30January1995

London: 30 January 1995
My dear folks,

Portugal. 07:55 on a Monday morning and still pitch-dark outside. After London, where the sun rises and sets much earlier, it takes some getting used to. The boys, as Jones is wont to call them, will arrive any minute and get to work on the micro-studio, MCP (Meu Castelo Pequenino - My Little Castle). They wouldn't be recognised as boys by anyone under 50 and their handiwork will certainly not be recognised as a fortress. But this is what Jones is pleased to call it and, like Adam with the animals, so it shall be.

MCP has made great strides since last I saw it and is very pleasing to the eye. Trying to describe it, even to those who remember the outhouses, is a test of my skills. As one looks at it (and the house behind it) from the garden, there is a central stone-clad front entrance. This gives off left to the old bread-oven room and right, through a tiny stone doorway, into the bathroom. In the miniature hall, directly behind the front door a steep flight of stone stairs (set hard against the wall) leads up and divides left into my old workshop and right into the sleeping pad (over the bathroom) a nook exactly big enough to take a double mattress. Jones could just about stand upright. (My nieces, Erica and Anita, would think it made in Heaven.

All the old walls have been raised with a concrete collar which serves both to secure the walls themselves (thick, but consisting solely of stones and lime) and to give much-needed extra height. The ceilings are traditional eucalyptus poles overlaid with cane (& a generous measure of insulation) and look superb. Poles have also been used in a combination of vertical and horizontal lines to construct a safety barrier above the bathroom (to prevent a sleeper emerging from the nook and toppling two metres to an extremely hard landing below. If this sounds like a hodge-podge, it looks wonderful in the best cottagey traditions.

We entertained the builders and a host of friends yesterday to a bucks-fizz breakfast & roof-wetting. It had become apparent to me on my arrival the previous afternoon that at least one aspect of my original plan was doomed. My old tool-room had become an integral part of the new apartment and there was no way that it could continue in its previous function without being an abuse. It clearly had to be sacrificed in interests of integrity and turning MCP into a viable living unit.

I collared Geoff (the builder) and wondered how easy (& inexpensive) it would be to throw a tiled roof out over the former pig pen (now the walled garden) adjoining MCP to create a shed that could become my new workshop. Geoff thought it reasonably easy. The end result should be the cutest of cottages and a home that should delight Jones until she becomes too stiff somewhere in the C21st to mount the daunting stairs. And so empires (and one's finances) are extended. I start to understand how penurious noble families come to occupy crumbling stately homes.

I found the menagerie in residence. The French (& visitor) occupy an apartment, the Germans one cottage and the English the other. There's room enough, especially when it's sunny and people can laze around. But the completion of MCP will mean a timely addition to the family. Sunny it has not been since my arrival. The mist curled around the hill the first evening and hid us entirely. Since then armies of clouds have rolled overhead, at times giving off a fine drizzle, at times allowing the sun to peep through. My guests accused me of bringing the English weather with me. It does not please them. But it is sorely needed. The Algarve is dry, unlike most of the rest of Europe, and sorely in need of rain.

On Sunday afternoon, after the roof-wetting, Jones and I went for a walk down one of the numerous tracks leading into the hills. It wound its way along for about a mile before joining the new Lisbon road. It was absolutely littered with shotgun cartridges. In fact, the air popped around us with the continual retorts of the hunters in the hills. We do not like the hunters. There is precious little left to hunt, in truth. But in season, on Thursdays and Saturdays, they emerge in their thousands and pepper everything in sight. We hope that they will all shoot themselves and thus rid us of the problem.

But we recognise that this is an unlikely solution and that we are going to have to live with them. Their activities are likely to be reduced only by the creeping invasion of outer suburbia from Loule, down in the valley. This is almost as undesirable as the hunters. But we can't change that either.

Midday: Jones is fiddling around in her garden from the warm security of my old ski jacket. The Calgarians might just remember it. I suspect that, like much of my winter wardrobe, it was a Calgarian donation. It is being put to good use, even though the nearest snow must be several hundred miles away. Several times a day, Jones runs coffee and biscuits over to the boys who are busy rendering the upper limits of the walls, immediately below the tiles. It looks good and is making steady progress. The end of March is the likely occupation point.

On the subject of ski-jackets, let me tell you that it was so cold last Thursday morning that I hauled my new ski jacket (Kevin would remember the garment well - immensely warm & once the height of fashion on the slopes of the Rockies) out of the cupboard to cycle to work. The cars parked in the street were heavily encrusted with rime. There was no wind, however, and tucked into the jacket and double knitted gloves, I was quite isolated and comfortable. It was the first time I had cycled to work in weeks. I'd been working mainly weekend and night shifts when it's easy to park in the Beeb's multi-storey car park and the temptation is to use the car. But since I'd just had my bike fixed, I couldn't think of a good reason not to use it. I badly needed the exercise. I'd done little but work & sleep for weeks.

Everybody has been working masses of overtime to allow management to free up staff for the pilot programmes which preceded the big two-channel launch last week. So I knew it was going to be a heavy day as I rode through the darkness - but not how heavy. To begin with, our team, which is meant to have two producers, lacked any. I pointed this out to the dept. deputy head who shook her head in despair. Every effort had been made to conjure up people from nowhere, without success. So I found myself elevated to producer and putting on air a bulletin an hour from 7a.m. to 7p.m. without a break. Ditto on the Friday.

What's more, to doll up the new programmes, all kinds of new formats had been adopted which meant putting each story through a kind of script conversion process to make it broadcastable in bulletins. We found ourselves innovating madly as we ran up against unimagined and unimaginable problems. What's more, all the brass were crowded into the gallery to watch proceedings, looking like a procession of undertakers in their dark suits. And we kept on taking live injects from Auschwitz to complicate matters further. It was like dancing barefoot on a floor littered with tacks.

By Friday night, I was sorely pooped. So was everyone else. It felt as though hurricanes had torn through our brains. The brass, to give them credit, had arranged a party upstairs at a nearby pub to celebrate the launch, universally reckoned a grand success. (Five mega-advertisers had signed up the same day, 3 of them airlines.) And everyone was pleased. I took the opportunity to have a word with the dept. head about my transfer to the Arabs as I'd had no confirmation or clarity about dates from Personnel or anyone else. He said the service was juggling staff as first one area and then another expanded rapidly. It figured! He hoped the matter would be resolved shortly. Then as I was about to leave, he called me back. People had told him, he said, that I had been doing exemplary work well above my station, and it was both noted and appreciated. Immodestly, I told him that his sources were impeccable and bade him good night. It's nice when it's recognised. Doesn't happen often.

Tuesday Night: It's just gone 10 p.m. One of Loule's several taxis (a smart Mercedes, like most of them) has dropped us back at the Cruz da Assumada corner and we have struggled up the driveway under the light of the stars. Loule itself, several hundred feet below, is bathed in the thickest mist. I could barely count five painted centre-stripes on the road. I cannot remember such freakish weather in our eight years at the Quinta. From the gates, I could see not a light on the plain below - merely a distant, half-lit horizon where the colonies would normally be blazing clusters along the coast. The hamlet of Cruz da Assumada itself protruded from the all-enveloping haze. And above us, undisturbed for once by the lights carpeting the Algarve plain, such a sky was lit as I can hardly remember.

We had walked down to dinner in the dusk. It's a brisk half hour trot into Loule, hugging the walls as a hundred Portuguese drivers swoosh by, each trying to set a new land-speed record on the run to Salir ten miles away. Most gardens on the way down are patrolled by Portuguese burglar alarms, dogs which sprint joyously to the gate to get in as many frenzied barks during our brief passage as is caninely possible. Misery for a Portuguese dog is to miss the strangers passing the gate, or to arrive when they have all but passed. One lad stuck his nose rather too determinedly through the gate, to receive a brisk reminder from my walking stick of the perils of exuberance.

Jones had decided that we should visit the Angolan restaurant, an establishment all but invisible on the main road into town. Its merits had been sung to us by our builders. It has two dishes, chicken and spare-ribs. The owner is an elderly Portuguese gentleman with a large tummy. His (black as the Ace of Spades) Angolan wife presumably gives the place its name. Dinner is served by a coffee-coloured daughter while an olive grand-daughter, maybe 4 or 5, amuses herself with her dolls. The place is an elderly hall, the wiring tacked to the ceiling, the decorations a sparse arrangement of wall plates and coat hangars. The food is excellent and good value for money.

I asked for the reserve wine, getting a good ticking off from Jones afterwards when I confessed that it cost £5.50, the price of the house horse-piss at the cheapest of London eateries, but treble the going rate for table wines at places like the Angolana. It was delicious. I made no apology. Jones had her chicken with lashings of piri-piri. I had mine without.

It's been a long day. I arose at dawn to join Maria's husband (Manuel) and a friend in relocating the vast heap of rubble from MCP to a rockery on the lower terrace where the stone wall needs buttressing. It was a lovely day - after two very mixed days and we stripped off layers as the sun rose. After the rockery had taken as much rubble as it could handle, we started dumping elsewhere. The boys meanwhile got on with plastering the exterior of MCP. The French were out, entertaining their relation; the Germans were snoozing in the sun; the Brits were discussing their house plans with their rascally builder. Jones toiled in her garden. (Jones always toils in her garden.) The cat made little runs past us.

The French delivered it back to Jones on her return from Portugal. It had moved in with them in her absence and looked straight through her when she greeted it affectionately. It had learned to purr in French, as she put it. But, since she now feeds it again, it purrs once more in English. It's a very adaptable cat; a Vicar of Bray feline; I guess that applies to most of them. They're more concerned with being fed & warm than who's providing the food & heat.

Friday Evening: Going home, courtesy of TAP, in a near-empty plane. We have left behind the Spanish hilltop villages picked out in the sun & are now somewhere over the sea. For the past three days, we have had almost wall to wall sunshine. The Germans have been sunbathing on the patio; the French have been entertaining their relation; the British have been tending their seedling garden and building Barbara's Bower.

Barbara's Bower started out as a seat, made of wood and stone, set into the bank overlooking the Rua Stanislaus (the lower drive). Gradually, it expanded, presiding over growing levels of approach steps, as if to accommodate courtiers and acolytes come to pay homage. It is the brainchild of John Vincent - the male half of the retired British couple who are awaiting the construction of their own home. It served the dual purpose of enabling him to employ a great deal of free time and to leave a monument to his stay. He pinches small quantities of sand and cement from the builders (who say that as I'm paying for it, they don't mind at all) and, stripped to the waist, labours away. It offers a magnificent view over the valley and the sea. Jones has tried it and found it quite comfortable.

The Germans, not to be outdone, found two planks of wood, got them sanded down and then, with great patience and skill, painted the name of the Quintassential on each in a Gothic-type of script. They then badgered us to obtain the necessary posts on which to mount them. And finally Gunther helped me attach the signs to the posts and install them at strategic points on the approach road. They look superb. We hope only that the local council does not object to our mounting them without the necessary authority.

The French, for their part, have continued their gradual clearing of the upper terrace, now renamed as the Champs Élysées. The stones they have extracted from it stand in a pile a metre high and two metres wide. The cleared areas are being planted with beans & herbs.

Another project - ours, this time - was to shore up a collapsing wall above the lower terrace with rising semi-circular steps which surround a large pot housing an orange tree. We went along with the Brits to select the tree when we inspected the handsome property on which they plan to build. (They have had an agonising four month wait trying to overcome the problems caused by the expiry of the previous building licence - far to complex to tackle in a family letter). The tree was duly planted. The following morning, Jones found an orange (tied with string) dangling from one of the branches - John's sense of humour. With the help of Manuel - our maid's husband - we completed the steps and managed to move a great deal of the rubble mountain which the builders have created.

We also virtually completed the painting of the exterior of MCP. As the cottage has not gone through all the Portuguese bureaucracy recommended for such developments, I wanted to marry the lower white walls and the newly-plastered upper sections before the contrast drew unnecessary questions. It was an excellent marriage, too, carried out with Manuel's help. Today I left Geoff and John doing the electrics - pulling the wires through the numerous plastic tubes dangling down from the ceiling. They estimate that it will take them another two months to complete the interior - and possibly a further month to build the exterior shed.

Geoff entertained us to dinner two nights ago in the cottage he built himself and which first won Jones over to have him build ours. The conversation - as conversations do - quickly went political and I became engaged in a lively discussion with another guest, Jones tapping away quite unnecessarily at my knee. No strains however (except perhaps on my head the following morning) and we left in excellent spirits. Other expats, a Scottish couple, had us around to dinner last night, preparing a meal and serving a selection of wines that would have done a king proud. My only problem was staying awake, after a long day's painting. After midnight, my eyes glazed over. Eventually, we staggered back up the hill and fell, quite exhausted into bed. It's not the work that's tiring in Portugal, it's the socialising.

It's time to wind this up. The engines are being throttled back and the plane is starting to descend. Thank you for a host of letters, faxes, phone calls and email. I can't imagine life without them.