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.
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!)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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