Letter from Espargal: 19 December 2015

NEW DAY DAWNS

It's a good thing that all those people met in Paris to save the world from overheating so that we can enjoy winter again in the Algarve. As the year slips down towards time's archive, the flies are still making merry here in the hills. They delight in dogs' poo, dally on sandwiches and cavort on my face when I'm trying to snooze. I hate flies!



Midwinter! What midwinter I ask? Our nights barely dip into single figures; our days drift by in the lower 20s. Only modesty and danger of sunburn dissuade us from disporting ourselves in the midday sun. You would never imagine that this was our rainy season. Three measly millimetres is all we have to show for December - not much to sustain us while smouldering summer looks nostalgically north once again.



Once I read about a competition for people to write the most striking sentence as the introduction to an imaginary book. If I had entered that competition, my sentence would have been:

It was difficult in those first weeks to sink the vessels packed with people fleeing the drowned lands, especially the boats groaning with women and children, but we were being overrun - and it was either them or us.

I didn't actually make that up. The thought just keeps floating around my head as hordes of refugees/migrants pour endlessly across the sea to the reluctant sanctuary of Europe and Euro leaders wonder how to stem the flow. Ironically, although the first refugees are about to arrive in Portugal, many have indicated that they would rather seek refuge elsewhere.



We didn't visit May at the nursing home this week. She hasn't been well and didn't recognise another old friend who did go to see her. The rest of the week has run its usual course. Saturday the boys continued to build the wall along the eastern flank of the Inacio field. They haul the cement mixer out, load the tractor box with sand, add cement, fill a tub with water and are busy within minutes. I leave them to it while we go walking.



When they had finished, they came down with me to assist neighbours to stack a mountain of firewood that the supplier had dumped at the entrance to the property. I lent a hand myself, wheeling (lightly-loaded) barrows around to the woodshed at the back of the house.


LARGE ROCK SHIFTED BY WILD BOAR ROOTING FOR BULBS

Monday is always a run-around, even though my English lessons are over until the new year. Ono's various pills - he turns 16 next month - had to be renewed, groceries got in and a fractious chainsaw handed in to the supplier for a service. Additionally, we took a Christmas hamper up the sisters, Marisa and Ana, at the Goldra dog sanctuary.


ANA & MARISA

If you think that we are overrun with animals, you have to see theirs. Three-hundred-and-sixty-five days a year, they tend, mend and feed the scores of dogs that depend paw and pad upon them. The sisters are neither of them young and I hesitate to think about the future of their enterprise. It's hard enough to think about our own.


MAN AT EASE

Speaking of which - you should know that our dogs have to be distracted when we leave or enter the property by car for they otherwise rush out of the gates and go exploring. The only viable distraction is treats. Barbara sometimes scatters a handful of cat biscuits on the cobbles as she leaves. At other times, she gives them a special biscuit from our bribe box.


SISTERS

One morning she left the box on top of a table out of their reach. At least, she thought it was out of reach. The remains of the box lay scattered about the cobbles on our return. Of the biscuits, unsurprisingly, there was no sign. No dog has owned up but Barri is the prime suspect. She's a competent thief as well as a cupboard lover, affecting heartfelt devotion as she noses through my pockets.


JOHANNESBURG - 1980

I have undertaken a long-overdue project - sorting out the thousands of photos on my computer. Jones and I must take 50 pictures a week, the best of which go into the blog. The rest simply gather dust on the hard drive. It's a large hard drive and not under any strain but that's not the point. The point is being able to find the pictures I vaguely remember taking when I want them.


OCTOBER 1979

The pictures tell half our history better than we can. Barbara wonders whether the hardware and software to view them will still be available in 20 years' time. I wonder whether anybody will want to. (Posterity can decide that for itself.) Either way, the task is going to take a few weeks more.


TABLE MOUNTAIN - 1970

Last week I got my singular and plural hang-ups off my chest. Here are some more. I should hook up a car battery to broadcasters and administer shocks according to the gravity of the offence: One jolt for "of course"; two for "sort of" & "kind of"; three for "you know"; four for "now!" and "actually" and five for "s/he went,like", "incredibly" or anything else particularly irritating or dull.


1962

As for politicians, they would be given a tingling burst for "the fact is", "the truth is", "we have been clear", "we have always said" and a great deal more of which I would be the arbiter.

Thursday we took Maria and Lucky to the vet for Lucky's second shot.


THURSDAY MORNING SKY

This is my last blog of 2015. I shall be joining my Canadian family in Calgary for Christmas. So will my sister and family from Berlin. Barbara remains at home to look after the zoo. She flies to London shortly after my return to spend New Year with Llewellyn and Lucia while I take up the reins. As ever, our animals dictate the course of our lives.



Happy Christmas and a peaceful New Year!

Letter from Espargal: 12 December 2015

The week begins with the arrival of my Saturday morning workers. The pair used to labour the whole day but I reduced this over the summer to 5 hours in view of the heat. And the workers decided they liked it that way. So that's how it's stayed.


COMPLETING WALL REPAIRS FROM THE TRACTOR BOX

We had three tasks in mind: to pick up the rocks the digger had scattered about, to complete the previous week's wall repairs and to continue with the new boundary wall. We made good progress. Strange how five hours just melts away when there are tasks in hand.



On Sunday lunched at the Hamburgo with a couple whose acquaintance we had made at a dinner in memory of a deceased friend. We took an immediate liking to them, a retired UK accountant who had spent time in Africa and his Luxembourg wife. The couple has bought a house in the Algarve with a view to wintering in the sunshine.



Such are our circumstances and inclinations that we rarely meet new people socially. The occasion felt vaguely like embarking on a date. In the event the meal was pleasantly relaxed and we look forward to meeting the couple again.



Monday brought the last English lesson of the year, one that concentrated on projects to dredge the lower Guadiana River separating Spain and Portugal, with a view to permitting larger boats to use it, hopefully boats carrying lots of cash-rich tourists.


DEATH'S HEAD HAWK MOTH CATERPILLAR

Of more interest I found the endeavours of the Left Bloc, now part of Portugal's socialist government, to abolish the hugely unpopular tolls on Portuguese motorways. According to the protagonist, factors that promote business and tourism would more than compensate the authorities for the losses from the tolls - a sort of virtuous circle effect. I have to confess my doubts. Nonetheless, the abolition would be cheered to the rafters by Portuguese motorists, at least until the road surface began to disintegrate for lack of maintenance.



Tuesday we woke to the crackle of gunfire as the hunters celebrated the holiday feast of the Immaculate Conception by slaughtering the wild life in the valley. When Jonesy wondered why this feast was not celebrated nine months before Christmas, I pointed out (with ex-monkish authority) that it marked the "original-sin-free" conception not of the baby Jesus, but of his mother - a common misunderstanding. Accordingly, in the church calendar the feast of Mary's nativity is celebrated nine months later on 8 September. Such Marian feasts were among the highlights of our year when I was a novice in the Marist Brothers - the Brothers of Mary - in the early 60s.


RECIPE BOOK REVISED BY MELLO

The dogma of the Immaculate Conception was declared in 1854 by Pope Pius IX (a fact I had to check on Wikipedia). Notably, it is also the dogma which many years ago started to shake me free of my faith. Original sin simply stopped making sense - and the arch of belief slowly collapsed with the keystone.



Tuesday was also the day when two of the pups failed to return from the morning walk. In vain did we call, whistle and bang their breakfast plates together to summon them home. Jones fretted greatly over their absence; she always does although she wishes she could do otherwise.


PALLY

The cause of their abscondence became clear an hour later when the pair returned, Pally clutching a much-chewed rabbit and Sparky, at his heels, eager to devour what remained of it. Time was when we ran into a rabbit or two most days while out walking. Now the great majority have been wiped out by a pestilence and we might see one a month.


PUPS UPGRADED TO BIZ CLASS

As a student and teacher (of sorts) of English, I have long been uncomfortable with the (now everyday) use of "they" and "their" in the singular as gender-free pronouns, as in:

"There is someone at the door; please see what "they" want."

In my bones I feel that the singular "someone" jars with the plural "they" and never the twain should meet. This is a mild example. Much worse are such media (stiff whisky-provoking) horrors as:

"The child has done their homework themselves."



So it was with some interest that I read (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34901704) the BBC online magazine article entitled:

Beyond 'he' and 'she': The rise of non-binary pronouns

In particular I was astounded by the lengths that some US universities are going to in offering students a choice of pronouns (often putative - such as "ze") with which they feel personally most comfortable. (E.g. Ze - rather than "he" or "she" - was not present!)

Students can now opt for a gender of preference or a temporary gender or to be gender free. Life was so much simpler when boys ran around in short pants and scuffed shoes while girls wore dresses and pink ribbons in their hair and everyone knew who was what.



Wednesday didn't start well. With coffee in mind we arrived early in Alte for my weekly physio appointment with Jodi to find three snack-bars shut for hols. Instead, I nipped into the supermarket to get a bag of bird food which I locked in the boot before going across the road for a restorative massage.



Five minutes into the massage, my phone rang from the table beside Jodi's treatment table. I ignored it. Then a message came through on it. Feeling uneasy, I asked Jodi if I could take a look. It was from Barbara. I had (unwittingly) locked her in the car. When she unlocked the door from the inside, she had set the alarm off. I was stranded in my undies and socks and not a fit sight for public viewing. Jodi was kind enough to nip across the road with the keys and resolve things. A post-massage coffee and therapeutic baggy helped to restore Jones's equilibrium.


JONES DAWN

Letter from Espargal: 5 December 2015

DAWN ON WEDNESDAY

On Friday we did our good deed for the week - although I'm thinking of upgrading it to our good deed for the month. We took Maria and her little dog, Lucky, to the vet in Loule to have the animal inoculated. Maria is an elderly Portuguese neighbour who spent much of her life working in the fashion trade in New York, where her offspring still live.


MARIA AT A CAFE AFTER THE VET VISIT

We arrived at her house in the village well armed with towels lest Lucky should be sick in the car, a possibility that Maria discounted, assuring us that Lucky was well travelled. Well travelled or not, Lucky vomited up half her breakfast on her way into Loule and the other half on the return journey, the second time as Maria was clutching the dog to her chest.


LITTLE LUCKY

The mess distributed itself equally between Maria's fine black coat and my front passenger seat. After wiping up the worst of it, we dropped the coat off at the dry-cleaner and then took the pair back home.



Saturday the boys arrived on the dot of eight to repair the two sections of collapsed walling in the Inacio field. (We name our various fields according to the vendors.) They rigged the cement mixer up at the bottom of the drive where Luis from Quim Quim had earlier dumped a metre of sand and a pile of cement bags. With the tractor I ran barrows of fresh concrete 200 metres to the scene of the collapse at the top of the field, half way up the hill.



The original builders had constructed the attractive dry-stone walling that is still to be seen everywhere in the region. But over the decades such walls inevitably begin to buckle and, following a good downpour, they frequently give way. Our repairs, anchored in concrete, should last for centuries. The new sections look just as good as the old wall, lacking only the grey patina that comes with age.


MORE WEDNESDAY DAWN - WITH STILL MORE TO COME

On Monday we dropped in on the adega to top up our supplies of liquor. On previous visits we had found the man in the office happy to do heavily discounted deals with a minimum of paperwork.



Obviously things had changed for receipt books were now much in evidence, along with new tables of prices. Even so, we emerged with six litres of Jonesy's favourite tipple at a price well below anything available in the shops.



From there we carried on to see May in the nursing home just down the road. She was fairly cheery, sitting with a companion in the lounge and and looking forward to her 85th birthday the following day. I left Jones to chat to her. This is quite hard work as May tends to drift in and out of reality and one simply has to play along with whatever she has to say.



Before going to my English class, I wrote down on a piece of paper the name of a product that I asked Jones to obtain for me from the pharmacy. This she was kind enough to do. However, I had confused its name with the not dissimilar Portuguese word for a knife ("faca" - not a word that one wants to utter aloud in the company of English speakers). Jones said that the pharmacists - there are several - had been much amused when she handed over the piece of paper - although the desired product was quickly deduced.



Monday afternoon the dermatologist's receptionist phoned to say that the laboratory report was "good" following the excision of a lump from my head last week. This I was pleased to hear as you may imagine. Midweek I returned to the surgery to have the stitches out and a few spots blasted with a gas gun. I emerged more than ready for the glass of wine that we enjoyed with a tomato and ham sandwich at the Eléctrico (Portuguese for a tram) on Faro Beach.



From there we repaired to the Algarve Forum to top up on dog biscuits (3 large bags at a welcome 50% discount) and jeans, the latter for me. With me I took an old pair to demonstrate the style to the salesman at Levis' shop (here pronounced "levies"). The salesman produced two pairs that fitted me to a T.



When he told me the price, I whistled. "Well they are Levis", he responded, as though that explained everything. Feeling a bit guilty, I confessed to Jones that they were rather expensive. "So what's new?" she responded, or something equally indicative of my tastes and spending habits. There isn't time in this blog to present a decent defence of my frugality. The long and the short is that we came away with two pairs of new jeans as well as one or two Jones Christmassy items.



In the event, the jeans were a bit long (my legs are shorter than I would wish and my back longer - an unfortunate combination) and we had to ask Nadia, the seamstress in Loule, to shorten them. Nadia insisted that she measure them on me, so I had to disrobe behind the curtain in her alterations workroom while a loud Russian sitcom played itself out on the TV beside me - the new Portugal. My parents could never have imagined it.



Before I leave Wednesday, let me say that it dawned with the most remarkable inversion - as you may have been noticing. A great lake of cloud lay in all the valleys around us - painting a world much like the one that Noah would have beheld as he hurried to finish his ark. Hence the series of pictures. Any compliments to Jones please!



Thursday Feliciano the digger man turned up to create a track through the Inacio field and to bash some of the more stubborn and prominent rocks that poke up from our fields. The worst of them pretty much blocked the tractor's progress through our new plot. Note the white paint that I had daubed on rocky outcrops requiring his attention.



Protruding rocks do their utmost to grip the scarifier as it passes over them, releasing the metal blades with a shriek and a shower of sparks. So it was quite satisfying to watch them first shuddering and then shattering under the weight of the huge hydraulic hammer.


HARD DAY'S NIGHT

In-between times I have been making my way steadily through Gianluigi Nuzzi's "Merchants in the Temple", often in bed late at night. My iPad recognises the low light and reverses the print and background colours to reduce glare. Like my previous read, the book is thoroughly researched, with names, dates and verbatim communications much in evidence - little surprise given the mountain of confidential documents that were leaked to the writer.



What the book isn't is edifying; it's not one that I should recommend to the faithful, especially the good souls who contribute to the church's annual (Peter's Pence) collection (supposedly) for the world's poor". What really becomes clear is the battle in which the present pope is engaged to reform the Vatican curia - powerful and well-ensconced clerical administrators with multiple funds at their disposal and little inclination to be reformed. Little wonder that the pontiff's ineffective predecessor stood down in despair.


ESPARGAL VILLAGE FROM THE TELEF