21April1997

Monday 21 April
My dear folks,

We are seated in Jones’s little kitchen. She is catching up on the pile of mail I brought down with me. The World Service is keeping us abreast of international evils. Noite is sunning herself outside, having consumed the extra helping of goo she won with piteous miaaws. The Quintassential is warming up after a chilly start to the day. The garden is soaked. The heavens opened on Friday, sending down steady, heavy rain that filled the pool, the wheelbarrow (& anything else that presented itself) to the brim. There were still showers about when I landed on Sat. p.m.

They returned again on Sun, causing several interruptions to the social gatherings Jones had arranged, a brunch & a barbecue – designed to get all our socialising over & done with. Some 20 locals rolled up to the former while the latter – in the evening – was for the SA contingent. The highpoint of the brunch was the huge bowl of punch we prepared. Jones didn’t know that I’d poured a flagon of red wine into it & I didn’t know that it contained a generous helping of gin & martini. “Mainly lemonade & fruit juice with a little wine,” I assured our visitors who consumed every last thimbleful before proceeding to tuck into my reserve supplies of red wine. This is thirsty country.

In the evening, I made a fire in a stand-alone barbecue that I could whip under cover as soon as it began raining, which it did in due course. I settled my debts with Bernie Basson who has reroofed the carport & Piet Maeyer (a valuable find) who has installed a new shower & painted out several of the casas. Piet is a big fellow in his mid sixties (with a handshake like a mechanical shovel) who has proved invaluable to us. He & his wife, Hettie, are living here for as long as the fancy & money takes them. They have an apartment in one of the coastal developments & finance their trans-European travels with sundry labours. I liked them both. Bernie (a human barrel) does general repairs in the “colonies” along the coast. He’s married to a charming ex-Mozambique Portuguese wife. Also with us were Andries, our resident retired diplomat, and Lo, the mother of media friends of ours. It was a useful day as well as a sociable one. It finished outside on the patio where, passing the binocs from person to person, we peered at the Hale-Bopp comet trailing through the western skies. What a beauty!

Our celebrations actually began on Saturday evening with dinner at the new café-bar on the road just below us. It has replaced the previous den at which locals gathered for gossip & refreshments until it was shut down by the authorities. The new place, Casa do Pasto (which is really just a generic name for an inexpensive eating house) is a vast improvement but you wouldn’t know this unless you’d been into the den. It’s run by a couple who work from 0730 to midnight seven days a week to service a dozen tables & the groups who cluster about the bar. The place is filled with dark-featured peasants, loud conversation & a halo of smoke. All important football matches play themselves out on the TV set affixed to the wall, a distraction from the serious card games at the corner tables. The place serves snacks rather than serious food but Senora Odette is only too happy to whip up dinner for those who want a meal & ours was excellent – for the price of what the bottle of wine alone would have cost in London.

Tuesday morning:
We are breakfasting in Casa 4 which is empty for a few days. Lord knows how we’d have managed without it during our parties. Jones’s little casa, however delightful, is designed for one or possibly two. We supped here last night as well, enjoying an excellent bottle of wine & the luxury of a fire. I was about to note the label when I recalled that I’d poured the remains of several bottles together after our brunch.

It’s remained damp. In fact, it’s been decidedly wet at times. A large black cloud arrived overhead at lunchtime & started a serious downpour mid-afternoon, just as we were completing a visit to Loule. Jones remarked that the rain seemed wetter than usual & I had to concur. It was very wet indeed, the kind that has people scurrying for cover & creates instant pools & rushing streams down the side of the road.

The little umbrella we were sharing was not up to the task of sheltering the pair of us & I left Jones sheltering under a shop canopy while I went to fetch the car. The rain continued as we drove to Cin Paints to buy a special green paint for the inside of the carport; & for another hour as we chatted to Sherri Wiltshire, an expat with whom we stayed on our first visit to the Algarve. It was her mini-development that gave us the idea of taking guests. Her garden is one of the wonders of the Algarve. Once the rain had eased off, we inspected her latest cottage & wandered around the acre of garden in true admiration of what she has achieved.

Having said that, I must add that the Quinta itself is looking pretty good. The many trees & shrubs have grown to a respectable size, offering a lot more shade & private nooks than we’ve had. The rockery beds are rejoicing in the showers; the aloes have thrown up glorious red flowers; there are clusters of red & pink & white roses & little celebrations of colour dotted everywhere. Not that it’s a disciplined garden; there are also great ranks of grasses & daisies & all the vegetation that the Algarve throws in for free. But the general sense remains of a Eden, a very nice place to be. Maria came up to say hello. I found my Portuguese vocabulary much shrunk since my last visit & rued my lack of words. I haven’t been doing any homework during my months in London.

Andries met us on our return from Sherri to say that there’d been a lightning strike & the electricity was down in the smaller cottage (where Lo is staying) & apartments. Lightning strikes have been very bad news indeed in the past. But this one – glory be – had merely tripped the mains which I promptly untripped with a muttered hallelujah.

Tuesday:
We met Maria at the bottom of the drive at 9.30 sharp & set out down the motorway to Makro. It’s a useful place for laying in wholesale supplies but indulges in the wretched practice of celebrating special occasions by importing 2 disc-jockeys who scream at each other over a tannoy while offering customers “free” gifts. My pleas to the management to reduce the racket fell on deaf ears. Having plundered the store, we made a grateful exit with our loot. This filled the boot & what remained of the interior to the brim. In fact, Jones had the ends of two drying racks resting on her head for the return journey.

Wednesday:
Piet arrived to begin tackling the long list of tasks I’d drawn up for him. While I painted the interior of the carport, he set about patching the drive. It’s ten years old & beginning to show its age. Mid morning, Lo’s youngest daughter, Afra, pitched up with her partner, Richard, to spend a few days in Casa 2. They’d hoped to bask in the sunshine but the day was cool with more promise of rain than sun. I hoped with them that the weather would improve but I don’t think I sounded very convincing. Back at the carport, I found that the drawback of painting the underside of a roof is that the paint drips in your hair & runs down your hand, no mater how frugally you apply it. After several hours, the carport looked much improved while I started to resemble the Green Gome. In fact, my fingers are still tinged with green as I type.

After lunch, Piet joined me to build a new path from Jones’s cottage to the drive. We are thinking of patenting our drive building method which is very quick & easy. You roll out an underlay of plastic to discourage weeds, wack down a couple of barrows of river sand & level it off & then you plant cement squares on the sand. Finally you make a border of stones to prettify the path & prevent all the sand from running out. Path done! In this instance, we made an extended border from the old tiles which had once adorned the cottages & it looked very good indeed. Jones was pleased. So was I.
Late p.m. we went for a walk through the hills, stopping at Casa de Pasto for a restorative. The grasses were started to break through the earth, no doubt much to the relief of the shepherdess whose charges had been having a hard time of it.

Thursday:
Piet tackled the pool where 2 of the coping stones had come adrift & a section of the patio had lifted off the cement base. I blessed him while he patiently chipped the old concrete away & resecured the stones; it was finicky, time-consuming work. To enjoy the assistance of such a willing & able worker is a blessing indeed. The number of things that need fixing at an establishment like ours simply boggles the imagination. I stopped varnishing at 1800 when our guests came around for a chat & drinks. Afterwards, we went down to the Orange Grove with Andre for a chicken supper. We’d no sooner arrived than the heavens opened, sending down streams of water that bounced back a foot into the air. I thought of the dry months ahead & breathed another thank you to the rain god. We must have had a good inch, to judge by the level in the wheel barrows on our return. You simply can’t take water for granted in the Algarve. It’s a precious resource, all the more so because most of the tourists take it for granted.

Friday
was a national holiday, April 25, when the Portuguese celebrate the 1974 revolution & it was also our off-day. It began with a brisk shower but that soon blew away to reveal a lovely morning. Barbara was expecting two French guests, a couple who had wintered with us previously. The gentleman is in his early seventies, his partner – a charming woman undergoing a long drawn-out & messy divorce – is much younger. We settled them in & drove down to Faro beach & parked ourselves in a favourite café where we paged through the pile of newspapers that Andre had donated. Outside, a motley collection of dogs had fun with just an occasional bottom sniff to establish who was who. Jones wanted to go to the loo but the café owner couldn’t find the key, a bit of a problem. Jones said “it” had gone away. But “it” was clearly going to come back again with a vengeance. So we decamped to a public loo down the road – & another café where we had more coffee & bagaco. We stopped to look at stone tables & benches for the patio below MCP. There was a set that took my fancy but Jones wanted time to think about it. She doesn’t like rushing decisions about these things.

Friday was also the day we decided to fetch the rock with the big fossil from the bank where it lay about a mile away. It was a prize that had first been spotted years ago by our geologist visitor, Ian, & one that had immediately captured Jones’s heart. The problem was how to retrieve the rock as it was far too heavy to carry & too big to manoeuvre into a motor car. So Jones & I set out down the track with a wheelbarrow, a length of rope & two poles to use as levers. Ten mins work saw the rock levered to the top of the bank & another ten mins had it in the wheelbarrow, all this to constant warnings from Jones against straining my back or worse.

It took us the best part of an hour to get it home, Jones pulling & I hefting the barrow, with frequent pauses to gather our breath & rest my arms. Getting the barrow up the drive was the real test of our endurance. We made it with only four stops, pausing breathless to explain to a descending Maria what we were about. Whatever Maria thought of her employers hauling rocks up their drive way in the middle of the afternoon she was too polite to say – although I’m sure she shared her thoughts with her family later. Our visitors greeted us with awe as we arrived in the garden. Lo immediately regretted that we hadn’t told her of our plans, saying she would have volunteered Richard who was “immensely strong”. I think it was probably as well for Richard that he was not aware of the many tasks for which Lo wanted to volunteer his services.

Afterwards, we cracked a bottle of Portuguese champers which we took with us on our walk through the fields, down past Herman the German’s house, past the ruins which are up for sale, & past the house where a Dutchman (named Portugies) committed suicide. There was a spectacular sunset underway against the backdrop of the hills which undulate in pastel folds into the distance. We brought the empty bottle back home for disposal in one of Loule’s bottle banks.

Saturday:
Faro airport. The plane’s an hour late getting in from London & an hour late getting out again. I’ve found a hole in the wall in which to plug in my computer & half bottle of Vinho Verde for solace. There’s a large & largely unfrequented self service area overlooking the arrivals hall which is just perfect for these occasions. I left our guests rejoicing in the sunshine & Jones in Loule where she goes to take coffee for consolation.