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.