Letter from Espargal: 22 May 2015

My phone has been playing up. It has been intermittently overheating and turning itself off, which is a bit of a pain. For phone buffs, it's an HTC One-X; I like the HTC brand and especially this model.

So midweek, as Natasha set about the house, we drove in to the Algarve Forum on the outskirts of Faro to ask Vodafone to check it out.

(Because Natasha takes over the ground floor with mops and vacuum cleaners and things, it's best to stay out of her way. If we're in, the dogs whine to join us.)

With me I took the Apple iPhone that my brother, Brendan, gave me during my visit to South Africa last year.

After explaining the problem to a helpful Vodafone assistant, I asked him to transfer the number from the HTC to the Apple.

In the old days, this would have meant just moving the simcard.

No longer! My HTC takes a micro-sim while my Apple needs a nano-sim (although with some models, the reverse is true.)

Maybe you know about these things.

ALLIUM REVOLUTION

The bottom line is that the HTC has been sent off for repair, the number has been transferred to my Apple and all my contacts have been downloaded from Vodafone Backup.

For her part, Barbara seems to have settled in with her new Samsung (Ace Style - previously known as the Samsung Young, a name that presumably didn't much appeal to the intended market).

Also requiring attention have been our electric dog clippers. To trim the long-haired dogs for summer I use Wahl multi-cut electric clippers. They work well on Prickles and Barri but throw up their teeth in despair when it comes to Russ.

The dog has a coat like a grizzly bear. Two or three cuts serve to blunt the clippers to the point of uselessness even though I carefully lubricate them with the prescription oil.

Previously I have ordered new blades from Amazon. Last week I ordered new clippers (which arrived post haste from France).

People who make clippers, like those who make printers, seem to rely for their profits on selling replacement parts rather than the machines themselves. So there's little saving in blades only. Russ is happy to hop up on to the patio table for a trim. I use the occasion to dig out the deep-buried burrs and seeds from his knotted hairy recesses.

On to the subject of cats: One doesn't have to live in the village for very long before coming across dastardly toms having their way with feline femmes on the roadside.

It's a sight that provokes Jones to lower the car window and give the toms a piece of her mind - not that they take a lot of notice.

A few weeks ago, the Dutch ladies entered their garage to find that a mother cat and five newly-born kittens had taken up home there. Being kind ladies, they are raising the brood - and plan to have the kittens neutered. The mother remains shy but her offspring are happy to be handled.

Close by lives Michael Brown, a hobby carpenter whose bird feeder I admired during a visit. Michael, who is also kind, agreed to make us one - which he did.

This we sprinkled with a variety of bird food and hung from the branches of a tree beyond the front patio. When the birds showed no interest in visiting it, we moved it to a similar branch beyond the east patio (with equally little effect) and finally to a branch in the south garden where the birds like to gather. We await results.

On the sciatic front I remain much improved if not cured - praise be! This week I have joined Jones on the morning walks - albeit shorter ones than she likes - and resumed my English classes. On Monday we discussed all the options now available to people to pay for the tolls on the A22 east-west Algarve motorway.

Because the highway was designed as a freeway (with no allowance for toll-booths at the ramps) the authorities have had great difficulty collecting the tolls, especially from foreign cars. They can track and fine locally-registered free-loaders recorded on their cameras but thousands of visitors from abroad use the road with impunity.

In truth this has been as much because of the difficulty of paying the tolls as any desire to avoid them. Until recently, the tolls could not be paid by casual users until at least 48 hours after their last passage - crazy for tourists. (http://www.theportugalnews.com/a22-algarve-tolls-what-you-need-to-know)

As much as we love our adopted country, it's not somewhere that one retires for the sake of efficient organisation.

There are notable exceptions, one of whom is Manuel, who runs the Hamburgo. The restaurant is strictly a family business. Most days he single-handedly takes orders, serves food and drinks and clears the tables as well as running the bar - while his wife, Graca, prepares the meals, sometimes with extended family assistance. As Manuel points out, he seldom knows whether to expect five people for a meal or fifty. This makes his life both extremely busy and stressful. In spite of the stresses and strains, he remains unfailingly courteous and helpful.

In high summer and on Sundays he likes to take on an assistant to ease the strain - the more so because many people chose to dine outside on the patio, under the flowering bougainvillea, which means much to-ing and fro-ing. Last year Manuel had the services of Elizabete who now works at Benafim's new retirement home. So far this season he has been unable to find a replacement.

"No-one has any money," he remarked to me, "but no-one wants to work". That's to say, no-one wants to work unsociable hours. Manuel has my sympathy. It is certainly evident that many migrants manage to secure work here where local people remain unemployed - a story common across western Europe.

Portugal's principal electricity supplier, the EDP, has informed its customers proudly that 80% of domestic consumption is now derived from renewables and more than half of it from wind power alone. Wind turbines line the west coast and there are vast photovoltaic-panel farms that stretch across the countryside.

There are those who complain in the local press about the ugliness of eolic and solar generators, complaints for which I've no sympathy. Give me wind turbines and panels any day (indeed, we have erected photovoltaic panels of our own) rather than the throat-catching fug of the coal-powered stations in whose shadow my Witbank brother lives.

DISTANT TURBINES AT SUNSET

A winter visit to the region during a temperature inversion makes the point. Having said which, I hope to be with him in a few weeks' time.

The irony is that the town authorities have not paid the national energy supplier's bills and residents are threatened with an electricity cut-off next month - surrounded by power stations as they are.


THE END OF A LONG, HARD DAY

The dogs have been playing merry havoc with Jones's garden while we're out - and it's hard to know what to do about it.