portugal's Interior Minister resigned in the wake of a scandal involving senior members of his administration. They had, it would seem, profited handsomely from a government project to award residence rights to non EU nationals prepared to invest substantial sums in the country - the so-called golden visa scheme. The news was, unsurprisingly, all over the Portuguese media for most of the week.

We make a point of listening to Portuguese radio and watching the occasional news bulletin as it's all too easy to live one's life in a complete expat bubble, without a clue of what's happening around one.

I have sometimes wondered just how bribable I would be (no-one has ever thought it worthwhile offering me a bribe) and how far I would go in paying a bribe. The latter, to be sure, is a lot more probable than the former, especially if it offered a shortcut to the bureaucratic slog that most projects in these parts require.

We still hope one day to regularise Casa Nada, our unregistered cottage/tractor shed. Although we're in no danger of having to knock it down, we can't legally sell it because it doesn't officially exist - except that is, for tax purposes. The tax department is the only branch of government happy to recognise otherwise non-existent structures!

May, whose electricity has been tripping because of low potential, called to say that the EDP technician had turned up as requested to raise her contracted threshold. We assured her that she could now safely turn up the electric heaters that warm the lounge where she spends her days watching TV oldies.

Our builders returned at the weekend to continue constructing the wall that is growing along the base of the Leonilde field. After several team efforts we've got things down to a fine art. On arrival Rosnan collects stones from the field while Slavic and I take off on the tractor to fetch rocks from the valley.

Two of our Portuguese neighbours have pointed us towards large piles of rocks on their properties, heaped up there years ago when they were clearing the terrain to plant carobs. They're only too pleased to see the back of them. It takes us about half an hour to fetch a load, a mixture of large rocks for the face of the wall and smaller ones to be concreted behind for backing.

Rosnan divides his time between the cement mixer and the wall where he works on the surface layer while Slavic concentrates on the face. I commute between them on the tractor.

In spite of the rain that has fallen since the start of the month, four inches by my calculation, the nearby Algibre river still runs dry. The river bed is as bare as it's been all summer, with just the occasional pool to show for its existence.

According to our neighbours, when they were children the river ran all year round. These days for much of the year it cannot keep its head above the pumps and boreholes sucking it dry.

Thursday evening: For once the Portuguese weather bureau email warning of thunderstorms accompanied by torrential rain came true. Too true!

We were sitting at the table, sipping baggies and nibbling get-thin biscuits as we timed the gap between the distant lightning strikes and the resulting claps of thunder.

When it gets uncomfortably tight, I pull all the plugs of our more sensitive electronics.

REPLACING THE DOWNSTAIRS PLUGS

We didn't get a chance. The sky seemed to explode right over the house. Simultaneously there was a bang and a flash of light from the lounge TV set as the electricity tripped. Fortunately, I had a battery-powered lamp standing by and the fire gave us some light. Jones's first question was whether we were insured for damage caused by lightning strikes. I was able to reassure her that we are.

At first we thought that all of Espargal was blacked out. But dimly visible street lights showed this not to be the case. It was just our switches that had tripped.

REPLACING THE PLUGS UPSTAIRS WITH CANINE ASSISTANTS

Rather late in the day, I went around pulling out all the sensitive electrical plugs as the rain streamed down. Regrettably, all the sockets are situated low down behind book shelves and at the base of cupboards that we built in a while back. The pictures tell the story. The dogs hate thunderstorms. You can't explain to a dog what's making all the noise or lighting up the sky.

When the storm was over, I plugged our devices back in. To our utter amazement, the TV still functioned. In my mind I'd written it off and was thinking about the morning phone call to seek claim forms from the insurance company. Everything else seems to work as well. As so often, we are grateful for small mercies.

STORMY NIGHT

Letter from Espargal: 14 November 2014

This past week has been various things but mostly it has been wet. In a different life, wet mornings would be welcome as nature's invitation to enjoy a sleep-in. But my dogs in this life don't believe in sleep-ins. They believe in walks come rain or shine. And they come pestering me at my bedside until they get one.

There was a time on wet mornings when we would pile the dogs into the car and take them down to the valley to walk along the tarred road. That way we could keep them out of the mud and the mud out of the house. But then we had four dogs rather than six. Six dogs (plus two humans) don't fit into the car, not convivially anyhow. And there's no realistic way to walk them on leads through the village without causing chaos.

JONES'S SPECIAL DOG NEXT DOOR WAITING FOR HIS EVENING BONE

So, on wet mornings it's up through the park to the top gate as usual and into the hills on our regular trails. Inevitably mud and small stones compact into the dogs' pads. Sometimes these intrusions are so uncomfortable that the animals pause to pull out stones with their teeth.

When we get back home it's a case of push-pulling each reluctant beast to a bowl of warm water to rinse the muck out again - and then drying its paws before it rushes back into the house.

Saturday Slavic and Roslan turned up promptly at 8.30 as I expect them to do again tomorrow.

I set Roslan to burning off piles of cuttings on the field while Slavic and I took the tractor down into the veld to collect rocks for our wall.

With Slavic I speak Portuguese. With Roslan I am still limited to hand-signal communications.

The wall is gradually making its way along the base of the Leonilde field (named like our other plots for its previous owner).

Roslan collects the stones (that litter our property in their tens of thousands) to be concreted into the gap between the rock frontage that his brother builds and the earth bank behind it.

Slavic has an artistic eye and it's seldom that I ask him to make any changes.

Several of our neighbours have already admired our walling efforts, as indeed they might.

You may admire them for yourself.

On Sunday I gathered my courage and stood for the first time since our return from holiday on the scales that reside beneath the bathroom dresser. My suspicions were confirmed. So I'm back on to the straight and narrow until I dip back down below 90kgs. It takes extraordinary resolution to enjoy a cruise with a drinks package included and return in the measure that one started out.

On Monday the computer shop that was testing my non-printing printer called to say that the problem lay with the expensive new printhead (ordered via Amazon) that I had just received and installed. I emailed the suppliers to say it was defective. They responded promptly asking me to send it back.

May's electricity has been tripping with the additional load that her autumn heaters have been putting on it. Before taking her to lunch I phoned the EDP to get them to increase the potential. They said they'd send a technician around within the next week to make the changes.

On Tuesday we visited the computer shop, retrieved the printer, extracted the printhead and sent it off via express, registered mail to the UK suppliers. With luck, a replacement printhead will be posted out shortly. And with more luck it should resurrect my printer. This is a fine multifunction device that I should be most reluctant to throw on the scrap heap.

My wife was sceptical about my chances of receiving a replacement part from the suppliers. I explained how particular Amazon was about the behaviour of the firms that advertise on its site - and how anxious these enterprises were to avoid negative feedback. But she remains dubious - at least until such time as the part arrives.

The news in Portugal has been dominated by an outbreak of legionnaire's disease in the north of the country that has put hundreds of people in hospital and several in the morgue. A fertilizer factory is thought the likely source. The writs will fly!

RAYMOND AT REST

Wednesday: Both Ana and Marisa looked tired when they appeared in the midday drizzle to remove the car-load of dog-food that we took up to the kennels in Goldra's heights. Ana confessed that they were struggling under the load of looking after 100-plus dogs. Among other things both were receiving medical attention for bad backs.

It's hard to know what to do about it. They get by on a wing and a prayer. The kennels are their life, 365 days a year. Although volunteers help out from time to time the burden falls on the sisters and they're not youngsters, either of them.

In the evening one of those big, determined brommer flies got first into the bedroom (whence I chased him out at Jones's request) and then into my study. I spent an hour, swatter in hand, trying to zap him each time he paused, as I ploughed my way through Yuval Harari's account of the rise of humankind - a most fascinating tome! Twice, I smacked him as he settled on the wall beneath a light - and this with one of Brendan's murderous leather swatters. Each time the fly fell behind my desk where he took several minutes to recover his senses before returning to buzz me anew. Eventually I (thought I) gave him the coup de grace with a whack that would have dazed a buffalo! (But either he or his brother is back.)

Thursday: May phoned to say that her electricity kept tripping. I called her Man Friday, Fernando, who'd already visited her house to see what he could do. There was nothing, he told me, but to wait for the EDP to increase the potential. In the meanwhile May had to go easy on using electrical devices. The swimming pool pump complicated matters, Fernando said, by kicking in from time to time, adding a large load to the supply.

We phoned the pool-man to ask if he could turn the pump off. He, it emerged, was at Loule Hospital getting a broken toe mended. He'd dropped something on it. So we went around ourselves, turned the pump off and set May's electric heaters to half-load. Hopefully the EDP will be there before the end of the week.

Thursday pm: We are misted in.

The rain falls steadily.

There's a welcome fire in the stove.

Letter from Espargal: 7 November 2014

MEDITERRANEAN GARDEN FAIR

Saturday: I took Jonesy and neighbour Liz to the Mediterranean garden fair at Estoi palace. Both are keen gardeners. The journey took rather longer than we anticipated because I was distracted and missed the motorway turn-off.

The fair was crowded, mainly with expats. The problem was parking, not a concern that had weighed on the minds of the palace's builders back whenever. I stayed with the dogs while the ladies inspected the offerings.

DOG RELISHING THE FIRE: MORE DOGS TO COME
SORRY - SHORT OF PICS THIS WEEK

Monday: An advice note in our postbox informed us that the parcel from London that we had been awaiting for several weeks would be available for collection from the parish office the following morning.

We lunched on brown rolls, ham and tomato at our favourite snack-bar in Loule. Jones bit into hers with great care, fearful of dislodging the front teeth that she'd bashed so painfully against a glass door on the ship.

In my English lesson, we revised names for months and weekdays and their distant Roman and Nordic origins. In Portuguese, both months and days are written entirely in lower case, which doesn't come naturally to us.

Another oddity (while I'm on the subject) is the use of first names after Mr or Senhor. I am generally addressed as Senhor (or Mr) Terry rather than Benson. In the same mode our lawyer is Doutora Isabel. As in Germany all professionals are doctored, professored or engineered rather than simply mistered.

In the evening we headed to the Hamburgo to celebrate Liz's somethingth birthday. She felt that the number was not important. We gleaned in the course of the evening that it was also her wedding anniversary and that she had married Mike after just an eight-week romance. He and Liz were both employed by the National Health in the UK before retiring to Portugal (like most of our expat group) around the turn of the millennium.

Overnight the wind blew and rain fell - 11mm. It was welcome, the rain rather than the wind.

FROM LLEWELLYN IN LONDON: TIGGER AND EDGAR

Tuesday: Before heading to the Ponte de Encontro in Benafim for coffee and cake, we stopped at the parish office to fetch the parcel from Llewellyn.

It was beautifully wrapped and the addresses were printed rather than hand-written.

Inside were two large hard-back books and a new print head for my expensive non-functioning Canon multifunction printer.

Back home I installed the new print head and waited for the printer to go through its extended warm-up exercises.

Then I tried to print. No luck. The machine couldn't be persuaded - at least not in black ink - in spite of my replacing the ink cartridges. After going through the usual noisy printing motions, it would eject a clean sheet of paper.

I scratched my head and tried printing in colour. That worked just fine. Puzzling and frustrating. Back to the computer shop it goes at the first opportunity.

The substantial tomes that accompanied the print head, ordered from Amazon and delivered (free) to Llewellyn's home in London, are lying on my bedside table. All that remains is for me to read them. The books are "Hack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch" by Nick Davies: and "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari.

We have read excerpts from the first in the papers and heard radio readings from the latter. Harari combines a gift for clarity of expression with a lovely turn of phrase. In my next life, as well as being an heir, I'm going to be a distinguished writer and have a fine baritone voice - among other things.

As a former Roman Catholic monk, I have long been fascinated (on the one hand) by the Church's insistence that humans have eternal souls, and (on the other) by our chromosomal closeness to a great many creatures past and present that apparently lacked (or lack) this everlasting essence.

Indeed, as evidence of this relationship, non-African populations still carry a genetic inheritance from their former Neanderthal neighbours. Harari's theme is that Sapiens is the only one of several species of Homo to survive - and why!

Natasha came to help Jones clear out the wooden shed, where a great deal of stuff has accumulated itself over the past months and years, growing ever dustier and grubbier in the process. We packed the tractor box with junk, which I dispersed among the recycle and garbage bins at the entrance to the village.

There were also several baskets of carobs that I donated to Joachim, a neighbour, whom I met at the end of the road. After loading them into a sack in his storage shed he insisted that I come into his parlour where he plied me with almond-stuffed dried figs and fig liquor.

Tuesday night was cool and windy, cool enough to justify a fire in the wood-burning stove. The dogs love a fire as much as we do. They settle down in their baskets, sometimes on their backs with their legs in the air. After supper I often make myself comfortable on the couch beside one of the beasts, generally drifting off for half an hour and waking to find that I've missed half of the TV programme I'd made of point of sitting down to watch.

Wednesday: Inforomba are scratching their heads over my recalcitrant printer. The US mid-term elections dominate the news. I wondered where the expression "lame duck" had come from. "Lame donkey" would surely be more appropriate.

TWO OF OUR THREE CATS

An angry feline exchange at the kitchen window after supper revealed that Not-Robbie (a Jones waif) had entered the kitchen and been interrupted at the cats' dinner bowl by one of ours. That is an exceptionally bold move. The dogs do not welcome foreign cats into the garden, never mind the house. And they have several times conveyed their low opinion of Not-Robbie to him through the fence. This could spell trouble all round.

An email from the estate agents informed us that all the papers for the apartment we're helping Natasha to acquire have now been updated. We await confirmation from our lawyer.

WILD ASPARAGUS

Thursday: It's a blue-sky morning - sunny, mid-teens with hardly a breath of wind - my kind of weather and my time of year. The hills looked glorious, soft, round and green. After our walk I shut the dogs on the back patio and went to spray the thorny wild asparagus that has sprung up everywhere in the park.

We have been particularly careful to keep the dogs away from any pesticide since the vet warned us that it was noxious to them. The wild asparagus is a proper pain. The thorns get into the dogs' pads as well as our fingers when we're collecting carobs.

GUY FAWKES MOON

The afternoon clouded over. I made an early small fire in the salamandra. What a luxury a fire is! One can close the doors, shut out the world and curl up for a while in one's safe, warm and comfortable nest.

Letter from Espargal: 31 October 2014

SUNSET AT SEA

This week amounts to a little ado about not very much. Life changes gear when the clocks go back, as they did last weekend. It's not so much the mornings that are affected; these feel much the same, a little lazier perhaps.

But an hour gets nicked from the afternoon, as if by some slick sleight of hand, leaving us feeling short-changed. Dusk now arrives at six.

That means we have to walk an hour earlier to get home before sunset.

While I feed the dogs, Jones slips down the path between our fence and Idalecio's to tend her waifs and strays. My wife does not favour the clock change. She's a creature of habit who was perfectly happy with the day the way it was. She finds that such biennial adjustments upset her rhythms. But the seasonal switch suits me. I'd rather have long evenings than late-dawning mornings.

In view of the long evenings, we've been checking the TV listings with additional interest. There's some great TV available on the 4 main BBC channels and a few programmes we follow on the commercial channels. One series, presented by a young physicist, concerns "man's place in the universe".

To illustrate the law of gravity, he was able to persuade the scientists at NASA's vast vacuum chamber to permit him to carry out an experiment there.

First he dropped a bowling ball and a bunch of goose feathers simultaneously from the roof of the chamber while it was filled with air - with the predictable result. Then, four hours later, when the air had been pumped out, he repeated the experiment. The feathers and the ball fell side by side, hitting the floor at exactly the same moment. It was quite astonishing to watch.

One is left is no doubt that the law of gravity applies equally to all objects.

IN THE BUSH

We've been varying our walks, exploring and establishing new paths through the vast tracts of rocky bushveld that surround us. Jones has an explorative streak. She has been looking for a short-cut between a track that we take home and the contour path that runs around the hill.

She bade me follow her one morning, declaring that she'd found a way through but we ended up in a prickly no-man's land, a shirt-snatching, skin-scratching thicket that wouldn't yield an inch. There was nothing for it but to retreat with the remnants of our dignity.

Even the dogs were challenged. The only animals that seem impervious to such obstacles are the wild pigs that bulldoze tunnels through the bush.

Since then Jones has found a route of sorts, strictly for the able-bodied. From time to time to take I take the big shears along to clear the most obstructive branches and the shrubbery that obscures the paths. Many of the paths we follow tend to be seasonal as nature forever tries to reclaim its own. As I tell Jones, when I can't see where I'm walking, I fall over. And I hate falling over. She's far more agile than I am and not sympathetic to (what she regards as) any unnecessary destruction of the wilderness.

One morning we encountered a terrific pong as we walked, I can only think from the spreading of slurry in an orchard.

Three of the dogs evidently discovered its origins for they returned home stinking to high heaven (why "high heaven"?), puzzled by our reluctance to allow them inside until they'd been washed.

Ours are not dogs that take naturally to water but with the juiciest of canine temptations dangled in front of their noses, we got the job done.

On the home front our new field has been taking up a lot of my time. For years I've been ploughing it as a favour to the previous owner. This was a difficult task as the field slopes awkwardly and the overhanging almond and carob branches did their best to drag me from the tractor.

So my first action was to cut back the most pernicious of these branches, using the shears from my perch on the tractor seat. Slavic and I then set about building a low wall down western edge of the field to retain the bank, which has been slipping into the road.

By backing the tractor slowly up the road with the tractor box lowered to ground level, it proved possible to produce a straight edge along the bank with minimum effort.

As usual we ride down to the valley to fetch rocks that are scattered in such abundance there. The hillsides are unfenced. Carob trees represent the only attempt at agriculture and the farmers, who plough around the trees to clear the undergrowth, are pleased to have us remove the rocks.

The last task was to remove Leonilde's initials from the marker stones at the corners of the field and replace them with my own before going to Benafim to record the change of ownership on the "cadastro" incorporating all properties within Loule council.

Loule is being used as a pilot council in this process in an attempt to establish exactly who owns which bits of land, much of which has been abandoned over the past 50 years as families migrated to the cities. One can still see everywhere on the hillsides the overgrown terraces where people long eked out an exiguous existence. Now only a few hunters and hikers are to be seen there - and the fire-service units in the heat of summer.

The next job is to continue the wall along the base of the field which stands about two metres above the road. Jones is anxious that we should not disturb two sites where she has found ladies' tresses orchids. So it's going to be delicate work, however we go about it.

Wednesday and Friday we joined May and her nephew Ken, down from Edinburgh, for lunch and banking.

We've been waiting to hear from our lawyer what progress she's made with the documentation she requires from the estate agents through whom we're assisting Natasha to buy an apartment. As the flat owners live in Australia and some of the documents are out of date, it's taking a bit of time. That's fine. We're not in a hurry.

The chef at the Hamburgo, Graça, and her daughter, Celina, preparing for Haloween