Letter from Espargal: 26 February 2016

Our week began last Saturday when Slavic arrived minus Andre who, he said, had gone off to Spain. Jones and I had a goodly supply of rocks awaiting him and he made great progress with the wall - so much that he and I had to make three more trips to Joachim's carob plantation to top up supplies. It's the back-filling of the gap between the wall itself and the bank that eats up the rocks.


DIRTY AIR

Sunday dawned murky and stayed that way. The air appeared badly in need of a wash. We felt as though we were looking through a pane of dirty glass. At brunch we asked Nicoline - a retired meteorologist - whether it might be sand from the Sahara. She thought it might well be, carried in on the south wind. Later she sent us this satellite picture of the sand storm over Iberia.



We wondered how the jet engines of passing airliners might be affected. The phenomenon made for spectacular sun and moon effects - as you see. Monday continued murky. Tuesday dawned clear, as though nature had power-washed the muck back into the Atlantic.


SANDY SUNSET WITH FOLIAGE

The subject of my English class was "assisted dying", an issue that has been occupying Portugal's political parties - or, at least, distracting them from their interminable squabbles over the economy. Four European countries currently permit doctors to help terminally ill people die. Now an eclectic group of Portuguese citizens has suggested that their country follow suit. My pupils were in two minds about the wisdom of doing so, apart from Inacio (a great hunter of wild boar) who felt strongly that dying should be left to nature and not to doctors.



Monday evening the dogs got a double walk - the second one to find the mobile phone that had slipped out of Jones's pocket during the first. It was lying on the path, none the worse for wear, where Jones had picked up twigs for kindling. The dogs didn't complain. In fact, they romped around more joyfully the second time than the first.



On Tuesday Jones paid her monthly visit to a Portuguese neighbour who is virtually house-bound. Here Natasha helped me clean up the branches from pruned almond trees that litter our fields. We trimmed off the smaller branches and piled up the bigger ones, to be cut into firewood in due course. During a break I asked Natasha - as I do each week - whether her Portuguese citizenship had come through yet. She applied a year ago. Much to my surprise, she replied "yes". So now she's Portuguese as well as Russian. I would be tempted to apply for Portuguese citizenship myself if there were not so much bureaucracy involved.



I/we have watched some more films. I was disappointed by Mad Max: Fury Road. It had terrific visuals but no soul - just warring cowboys and Indians in the guise of motorised post-apocalyptic warriors. Jones gave it ten minutes before deciding that it wasn't her scene. The most diverting bit was Charlize Theron's prosthetic arm - not that anyone would have recognised Ms Theron. It was very well done - inevitably with computer magic. Google revealed all.



The pair of us sat down another night to a low budget local movie called The Right Juice (O Sonho Certo) - a story of an English expat whose endeavours to start a citrus farm in the Algarve run into a conspiracy by a mining company intent on buying up the land. It was of particular interest as it was set in familiar locations and one of our Espargalian neighbours played a leading part.


ALMOND BLOSSOM

We are depressed at the prospect of three months of interminable arguments over the pros and cons of the UK's exit from the EU - ahead of the "Brexit" referendum to be held in June. We shudder at the prospect of a yes vote. To our regret, neither of us will be able to vote. The overseas vote is restricted to expats who have lived in the UK within the past 15 years. We have been out for 18. (Can't believe it!)


JONES MOON

Meanwhile we see stricken sterling, our income source, slipping steadily south on the surrounding uncertainty; not that we expect much sympathy from family in South Africa or Canada (whose own currencies - for other reasons - have also nose-dived).


PENULTIMATE SANDY SUNSET

I have copied our library of 8,000 photos to our digital photo frame. They cover myriad memories, a 100 years, a score of countries, several seas and a lot of both joy and heart-sore.

There are now two strays camped at Alto Fica corner. Our animal expenditure has sky rocketed.


THAT'S ALL FOLKS

Letter from Espargal: 19 February 2016

DOGS GATHERED AROUND THE FIRE

For several nights, while getting into bed, shoving Prickles and Ono over to Jones's side, I have listened to the UK shipping forecast predicting gales in all sea areas. Not just gales but seas raging at storm force 10 and violent storm 11. On Sunday those storms headed south across the Bay of Biscay to Iberia. Weather forecasters warned of 14-metre waves off Portugal's coast. Ports were closed. The Algarve caught the tail-end of the tempest but it proved to be the tail of a scorpion.



For 48 hours we were buffeted, blown, barged, tugged, torn and tormented. Everything that wasn't tied down outside the house, flew off. Trees thrashed about, spilling nuts and carobs. Weighty garden pots toppled over. The dogs' dishes skidded into distant corners of the garden. The beasts themselves huddled with us around the fire. To open the front door while the back was ajar (or vice versa) was to invite a million icy demons to shriek though the house. It was horrible, a world ill at ease with itself.



On Tuesday the winds abated and winter arrived, displacing an extended mild autumn. Temps dropped from double figures to shivery singles. We wore two jackets on our walk and needed them. For once the air was clear, purged of pollutants by the storm. From the hilltop we could see half the world. A pale blue sky arched across to a deep blue sea. It was as though order had emerged from the chaos in the process of creation.


MAY'S HOUSE

Monday was given over to shopping. For the first time in years May no longer figured on our Monday to-do list. She has already been cremated. Her affairs now lie in the hands of her nephew, Ken, who is back in Edinburgh. He plans to return to Portugal once the lawyer has completed death's bureaucracy - to put the property on the market.


MAY'S GARDEN & POOL

Tuesday saw my annual meeting with our accountants, half an hour away in the little town of Guia. It was brief and to the point. Our recent financial affairs have been mercifully straightforward following the wretched complications arising from various purchases and sales in the 2014 tax year. It took months to get the taxman off my back.



The sunny weather brought back Eugenio, the tree pruner, to finish cutting back our numerous almond trees. The branches lie scattered across our fields, the boughs bound for firewood, the twigs for bonfires. The fields themselves are knee-high in greenery, still too wet to plough.


BENAFIM SUNSET - TB

Tuesday also witnessed a celebration lunch at the newly re-opened Hamburgo to mark Dagmar's somethingth birthday. The restaurant had closed for a couple of months while Manuel brought in a firm to fit an acoustic ceiling, recessed lighting and much more. The hard wooden chairs have gone, replaced by comfortable padded seats. All in all, it's a great improvement - decor to match the venue's reputation.



On Wednesday we returned to the Hamburgo for Fintan's birthday. The restaurant is one of those places that I am happy to visit on any number of birthdays or, for that matter, for non birthdays. It combines a pleasant ambiance, a gracious host, excellent fare and value for money. More particularly, it is just across the valley from Espargal.


ESPARGAL SUNSET - BJ

Also on Wednesday we made two runs to fetch rocks for Saturday's wall building. That's Jonesy and I - or "myself and my wife" as they to say. The sun was out to take the sting out of the cold. On the road we bumped into two sets of neighbours; from their car windows they conversed with Jones who was perched in the tractor box out of the wind. Espargal is a place where this kind of interaction feels perfectly normal.

We had left Natasha busy in the house. She spent the weekend in Cascais with her son, Alex, who had been competing in a gymnastics competition. It seems he did well enough to please himself and his mother if not well enough to get through to the finals.



Speaking of pleasing "his" mother - on the BBC's Today programme on Radio 4,  an announcer promo-ed a feature with the words: "Why does a person beat their wife?" My pedantic hackles rose. Radio 4 is supposed to have certain pretensions. So I suggested the announcer make it "HIS wife" - unless she was including lesbian "wife" batterers. The introduction was later amended to: "Why does a person beat their partner?", fractionally more tolerable.

Portuguese - with its inflected adjectives and pronouns - is little afflicted by these grammatical gender dilemmas. I wish that I too were less afflicted. Jones says I'm a bigot - although not necessarily in this context. I think it's more a case of Don Quixote, tilting uselessly at windmills.


NEW SKYPE PHONE

Following recent conversations with Portugal Telecom we now have working phones upstairs and down on the landline. They don't take messages. Skype users please note (that courtesy of Llewellyn) we also have a new Skype phone - one that takes calls via the router. Two previous Skype phones were zapped by lightning. We also have our mobile phones. Mine resides in my pocket. Jones's sometimes lingers on a table or window ledge.



Now that Foyle's War has gone the way of all good things, I - rather than we - have been watching movies instead. The first of these was "Sicario". Jones tried it before deciding that it wasn't her scene. In truth, the movie initially leaves the viewer almost as much in the dark as its protagonist. However events gradually come into focus for both parties and by the end I could see why it had achieved such good reviews - tough viewing though it was.



This is more than I can say for the award-winning Revenant. I had ordered the movie from Amazon - or thought I had - only to receive a DVD containing a different movie with the same name - a gory fest of ghouls and zombies that went straight into the waste bin. However, after watching the real thing, I wondered whether the zombies might have been an improvement. It seemed to me to represent two-and-a-half hours of murky, highly improbable, unrelieved freezing misery. While I take my hat off to the actors and crew who endured the stark, arctic conditions to make it, my award would go to viewers who sit through it.

Letter from Espargal: 12 February 2016

One way and another, this has been quite a week. The first - decidedly unwelcome - development was to return from our morning walk on Saturday to find that my tractor was no longer parked where I'd left it beside my wall builders. It was 20 metres away with water squirting from the valve of the right rear tyre. (Tractor tyres are filled with water to lend the vehicle greater weight!)



Slavic explained that he and Andre had heard the hissing and - sensibly - thought it wise to move the tractor to level ground while the tyre was still inflated. Leaving them to carry on working, I shot into Benafim to get a new valve. But this failed to stop the flow. So we jacked the tractor up, drained the tyre, got the wheel off and propped it up - pending rescue.

Rescue arrived on Monday in the shape of Paulo from Auto Salir. But his high-sided van wasn't nimble enough to ascend our steep, damp driveway. To get the wheel down to the van I sought assistance from Joachim, a tractor-owning neighbour. Joachim arrived promptly but sans tractor; it was loaded with firewood, he said. So the three of us manhandled the heavy wheel down the driveway to the van.


PAULO RE-ATTACHING THE WHEEL

Late the same afternoon Paulo returned with the tyre reinflated, this time in his own 4x4 pickup. The problem had not been with the valve, he explained, but with the punctured tube. This the garage had patched and refilled with water. It weighed a ton. Even so, Paulo managed to haul it off the pickup and wheel it across to the tractor where he bolted it back on. I was very pleased to have my tractor back. There are few things more useless than a three-wheeled tractor.


HOOP DAFFODILS

About the same time Jones reported her phone missing. She last recalled using it after returning from our p.m. dog walk. Dusk was falling. With the aid of a torch, she retraced first her route up to the telef (where she likes to toast the sunset) and then down to the waifs - while I intermittently rang the phone. No luck!


THE ROUGH INDICATION OF WHERE THE PHONE LAY - BLUE DOT

I then tried locating it via Google's Android Device Manager. This informed me that the phone was lying within 7 metres of Espargal Road - which it indicated with a vague dot on a map. However, the map showed every road in the village as Espargal Road. It wasn't helpful!


PALE BLUEBELLS

Suspicion fell on Mello who had twice before stolen Jones phones (she stands on her hind legs to hook them off tables) and rendered them useless. We checked her favourite spots. In fact much of Tuesday was spent in searching. Jones was depressed at the thought of losing another mobile and anxious to find it.


THE FIND FOR THE CAMERA

The following afternoon, Llewellyn - learning of the loss - suggested that I return to the Google software and press the RING button that would cause the phone to ring for a full five minutes. It was towards the end of those five minutes that Jones heard the faint tinkle of the phone near the bottom of the drive. She found it in a clump of greenery where she'd pulled out a couple of weeds.


LITTLE WONDER WE HADN'T BEEN ABLE TO SPOT IT EARLIER

Meanwhile, Llewellyn messaged us to say that we should look for the phone where the cement drive met the tarred road - exactly where we'd found it moments earlier. He had logged into Google as Barbara, found the rough location of the phone (as I had) and then switched to Google Earth view which was much more precise.


THE GOOGLE EARTH PICTURE SHOWING THE SPOT - COURTESY LLEWELLYN

The moral of the story for owners of Android phones (as opposed to Apple, Windows etc) is set LOCATION to ON and to register with Google. The software also allows the (logged in) owner remotely to lock a phone or delete its data. I should add that it's useful to have a tech-smart relative.



Before I leave Llewellyn, let me add that we are rapidly approaching the end of Foyle's War, a TV series that he introduced us to - sending us boxes of DVDs. We soon became addicted and acquired the rest of the series. For those unfamiliar with it, Foyle's War hinges on the investigations of a policeman during WWII and the years thereafter. But that tells you nothing about its lure.



Reverting to the tractor mishap - it represented the second puncture of the weekend. A wheelbarrow tyre that had been fixed just last month deflated again. I took it back to Helio who runs a buzzbike and garden machinery repair shop in Benafim - a dark cavern so chockablock with buzzbikes and dripping with spare parts that he is forced to work almost on the pavement. He repaired the tube again after extracting a tiny needle of steel that had embedded itself in the tyre.


MAY IN HAPPIER TIMES

Changing tack once again - we visited May on Monday, really to say goodbye. We had learned that she was going rapidly downhill with a second dose of pneumonia and had declined further food or treatment. We held her hands for a few minutes. She was too weak to speak - ready to join her Harry whom she missed so dearly.

Her Scottish nephew, Kenneth, flew in on Tuesday night and hurried directly to her bedside. He phoned us a little later to say that he had managed to spend 15 minutes with his semi-conscious aunt, clasping her hand and reminding her of good times together. Then she gave a sigh and died. The staff said she had waited for him to come and so it seems. RIP May. We met up with Kenneth on Wednesday as he now deals with the bureaucracy entailed on deaths and funerals.



SCREENSHOT OF THE TAP SITE

Early in the year as it is, we have been turning our thoughts to a holiday this coming October when our house sitters will be down again. I mention this because I was trying to compare easyJet's prices to Madeira with those of TAP. EasyJet proved easy enough. But each time I logged into TAP and entered tentative flight details, its site accused me of being a robot and blocked further access. This happened for several days. I reported the problem to TAP who say that they are investigating.


LEG-LIFTERS IN THE PARK ON A WET MORNING

Equally frustrating have been my attempts to report a noisy phone line to Telecoms whose helpline inevitably entails a long wait. I eventually got through and, after plugging and unplugging the phone and filter as instructed by the assistant, was informed that the fault lay not with the line but the phone. So I disconnected the phone and bought another. No improvement! This time I tried reporting the fault late at night and got through straight away (having navigated the inevitable menu). In fairness to Telecoms the fault was fixed the following morning. It turned out to be at the exchange in Benafim.


THE ORPHANS CLAIMING THE BEST SPOT BESIDE THE FIRE

Friday we are taking Maria and her little dog, Lucky, to Loule for Lucky's third and final vaccine shot. Lunch with Ken follows - and perhaps a couple of rock runs in the afternoon.

Letter from Espargal: 5 February 2016

In order to display some award-winning pictures, the blog opens on a tractor ride down to Joachim's carob plantation to get rid of the recycling and load up with rocks. In the absence of other rock loaders, Jonesy had volunteered her services, albeit with some misgivings. That's her seated on a cushion in the box. She said the cushion didn't help much over the bumps.



We had advanced barely 200 metres down the road when we ran into Olly who hitched a ride as far as the post boxes at the bottom of the hill. That's him talking to Jones. Another 200 metres and we came across Pauline who was camouflaged behind Macbethian(?) armfuls of hedge trimmings from Casa Mack. So we volunteered the tractor. (No pics! Sorry!)


THE BOYS AT WORK LAST SATURDAY, PICTURED FROM THE NEIGHBOUR'S SIDE. THE FALL ON MY SIDE IS MUCH GREATER

Jones vacated the box which took all the remaining trimmings plus the corpse of an overweening cactus that Fintan (who had just arrived with a wheelbarrow) thought prudent to cut down while the tractor was handy. Having deposited the load, Jones and I had time for one rock run before lunch.



At that point Natasha called to volunteer her own services - an offer we were glad to accept. She's a jolly good loader. Some of the rocks she managed to heave on board would have done Slavic proud.



We made a couple of trips, sufficient to keep the boys busy on Saturday, assuming that the rain holds off. The wall is making slow but steady progress along the upper border of our field, earning the admiration of neighbours as it does so.



Natasha and I then got stuck into the triffids (Jones's name for them), a variety of wild celery that overflows the garden each spring.


TRIFFID

The plants spread out like giant umbrellas, covering beds, paths and verges in a green canopy before shooting up flowery spikes. One or two would be nice but they simply take over the garden and its surrounds.


JONES PIGEON PICTURE

The start of February always sees me scrutinising bank statements in preparation for our tax return. After a brush with the taxman last year - I still don't know what he was unhappy about - I am taking a great deal of care. The Finances is the one arm of government that really strives for efficiency; by which I mean extracting tax, not serving the tax payer.


ANOTHER JONES PIGEON PICTURE

We now take it as read that the Finances freely exchanges information with other EU members. It has also obliged enterprises of any size to install cash registers linked directly to its own computers. And now, as I learned at a tax seminar midweek, all company invoices bearing the recipient's fiscal number arrive electronically at the Finances, which assigns these to the recipient's tax file and calculates any tax credits that may be due.




It might be worth adding - as I learned at the seminar - that 90% of Portuguese taxpayers now file their returns online, the highest percentage in the EU after Finland. At the same time, more than half of Portuguese adults in receipt of income file no returns at all, falling beneath the filing threshold - first world and third world all jumbled up.


BENAFIM DAWN

After the seminar, held at a smart hotel in the resort of Vilamoura, Jones and I took ourselves to next-door Quarteira, a down-to-earth apartment block town where the Portuguese come to holiday along with foreign tourists. The sea front boasts a long promenade that we shared with the occasional jogger, dog walker and holiday maker. Ono and Prickles insisted on checking every pole and kerb stone, making a donation where they deemed it appropriate. A trickle of holiday-makers joined us at the beach-front snack bar where we lunched under cool, cloudy skies on toasted tuna sandwiches, flicking crumbs to the waiting sparrows.


THE STRAY

Speaking of crumbs: we have added the stray at Alto Fica corner to our waifs and strays list. The animal has got to know our car and comes running as we approach, although he will not take anything directly from our hands. So, each time we pass we drop a snack on to the verge - a chewie or a couple of biscuits or the occasional bone. The people who live nearby don't seem to mind his presence, although there's no knowing how long that will be the case. As neighbours have observed, the beast likes to sunbathe in the road and is averse to moving for approaching vehicles, which is unwise.



Pause there as Jones takes the morning coffee tray downstairs, stopping to inquire whether I have seen her glasses. I am able to inform her that they are perched on her head, their favoured retreat when she works at her desk.



My digital photo frame has arrived although not yet the capacious USB stick I ordered to go with it. (This, Amazon informed me, was being sent "ahead" separately.) Still, the small USB stick that was included with the frame took some three thousand of our holiday photos. After spending an hour loading these, I plugged the stick into the frame and started reliving our holidays. The device is triggered by movement in the room and cleverly shuts itself down when no-one is around. The question is where to put it.



This weekend the senior university, like much of Loule, is closing down for carnival. While Brazil's famous carnival is celebrated in high summer, Portugal's carnivals often parade through shivering streets - according to the whimsy of the weather. Still, that doesn't inhibit the scantily-clad maidens who crew the floats or the beer-swilling merry makers who cheer them on, often with an exchange of (mainly harmless) missiles. Jones and I decided years ago that attendance at carnivals was superfluous to our happiness.



As our Portuguese teacher pointed out to us, the word "carnival" - in Portuguese "carnaval", signalling the start of Lent, is popularly thought to derive from the Latin for "farewell to meat" or possibly "farewell to flesh". (The medieval church expected the faithful to abstain from both meat and sex during Lent - and at a great many other times!)