Letter from Espargal: 31 July 2015

It is with relief each summer that we box up July and put it away for another year. July is the hardest month to bear, the hottest, driest, sweatiest, most demanding month. The garden, still strewn with winter's detritus, pleads endlessly for water. For us and our beasts, staying cool is so much harder than staying warm.

If one has to be about in July, the best time is dawn and dusk. I leave dawn to Jones and her beasts. Dusk we enjoy together on the north patio over a baggy, generally dogs underfoot, with the orphans quartered, the garden watered and the day nearly sorted. Most evenings there's a breeze sufficient to discourage the mosquitoes, not that there've been many about.

AO LUAR

Last Friday evening was an exception to our usual programme. Along with most of the village we went along to the grounds of the former primary school to watch a performance by travelling players who call themselves Ao Luar - "moonlit" or "in the moonlight".

We travelled down on the tractor, Barbara riding side-saddle (where she hangs on with seeming nonchalance), to avoid the usual negotiations with the dogs over use of the car.

The Ao Luar troupe tours the villages with council support. They erect a mini-stage and wings, set out a dozen benches and set up a small control desk for lights and music.

Their repertoire consists of Moliere-inspired farces, intended to provide sufficient wit for the adults and comedy for the kids. The audience, of 40 or 50, loved it.

The six actors have to play multiple roles. Interruptions - to hush talkers among the audience - are par for the course. While finer points of the dialogue were lost on us, the drift was clear and we enjoyed the performance as much as any.

Saturday morning Andrei and Slavic returned. The tasks I had in mind for them were set aside in favour of more urgent needs. I had been up twice in the early hours to hush the squealing orphans. In spite of my attempts to render the pen escape-proof, Sparky had got out - she's an Alpine-level climber - much to her noisy delight and Mello's squalling distress.

So the boys spent most of the morning raising the height of the fence around the pen, those sections that we hadn't reinforced already, from one metre to two. They also used up our remaining cobbles to create a path between large rocky outcrops, leading to a section of Barbara's garden.

In spite of the heat, Barbara has spent a couple of hours each day cutting back, ripping out the remnants of last season's growth and repairing the depredations of her pets.

In these endeavours I confess that I have not joined her. I am happy to attend to sitting or standing tasks - including ironing and mending - but bending over is not my thing. (If I sat down like this, it would be for the last time!)

Monday went somewhere. Unless we do something special or I make a note, the days simply vanish into oblivion. Little wonder that old people lose track of them.

Tuesday we dropped in on Fatima for haircuts. Then, after feeding Ginger and visiting May - no change to report - we stopped at JL's for a glass of wine and a tuna sandwich. I particularly enjoyed the former as I had resolved to confine myself for a time (undefined) to non-alcoholic drinks at home as part of an intermittent self-improvement drive.

SEATED AT JL's

While we were sitting down a most beautiful butterfly landed on Barbara's t-shirt and stayed there. My wife observed that it might be Raymond come to visit. Whatever the case, the butterfly was a welcome visitor and appeared perfectly happy where he sat.

Barbara eventually moved across to a nearby bush in order to transfer the little creature to a safer perch while she lunched.

We have been following two stories in the media closely. One is the court judgment in the UK over-ruling the will of a woman who wanted all her estate divided among animal charities and none to go to her estranged daughter. Although the will was sound, the judges decided that the daughter deserved a hefty chunk of it.

More interesting has been the fate of the Minnesota dentist whose idea of sport is to shoot arrows into unthreatening, inedible wild animals; in short, the story of Cecil the Zimbabwean lion. It is with a great deal of schadenfreude that we have heard the man hounded - temporarily at least - out of Facebook, house and practice.

HOW IT USED TO LOOK

If you live in these parts, you get used to a lot of hunters doing a great deal of hunting. But at least they eat what they hunt rather than nailing the remains to the living room wall.

Wednesday, while massaging my back, Jodi informed me that the village of Alte, where she has her rooms, is up in arms. The cause celebre is the drying up of the "vicarage waterfall" that cascades down from the road to the stream in the valley below.

The water, which rises from two springs a kilometre back up in the hills, runs down through a channel that becomes village swimming pool in the summer months before spreading itself into a pond for geese and ducks.

The local authorities have stated that the drying up is the natural consequence of the low rainfall last winter.

However, and this is the nub of the matter, many people attribute it more to the vast acreage of young citrus trees that stretches up the hillsides beyond the village.

These have been planted by the village's richest man, whose boreholes are believed to be bleeding the water-table dry.

Petitions and social media pressure groups are being got up - to what effect remains to be seen.

BENAFIM, ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE VALLEY

On the way home we stopped off in Benafim to deliver some items to the community centre for this weekend's festival and again to allow Mary the hairdresser to trim my toe nails.

She and I practise useful English phrases as she works away. She's anxious to learn enough to communicate with unilingual expats.

Thursday: Although you may not see much difference, the rest of this blog comes to you courtesy of Windows 10.

Microsoft notified me last night - much to my surprise; I had expected to wait a while - that I could now upgrade from Windows 7 and, with a rollback option if I didn't like it, I thought "why not?".

In truth I've also been doing a good deal of reading about the latest version of Windows and it's been well reviewed. The appearance is very different but the layout is user-friendly and it's a case of so far, so good. We'll see how we go.