25August1995

London and Portugal: 25th August 1995
My dear folks,

You have to credit the authorities in Lisbon. They don't waste cash on traffic signs, at least not on signs that don't serve the interests of residents. The locals don't spend a lot of time trying to get from the airport in the north of the city to the only bridge over the Tagus in the south. But visitors do, a great deal of time. Mike & Rose Rushton spoke in July of the nightmare they'd had trying to negotiate the city & we came to understand why. I flew to Lisbon last Sat. because I couldn't get a flight to Faro. Jones had travelled up by bus to meet me.

We left the airport in our hire car & promptly started going round in circles. At each traffic light, we'd bawl at the nearest driver who would bawl back - generally that we were going in the wrong direction. U-turn followed U-turn. Praise be that Jones had taken a taxi from the city centre to the airport (after the late arrival of her bus) & she remembered the route. We eventually found the bridge, a vast structure, & our way on to it via a tangle of approach roads. Five lanes merged into one horrendous traffic jam full of hot, sticky & irritable people. Not the best start!

But it got better. It was two hours to the Alentejan Quinta where Jones had booked us in for the night. The house was perched on the lower slopes of Evoramonte, a high hilltop village whose stout castle towers over the countryside. We'd visited the castle during a previous visit & admired the Quinta from above. We both love the fine architecture of old Portugal (much of which is sadly in ruins). In this case, the owners had done a tremendous job of restoration. They turned out to be a man whose nationality baffled us, married to a Portuguese. He was a strange fellow who struggled to find words & was much given to delayed gestures. These generally arrived several seconds after the sentence they were intended to illustrate - very disconcerting! She, we discovered, suffered from cancer, although the disease was in remission. We sat & chatted to them & a teenage daughter, then picnicked on bread, cheese & taramasolata, washed down with cold sparkling wine (plonked in ice donated by the "fish" lady at a supermarket). Alentejan sunsets are just as splendid as those in the Algarve.

Sunday morning we braved the road south to the Algarve. Fortunately for us, most of the traffic was heading north. Portuguese drivers are an extraordinary breed. To begin with, they are very knowledgeable. To obtain their licences, they first have to pass a written exam on the complex Portuguese driving code. Maria's daughters are both studying hard to do so. They attend daily classes & judging from the hefty tome they're using, it's hard work. If they pass, they're entitled to begin the actual process of learner driving. This involves crawling around the local roads accompanied by a teacher whose right arm always dangles out of the window.

Eventually, after much effort & expense, the learner may obtain a licence. The following morning & forever after, he/she screams down the road, passing on blind corners & weaving in & out of the traffic. The accident rate is the highest in the EC. All you can say for them is that they don't kill people maliciously. There's no ill will. There's just an overwhelming impulse always to pass the car ahead. The slower the vehicle in front, the more determinedly it sticks to the middle of the road. So life on the roads is exciting & the ambulances do good business.

Still we arrived safely at lunchtime to find the Quinta basking in the summer sun. Our resident retired diplomat, Andries, was working on his tan in the end apartment; there were 2 young ladies next door. The middle cottage had just been vacated by our long-stay English guests & a BBC family (the Fishes) were installed in the large cottage. My first impression was of 3 year-old Lily Fish, absolutely stark-naked, chasing Noite up the Gorgeous Path of Righteousness. Lily was phenomenal in every respect. Like her slightly older brother, Tommy, she was eloquent beyond her years.

She was fascinated by Noite & only too happy to wander into MCP & shoot up the stairs to see if Noite had taken refuge in her basket. She saw no reason to wear clothes in the August weather. Tommy generally wore a costume. He had little gardening projects. Both were very active but good fun. Their parents were great. We began the visit by getting everybody down to the Magic Circle of stones under the fig tree outside MCP for glasses of sunset champers & then decamped to our favourite restaurant where we could eat outside & the kids could run around in the gardens.

One of my first tasks was to install the cat flap I had brought from London. I took the glass-paned aluminium door of MCP off its hinges & laid it flat. Then with the glass cutter I had also bought, I tried to cut out a circular section from one of the bottom panes. Of course, it's impossible. No matter how deeply you score the glass, when you come to tap out the circle, the glass shatters, especially when the circle takes up most of the pane - as it did. We wedged the door in the car & took it down to the glass shop in Loule. There the owner took one look at it & directed us to another shop a mile away that deals in perspex, the only thing, she insisted, for the job. We found the shop but it was closed. So we noted the phone number & retreated back up the hill. I don't mean to overwhelm you with detail, it's just symptomatic of life in Portugal.

Eventually I managed to reach the fellow who said he'd be in for an hour. Back down the hill I went, clutching the door. I found him & he did the job there & then. The only problem was that he was out of blades for his jigsaw. So he cut the hole in the perspex pane but turning the sheet manually on the top of an exposed circular saw, a lengthy, finger-threatening exercise. Still, it worked. Finally we installed the pane & cat flap. Back up the hill to introduce it to Noite.

Noite, I have to tell you is a Portuguese cat & they don't believe in cat flaps. She stared at it suspiciously & eventually crept close enough for some cautious sniffs. But that was it. She didn't need it in her life. Just leave the door open as usual, she indicated, & she'd manage fine. Back to the instructions. These advised us to pin the flap open for several days & entice the cat through with food. This scheme took some patience but it worked. Within a day or two, the sound of cat biscuits been emptied on to her plate had Noite hopping in & out as though she'd grown up with catflaps. Then we removed the pin holding the flap open & tried to get her to push her way through. No ways! All her previous suspicions were confirmed & she refused to go near it. I urged Jones not to go soft but to let hunger accomplish the task for us. But I suspect that Jones's heart will give way before Noite's resistance does.

My big task for the visit was to complete the repair of the collapsed 3-metre high terrace wall beneath the olive tree. Ever since we bought the property, the area has been an eye-sore, particularly galling as the olive tree is the biggest & shadiest on the property & an ideal spot for a bench. We began the repair last year by planting a fruit tree in a container at the base of the collapse & building layers of rocks around it.

This week, with Jones's help, I borrowed a few rocks from our neighbours' fields & wheeled them back in the barrow. (Jones's expression for this is "liberating" rocks). Then we began to build upwards, securing each row on the one below & cementing them in for good measure. Years of accumulated builders' rubble was buried or dragged away. Jones laid black plastic sheeting (to suppress weeds) on the upper area & I covered it in stones. (This paragraph embraces 2 days of hard labour.) The final result was deeply satisfying. We carried over a garden bench, settled in place beneath the tree & then sat down to celebrate out efforts with the dry sparkling wine (poor man's champers) we like so much. From the bench one looks down over Loule & the valley running down to the sea 10 miles away. It's a good place to sit & reflect, especially with a few glasses of bubbly.

All week, there's been a clattering in the area, a steady background rattle that proclaims the harvesting of the carobs. For the locals, this is an important source of revenue. Don't believe people who tell you money doesn't grow on trees. Around us, it does - figs, olives, almonds & carobs - the latter known in Portuguese as "alfarobas". The peasants arrive in family groups to collect the carobs, carrying 5-metre-long bamboo canes. These they thrust up into the branches of the "alfarobeiras" to thrash down the long black pods containing the valuable seeds. Prices are high this year - the Japanese have apparently discovered the benefits of carobs - & the trees were stripped being bare. We passed one crone (who must have been in her late seventies) perched on a branch over our heads. I urged her to be careful but she assured me that there was nothing to worry about. Carobs were carobs & not to be overlooked.

The fig trees on our property & all around us were also loaded with ripening fruit. Jones had plucked dozens of figs & laid them out (on a tray resting on a chair) in the sun to dry. To keep the ants off, she placed the feet of the chair in little basins of water. This worked fine except that the whole affair was precarious & came toppling down at least prompting. Jones hated to see the figs going waste. She urged our guests to eat their fill & did the same herself. On our walks she could never pass a fig tree without plucking a couple of figs from it. They were delicious & it was a sin to let them rot. But we have more fig trees & figs than we know what to do with, certainly more than an army of visitors could eat. Most will inevitably return to the soil.

The Thursday before my return we decided to take off - mainly anyhow. We walked through the dry, brown fields & then down the back roads that wind towards the hamlet of Paixanito. New white houses are dotted about the countryside. You have to look more carefully for the shapes of the roofless stone cottages that hide under trees & blend in so naturally with the habitat. Their occupants are gone, their neat stone walls slowly coming apart. The people who once worked the fields now live off the tourist industry along the coast or in the apartments mushrooming around the fringes of towns. But the fields bear witness to the centuries of agriculture that once supported the Algarvians. A network of stone walls, also disintegrating, still separates each patch.

We lunched at Maria's restaurant on freshly grilled sardines. Utterly delicious! Then we took the short route home & drove down to the beach at Quarteira. For as far as the eye could see, it was dotted with people & brollies. We strolled along the water's edge towards the distant red cliffs marking the start of the expensive developments. Around Quarteira, most of the beach-goers were Portuguese whose enviable Mediterranean skins were burned a rusty brown. Small children played naked in the sand.

Most of the adults wore costumes but an assortment of boobs could be discerned among the crowds & among the dunes further along the beach, were the unmistakable shapes of naked men. Jet skis whirred along the shore & little aeroplanes flew overhead pulling ribbons advertising local attractions. Joggers puffed along the beach, both the athletic types displaying their trim physiques & the pot-bellied visitors trying to undo a lifestyle in an afternoon. It was all very relaxed & entertaining.

We wanted to braai that evening. To Jones's disappointment, the well-known local butcher was out of her favourite sausages. I persuaded her to brave the local hypermarket (always seething with customers) while I filled the car with petrol. Afterwards I waited in the car park. Maria's daughters, fresh from their driving classes, joined me. The hypermarket was handing out free cake to celebrate its second birthday & they'd come for their share. We chatted.

Thirty minutes later, I went in to find Jones. She'd got the sausages but been caught (in the express queue) behind two problematic customers & was spitting with fury. We calmed her down. It was Portugal, after all, where shopping remains essentially a social exercise. Normally she wouldn't mind, she explained. It was knowing that I was waiting that made it so exasperating. The waiting was worth it. The sausages were excellent. We braaied them under the fig tree outside MCP & then sat on our bench under the stars for a while.

An item arrived for Andries on my last day via the DHL delivery company. Jones recalled that a similar delivery had been made earlier by the uniformed staff of a similar outfit who, with their shoulder tabs and badges, looked very official indeed. The Boys, who were completing MCP, spotted the arrival & promptly made themselves scarce, fearing that the Inland Revenue or worse had finally caught up with them.

We had arranged with Andries to lunch at a tiny restaurant in the town of Salir, some 20 mins. away. The restaurant is situated among perfect little houses on the ramparts of what used to be a castle. It is family-run & patronised by the locals & knowing visitors. Andries took us there in his smart new Rover convertible. What style! We had to park & walk the last 100 yards along narrow cobbled roads. The place was nearly empty, for once. Andries had sausages, Jones & I settled for turkey steaks - &, of course, icy-cold vinho verde. It was a lovely way to end the trip, especially as someone else was doing the post-prandial driving.

My packed bags awaited me back at MCP. Jones accompanied me to the airport for the final coffees & bagaceiras. I phoned her from London to say all was well. She had walked back 2 miles to the main road, caught a bus to Loule, & then walked back up the hill to Cruz da Assumada. No wonder she's fit. Would I could say the same. At least, she has put on a little weight & I've given her every encouragement to put on some more.

This afternoon I cycled into town & spent an hour touring the computer shops on Tottenham Court Road for the cheapest (final release) version of Windows 95. Typical prices were around £85 & I was pleased to get a copy for £69. It's installed already. As I arrived back home, a big, black Mercedes with gold-chain-clad black driver & deafening sound system was cruising the street. The Notting Hill Carnival is about to kick off, my least favourite time of the year. My prayers for thunderous storms have gone unanswered. I'm grateful to be working the next few days/nights. London is a little cooler with faint the prospect of some badly needed rain. Thank you for your letters & faxes. Three of "my tenants" (who share a flat) haven't been paying the rent & I must start chasing them. Who needs it?