Letter from Espargal: 27 January 2017

Thursday afternoon and it's pissing down! My sister, Cathy, is visiting from Berlin. Here's a picture her taking a picture of the rain, lest you were in any doubt.



Most of the week has been sunny, so she's not complaining. She's also made herself useful by taking lots of photos , as you may see.



Here's one of the almond blossom now clothing the nut trees in delicate pink and white dresses.



The blossom gives promise of a fine crop of almonds, assuming that the rain doesn't destroy it, as happened last year.



Here you see - if you look closely - Cathy and Jonesy at Faro beach.



And here on the promenade at Olhao.



I was there too. As always, Prickles and Ono ride shotgun.



From marinas at both ends of the promenade, boats headed over to the distant chain of offshore islands.



Any outings have been timed to fit in between dog walks. Poor Pally, left of picture, is still limping badly - not that his injury discourages him from joining us.



Ascending Olly's path on the far side of Espargal hill.



If (until now) the days have been glorious, the nights have been cold. The wood-burning stove has been working overtime.



It's a dogs' life.



When the fire grows too warm, one retires to the couch.



Jones spotted this yellow bird. We're unsure of its identity.



Cathy followed suit by snapping this robin, hiding in a tree. Such visitors are uncommon. It's the doves and the sparrows that rule the roost.



The aloes are fired up in every corner of the garden.



Slavic spent a morning assisting me with clearing and burning.



It's still raining. Three inches recorded so far! Time to call it a day.

Letter from Espargal: 20 January 2017

Monday was a red letter day. It was the day the Hamburgo reopened after an extended break. We celebrated the occasion by supping there with neighbours, David and Sarah. The dinner was as good as ever. But, much to our chagrin, the music that blared from new TV screens featuring screeching, gyrating bimbos did nothing to improve the occasion. Oh dear!

THIS IS ONE PUSSY (CAT) THAT HE AIN'T GRABBING

It's hard to blog while pretending to ignore the mammoths in the room. We feel dispirited, as depressed by the swearing-in of a petulant fantasist on the far side of the Atlantic as the onward march of the Brexiteers closer to home. Yes, we know that the world is sharply divided and that others see it differently. Farewell Obama. Whatever history's verdict may be, we have admired your efforts and we are sorry to see you go.



In the face of these great tides of change, I have only trivia to offer. Portugal, which spends most of its time sweltering in the sun, has this week been shivering. Dawn frost glistens in the valleys; on the hills there have been brief hints of snow. We've needed two jackets to face the bracing morning air. Our wood-burning stove has been working overtime, its hairy acolytes camped gratefully around it.



On Monday my mobile phone twice threw a fit, heating itself up alarmingly and discharging its battery. On Tuesday I took it in to Vodafone who sent it off to the repairman after first removing its (nano) simcard, reframing it (as a micro sim) and replacing it in my back-up phone. We lunched in the pale sunshine at the Electrico snackbar on Faro beach, our favourite. In the car-park across the road, a dozen motor-homes idled away the day, TV antennae poised and solar panels soaking up the sun.



A dozen more were drawn up in the vast new parking ground on the far side of the estuary. Their occupants have easy access to the beach via the new boardwalk across the intervening water. Such vans are sprinkled, like spots on a plum-pudding dog, around every beach, picnic spot and resort in the Algarve. It's as though northern Europeans have fled south like refugees from the arctic winter.



Back home it took me a couple of hours to set up my replacement phone and to persuade it to talk to my watch. What I hadn't realised - among other things - was that WhatsApp needed to be reconfigured before it would function as me in a different phone. Apologies to any WhatsAppers who found me mysteriously absent. At this point, everything seems to be up and running again.


JONES WITH A FAVOURITE SCARF AND A NEW SWEATER

Wednesday brought my weekly back tune-up with Jodi. Thursday and Friday were unusually sociable. After Thursday lunch with friends at the Hamburgo (Oh, that music!) we visited their house 30 minutes away. It's impressively high-tech. A bank of solar panels feeds underfloor heating, supplemented when necessary with electricity, gas or wood-fired combustion. A panel in kitchen wall constantly monitors the operation of the above.



The whole house exterior has been clad with insulation panels, covered and painted to look like plaster. All doors and windows are heavily double-glazed. Energy requirements are minimal. I like it.

HEDGE IN BLOOM

Friday, after shopping, we joined another friend, Kenneth, for lunch. He's down from Scotland to oversee the sale of the house he inherited from his aunt, May - the old lady we assisted in her final years. We've been his link with agents, as well as the gardener and maid.



In-between times (and especially between twice daily walks) we have repaired more of the cushions that the dogs ripped apart, helped neighbours make travel arrangements online and acted as foster parents to a (tenth) dog while its owners are abroad. (That's apart from six more local mutts that we "treat".) Even without the likes of Trump and Brexit, life sure hasn't been dull!

Letter from Espargal: 13 January 2017

My English classes started up again on Monday following the Christmas break. Events dictated the choice of subject, although in the Trumpian and Brexit clamour that thunders around our media, I doubt that you noticed. It was the death of the ailing father of Portuguese democracy, Mario Soares - former Socialist Party leader, prime minister and president. For some years he had been withdrawing from notice under the burden of age and infirmity.



Portuguese youth would know of his role in the overthrow of the dictatorship mainly through their history books. But for the "senior" pupils in my English class, who grew up under Salazar and were witness to the 1974 Carnation Revolution, Soares is part of their life story, as pivotal to Portuguese history as Walesa to Poland's or Mandela to South Africa's.



Tuesday aside - when a tempest raged around us - it's been another sunny week of a kind that ice-bound eastern Europe and stormy Britain can only dream about. We don't go walking until after 09.00, when the sun is up and the dew-glistening paths are drying out. The temperature is busy climbing from mid-singles overnight to the upper teens so that the jackets we wear on departure are often slung over our shoulders on our return.



After doggy breakfast, when we sit back to enjoy a cup of coffee in the glass-enclosed sun-flooded south patio - dogs on the divan, doves at the bird-feeder and the garden glorious - you might well think us one stop short of heaven.



Wednesday brought the return from holiday in Russia of Natasha, who was recovering from the previous day's coach trips and flights. She said she had spent most of her vacation eating and sleeping. Temperatures down to C*-33 did little to tempt her out. Young Alex, who has grown up in Portugal's mild climate found the frigid conditions daunting.



With Natasha came Slavic for the day. He normally works weekdays at a quinta in the hills but found himself stranded when his car broke down. So he spent the day here instead. He and I laboured away in the park, cutting back the almond trees, clearing under the carobs and burning off.



The dogs love it when we busy ourselves in the park. They nose about the bushes or plant themselves in sunny spots the better to idle away the hours. They have a knack of disappearing into the scenery so that you almost fall over them before you see them.



Poor Pally has been nursing a sore paw all week. But as his need to go tearing around the countryside, yapping his head off, is hardwired into his circuitry, he speed-hobbles into the distance on three legs.



An hour or two later he reappears to seek admittance at the gate, sore paw held miserably aloft. It's hard to know just what the problem is. As with the other two orphans, he will not allow close examination. They don't mind being stroked on occasion but they freak at any attempt at restraint.

EIGHT DOGS AND I

Jones, I regret to say, inherited my cold, hacking, coughing and spluttering for several days as I have continued to do myself. Whatever may or may not be true about "man colds" she was certainly less affected (and infected) than her spouse - and recovered far more swiftly. Whether that's a gender thing or a gene thing it's hard to know.


MOON BALANCED ON A CHIMNEY

Before retiring most nights, I listen to the "Book of the Week" on BBC Radio 4. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/schedules#on-now) This week's readings have been from Diarmaid MacCulloch's work, The Reformation - a tome that I have downloaded and am about to read. He is professor of the History of the Church at Oxford.



We came across him as the presenter of television documentaries on aspects of Christianity - and found him deeply impressive. Interestingly, while he went as far as being ordained a deacon in the Church of England, he declined ordination to the priesthood because of the Church's attitude to (his) homosexuality. 


ALMOND BLOSSOM

Unlike the UK, which ends its tax year in April, Portugal sticks to the calendar year. That means that I have to sit down early in the new year to prepare our accounts. These are complicated by exchange rate fluctuations and annuities foreign to the Portuguese taxman. My part is to list in-comings and outgoings carefully and to hand the details over to our accountants.


SEVERELY PRUNED ALMOND PLANTATION NEXT DOOR

As you may imagine, like a couple of million other expats, we are less than thrilled with the continuing slide of sterling. I find it as hard to restrain myself over Brexiteers proclaiming a brave new world as over the tweeting Donaldo's ravings.



We have been listening to yet another fascinating radio series on the BBC, about the new "post truth" world and how social media are serving to reinforce people in bubbles of their own prejudice. Fifty per cent of Americans are said to get their news from social media. Can you credit it?

Let us be grateful for such sensible souls as thee and me.



 

Letter from Espargal: 6 January 2017

Although my electronic gadgetry informs me that we are now in the year 2017, the start of January in these parts feels little different to the end of December. There's nothing in the air to mark the exit of one era and the arrival of another - the Trumpian and Brexit era. The hunters who were bang-banging down in the valley on New Year's Eve were back at it the following day, oblivious to the tidings; not that they bothered us.



In Espargal, and more particularly in Valapena, the midnight hour arrived, not with a bang and not even with a murmur, just with the chimes of Big Ben via the headboard speakers to mark the change-over as the beasts and I settled back. Cathy was saying that Berlin seemed to be exploding around her with thunderous fireworks. The only sound here, apart from the radio, was Prickles' gentle and rhythmic snoring. I have to say that I liked it that way.


BARBARA AT GRADUATION, 1964

Jones too reported much sound and fury in London where she and her family likewise celebrated the big moment in their beds. She flew back to Faro later that day, emerging in the temporary arrivals hall with one hand gripping a bulging suitcase, stuffed with Christmas goodies from her hosts. Thank you hosts. (Faro airport is still in the throes of a mega overhaul!)


THAMES SIDE WALK WITH LUCIA, EDGAR AND HAZEL

Behind her she left Llewellyn with a cold and here she found me with one. I can only think that I picked it up during a check-up at Loule hospital a few days earlier. Hospitals can be very bad for one's health, as the media constantly remind us. Loule hospital, if it were the culprit, did me no favours for the cold is as unpleasant as any I have suffered, a level-one man-cold of a severity incomprehensible to womankind.


DOG CAFE

In Jones's absence I kept myself pretty busy. One morning was devoted to (yet another) fight with our incompetent internet TV and phone line suppliers. I had visited them several weeks ago to cancel the phone (which has served the interests of cold and phantom callers more than ours.) However, the suppliers didn't cancel it and continued to charge me.


ANOTHER LLEWELLYN PHOTO

So back to Faro I went to query things. The pretty (useless) bimbo to whom I spoke picked up a mobile phone and called the number of a colleague who took 30 minutes first to offer me a 40% discount on my subscription if I stuck with both TV and phone - I accepted - and then to effect the change. He kept asking me to hold just a few more minutes while he diddled on his computer.


BACK HOME, WITH MINI

Why the bimbo was incapable of doing this herself remains a mystery. I had the same palava last year when I tried to cancel my wifi subscription. The company policy appears to be: do nothing until the customer returns to complain. Deal with Meo at your peril! (Meanwhile we still have the phone line but for the moment there's no phone plugged into it. We remain contactable via email, sms, WhatsApp, mobile phone and Skype.)



The one real benefit of my visit was the purchase of a battery-operated vacuum cleaner. There's no cord to trip over, it's light and maneuverable, it has enough power to run for an hour and it really works. I made good use of it over the next few days as I sought to keep the house clean enough to win the returning Jones's approval. Inevitably, this was a goal in which I received little assistance from the dogs, who moult incessantly.



My farmer neighbour, Armenio, after helping me cut back old almond trees, with a view to grafting them in the spring, invited me round to his mini-museum to taste his latest brew. As the barrel lacked a tap, he had to suck it out through a tube. Tasted pretty good, nonetheless.



His museum is filled with a range of old implements as well as numerous natural sculptures. These he shapes from the roots of a local tree (ripped out by diggers clearing the land), sanding them and varnishing them to get the finish. They are spectacular and I've no doubt would sell well should he decide to put them on the market.



Twice I visited a holiday house in the village recently acquired by a Swedish couple. I had promised to take around some firewood to warm the house ahead of their return. However, as they had earlier remarked, the small wood-burning stove did nothing to encourage the building of fires.

PICTURE TAKEN FROM OUR PATIO TO CHECK WHETHER SMOKE WAS RISING FROM THEIR CHIMNEY

After discussing the problem with them, I returned with a chimney sweeping kit and an extension ladder to check the top of the chimney. The exit of the stack was clear and the chimney - as far as the brush would reach - was virtually clean, so I could only think was some other problem. I put them in touch with the builder, whose workers subsequently removed a large birds' nest from the stack. The fire now draws enthusiastically!



Each year we get an invasion of these little "Christmas" beetles. Here you see a dozen or so that had fallen into a water butt and which, after photographing them, I rescued. At least I tossed them into the garden and wished them well. Jones said she had done the same a little earlier in the day. Much of the time we come across the little creatures lying on their backs on the floor, either dead or twitching their little legs uselessly. I reflected that evolution was having a bad day when it signed off on the Christmas beetle.