Happy New Year! May 2015 be our year! I confess that the arrival of New Year was a non-event in this household. We were all (I'm including the beasts) in bed well before midnight. 2014 seemed to slip seamlessly into 2015, a few barks from Barri apart - presumably at the fireworks.
On the way home from the airport on Thursday morning I stopped to clean the car. There is no better way to begin a year than by cleaning the car. It sets things up. The vehicle feels so much smarter, newer, more impressive and better tuned when one leaves the wash bay - a therapeutic exercise for both car and driver. And no better time than a blue sky New Year's morning while the world sleeps off the previous night's celebrations.
The reason that I went to the airport was to drop Barbara, who is spending several days with Llewellyn and Lucia, catching up on friends, exhibitions and London in general. Jonesy loves London. Her visit also gives her the opportunity to escape for a few days from her overly-demanding animals.
Between us at the moment we are catering for nine dogs and five cats - plus the two local waifs that get an afternoon bone. Don't ask!
Most demanding of all has been the brown bitch (whom I call Brownie; Jones and Marie have their own names for her).
On Monday morning we managed to catch her. Idalecio and Sonia took her to the vet who spayed her, removing 10 pups from her womb at the same time. On Tuesday Idalecio brought her back. We thought to put her up in our heated downstairs bathroom for a few days until she was over the op. But she howled the whole of Tuesday night, excepting the hours that Jones or I sat with her. So Wednesday morning we led her back to rejoin her two pals, who greeted her joyously - and she them.
On both Tuesday and Wednesday I visited Jodi the physio in Alte for a massage, having put my back out on Sunday while trying to put my socks on. The episode came out of the blue and peeved me considerably - ditto my wife. Since then things have much improved.
Last Saturday Slavic and Roslan extended the great wall of Espargal by another ten metres. Here they are posing beside a monster rock that Slavic managed to tip into the tractor box. We have a great choice of rocks from the debris mountains to which local farmers have invited us to help ourselves.
We took a can of diesel around to Joachim Sousa to thank him for his generosity in this regard. Another farmer friend has presented us with a bottle of medronho that he made in the still that we gave him for Christmas a year or two ago. It's his first production, yet to be tasted.
Yesterday the Ukrainian brothers returned to continue their labours. By now we operate as a well-drilled team. The boys heave a few bags of cement on to the back of the tractor and load the cement mixer, which we trundle down to the pile of sand at the entrance to the property.
From there Slavic and I head down to the carob plantation five minutes away to load rocks from one of a dozen rock mountains that litter the property - as per the picture. Typically the rocks are bulldozed into such mountains before the farmer first plants out the trees.
Then it's home again, with the tractor's front wheels bouncing nervously, to dump the rocks and set about the wall. Slavic tends to work on the base and Roslan the top. It's seldom necessary to say anything. I reckon that we'll be done next week - that's apart from the entrance.
I've been hoping to come across a digger working in the village with a view to enticing the driver up to the field for an hour or two. That's all it should take to ease the slope from the road to the property.
Twice a day I slip down to Idalecio's cottages with a bowl of mixed meat and biscuits to feed the three strays who camp there. Morning and evening the brown job (here half-camouflaged) needs to take an antibiotic to see her over her surgery. She gulps down the spoonful of meat in which I bury the pill - and certainly shows no after-effects.
Idalecio has moved the kennel to beneath the tree at the top of his drive, where the pups have been sleeping. He tells me that all three now huddle down together in the kennel at night. For the moment the arrangement works well. But it has to change before his guests start arriving.
Finally, courtesy of Llewellyn, here are a few pics of Barbara with him and Lucia and the dogs in London.
This photo was taken in their lounge; the other two speak for themselves.
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