Saturday, 25 April 1998: Another lovely day
My dear folks,
There's a different feel about the Witbank Benson household on a Saturday morning. Bren still gets up fairly early as he goes to fetch one of his company employees who spends the day in the garden. Micaela will sleep in if she gets the chance, something for which - like music & horse-riding - she has a gift. Other guests do so at their own risk for Brendan loves nothing more than to fling open their doors & order the dogs to wake them up. The dogs need little encouragement. They bound into the room & leap upon the bed where Rose (the Rotweiler) cavorts while Lily (the Dalmatian) does some face licking & ear nibbling. Since they're both heavyweights, it's not an experience easily to be forgotten. The dogs love the weekends too for it's their only real chance to spend any time with their humans.
There are two modes of dog behaviour, one when Bren's at home; the other when he's away. Both dogs acknowledge him as the undisputed master of the house. They know exactly which tone of voice spells trouble & how much. Both have mastered to the millisecond how long they have to spend lying down - at his instruction - before they can safely move again. He doesn't allow his dogs to beg at the table or relax on the furniture. Micaela tolerates a more lenient regime, one that Lily especially prefers. It means that she can lie on the sofa with her head resting on the armrest while she watches proceedings. The sound of a car in the driveway has her leaping across the room where she balances on the armrest & back of the opposite sofa in order to peer through the curtains. She's so bright, it's scary. Unlike Rose, Lily has been known to steal from time to time. A tray of pies disappeared one day & there was little doubt about the thief, especially as Lily gets conscience-stricken & the family immediately know what she's been up to. It's just a matter of establishing what's missing.
Bren still goes across to the office of his company, FGM, on a Saturday to let in a book-keeper. Until recently, he had a secretary who did the books but she departed under a cloud. He was pleased to see the back of her as relations had become frayed but less pleased to go through the books afterwards & discover why she'd resigned. Brendan's language at the office is frequently colourful but on this occasion it hit the deep purple register. I was with him at the time, so I know. In fact, I've spent two mornings helping him to sort out his end-of-month accounts. This is a fractious business as the phone interrupts his labours almost as much as people do - & it's hard to concentrate. What's more, finding the appropriate files & invoices is frequently time-consuming. My heart went out to his unfortunate assistant - the young & immensely willing Deric - who bore the brunt of Brendan's frustration.
FGM, I ought to say, occupies some two acres on a site which backs on to the motorway. Affixed to the high, electrically controlled gate are various signs discouraging callers. One reads: "No pedlars, agents, salesmen or other such pests." There is no bell at the gate. When I asked Brendan how visitors announced their arrival, he said they hooted. (I'd had to climb over the wall after arriving on my bicycle one day & failing to attract attention!) There are two air-conditioned porta-cabins on the property. Brendan has his offices in one which he shares with a foreman. In the other live the accounts, the files & the long-suffering Deric. The secretary's departure has meant there's a vacant desk there. Behind this desk is a mini-kitchen with a few cupboards, sink, fridge & dish-washer. Outside, beyond the dying flowers & the array of cigarette butts that Brendan hurls through the open door, is a washroom. There are half a dozen sheds & garages fringing the property - filled with plant machinery. At a central open workshop, labourers are busy painting, cutting & welding hundreds of metal bars for the stone-dust barriers & stoppings required underground.
Covered parking is provided for half a dozen vehicles. Most of the time, it's occupied by assorted bakkies. The alarm company that Brendan employs has installed various beams that are triggered by anyone entering the property. Until they did so, break-ins were frequent, in spite of the huge (& terrifying) rotweiler that used to guard it. Attempted break-ins have continued but have all been frustrated by the prompt arrival of security guards. The company, Winning Alarms, is really good. Bren had no sooner arrived at FGM last weekend than the company rang to check on his right to be there. A couple of check-calls followed during the day. Similarly, when his home alarm has gone off accidentally - last time when Lily's wagging tail whacked a sensitive window - there's just been time to make it to the phone for the inevitable check call. Security is big business & little wonder. The pages of the newspapers are filled with an endless round of brutal murders & robberies. FGM's uncompromising view on this is announced from the notice-board in one of the porta-cabins: "If you steal something from FGM, we hope you die."
I have cycled across to FGM each day from Plumer Street where Brendan's house is situated in one of the older parts of town. It's a comfortable 30 minute ride through the suburbs. The first day took me 90 mins but that was my own fault. The streets are wide & free of the vehicles that line both sides of the road in London. Cycling here is a joy by comparison, especially in the sunshine we've basked in all week. There's a footbridge over the freeway that enables cyclists to avoid the worst of the main roads. School pupils & the occasional black were my only fellow cyclists. Few whites walk anywhere. Car travel is the norm. The nearby down-town area is very black. Parking is limited & the fear of crime is highest there. So most white shoppers head for the several big shopping centres that dot the suburbs. These all have guards, some well armed. Security elsewhere is lighter.
Down at the Nelspruit shopping centre where Bren has his restaurant, it is negligible & a source of constant concern to restaurant staff - as incidents are frequent. The restaurant managers go armed, in spite of protests of the centre manager, a woman, with whom Brendan has had a couple of heated exchanges. He is livid about the lack of security & is not a person to hide his feelings. He's told the manager that if Conal is attacked as a result of security failings, he - Brendan - is coming after her. I suspect that she will be as relieved at the Bensons' departure from Nelspruit as they will be themselves.
During my cycle expeditions here in Witbank, I have been fascinated by the acres of sports grounds to be found all over the town with hardly a soul on them. The luxury of space just isn't appreciated. The churches, dotted about the suburbs, are big business. This gets Brendan's goat as a syndicate which milked FGM of large sums of money was made up of some of the area's more prominent church goers & elders.
Brendan had hoped to take Micaela horse riding on Friday p.m. but found himself tied up so I went in his place. It's an hour up the motorway to the outskirts of Pretoria where Micaela stables her mare - which is just old enough to be ridden - & takes lessons from a leading teacher. I watched Micaela riding for the best part of an hour. She's a splendid horsewoman & made the exercise look effortless - at least until the horse she was riding suddenly refused to take a jump & threw her rider. Micaela landed on her face on the wooden beams of the jump, suffering grazes & bruises. I thought she was a hospital case but, after recovering from the fall, she resumed the lesson & jumped the horse over the same jump half a dozen times.
Last night, I took her, a friend of hers & Bren to dinner at the best restaurant in town - our thanks to Mum; it was a fitting way to wind up the week. Bren has shot up to Johannesburg today. Sunday we go down to Nelspruit before I fly back to London in the evening.
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
21April1998
Tuesday, 21 April 1998
My dear folks,
The British would kill for the sunny days that roll out effortlessly and endlessly here in Witbank; blue skies, green lawns & peaceful suburbs filled with bird-song & flowers. If all you wanted from a holiday was a chance to relax in the sunshine, Witbank would do very nicely. Ditto if you wanted a look at a typical working South African town. The suburbs remain overwhelmingly white - high fences, alarms & fierce dogs offering some protection against the high levels of crime. But most of these things you know so I’ll leave them alone.
The Benson residence at 59 Plumer Street is a typical old Witbank property. During the day its sole inhabitants are Lily the Dalmatian and Rosie the Rotweiler, except for the three mornings when Evangelina comes to clean. Lily and Rosie are an integral part of the household & worthy of some attention. Lily has green crocodile eyes & is about as astute as they come; she reads her humans like a book & knows exactly how far she can go. She is full of tricks & can be utterly charming or lapse into sulks. She has become a little stout since "her operation". Rosie is a softie whose muscular torso & blood-curdling howls hide a pacifist heart - not that passers by would get any inkling of this. She hates the threat of domestic violence & growls in dismay if Brendan raises an arm. She soaks up all the attention she can get. Unlike Lily, she is not a clever dog, but she is bright enough to know that Lily is the star performer & she gets very jealous. Both dogs sleep in the scullery except on rare occasions when they can be found on Micaela's bed.
Micaela attends the convent, just around the corner, where the majority of pupils are black. (White pupils almost became extinct but have recently been returning there in small numbers.) Micaela is not a morning person; during the week she rises reluctantly at 6.45 for the start of classes at 7.30. Sometimes, she walks the 100 yards to school with friends; at other times, Brendan drops her. He will not allow her to walk alone. She is fetched from school by a young woman teacher who (is currently raising a family &) oversees Micaela's homework & coaches her. Bren picks his daughter up from the woman's house in the evenings. The arrangement seems to work well. Micaela is going on 17; she is in the 11th grade & hopefully will finish school next year. She is an accomplished horse woman & has a flair for music but she is not academically inclined. Her hope is to do something with horses.
Conal is down in Nelspruit where he & another manager take it in turns to run Brendan's restaurant. We drove down on Sat. Brendan curses the day he ever went into the restaurant business & so does Conal, who hates the work & being far from home. He was sent down there to try to stem the losses arising from continuing corruption & fraud. Brendan, having fired the crooked partner who cost him a fortune, found that he was still being robbed blind by all concerned. The restaurant has been on the market for some time & Brendan is now negotiating with a potential buyer for a knock-down sale. He will be deeply relieved to get the place off his hands. He makes the five hour round trip to Nelspruit at least once a week. As his sole transport is now a bakkie, it is not a comfortable trip & there is seldom good news waiting for him when he arrives. God willing, Benson's restaurant will soon be history.
For the other six days of the week, for at least 11 hours a day, he has been struggling to keep his Witbank business afloat. It has been an exhausting, debilitating process. The problems have arisen as a result of widespread fraud & a downturn in the economy; sadly, his generally useless legal partners give him no backing to speak of. The problems have been exacerbated by the tedious bureaucracy that now hedges labour relations. No doubt that it protects employees interests; it also means that disgruntled employees can tie him up in hours of protracted hearings with labour officials - and they do. It drives him mad.
He came across mounting evidence of a syndicate to defraud him & eventually caught the main perpetrator red-handed. He reckons he was taken for hundreds of thousands of rands. The same is true for the restaurant. To stay afloat, he has mortgaged his house to the hilt, knowing that the collapse of the business would cost him his home as well. It has been a deeply worrying time. He has no friends to speak of, no social life, no holidays and no days off work. His entire efforts have been concentrated on trying to survive. A severe blow came some weeks ago when the coal mines - around which all his work is concentrated - indefinitely postponed a major project of his without warning.
The hardest part is that he has had no-one to turn to. His legal partners, with problems of their own, have been of little assistance. "I was trained as quantity surveyor and builder," Brendan pointed out, saying that these skills did not equip him for the legal, bureaucratic & economic minefield he walked. "I wish Kevin had been here," he said, speaking of Kevin's experience in these things, "he would have known what to do."
A month ago, he was close to despair. I am very pleased to say that things are looking up. First & foremost, he is hopeful of getting rid of the Nelspruit albatross shortly & of getting Conal back up to Witbank. He has also recently had welcome contracts for both underground and surface work. The latter entails the maintenance of hundreds of mine-owned houses. It is straightforward & pays it way but makes little profit. Underground is where his hopes lie.
His underground teams are involved in two specific tasks of which I knew nothing until a few days ago. In both of them, Brendan has been at the forefront of new technology & he has a patent pending. Several other mines have expressed interest & asked him to demonstrate the process which involves "stoppings", a means of blocking off passages for ventilation purposes. The other task involves "stone-dust barriers". These are bags of a fine, inert chalky dust which are hung in their scores in the tunnels behind the coal face. In the event of an explosion, they burst and the dust stops the flame which otherwise threatens to race through the entire mine. Because the coal cutting machines throw up a firework display of sparks from the rock interspersed with the coal seams & can hit a pocket of methane at any moment, fire prevention is a major exercise. Brendan waits day by day for a particular contract that would see him right out of the woods. He also has great hopes that his patent will be lucrative although the patent will not come through until next year.
As I indicated, he makes an early start. That meant that I found myself at home this week with no means of transport. Witbank does not run to public transport & distances are impratically large for walking. Nor is the visitor encouraged to walk. So I went out & bought a bicycle. If that sounds a bit extreme for a brief visit, it's not. I managed to acquire bike, pump, helmet, lock & gloves for less than the equivalent of £100. The bike easily gets me to the several shopping centres - or nearby downtown - as well as to Brendan's porta-office, situated on a site on the other side of town. Micaela has asked to inherit it & I have said that she is welcome to use it, at least until my next visit.
My arrival did provoke a small crisis. Brendan spent much of Sunday searching for the bank cards which I left with him & which give me access to my account & Mum's. He hunted through the numerous files which littered a desk, taking the opportunity to open dozens of statements which had lain untouched for months - some for years. Over a period of several hours, he went through every single file in vain. We then hunted around the house before Bren remembered another box housing Dad's old files - & there the cards were. At least, he got up to date with his mail. I have since brought him a simple hanging file system & installed his files in it. He is pleased & grateful.
My dear folks,
The British would kill for the sunny days that roll out effortlessly and endlessly here in Witbank; blue skies, green lawns & peaceful suburbs filled with bird-song & flowers. If all you wanted from a holiday was a chance to relax in the sunshine, Witbank would do very nicely. Ditto if you wanted a look at a typical working South African town. The suburbs remain overwhelmingly white - high fences, alarms & fierce dogs offering some protection against the high levels of crime. But most of these things you know so I’ll leave them alone.
The Benson residence at 59 Plumer Street is a typical old Witbank property. During the day its sole inhabitants are Lily the Dalmatian and Rosie the Rotweiler, except for the three mornings when Evangelina comes to clean. Lily and Rosie are an integral part of the household & worthy of some attention. Lily has green crocodile eyes & is about as astute as they come; she reads her humans like a book & knows exactly how far she can go. She is full of tricks & can be utterly charming or lapse into sulks. She has become a little stout since "her operation". Rosie is a softie whose muscular torso & blood-curdling howls hide a pacifist heart - not that passers by would get any inkling of this. She hates the threat of domestic violence & growls in dismay if Brendan raises an arm. She soaks up all the attention she can get. Unlike Lily, she is not a clever dog, but she is bright enough to know that Lily is the star performer & she gets very jealous. Both dogs sleep in the scullery except on rare occasions when they can be found on Micaela's bed.
Micaela attends the convent, just around the corner, where the majority of pupils are black. (White pupils almost became extinct but have recently been returning there in small numbers.) Micaela is not a morning person; during the week she rises reluctantly at 6.45 for the start of classes at 7.30. Sometimes, she walks the 100 yards to school with friends; at other times, Brendan drops her. He will not allow her to walk alone. She is fetched from school by a young woman teacher who (is currently raising a family &) oversees Micaela's homework & coaches her. Bren picks his daughter up from the woman's house in the evenings. The arrangement seems to work well. Micaela is going on 17; she is in the 11th grade & hopefully will finish school next year. She is an accomplished horse woman & has a flair for music but she is not academically inclined. Her hope is to do something with horses.
Conal is down in Nelspruit where he & another manager take it in turns to run Brendan's restaurant. We drove down on Sat. Brendan curses the day he ever went into the restaurant business & so does Conal, who hates the work & being far from home. He was sent down there to try to stem the losses arising from continuing corruption & fraud. Brendan, having fired the crooked partner who cost him a fortune, found that he was still being robbed blind by all concerned. The restaurant has been on the market for some time & Brendan is now negotiating with a potential buyer for a knock-down sale. He will be deeply relieved to get the place off his hands. He makes the five hour round trip to Nelspruit at least once a week. As his sole transport is now a bakkie, it is not a comfortable trip & there is seldom good news waiting for him when he arrives. God willing, Benson's restaurant will soon be history.
For the other six days of the week, for at least 11 hours a day, he has been struggling to keep his Witbank business afloat. It has been an exhausting, debilitating process. The problems have arisen as a result of widespread fraud & a downturn in the economy; sadly, his generally useless legal partners give him no backing to speak of. The problems have been exacerbated by the tedious bureaucracy that now hedges labour relations. No doubt that it protects employees interests; it also means that disgruntled employees can tie him up in hours of protracted hearings with labour officials - and they do. It drives him mad.
He came across mounting evidence of a syndicate to defraud him & eventually caught the main perpetrator red-handed. He reckons he was taken for hundreds of thousands of rands. The same is true for the restaurant. To stay afloat, he has mortgaged his house to the hilt, knowing that the collapse of the business would cost him his home as well. It has been a deeply worrying time. He has no friends to speak of, no social life, no holidays and no days off work. His entire efforts have been concentrated on trying to survive. A severe blow came some weeks ago when the coal mines - around which all his work is concentrated - indefinitely postponed a major project of his without warning.
The hardest part is that he has had no-one to turn to. His legal partners, with problems of their own, have been of little assistance. "I was trained as quantity surveyor and builder," Brendan pointed out, saying that these skills did not equip him for the legal, bureaucratic & economic minefield he walked. "I wish Kevin had been here," he said, speaking of Kevin's experience in these things, "he would have known what to do."
A month ago, he was close to despair. I am very pleased to say that things are looking up. First & foremost, he is hopeful of getting rid of the Nelspruit albatross shortly & of getting Conal back up to Witbank. He has also recently had welcome contracts for both underground and surface work. The latter entails the maintenance of hundreds of mine-owned houses. It is straightforward & pays it way but makes little profit. Underground is where his hopes lie.
His underground teams are involved in two specific tasks of which I knew nothing until a few days ago. In both of them, Brendan has been at the forefront of new technology & he has a patent pending. Several other mines have expressed interest & asked him to demonstrate the process which involves "stoppings", a means of blocking off passages for ventilation purposes. The other task involves "stone-dust barriers". These are bags of a fine, inert chalky dust which are hung in their scores in the tunnels behind the coal face. In the event of an explosion, they burst and the dust stops the flame which otherwise threatens to race through the entire mine. Because the coal cutting machines throw up a firework display of sparks from the rock interspersed with the coal seams & can hit a pocket of methane at any moment, fire prevention is a major exercise. Brendan waits day by day for a particular contract that would see him right out of the woods. He also has great hopes that his patent will be lucrative although the patent will not come through until next year.
As I indicated, he makes an early start. That meant that I found myself at home this week with no means of transport. Witbank does not run to public transport & distances are impratically large for walking. Nor is the visitor encouraged to walk. So I went out & bought a bicycle. If that sounds a bit extreme for a brief visit, it's not. I managed to acquire bike, pump, helmet, lock & gloves for less than the equivalent of £100. The bike easily gets me to the several shopping centres - or nearby downtown - as well as to Brendan's porta-office, situated on a site on the other side of town. Micaela has asked to inherit it & I have said that she is welcome to use it, at least until my next visit.
My arrival did provoke a small crisis. Brendan spent much of Sunday searching for the bank cards which I left with him & which give me access to my account & Mum's. He hunted through the numerous files which littered a desk, taking the opportunity to open dozens of statements which had lain untouched for months - some for years. Over a period of several hours, he went through every single file in vain. We then hunted around the house before Bren remembered another box housing Dad's old files - & there the cards were. At least, he got up to date with his mail. I have since brought him a simple hanging file system & installed his files in it. He is pleased & grateful.
17April1998
Kinshasa: 1330: Friday 17 April 1998
My dear folks,
It’s not every day that I begin a letter with a Kinshasa dateline - although I suppose that when it comes from a plane at the airport it could be described as a bit of a con. Still, I had great dawn views of the Zaire river as we approached the strip of concrete glued to the African veld - no fences here - & of the pondok fringes of the city. So, Kinshasa it definitely is. The captain put the plane down gently enough to win a round of applause & many of the passengers got off. I have had the rare luxury of an empty seat beside me from the start; I now have the privilege of an empty row.
Thursday was quite exciting, as days go for us retired folk. It began with Samson’s exuberant escape when I went to take him for his pee & pooh run first thing in the morning & then had to chase him across the Portuguese countryside. He ignored my breathless threats & pleas as he completed a blissful tour of his old pursuits. I wasn’t pleased by the time I eventually caught up with him; nor was he, the blighter.
Then came the obviously spectacular suicide of the chap who threw himself in front of the train shortly after it left Loule for Lisbon on Thursday afternoon. I confess that I saw nothing of it, concluding that the crunching beneath the wheels came from branches that had fallen on the track. But the train screeched to a halt & a passenger who clambered down to investigate came back with a first hand account from the shocked train driver. It was all of an hour before the emergency services had finished picking up the pieces & we got on our way again.
The ferry trip in a miniature storm across the Tagus estuary from Barreiro station to central Lisbon & the bus trip to the airport in the evening rush-hour were interesting as these things go, but not really exciting. However, negotiating the obstacle course between the airport bus stop & the terminal was as challenging as anything faced by Stanley. Lisbon airport, like much of the city, is a tip as the authorities frantically try to ready the place for Expo 98 in the summer. It was pouring & the area was a mud bath. The road I tried to take in the gloom suddenly turned itself into a building site. I made my way through deserted car parks & under the skeleton of a raised approach road until with some relief I spotted a route to the terminal building.
I called Jones from the airport. She had accompanied me to the station (courtesy of Mario, our taxi driver) & afterwards tried to take a back route home from the station, which is a couple of kms south of Loule itself. She was forced to backtrack as a river intervened to block her way. Her long walk did not prevent her taking Samson on his usual evening outing. The children of our American guests accompanied her & counted 21 canine pee stops. I had explained to them that dogs use urine as visiting cards & would be shocked at the thought of wasting it all on one spot. Even so, Samson excelled himself in demonstrating the point. He’s pretty good in the other department too & Jones has visions of her garden disappearing under a vast mound of dog droppings if he roams free.
After one day of purest Easter sunshine, the Algarve returned to the sun & showers formula that has so vexed our visitors & frustrated my efforts to get the place painted. One moment the horizon would be black as thunder & down would come the rain; next moment we’d be bathing in bright sunshine. In spite of this, the painting progressed. I got a 2nd 20-litre can of white emulsion from the suppliers & managed to bring an extendible 3-metre ladder home on the roof of the Rocket to reach the upper levels of the Casas.
On Monday we drove into Faro where I had been advised to talk to the Automobile Club of Portugal about matriculating the Rocket down there. Portugal still has a formidable jungle of bureaucracy to be negotiated by anyone moving themselves or their stuff to the country. The ACP were very helpful. However, it appeared that to register the car, we’d have to apply for residence permits ourselves. I got in touch with a small agency that we’ve used before who were equally helpful & who agreed to set the process in motion. In effect however, nothing is to happen until my return to Portugal, probably some time in June.
During a walk along our “fossil path” that evening we came across an old guy who was building a stone wall along the boundaries of his property. The wall was a work of art & I stopped to admire it & ask him if he’d be interested in building one for us. He said that he’d retired from the business but knew of a “padreiro” who might be able to help us. When I asked about obtaining stone, he offered us the rocks that littered the edge of his field. I was pleased to accept. But his field is remote from the road & by the time I came to leave for RSA we still hadn’t worked out a way of getting the rocks - some of them huge - on to the road & up to the Quinta; nor where to put them. So the project has been shelved for the moment.
Two projects that are to go ahead are the installation of an awning above the upper bedroom window in Casa 4, to stop the rain pouring through; & fixing of the Casa 4 shutters. The carpenter who made these (out of tongue & groove-joined) mahogany planks omitted to use a transverse strip to secure them. So the shutters have all slipped & none of them closes properly. A local firm is to attend to both projects. It would have been cheaper to find a carpenter to fix the shutters but the price-saving is inevitably set off by the hassle. Carpenters are happy to quote you date & price but tend not to appear if they have other priorities - as they generally do.
On Tuesday evening, when we’d arranged to hold a braai for our guests, the rain poured down & we retreated to Casa 3 which has a semi-protected barbecue. After the cooking was done we were glad to shovel the coals into the fireplace in the lounge. On Wednesday evening, we dined at the local where we’d been invited by the owners to be their guests - by way of thanks to the Quintassential’s contribution to their living. The British expats from the valley were congregated there in large numbers - it’s a favourite drinking hole. One of the questions we have to resolve in the months ahead is how to continue enjoying the company of neighbours without being drawn into the confined circle of social life that prevails.
Witbank: Sunday 19 April.
My battery ran out long before we took off again from Kinshasa where a refuelling problem led to a 3-hour delay. It was late afternoon before we landed at Johannesburg where a patient employee of Bren’s was waiting to meet me. Of Bren, Conal, Micaela, Lily & Rose, more in the next letter.
Blessings,
T
My dear folks,
It’s not every day that I begin a letter with a Kinshasa dateline - although I suppose that when it comes from a plane at the airport it could be described as a bit of a con. Still, I had great dawn views of the Zaire river as we approached the strip of concrete glued to the African veld - no fences here - & of the pondok fringes of the city. So, Kinshasa it definitely is. The captain put the plane down gently enough to win a round of applause & many of the passengers got off. I have had the rare luxury of an empty seat beside me from the start; I now have the privilege of an empty row.
Thursday was quite exciting, as days go for us retired folk. It began with Samson’s exuberant escape when I went to take him for his pee & pooh run first thing in the morning & then had to chase him across the Portuguese countryside. He ignored my breathless threats & pleas as he completed a blissful tour of his old pursuits. I wasn’t pleased by the time I eventually caught up with him; nor was he, the blighter.
Then came the obviously spectacular suicide of the chap who threw himself in front of the train shortly after it left Loule for Lisbon on Thursday afternoon. I confess that I saw nothing of it, concluding that the crunching beneath the wheels came from branches that had fallen on the track. But the train screeched to a halt & a passenger who clambered down to investigate came back with a first hand account from the shocked train driver. It was all of an hour before the emergency services had finished picking up the pieces & we got on our way again.
The ferry trip in a miniature storm across the Tagus estuary from Barreiro station to central Lisbon & the bus trip to the airport in the evening rush-hour were interesting as these things go, but not really exciting. However, negotiating the obstacle course between the airport bus stop & the terminal was as challenging as anything faced by Stanley. Lisbon airport, like much of the city, is a tip as the authorities frantically try to ready the place for Expo 98 in the summer. It was pouring & the area was a mud bath. The road I tried to take in the gloom suddenly turned itself into a building site. I made my way through deserted car parks & under the skeleton of a raised approach road until with some relief I spotted a route to the terminal building.
I called Jones from the airport. She had accompanied me to the station (courtesy of Mario, our taxi driver) & afterwards tried to take a back route home from the station, which is a couple of kms south of Loule itself. She was forced to backtrack as a river intervened to block her way. Her long walk did not prevent her taking Samson on his usual evening outing. The children of our American guests accompanied her & counted 21 canine pee stops. I had explained to them that dogs use urine as visiting cards & would be shocked at the thought of wasting it all on one spot. Even so, Samson excelled himself in demonstrating the point. He’s pretty good in the other department too & Jones has visions of her garden disappearing under a vast mound of dog droppings if he roams free.
After one day of purest Easter sunshine, the Algarve returned to the sun & showers formula that has so vexed our visitors & frustrated my efforts to get the place painted. One moment the horizon would be black as thunder & down would come the rain; next moment we’d be bathing in bright sunshine. In spite of this, the painting progressed. I got a 2nd 20-litre can of white emulsion from the suppliers & managed to bring an extendible 3-metre ladder home on the roof of the Rocket to reach the upper levels of the Casas.
On Monday we drove into Faro where I had been advised to talk to the Automobile Club of Portugal about matriculating the Rocket down there. Portugal still has a formidable jungle of bureaucracy to be negotiated by anyone moving themselves or their stuff to the country. The ACP were very helpful. However, it appeared that to register the car, we’d have to apply for residence permits ourselves. I got in touch with a small agency that we’ve used before who were equally helpful & who agreed to set the process in motion. In effect however, nothing is to happen until my return to Portugal, probably some time in June.
During a walk along our “fossil path” that evening we came across an old guy who was building a stone wall along the boundaries of his property. The wall was a work of art & I stopped to admire it & ask him if he’d be interested in building one for us. He said that he’d retired from the business but knew of a “padreiro” who might be able to help us. When I asked about obtaining stone, he offered us the rocks that littered the edge of his field. I was pleased to accept. But his field is remote from the road & by the time I came to leave for RSA we still hadn’t worked out a way of getting the rocks - some of them huge - on to the road & up to the Quinta; nor where to put them. So the project has been shelved for the moment.
Two projects that are to go ahead are the installation of an awning above the upper bedroom window in Casa 4, to stop the rain pouring through; & fixing of the Casa 4 shutters. The carpenter who made these (out of tongue & groove-joined) mahogany planks omitted to use a transverse strip to secure them. So the shutters have all slipped & none of them closes properly. A local firm is to attend to both projects. It would have been cheaper to find a carpenter to fix the shutters but the price-saving is inevitably set off by the hassle. Carpenters are happy to quote you date & price but tend not to appear if they have other priorities - as they generally do.
On Tuesday evening, when we’d arranged to hold a braai for our guests, the rain poured down & we retreated to Casa 3 which has a semi-protected barbecue. After the cooking was done we were glad to shovel the coals into the fireplace in the lounge. On Wednesday evening, we dined at the local where we’d been invited by the owners to be their guests - by way of thanks to the Quintassential’s contribution to their living. The British expats from the valley were congregated there in large numbers - it’s a favourite drinking hole. One of the questions we have to resolve in the months ahead is how to continue enjoying the company of neighbours without being drawn into the confined circle of social life that prevails.
Witbank: Sunday 19 April.
My battery ran out long before we took off again from Kinshasa where a refuelling problem led to a 3-hour delay. It was late afternoon before we landed at Johannesburg where a patient employee of Bren’s was waiting to meet me. Of Bren, Conal, Micaela, Lily & Rose, more in the next letter.
Blessings,
T
12April1998
Easter Sunday: 12 April 1998
My dear folks,
The day has dawned fittingly pure & bright (& jolly chilly) after a week of sunshine & showers; for the first time, we are free of the menacing clouds that have boiled up over the hills with their armoury of squalls. Time & again, they have tested the Quinta's defences with volleys that rattled the shutters & bent the trees; each time, my neighbour & I have fled from the roof to seek cover below, clutching our paint & brushes. In a perfect world, I'd have waited for the sunshine that CNN's Internet weather site promised us for Easter. But the helpful neighbour had other plans for Easter & I need to complete as much of the painting as I can before my departure for Lisbon & RSA on Thursday.
Our winter house sitters had intended to do much of the painting, or so they said, at a rate that would comfortably have paid most of their bills. They were on a tight budget, they explained, & eager to augment their income. However, they appear to have been seduced by the good life, which is not expensive in this part of the world. So although the critical interiors were repainted before the arrival of the season's first guests, the exterior was in need of lots of TLC.
I bought 5 litres of primer & 20 litres of the best white emulsion from the Cin depot on the main road & have been hard at it this past week. The pattern has become well established; scrape the walls, prime them, paint them & run for cover from the rain. The days have merged, piling up like a mound of washing at the foot of the bed. "The poor always have to work," I commented to our maid who has recently sold a property & has an unaccustomed few thousand in the bank. "So do the rich," she retorted. Maria is never short of an answer.
We rise around dawn when Samson starts whining to be let out of workshop. Jones has got into the habit of taking him on a brief pee-run before feeding him his breakfast. I should say immediately that little sign remains of the mangy, ribcage-framed cur we inherited. Instead, we now possess a handsome fleshed-out dog whose most ferocious aspect is his appetite. It's enormous. So is his need for exercise. Because he's a roamer, we've hesitated to let him off the long leash that tethers him, except for short spells. So, after breakfast, Jones - who takes her animal duties seriously - has been taking him (& herself) for his hour-long morning walk. By mid-afternoon he is desperate for his hour-long evening walk. He comes back from that desperate for his supper & then has to be enticed into the workshop with an additional handful of biscuits.
Jones was fearful of a clash between Samson and Noite who has spent the past 5 months with our house-sitters. The cat had made herself at home, warming herself beside their fire & sleeping on their beds. She had to be enticed back down to MCP after their departure. But within a day the pair had accepted each other & are content to share the same patio where the dog lies up on a thick, carpet-covered wodge of foam.
More to the point, both animals have accepted the presence of Tattycat, our latest arrival. To see Tatty is to understand his name. He clearly had a hard life before discovering 7th Heaven & gives the appearance of having gone 10 rounds with a wringer. One ear stands up; the other is mangled beyond repair. He is long-furred with three white paws & one black one. It was our house-sitters who took pity on him after he had stolen some frozen bread that they had put out in the sun to thaw.
He must have been ravenous. No longer! He now gets fed at least twice a day. That task has been taken over by the guests staying in Casa 4, an American couple - & their two kids - with whom Jones worked at NBC for many years. Tatty is on the doorstep in the morning where he announces his presence with a bit of yowling if food does not appear promptly. His suspicions of humans have dulled although by no means disappeared. He won't be touched or cuddled but he is now prepared to eat from a bowl placed at our feet. He has also discovered milk which he thinks is wonderful. Previous feline visitors have warred with Noite but she is prepared to lie up on the tiles with Tatty as though the pair of them were bosom buddies. So it looks, for better or worse, as though Tatty is becoming part of the family. That's ok, there's room for a 2nd cat - although not inside MCP.
Between meals & painting & walking & shopping, we have been fairly sociable. We met most of the valley residents at the birthday celebrations of a neighbour. Then we invited South African friends to supper at the corner cafe & also took our American friends there the night they arrived. Apart from that, we've had the pool man up to clean the water-softener, the pump man to coax the bore-hole pump back into life & a general man to quote us for the erection of an awning & the re-alignment of half a dozen shutters. The "painting" main is a neighbour who is happy to earn pocket money while he awaits a contract for a project he's promoting. We have also been attending to the needs of our guests, a couple in Casa 3 & couple with babe in Casa 2, as well as the Americans. So idle it hasn't been.
Sunday evening:
At that point, I joined Jones and Samson on a walk through the hills. We had decided to take Sunday off. A BBC friend who also owns a house in the area arrived middayish when we all drove down to a restaurant in the valley for a leisurely lunch of salmon steaks. From there we took ourselves down to Loule where the statue of the Virgin was due to be marched a mile from the beehive church in the hills to the central church in the town. It's half of an annual ceremony (the statue is marched back later this month). Thousands of people line the route and many march back earnestly behind the band and the bier carrying the Virgin. The only problem was the timing. We arrived mid-afternoon for a ceremony we expected to start at 1600. By the time it got underway 90 minutes later, the two children were chaffing at the bit. I had to lose a noughts & crosses series to 9 year old Walker (who won the Easter Egg at stake) & then negotiate an extended stay with him (at the cost of another Easter Egg).
On our return, we congregated at the pool where Walker went swimming in spite of the freezing temperatures. The BBC friend presented me with a set of crystal wine glasses "from the gang" plus a card bearing dozens of farewell tributes. They were so kind that I thought I might well have died & have been listening to my obituary from heaven. Sad that the nicest things are often said about the deceased, isn't it, and nice to be the exception. I was touched. Tomorrow, I have to try to register the car & do some more painting & pay our taxes & a dozen other things you don't really want to know about. As for being retired, we'll I'm starting to wonder whether it isn't just like working, except that you don't get paid for doing it. Question is whether there's a future in it.
Blessings.
T
My dear folks,
The day has dawned fittingly pure & bright (& jolly chilly) after a week of sunshine & showers; for the first time, we are free of the menacing clouds that have boiled up over the hills with their armoury of squalls. Time & again, they have tested the Quinta's defences with volleys that rattled the shutters & bent the trees; each time, my neighbour & I have fled from the roof to seek cover below, clutching our paint & brushes. In a perfect world, I'd have waited for the sunshine that CNN's Internet weather site promised us for Easter. But the helpful neighbour had other plans for Easter & I need to complete as much of the painting as I can before my departure for Lisbon & RSA on Thursday.
Our winter house sitters had intended to do much of the painting, or so they said, at a rate that would comfortably have paid most of their bills. They were on a tight budget, they explained, & eager to augment their income. However, they appear to have been seduced by the good life, which is not expensive in this part of the world. So although the critical interiors were repainted before the arrival of the season's first guests, the exterior was in need of lots of TLC.
I bought 5 litres of primer & 20 litres of the best white emulsion from the Cin depot on the main road & have been hard at it this past week. The pattern has become well established; scrape the walls, prime them, paint them & run for cover from the rain. The days have merged, piling up like a mound of washing at the foot of the bed. "The poor always have to work," I commented to our maid who has recently sold a property & has an unaccustomed few thousand in the bank. "So do the rich," she retorted. Maria is never short of an answer.
We rise around dawn when Samson starts whining to be let out of workshop. Jones has got into the habit of taking him on a brief pee-run before feeding him his breakfast. I should say immediately that little sign remains of the mangy, ribcage-framed cur we inherited. Instead, we now possess a handsome fleshed-out dog whose most ferocious aspect is his appetite. It's enormous. So is his need for exercise. Because he's a roamer, we've hesitated to let him off the long leash that tethers him, except for short spells. So, after breakfast, Jones - who takes her animal duties seriously - has been taking him (& herself) for his hour-long morning walk. By mid-afternoon he is desperate for his hour-long evening walk. He comes back from that desperate for his supper & then has to be enticed into the workshop with an additional handful of biscuits.
Jones was fearful of a clash between Samson and Noite who has spent the past 5 months with our house-sitters. The cat had made herself at home, warming herself beside their fire & sleeping on their beds. She had to be enticed back down to MCP after their departure. But within a day the pair had accepted each other & are content to share the same patio where the dog lies up on a thick, carpet-covered wodge of foam.
More to the point, both animals have accepted the presence of Tattycat, our latest arrival. To see Tatty is to understand his name. He clearly had a hard life before discovering 7th Heaven & gives the appearance of having gone 10 rounds with a wringer. One ear stands up; the other is mangled beyond repair. He is long-furred with three white paws & one black one. It was our house-sitters who took pity on him after he had stolen some frozen bread that they had put out in the sun to thaw.
He must have been ravenous. No longer! He now gets fed at least twice a day. That task has been taken over by the guests staying in Casa 4, an American couple - & their two kids - with whom Jones worked at NBC for many years. Tatty is on the doorstep in the morning where he announces his presence with a bit of yowling if food does not appear promptly. His suspicions of humans have dulled although by no means disappeared. He won't be touched or cuddled but he is now prepared to eat from a bowl placed at our feet. He has also discovered milk which he thinks is wonderful. Previous feline visitors have warred with Noite but she is prepared to lie up on the tiles with Tatty as though the pair of them were bosom buddies. So it looks, for better or worse, as though Tatty is becoming part of the family. That's ok, there's room for a 2nd cat - although not inside MCP.
Between meals & painting & walking & shopping, we have been fairly sociable. We met most of the valley residents at the birthday celebrations of a neighbour. Then we invited South African friends to supper at the corner cafe & also took our American friends there the night they arrived. Apart from that, we've had the pool man up to clean the water-softener, the pump man to coax the bore-hole pump back into life & a general man to quote us for the erection of an awning & the re-alignment of half a dozen shutters. The "painting" main is a neighbour who is happy to earn pocket money while he awaits a contract for a project he's promoting. We have also been attending to the needs of our guests, a couple in Casa 3 & couple with babe in Casa 2, as well as the Americans. So idle it hasn't been.
Sunday evening:
At that point, I joined Jones and Samson on a walk through the hills. We had decided to take Sunday off. A BBC friend who also owns a house in the area arrived middayish when we all drove down to a restaurant in the valley for a leisurely lunch of salmon steaks. From there we took ourselves down to Loule where the statue of the Virgin was due to be marched a mile from the beehive church in the hills to the central church in the town. It's half of an annual ceremony (the statue is marched back later this month). Thousands of people line the route and many march back earnestly behind the band and the bier carrying the Virgin. The only problem was the timing. We arrived mid-afternoon for a ceremony we expected to start at 1600. By the time it got underway 90 minutes later, the two children were chaffing at the bit. I had to lose a noughts & crosses series to 9 year old Walker (who won the Easter Egg at stake) & then negotiate an extended stay with him (at the cost of another Easter Egg).
On our return, we congregated at the pool where Walker went swimming in spite of the freezing temperatures. The BBC friend presented me with a set of crystal wine glasses "from the gang" plus a card bearing dozens of farewell tributes. They were so kind that I thought I might well have died & have been listening to my obituary from heaven. Sad that the nicest things are often said about the deceased, isn't it, and nice to be the exception. I was touched. Tomorrow, I have to try to register the car & do some more painting & pay our taxes & a dozen other things you don't really want to know about. As for being retired, we'll I'm starting to wonder whether it isn't just like working, except that you don't get paid for doing it. Question is whether there's a future in it.
Blessings.
T
1April1998
1st April 1998
My dear folks,
The rest of my life is continuing here in the card room of the ferry, Pride of Bilbao, together with the lives of a squabble of bridge players. There’s a convenient plug here for my computer. Jones has gone off for a wander. We are somewhere off the coast of Brittany, turning into the Bay of Biscay & heading for Spain. We upgraded ourselves from the bowels of the ship to a smart outer cabin on the 4th deck. There’s a wrinkly green sea down below us, looking flatter than it is. I was woken in the early hours by the pitching – & accompanying shudders & groans from the vessel - & I thought to see great walls of water at dawn. Instead I found the ship dipping deep into a steady swell with not even a hint of a white cap. Jones feels a little queasy. She does not have a sailor’s stomach.
The mist blew away mid-morning & a welcome sun tempted us out for a blustery turn about the decks. There were several other boats visible around us, ferries, freighters & trawlers. The Pride of Bilbao is a big vessel as ferries go, taking 500 cars, lots of huge lorries & 2,500 passengers. She is very comfortable, with three upper decks given over to thickly-carpeted lounges, play-rooms, restaurants & shops, to say nothing of casino, library & cinema. Jones hasn’t brought a bathing costume but she accompanied me down three decks to the pool where I followed a swim with a dip in the jacuzzi & a sweat in the sauna.
A couple with a young child came past us as we left and we heard the woman asking her man: “How are we going to fill the rest of the day?” I exchanged sympathetic glances with him. Nearly all the passengers appear to be English. The crew is largely Spanish although they manage well enough in English. We tried in vain to get a decent cup of expresso coffee from the coffee shop where a chatty waitress confessed that she barely survived the three-week-on, two-off stint of duty without the real thing. Only the watery English equivalent is available.
So far, I must tell you, I have found retirement perfectly agreeable. It has occurred to me that we pensioners are paid merely to stay alive. That’s a wonderful thought. We don’t have to do anything to get our money other than be. No more sitting through the farce of an annual interviews, no more anxious boards for non-existent jobs. Just wake up in the morning and your money’s there. I think I could get used to it. Part of Monday went on the continuing thinning out of our possessions. I hooted as I discovered half a dozen elderly copies of my CV in a file and joyfully tore them to shreds. Jonesy’s CV followed suit. A great many more documents and files were also shredded & dumped in the paper bin over the road. The printer’s tray, together with some trinkets & moulded wooden feet (ex Dad or Granddad) for keeping shoes in shape, went down to the bric-a-brac shop.
There, the Canadian owner, Peter, gave us £15 for the lot. On Tuesday morning I took the car down to the garage for a thorough clean & check before starting to pack the numerous boxes we’d been stuffing with objects all week. We aimed to be away about 1400 but it was 1530 before we finally staggered downstairs with the last load. My final act was to take the Westminster parking disc off the windscreen and post it back to the council with a request for a refund. I could just see out of the back window over the top of the mountain of cases & boxes on the back seat. The pair of us felt exhausted. I had hardly got out of London when I found myself nodding off & had to pull into a rest area for a 15 min kip. After that it was an easy 2½ hours down the motorway to Portsmouth.
Saturday 4 April at the Quinta
Samson is having a good scratch here beside me on the patio of MCP. He’s just been for his first walk of the day but it wasn’t half long enough for his pleasure. It was followed by a large plate of dog biscuits and goo which he demolished effortlessly. No wonder his ribs have disappeared beneath a comfortable layer of flesh. He also likes lots of attention and keeps on wandering over to stick his nose under my elbow.
The sun has just appeared, a welcome sun after the grey skies and strong winds that greeted our arrival in the Algarve yesterday. Our guests were not best pleased. We’ve couples in all three casas, two of them with babes. They were made at home in our absence by our house-sitter whom we are about to run to the airport.
The journey down was blessedly problem free. The hardest bit was navigating the freeways that we picked up on the outskirts of Bilbao harbour at the height of the morning rush-hour. Jones navigated with the aid of twin (large & small scale) maps of Iberia while I drove. It’s 1150 kms from Bilbao to the Quinta, most of which we covered during a 10-hour drive on Thursday. We ended up just across the Portuguese border in the little Alentejan town of Vila Vicosa where we waited as a crowd trailed down the main road behind a hearse. Jones turned down the offer of a five-star hotel in favour of a small ‘pension’ in the main street. It proved an excellent choice, comfortable & inexpensive. Its only drawback was its situation between two competing clock-towers. Jones said the bells stopped chiming about midnight. If that was the case, they certainly started again at 0345 when I awoke, clanging away (a minute apart) at every quarter hour.
Vila Vicosa is at the heart of the Alentejo’s marble quarrying industry & there is evidence of this everywhere. As far as the townspeople are concerned, marble is just the local stone. The kerb stones are made of marble; the broad pavements are covered with marble chips; the town benches are marble.
The town’s ducal palace is being restored and a vast square is being laid out in front of it, in marble of course. We visited the gardens of the adjacent pousada (a smart, state-run hotel) where I noted a few features, in particular the water garden.
We supped on the dish of the day at the smartest café in town, although such distinctions in Vila Vicosa are very fine indeed. To the untutored eye, they all look a bit like dives. The locals, congregated in the bar section of the restaurant, were fascinated at our presence and they accosted us politely on our way out to satisfy their curiosity. After a brief conversation, a local worthy marched us across the road to a gift shop where he invited Jones to take her choice of the marble ashtrays as a momento of our visit. She did. We were touched.
The Portuguese road links with the Alentejo have been much improved since our last trip there and we were home at the Quinta by early afternoon. The Rocket sang all the way. What a pleasure it was to be pulled along by a decent engine instead of the 1100cc jobs we generally hire down here. The only drawback was the difficulty of seeing the oncoming traffic when trying to overtake. Jones would indicate to me each time whether I could pull out for a clear look. The Portuguese drive like people possessed; killing & maiming one another is a national pastime; it’s easy to understand why they have the highest accident rate in the European Union. Mainly, I stuck to the side of the road & let them whiz by. A stream of ambulances howled their way up & down the national road, fetching & carrying the unfortunates who hadn’t made it.
The journey through the Alentejo took us through fields stained in mauves by great sweeps of (wild flowers that Jones stopped to identify as) pulsatillas, yellow daisies & red poppies. The colours were wonderfully vivid. The countryside was brimming with new growth. There’d obviously been lots of rain. The Quinta looked as though it had run riot in Jonesy’s two-week absence. Most of the flower beds are bursting with colour. In every other available space on the terraces, shoulder-high beds of yellow daisies compete with jungles of blue borage. Dozens of plants have scorned the official driveways, thrusting themselves up amid the gravel & flowering madly. It’s gorgeous if a bit overpowering.
Also a bit overpowering is the task ahead. We’ll take a day or two to get a grip on it as we get used to the needs of the dog & the repatriation of the cat to MCP, to say nothing of the arrival of Tatty-cat, of whom more later. There’s lots of painting to be done, something I will make a high priority. Meanwhile, we are here and very pleased to be so.
Blessings ever,
T
My dear folks,
The rest of my life is continuing here in the card room of the ferry, Pride of Bilbao, together with the lives of a squabble of bridge players. There’s a convenient plug here for my computer. Jones has gone off for a wander. We are somewhere off the coast of Brittany, turning into the Bay of Biscay & heading for Spain. We upgraded ourselves from the bowels of the ship to a smart outer cabin on the 4th deck. There’s a wrinkly green sea down below us, looking flatter than it is. I was woken in the early hours by the pitching – & accompanying shudders & groans from the vessel - & I thought to see great walls of water at dawn. Instead I found the ship dipping deep into a steady swell with not even a hint of a white cap. Jones feels a little queasy. She does not have a sailor’s stomach.
The mist blew away mid-morning & a welcome sun tempted us out for a blustery turn about the decks. There were several other boats visible around us, ferries, freighters & trawlers. The Pride of Bilbao is a big vessel as ferries go, taking 500 cars, lots of huge lorries & 2,500 passengers. She is very comfortable, with three upper decks given over to thickly-carpeted lounges, play-rooms, restaurants & shops, to say nothing of casino, library & cinema. Jones hasn’t brought a bathing costume but she accompanied me down three decks to the pool where I followed a swim with a dip in the jacuzzi & a sweat in the sauna.
A couple with a young child came past us as we left and we heard the woman asking her man: “How are we going to fill the rest of the day?” I exchanged sympathetic glances with him. Nearly all the passengers appear to be English. The crew is largely Spanish although they manage well enough in English. We tried in vain to get a decent cup of expresso coffee from the coffee shop where a chatty waitress confessed that she barely survived the three-week-on, two-off stint of duty without the real thing. Only the watery English equivalent is available.
So far, I must tell you, I have found retirement perfectly agreeable. It has occurred to me that we pensioners are paid merely to stay alive. That’s a wonderful thought. We don’t have to do anything to get our money other than be. No more sitting through the farce of an annual interviews, no more anxious boards for non-existent jobs. Just wake up in the morning and your money’s there. I think I could get used to it. Part of Monday went on the continuing thinning out of our possessions. I hooted as I discovered half a dozen elderly copies of my CV in a file and joyfully tore them to shreds. Jonesy’s CV followed suit. A great many more documents and files were also shredded & dumped in the paper bin over the road. The printer’s tray, together with some trinkets & moulded wooden feet (ex Dad or Granddad) for keeping shoes in shape, went down to the bric-a-brac shop.
There, the Canadian owner, Peter, gave us £15 for the lot. On Tuesday morning I took the car down to the garage for a thorough clean & check before starting to pack the numerous boxes we’d been stuffing with objects all week. We aimed to be away about 1400 but it was 1530 before we finally staggered downstairs with the last load. My final act was to take the Westminster parking disc off the windscreen and post it back to the council with a request for a refund. I could just see out of the back window over the top of the mountain of cases & boxes on the back seat. The pair of us felt exhausted. I had hardly got out of London when I found myself nodding off & had to pull into a rest area for a 15 min kip. After that it was an easy 2½ hours down the motorway to Portsmouth.
Saturday 4 April at the Quinta
Samson is having a good scratch here beside me on the patio of MCP. He’s just been for his first walk of the day but it wasn’t half long enough for his pleasure. It was followed by a large plate of dog biscuits and goo which he demolished effortlessly. No wonder his ribs have disappeared beneath a comfortable layer of flesh. He also likes lots of attention and keeps on wandering over to stick his nose under my elbow.
The sun has just appeared, a welcome sun after the grey skies and strong winds that greeted our arrival in the Algarve yesterday. Our guests were not best pleased. We’ve couples in all three casas, two of them with babes. They were made at home in our absence by our house-sitter whom we are about to run to the airport.
The journey down was blessedly problem free. The hardest bit was navigating the freeways that we picked up on the outskirts of Bilbao harbour at the height of the morning rush-hour. Jones navigated with the aid of twin (large & small scale) maps of Iberia while I drove. It’s 1150 kms from Bilbao to the Quinta, most of which we covered during a 10-hour drive on Thursday. We ended up just across the Portuguese border in the little Alentejan town of Vila Vicosa where we waited as a crowd trailed down the main road behind a hearse. Jones turned down the offer of a five-star hotel in favour of a small ‘pension’ in the main street. It proved an excellent choice, comfortable & inexpensive. Its only drawback was its situation between two competing clock-towers. Jones said the bells stopped chiming about midnight. If that was the case, they certainly started again at 0345 when I awoke, clanging away (a minute apart) at every quarter hour.
Vila Vicosa is at the heart of the Alentejo’s marble quarrying industry & there is evidence of this everywhere. As far as the townspeople are concerned, marble is just the local stone. The kerb stones are made of marble; the broad pavements are covered with marble chips; the town benches are marble.
The town’s ducal palace is being restored and a vast square is being laid out in front of it, in marble of course. We visited the gardens of the adjacent pousada (a smart, state-run hotel) where I noted a few features, in particular the water garden.
We supped on the dish of the day at the smartest café in town, although such distinctions in Vila Vicosa are very fine indeed. To the untutored eye, they all look a bit like dives. The locals, congregated in the bar section of the restaurant, were fascinated at our presence and they accosted us politely on our way out to satisfy their curiosity. After a brief conversation, a local worthy marched us across the road to a gift shop where he invited Jones to take her choice of the marble ashtrays as a momento of our visit. She did. We were touched.
The Portuguese road links with the Alentejo have been much improved since our last trip there and we were home at the Quinta by early afternoon. The Rocket sang all the way. What a pleasure it was to be pulled along by a decent engine instead of the 1100cc jobs we generally hire down here. The only drawback was the difficulty of seeing the oncoming traffic when trying to overtake. Jones would indicate to me each time whether I could pull out for a clear look. The Portuguese drive like people possessed; killing & maiming one another is a national pastime; it’s easy to understand why they have the highest accident rate in the European Union. Mainly, I stuck to the side of the road & let them whiz by. A stream of ambulances howled their way up & down the national road, fetching & carrying the unfortunates who hadn’t made it.
The journey through the Alentejo took us through fields stained in mauves by great sweeps of (wild flowers that Jones stopped to identify as) pulsatillas, yellow daisies & red poppies. The colours were wonderfully vivid. The countryside was brimming with new growth. There’d obviously been lots of rain. The Quinta looked as though it had run riot in Jonesy’s two-week absence. Most of the flower beds are bursting with colour. In every other available space on the terraces, shoulder-high beds of yellow daisies compete with jungles of blue borage. Dozens of plants have scorned the official driveways, thrusting themselves up amid the gravel & flowering madly. It’s gorgeous if a bit overpowering.
Also a bit overpowering is the task ahead. We’ll take a day or two to get a grip on it as we get used to the needs of the dog & the repatriation of the cat to MCP, to say nothing of the arrival of Tatty-cat, of whom more later. There’s lots of painting to be done, something I will make a high priority. Meanwhile, we are here and very pleased to be so.
Blessings ever,
T
1April1998
1st April 1998
My dear folks,
The rest of my life is continuing here in the card room of the ferry, Pride of Bilbao, together with the lives of a squabble of bridge players. There’s a convenient plug here for my computer. Jones has gone off for a wander. We are somewhere off the coast of Brittany, turning into the Bay of Biscay & heading for Spain. We upgraded ourselves from the bowels of the ship to a smart outer cabin on the 4th deck. There’s a wrinkly green sea down below us, looking flatter than it is. I was woken in the early hours by the pitching – & accompanying shudders & groans from the vessel - & I thought to see great walls of water at dawn. Instead I found the ship dipping deep into a steady swell with not even a hint of a white cap. Jones feels a little queasy. She does not have a sailor’s stomach.
The mist blew away mid-morning & a welcome sun tempted us out for a blustery turn about the decks. There were several other boats visible around us, ferries, freighters & trawlers. The Pride of Bilbao is a big vessel as ferries go, taking 500 cars, lots of huge lorries & 2,500 passengers. She is very comfortable, with three upper decks given over to thickly-carpeted lounges, play-rooms, restaurants & shops, to say nothing of casino, library & cinema. Jones hasn’t brought a bathing costume but she accompanied me down three decks to the pool where I followed a swim with a dip in the jacuzzi & a sweat in the sauna.
A couple with a young child came past us as we left and we heard the woman asking her man: “How are we going to fill the rest of the day?” I exchanged sympathetic glances with him. Nearly all the passengers appear to be English. The crew is largely Spanish although they manage well enough in English. We tried in vain to get a decent cup of expresso coffee from the coffee shop where a chatty waitress confessed that she barely survived the three-week-on, two-off stint of duty without the real thing. Only the watery English equivalent is available.
So far, I must tell you, I have found retirement perfectly agreeable. It has occurred to me that we pensioners are paid merely to stay alive. That’s a wonderful thought. We don’t have to do anything to get our money other than be. No more sitting through the farce of an annual interviews, no more anxious boards for non-existent jobs. Just wake up in the morning and your money’s there. I think I could get used to it. Part of Monday went on the continuing thinning out of our possessions. I hooted as I discovered half a dozen elderly copies of my CV in a file and joyfully tore them to shreds. Jonesy’s CV followed suit. A great many more documents and files were also shredded & dumped in the paper bin over the road. The printer’s tray, together with some trinkets & moulded wooden feet (ex Dad or Granddad) for keeping shoes in shape, went down to the bric-a-brac shop.
There, the Canadian owner, Peter, gave us £15 for the lot. On Tuesday morning I took the car down to the garage for a thorough clean & check before starting to pack the numerous boxes we’d been stuffing with objects all week. We aimed to be away about 1400 but it was 1530 before we finally staggered downstairs with the last load. My final act was to take the Westminster parking disc off the windscreen and post it back to the council with a request for a refund. I could just see out of the back window over the top of the mountain of cases & boxes on the back seat. The pair of us felt exhausted. I had hardly got out of London when I found myself nodding off & had to pull into a rest area for a 15 min kip. After that it was an easy 2½ hours down the motorway to Portsmouth.
Saturday 4 April at the Quinta
Samson is having a good scratch here beside me on the patio of MCP. He’s just been for his first walk of the day but it wasn’t half long enough for his pleasure. It was followed by a large plate of dog biscuits and goo which he demolished effortlessly. No wonder his ribs have disappeared beneath a comfortable layer of flesh. He also likes lots of attention and keeps on wandering over to stick his nose under my elbow.
The sun has just appeared, a welcome sun after the grey skies and strong winds that greeted our arrival in the Algarve yesterday. Our guests were not best pleased. We’ve couples in all three casas, two of them with babes. They were made at home in our absence by our house-sitter whom we are about to run to the airport.
The journey down was blessedly problem free. The hardest bit was navigating the freeways that we picked up on the outskirts of Bilbao harbour at the height of the morning rush-hour. Jones navigated with the aid of twin (large & small scale) maps of Iberia while I drove. It’s 1150 kms from Bilbao to the Quinta, most of which we covered during a 10-hour drive on Thursday. We ended up just across the Portuguese border in the little Alentejan town of Vila Vicosa where we waited as a crowd trailed down the main road behind a hearse. Jones turned down the offer of a five-star hotel in favour of a small ‘pension’ in the main street. It proved an excellent choice, comfortable & inexpensive. Its only drawback was its situation between two competing clock-towers. Jones said the bells stopped chiming about midnight. If that was the case, they certainly started again at 0345 when I awoke, clanging away (a minute apart) at every quarter hour.
Vila Vicosa is at the heart of the Alentejo’s marble quarrying industry & there is evidence of this everywhere. As far as the townspeople are concerned, marble is just the local stone. The kerb stones are made of marble; the broad pavements are covered with marble chips; the town benches are marble.
The town’s ducal palace is being restored and a vast square is being laid out in front of it, in marble of course. We visited the gardens of the adjacent pousada (a smart, state-run hotel) where I noted a few features, in particular the water garden.
We supped on the dish of the day at the smartest café in town, although such distinctions in Vila Vicosa are very fine indeed. To the untutored eye, they all look a bit like dives. The locals, congregated in the bar section of the restaurant, were fascinated at our presence and they accosted us politely on our way out to satisfy their curiosity. After a brief conversation, a local worthy marched us across the road to a gift shop where he invited Jones to take her choice of the marble ashtrays as a momento of our visit. She did. We were touched.
The Portuguese road links with the Alentejo have been much improved since our last trip there and we were home at the Quinta by early afternoon. The Rocket sang all the way. What a pleasure it was to be pulled along by a decent engine instead of the 1100cc jobs we generally hire down here. The only drawback was the difficulty of seeing the oncoming traffic when trying to overtake. Jones would indicate to me each time whether I could pull out for a clear look. The Portuguese drive like people possessed; killing & maiming one another is a national pastime; it’s easy to understand why they have the highest accident rate in the European Union. Mainly, I stuck to the side of the road & let them whiz by. A stream of ambulances howled their way up & down the national road, fetching & carrying the unfortunates who hadn’t made it.
The journey through the Alentejo took us through fields stained in mauves by great sweeps of (wild flowers that Jones stopped to identify as) pulsatillas, yellow daisies & red poppies. The colours were wonderfully vivid. The countryside was brimming with new growth. There’d obviously been lots of rain. The Quinta looked as though it had run riot in Jonesy’s two-week absence. Most of the flower beds are bursting with colour. In every other available space on the terraces, shoulder-high beds of yellow daisies compete with jungles of blue borage. Dozens of plants have scorned the official driveways, thrusting themselves up amid the gravel & flowering madly. It’s gorgeous if a bit overpowering.
Also a bit overpowering is the task ahead. We’ll take a day or two to get a grip on it as we get used to the needs of the dog & the repatriation of the cat to MCP, to say nothing of the arrival of Tatty-cat, of whom more later. There’s lots of painting to be done, something I will make a high priority. Meanwhile, we are here and very pleased to be so.
Blessings ever,
T
My dear folks,
The rest of my life is continuing here in the card room of the ferry, Pride of Bilbao, together with the lives of a squabble of bridge players. There’s a convenient plug here for my computer. Jones has gone off for a wander. We are somewhere off the coast of Brittany, turning into the Bay of Biscay & heading for Spain. We upgraded ourselves from the bowels of the ship to a smart outer cabin on the 4th deck. There’s a wrinkly green sea down below us, looking flatter than it is. I was woken in the early hours by the pitching – & accompanying shudders & groans from the vessel - & I thought to see great walls of water at dawn. Instead I found the ship dipping deep into a steady swell with not even a hint of a white cap. Jones feels a little queasy. She does not have a sailor’s stomach.
The mist blew away mid-morning & a welcome sun tempted us out for a blustery turn about the decks. There were several other boats visible around us, ferries, freighters & trawlers. The Pride of Bilbao is a big vessel as ferries go, taking 500 cars, lots of huge lorries & 2,500 passengers. She is very comfortable, with three upper decks given over to thickly-carpeted lounges, play-rooms, restaurants & shops, to say nothing of casino, library & cinema. Jones hasn’t brought a bathing costume but she accompanied me down three decks to the pool where I followed a swim with a dip in the jacuzzi & a sweat in the sauna.
A couple with a young child came past us as we left and we heard the woman asking her man: “How are we going to fill the rest of the day?” I exchanged sympathetic glances with him. Nearly all the passengers appear to be English. The crew is largely Spanish although they manage well enough in English. We tried in vain to get a decent cup of expresso coffee from the coffee shop where a chatty waitress confessed that she barely survived the three-week-on, two-off stint of duty without the real thing. Only the watery English equivalent is available.
So far, I must tell you, I have found retirement perfectly agreeable. It has occurred to me that we pensioners are paid merely to stay alive. That’s a wonderful thought. We don’t have to do anything to get our money other than be. No more sitting through the farce of an annual interviews, no more anxious boards for non-existent jobs. Just wake up in the morning and your money’s there. I think I could get used to it. Part of Monday went on the continuing thinning out of our possessions. I hooted as I discovered half a dozen elderly copies of my CV in a file and joyfully tore them to shreds. Jonesy’s CV followed suit. A great many more documents and files were also shredded & dumped in the paper bin over the road. The printer’s tray, together with some trinkets & moulded wooden feet (ex Dad or Granddad) for keeping shoes in shape, went down to the bric-a-brac shop.
There, the Canadian owner, Peter, gave us £15 for the lot. On Tuesday morning I took the car down to the garage for a thorough clean & check before starting to pack the numerous boxes we’d been stuffing with objects all week. We aimed to be away about 1400 but it was 1530 before we finally staggered downstairs with the last load. My final act was to take the Westminster parking disc off the windscreen and post it back to the council with a request for a refund. I could just see out of the back window over the top of the mountain of cases & boxes on the back seat. The pair of us felt exhausted. I had hardly got out of London when I found myself nodding off & had to pull into a rest area for a 15 min kip. After that it was an easy 2½ hours down the motorway to Portsmouth.
Saturday 4 April at the Quinta
Samson is having a good scratch here beside me on the patio of MCP. He’s just been for his first walk of the day but it wasn’t half long enough for his pleasure. It was followed by a large plate of dog biscuits and goo which he demolished effortlessly. No wonder his ribs have disappeared beneath a comfortable layer of flesh. He also likes lots of attention and keeps on wandering over to stick his nose under my elbow.
The sun has just appeared, a welcome sun after the grey skies and strong winds that greeted our arrival in the Algarve yesterday. Our guests were not best pleased. We’ve couples in all three casas, two of them with babes. They were made at home in our absence by our house-sitter whom we are about to run to the airport.
The journey down was blessedly problem free. The hardest bit was navigating the freeways that we picked up on the outskirts of Bilbao harbour at the height of the morning rush-hour. Jones navigated with the aid of twin (large & small scale) maps of Iberia while I drove. It’s 1150 kms from Bilbao to the Quinta, most of which we covered during a 10-hour drive on Thursday. We ended up just across the Portuguese border in the little Alentejan town of Vila Vicosa where we waited as a crowd trailed down the main road behind a hearse. Jones turned down the offer of a five-star hotel in favour of a small ‘pension’ in the main street. It proved an excellent choice, comfortable & inexpensive. Its only drawback was its situation between two competing clock-towers. Jones said the bells stopped chiming about midnight. If that was the case, they certainly started again at 0345 when I awoke, clanging away (a minute apart) at every quarter hour.
Vila Vicosa is at the heart of the Alentejo’s marble quarrying industry & there is evidence of this everywhere. As far as the townspeople are concerned, marble is just the local stone. The kerb stones are made of marble; the broad pavements are covered with marble chips; the town benches are marble.
The town’s ducal palace is being restored and a vast square is being laid out in front of it, in marble of course. We visited the gardens of the adjacent pousada (a smart, state-run hotel) where I noted a few features, in particular the water garden.
We supped on the dish of the day at the smartest café in town, although such distinctions in Vila Vicosa are very fine indeed. To the untutored eye, they all look a bit like dives. The locals, congregated in the bar section of the restaurant, were fascinated at our presence and they accosted us politely on our way out to satisfy their curiosity. After a brief conversation, a local worthy marched us across the road to a gift shop where he invited Jones to take her choice of the marble ashtrays as a momento of our visit. She did. We were touched.
The Portuguese road links with the Alentejo have been much improved since our last trip there and we were home at the Quinta by early afternoon. The Rocket sang all the way. What a pleasure it was to be pulled along by a decent engine instead of the 1100cc jobs we generally hire down here. The only drawback was the difficulty of seeing the oncoming traffic when trying to overtake. Jones would indicate to me each time whether I could pull out for a clear look. The Portuguese drive like people possessed; killing & maiming one another is a national pastime; it’s easy to understand why they have the highest accident rate in the European Union. Mainly, I stuck to the side of the road & let them whiz by. A stream of ambulances howled their way up & down the national road, fetching & carrying the unfortunates who hadn’t made it.
The journey through the Alentejo took us through fields stained in mauves by great sweeps of (wild flowers that Jones stopped to identify as) pulsatillas, yellow daisies & red poppies. The colours were wonderfully vivid. The countryside was brimming with new growth. There’d obviously been lots of rain. The Quinta looked as though it had run riot in Jonesy’s two-week absence. Most of the flower beds are bursting with colour. In every other available space on the terraces, shoulder-high beds of yellow daisies compete with jungles of blue borage. Dozens of plants have scorned the official driveways, thrusting themselves up amid the gravel & flowering madly. It’s gorgeous if a bit overpowering.
Also a bit overpowering is the task ahead. We’ll take a day or two to get a grip on it as we get used to the needs of the dog & the repatriation of the cat to MCP, to say nothing of the arrival of Tatty-cat, of whom more later. There’s lots of painting to be done, something I will make a high priority. Meanwhile, we are here and very pleased to be so.
Blessings ever,
T
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
30March1998
Monday 30 March 1998,
My dear folks,
Good morning. We woke early and came downstairs for coffee & and a brief unspoken consideration of the start of the rest of our lives. This pleased Mavis no end. He comes upstairs in the early hours & either makes himself comfortable on the bed or sits in the nook patiently awaiting the signs of life that precede his breakfast. (For the benefit of those who have enquired about his future welfare, I can only say that we are giving much thought to it. Jones is worried that he may not like Portugal so we are casting around in London as a first resort!)
Yesterday went quite slowly in spite of several intervals for small celebrations with the shifts of TV colleagues on the far side of the glass panels that separate them from Online. I had taken pains to keep my going as low key as possible & with a few inevitable exceptions, they were in ignorance of my departure. So their surprise on my handing out glasses of bubbly corks was great. I was much envied & assured that I would be greatly missed. The testimonials started to sound, as I pointed out, like an obit, & I had to take refuge in a few additional glasses to restore my nerves.
At the end of the day, I walked down the familiar corridors, through the courtyard & past the television studios to the bike shed, with a sense of crossing a watershed. However, I have been importuned by both Online & TV News to let them the moment I am available for freelance shifts & in this world nothing is impossible. I could take my redundancy money & return in “foive Moondays” ‘World’s’ Irish roster organiser assured me, adding that he would be very pleased if I did. Although it’s reassuring to know, it’s not part of the plan. The thought occurred to me that I liked nothing so much about the BBC as the leaving thereof. But I’m not sure that it’s true because I worked with some splendid people & I shall really miss their company.
I had a small celebration with my wife when I got home, just in time to avoid a shower. We opened a bottle of bubbly that has long lain in the fridge awaiting the occasion. We kept half an eye on the TV where BBC 2 is doing a compelling series on evolution & the waves it created & continues to create. One of the first things I want to do in Portugal is to put in a satellite dish in order to enjoy the benefit of the BBC channels available by satellite.
On the Shirland Road front, after talks with my neighbours and the woman who owns two of the flats in the house, a deal has been agreed in principle. The neighbours, who live in the basement flat, are to buy the ground floor flat from the woman concerned. She, in turn, is to buy our flat from us. This will save the neighbours a lot of money & give them the benefit of owning adjoining flats in the lower half of the house while the lady concerned will own the top half. With any luck, all this will happen some time in June.
Jones has spent much of her last few days in London running around, where possible with Bevan, looking at flats. He was impressed by a superb if somewhat pricey studio in a fine block in St Johns Wood but turned up his nose at the much cheaper ex-council flat I described in my last letter. Jones & I continue to give consideration to purchasing another foothold somewhere in Britain after the sale of Shirland Road. Jones would like to stay in London: I would like to move out, if only for price reasons. So we’ll see.
That’s the state of play. For many good wishes, thank you. After some reflection, I have decided that I’ll probably be a YAP rather than an OAP for the next few years.
Blessings,
T
My dear folks,
Good morning. We woke early and came downstairs for coffee & and a brief unspoken consideration of the start of the rest of our lives. This pleased Mavis no end. He comes upstairs in the early hours & either makes himself comfortable on the bed or sits in the nook patiently awaiting the signs of life that precede his breakfast. (For the benefit of those who have enquired about his future welfare, I can only say that we are giving much thought to it. Jones is worried that he may not like Portugal so we are casting around in London as a first resort!)
Yesterday went quite slowly in spite of several intervals for small celebrations with the shifts of TV colleagues on the far side of the glass panels that separate them from Online. I had taken pains to keep my going as low key as possible & with a few inevitable exceptions, they were in ignorance of my departure. So their surprise on my handing out glasses of bubbly corks was great. I was much envied & assured that I would be greatly missed. The testimonials started to sound, as I pointed out, like an obit, & I had to take refuge in a few additional glasses to restore my nerves.
At the end of the day, I walked down the familiar corridors, through the courtyard & past the television studios to the bike shed, with a sense of crossing a watershed. However, I have been importuned by both Online & TV News to let them the moment I am available for freelance shifts & in this world nothing is impossible. I could take my redundancy money & return in “foive Moondays” ‘World’s’ Irish roster organiser assured me, adding that he would be very pleased if I did. Although it’s reassuring to know, it’s not part of the plan. The thought occurred to me that I liked nothing so much about the BBC as the leaving thereof. But I’m not sure that it’s true because I worked with some splendid people & I shall really miss their company.
I had a small celebration with my wife when I got home, just in time to avoid a shower. We opened a bottle of bubbly that has long lain in the fridge awaiting the occasion. We kept half an eye on the TV where BBC 2 is doing a compelling series on evolution & the waves it created & continues to create. One of the first things I want to do in Portugal is to put in a satellite dish in order to enjoy the benefit of the BBC channels available by satellite.
On the Shirland Road front, after talks with my neighbours and the woman who owns two of the flats in the house, a deal has been agreed in principle. The neighbours, who live in the basement flat, are to buy the ground floor flat from the woman concerned. She, in turn, is to buy our flat from us. This will save the neighbours a lot of money & give them the benefit of owning adjoining flats in the lower half of the house while the lady concerned will own the top half. With any luck, all this will happen some time in June.
Jones has spent much of her last few days in London running around, where possible with Bevan, looking at flats. He was impressed by a superb if somewhat pricey studio in a fine block in St Johns Wood but turned up his nose at the much cheaper ex-council flat I described in my last letter. Jones & I continue to give consideration to purchasing another foothold somewhere in Britain after the sale of Shirland Road. Jones would like to stay in London: I would like to move out, if only for price reasons. So we’ll see.
That’s the state of play. For many good wishes, thank you. After some reflection, I have decided that I’ll probably be a YAP rather than an OAP for the next few years.
Blessings,
T
26March1998
Thursday 26 March 1998,
My dear folks,
It is a grey, rainy London day. But since we need the rain and it serves to make the flat feel all the cosier, we can't say we mind. By we, I mean Jones, Mavis and me. Jones is dressing upstairs before she launches herself on a series of flat viewings on behalf of her nephew, Bevan. Mavis is curled into a furry ball in his customary spot on the couch, awaiting either a ray of sunshine or supper, whichever comes first, to tempt him down to the landing.
I am standing, peering through the window, talking to my computer and to you as I contemplate my final three shifts with the BBC and life thereafter. I have an early morning start on Friday, followed by two day-shifts over the weekend. On Monday we tidy up our lives and on Tuesday we drive to Portsmouth.
In the meanwhile, I am chasing the BBC in an effort to sort out my pension before my departure. The pensions dept is based in Cardiff where at a helpful lady assured me at the end of last week that the relevant correspondence was in the post. She meant the BBC internal post which, like the camel trains of old, takes its time. I must say that it does sound funny to be talking about "my pension" and to think of myself as a pensioner. Pensioners are the crinkly old folk, leaning on their walking sticks, who queue up in front of me in the Post Office for their weekly handouts when I am in a hurry to purchase stamps. Then they count it all twice before moving away from the counter. I suppose that like much in life, it’s a question of time.
The one bit of good news from the BBC was an unanticipated additional payment. They must be pleased to be getting rid of me. Until I received notice of this welcome titbit I had planned to take my laptop computer to the manufacturers to have it upgraded. It is 18 months old and, in computer terms, that is positively ante-diluvian. More to the point, it cannot cope with much of my software. As I pointed out to Jones, news of the additional cash was clearly intended by God as a sign that I should get a new laptop instead of an upgrade, one with all the latest bells and whistles. Jones, who is not as familiar with the divine mind as I am, didn't see it that way. She promptly set about dissuading me, insisting that my current model was quite powerful enough for all the things it needs to do.
She was joined in this campaign by Freglet who came up from Brighton yesterday to celebrate my imminent retirement. The three of us made our way to a pub that does excellent lunches for what proved to be a rather boozy meal. I confess that I speak on my own behalf. But as I remarked, we do not celebrate these occasions very often and, from time to time, they do not do too much harm. At £11 a bottle of wine, it’s a good thing too. It hurts when I think about it. That’s the kind of price we think of paying per case in Portugal.
Before I abandon the subject of computers, let me mention that the latest range of Dell Inspiron models seems very attractive. I have done a great deal of reading reviews of them on the Internet. But if anyone has any experience of them, I am all ears.
Last night we hired “The Full Monty” from the local library and sat down to watch after supper. I’d seen it before. Jones hadn’t. It was well done, sufficiently gritty to open one’s eyes to the realities of life on the dole. I’m sorry it didn’t do better at the Oscars. Strikes me that hometown fashion & fancy weigh heavily with the academy.
We heard a discussion beforehand of the five women nominated for the Best Actress award, four of them British and one American. The betting was that the American would get it, and so she did.
Thursday afternoon.
At that point, the door bell rang and one of my flat owners turned up for a working lunch to discuss the future management of her properties. The discussion was fruitful and the lunch pleasant, excepting the horribly smoky atmosphere in the little restaurant overlooking the canal. I had arranged to meet Jones at a flat about a mile away for a viewing after lunch. In the event I arrived late & after lingering hopefully at the entrance for 15 mins I hurried back to Shirland Road where I grabbed my bicycle and headed off for a second appointment about two miles in the opposite direction.
This time I found Jones waiting on the pavement. A young gentleman arrived in due course and conducted us up three dingy flights of stairs to a pokey little studio that was going for £72,000. The gentleman assured us that the owner was renting out the flat for £200 a week. We were as little impressed with his assertions as we were with the flat and, after thanking him for his kindness, we went our separate ways.
We walked back home where Jones again contacted the agent handling the first flat and arranged to take me straight around there. It proved to be a studio situated on the ground floor of an attractive and well-maintained ex-council block. The asking price is £50,000. One doesn’t find much in London at that price. The flat had its own entrance as well has the advantage of a separate kitchen and looked an altogether more attractive proposition. We have drawn it to Bevan's attention.
By the time we got home, we must have had a good eight miles under our belts and were ready for a cup of tea and the evening news. There’s been much coverage of the Canadian trip of the three princes, Charles, William & Harry. William has turned into a comely lad & has had to face the baying of the shriekies outside various venues in Vancouver. Scary stuff. Reminds me of the harpies who cluster, keening, around the BBC gates whenever some pop star arrives for a performance.
Rather less attention has been paid to the recovery of Princess Margaret from the stroke she suffered while on Mustique. As Private Eye put it, “Fat, rich woman not very ill”. She does not exactly rank high in the people’s affections and I suspect that Private Eye got just about right.
Will be down at the Quinta from April 3 to 16 and with Brendan in Witbank for about ten days from April 17. I then head back to London to tie up all the loose ends. I would hope to join Jones down in Portugal some time in June. Bevan will be staying in the flat in London during my absence.
My dear folks,
It is a grey, rainy London day. But since we need the rain and it serves to make the flat feel all the cosier, we can't say we mind. By we, I mean Jones, Mavis and me. Jones is dressing upstairs before she launches herself on a series of flat viewings on behalf of her nephew, Bevan. Mavis is curled into a furry ball in his customary spot on the couch, awaiting either a ray of sunshine or supper, whichever comes first, to tempt him down to the landing.
I am standing, peering through the window, talking to my computer and to you as I contemplate my final three shifts with the BBC and life thereafter. I have an early morning start on Friday, followed by two day-shifts over the weekend. On Monday we tidy up our lives and on Tuesday we drive to Portsmouth.
In the meanwhile, I am chasing the BBC in an effort to sort out my pension before my departure. The pensions dept is based in Cardiff where at a helpful lady assured me at the end of last week that the relevant correspondence was in the post. She meant the BBC internal post which, like the camel trains of old, takes its time. I must say that it does sound funny to be talking about "my pension" and to think of myself as a pensioner. Pensioners are the crinkly old folk, leaning on their walking sticks, who queue up in front of me in the Post Office for their weekly handouts when I am in a hurry to purchase stamps. Then they count it all twice before moving away from the counter. I suppose that like much in life, it’s a question of time.
The one bit of good news from the BBC was an unanticipated additional payment. They must be pleased to be getting rid of me. Until I received notice of this welcome titbit I had planned to take my laptop computer to the manufacturers to have it upgraded. It is 18 months old and, in computer terms, that is positively ante-diluvian. More to the point, it cannot cope with much of my software. As I pointed out to Jones, news of the additional cash was clearly intended by God as a sign that I should get a new laptop instead of an upgrade, one with all the latest bells and whistles. Jones, who is not as familiar with the divine mind as I am, didn't see it that way. She promptly set about dissuading me, insisting that my current model was quite powerful enough for all the things it needs to do.
She was joined in this campaign by Freglet who came up from Brighton yesterday to celebrate my imminent retirement. The three of us made our way to a pub that does excellent lunches for what proved to be a rather boozy meal. I confess that I speak on my own behalf. But as I remarked, we do not celebrate these occasions very often and, from time to time, they do not do too much harm. At £11 a bottle of wine, it’s a good thing too. It hurts when I think about it. That’s the kind of price we think of paying per case in Portugal.
Before I abandon the subject of computers, let me mention that the latest range of Dell Inspiron models seems very attractive. I have done a great deal of reading reviews of them on the Internet. But if anyone has any experience of them, I am all ears.
Last night we hired “The Full Monty” from the local library and sat down to watch after supper. I’d seen it before. Jones hadn’t. It was well done, sufficiently gritty to open one’s eyes to the realities of life on the dole. I’m sorry it didn’t do better at the Oscars. Strikes me that hometown fashion & fancy weigh heavily with the academy.
We heard a discussion beforehand of the five women nominated for the Best Actress award, four of them British and one American. The betting was that the American would get it, and so she did.
Thursday afternoon.
At that point, the door bell rang and one of my flat owners turned up for a working lunch to discuss the future management of her properties. The discussion was fruitful and the lunch pleasant, excepting the horribly smoky atmosphere in the little restaurant overlooking the canal. I had arranged to meet Jones at a flat about a mile away for a viewing after lunch. In the event I arrived late & after lingering hopefully at the entrance for 15 mins I hurried back to Shirland Road where I grabbed my bicycle and headed off for a second appointment about two miles in the opposite direction.
This time I found Jones waiting on the pavement. A young gentleman arrived in due course and conducted us up three dingy flights of stairs to a pokey little studio that was going for £72,000. The gentleman assured us that the owner was renting out the flat for £200 a week. We were as little impressed with his assertions as we were with the flat and, after thanking him for his kindness, we went our separate ways.
We walked back home where Jones again contacted the agent handling the first flat and arranged to take me straight around there. It proved to be a studio situated on the ground floor of an attractive and well-maintained ex-council block. The asking price is £50,000. One doesn’t find much in London at that price. The flat had its own entrance as well has the advantage of a separate kitchen and looked an altogether more attractive proposition. We have drawn it to Bevan's attention.
By the time we got home, we must have had a good eight miles under our belts and were ready for a cup of tea and the evening news. There’s been much coverage of the Canadian trip of the three princes, Charles, William & Harry. William has turned into a comely lad & has had to face the baying of the shriekies outside various venues in Vancouver. Scary stuff. Reminds me of the harpies who cluster, keening, around the BBC gates whenever some pop star arrives for a performance.
Rather less attention has been paid to the recovery of Princess Margaret from the stroke she suffered while on Mustique. As Private Eye put it, “Fat, rich woman not very ill”. She does not exactly rank high in the people’s affections and I suspect that Private Eye got just about right.
Will be down at the Quinta from April 3 to 16 and with Brendan in Witbank for about ten days from April 17. I then head back to London to tie up all the loose ends. I would hope to join Jones down in Portugal some time in June. Bevan will be staying in the flat in London during my absence.
19March1998
Thursday 19 March 1998,
My dear folks,
I wish you could see me, standing like Lord Muck, dictating a letter to my computer which now takes dictation as fast as I speak. Driven utterly to distraction last week by its failure to cope with the needs of the dictation programme, I spoke first to the computer boffins at the BBC & next to the manufacturers, Dan Computers, about adding more Ram chips. Then I drove out to Dan to purchase the chips &, finally heart in mouth, I delved into the computer's innards to slot the chips in. The motherboard was horribly obscured by all kinds of wiring and for a time I thought I would have to go back, cap in hand, to Dan with both chips and computer.
The operation went a little more smoothly once I had worked out which way the chips actually slotted in. Just as the lady at Dan had promised, the computer instantly recognised the effective tripling of its muscle power and it roared ahead like a patient cured of a malaise. It’s treated the dictation programme ever since with positive disdain. I was thrilled & I remained thrilled; it’s like trading in your old banger for a sports car. The lesson is that software manufacturers, for the best of commercial reasons, are prone to understate grossly the system specifications required to run their software.
If you are under the impression that I’m spending my life mucking around with computers, you are dead right. But it is the 10 and 12-hour sessions at BBC Online that take up my life, not the odd hour at home. I got back last night after my third consecutive midnight shift, to be greeted by a whinging Mavis who hardly knew whether he was more desperate to be fed or to get out. (When the chips were down, he was more desperate to be fed, and then cuddled.) I have become quite fond of cycling back to Maida Vale in the early hours. What a pleasure to have the roads largely to myself!
Jones is due back from Portugal in a few hours. I plan a mad scramble to clean and vacuum the flat before driving down to Gatwick to meet her early this p.m. She is leaving Sampson in the hands of our house sitters for the two weeks that she will be away, a much fitter & fatter dog than she found on her arrival a month ago. I have several days off work before beginning my final five shifts next week. We will need every hour as we get ready to drive down at the end of the month. Before that happens, I have meetings arranged with friends, flat owners, financial advisers, fixers & and neighbours interested in purchasing our flat.
I have also booked to fly to South Africa on April 17 to spend a week or so there with Brendan and family in Witbank. It is a visit that I have long had in mind. I will depart from Lisbon on a flexible ticket, which brings me back to London by the end of the month. I suspect that most of May will be required to sort out our flat affairs in London & to make arrangements with our numerous clients for the rest of the Quinta season. I would hope to join Jonesy down the Quinta sometime in June - or at least to fly down in-between.
Once again, for the many kind thoughts and good wishes, a big thank you. I will keep this on the short side and make an early start on the flat.
Blessings ever
T
My dear folks,
I wish you could see me, standing like Lord Muck, dictating a letter to my computer which now takes dictation as fast as I speak. Driven utterly to distraction last week by its failure to cope with the needs of the dictation programme, I spoke first to the computer boffins at the BBC & next to the manufacturers, Dan Computers, about adding more Ram chips. Then I drove out to Dan to purchase the chips &, finally heart in mouth, I delved into the computer's innards to slot the chips in. The motherboard was horribly obscured by all kinds of wiring and for a time I thought I would have to go back, cap in hand, to Dan with both chips and computer.
The operation went a little more smoothly once I had worked out which way the chips actually slotted in. Just as the lady at Dan had promised, the computer instantly recognised the effective tripling of its muscle power and it roared ahead like a patient cured of a malaise. It’s treated the dictation programme ever since with positive disdain. I was thrilled & I remained thrilled; it’s like trading in your old banger for a sports car. The lesson is that software manufacturers, for the best of commercial reasons, are prone to understate grossly the system specifications required to run their software.
If you are under the impression that I’m spending my life mucking around with computers, you are dead right. But it is the 10 and 12-hour sessions at BBC Online that take up my life, not the odd hour at home. I got back last night after my third consecutive midnight shift, to be greeted by a whinging Mavis who hardly knew whether he was more desperate to be fed or to get out. (When the chips were down, he was more desperate to be fed, and then cuddled.) I have become quite fond of cycling back to Maida Vale in the early hours. What a pleasure to have the roads largely to myself!
Jones is due back from Portugal in a few hours. I plan a mad scramble to clean and vacuum the flat before driving down to Gatwick to meet her early this p.m. She is leaving Sampson in the hands of our house sitters for the two weeks that she will be away, a much fitter & fatter dog than she found on her arrival a month ago. I have several days off work before beginning my final five shifts next week. We will need every hour as we get ready to drive down at the end of the month. Before that happens, I have meetings arranged with friends, flat owners, financial advisers, fixers & and neighbours interested in purchasing our flat.
I have also booked to fly to South Africa on April 17 to spend a week or so there with Brendan and family in Witbank. It is a visit that I have long had in mind. I will depart from Lisbon on a flexible ticket, which brings me back to London by the end of the month. I suspect that most of May will be required to sort out our flat affairs in London & to make arrangements with our numerous clients for the rest of the Quinta season. I would hope to join Jonesy down the Quinta sometime in June - or at least to fly down in-between.
Once again, for the many kind thoughts and good wishes, a big thank you. I will keep this on the short side and make an early start on the flat.
Blessings ever
T
15March1998
Sunday 15 March 1998
My dear folks,
Good morning to you from a grey London. Old Mave has wandered in to see what's up, found nothing of interest, & wandered out again. Sunday morning music is coming from the lounge, courtesy of Radio 3. There’s the twittering of birds from the garden and the occasional grumble of an overhead aircraft. The city seems to be at peace with itself.
I have bought myself one of those programmes that enables one to speak to a computer. When it works, it works amazingly well. But it has absolutely no sense of context & the most irritating habit of deliberately misunderstanding one. Some sentences go down in as little time as it takes to speak them. Others require five minutes of fiddling about with, that is, if you play by the book and do verbal corrections rather than grabbing for the mouse and keyboard in sheer bloody frustration. (Try explaining to a computer that you want ‘grumble’ and not ‘crumble’ or ‘rumble’, and why doesn’t it bloody listen to what you’re saying!)
I truly empathise with those parents who can be seen wandering desperately up and down, cradling a squalling infant who is deaf to every entreaty. The sellers of the programme warn you that you have to spend some time training it to the way you speak. But it is a little bit like adopting the cutest-looking, curly-haired child only to find that it comes pre-programmed with a totally different set of ideas. Also, the programme is very memory hungry & it stops regularly for up to 30 seconds while the hard disk grinds away doing the millions of calculations necessary. I have had a brief word with Dan computers who assure me that it is the simplest task to adjust the settings after inserting additional RAM chips - & that’s next on my agenda.
The reason I bought it that I have run into a bit of RSI as a result of too much keyboarding & mouse-work. But I am beginning to think the RSI the preferable companion. Persistence is clearly going to be called for. The programme has made me think much of the conclusions that Steven Pinker draws in his book ‘The Language Instinct’ about the way we anticipate what a speaker is about to say – and the vast selection of phrases & contexts that we constantly draw on. It was a very satisfying book, especially if one is willing to skip over the denser sections.
Now I’m in to Michael Hawkins’s Hunting Down the Universe. He’s trying to sell the notion that the missing matter is in the universe is contained in vast numbers of black holes. Unfortunately, he lacks Pinker's elegant phrases and does himself no favours with a turgid introduction. Still, the book contains some of the loveliest photos I’ve ever seen of supernovae & other mind-blowing galactic events and I hope the coming chapters prove equally rewarding.
I am getting used to the idea that I have only two weeks remaining with the BBC. Jonesy asks me from time to time whether I am having second thoughts. The answer is a resounding ‘no’ - none whatsoever. I did wonder for a short while, after declaring my interest in redundancy, whether I was really ready for it. It was, however, a very short while indeed. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the notion. My dread this previous month has been that the BBC would not see its way clear to doing a deal. My patience and Jones’s were both sorely tried as we awaited the outcome. My thanks to you for the many kind thoughts that have come my way.
Jones will be back in London this coming Thursday. We then have 12 days to wrap up our London lives before taking the Rocket down to Portsmouth & the ferry on the 36-hour voyage to Bilbao. We are giving ourselves 2 days to drive down to the Quinta & several weeks before I return to London to sort out our affairs here. Today I am to have lunch Stef & Herman with whom I have many things to discuss.
Among the interim arrangements I am making is the cancellation from the end of March of the second phone/fax line into the London flat. So those of you who still have the 2664211 number pencilled in, please pencil it out. It’s about to vanish. 2864592 will remain as a phone and fax number. From time to time over the weekends and evenings it may be engaged for lengthy periods while I’m surfing the net – something that I have been doing on the other number.
I cycled into Trafalgar Square on Friday to fetch my newly-renewed passport from the SA High Commission & then on to Hammersmith for a long session with a financial adviser. I was very grateful for the latter because the pension-option explanations from the Beeb were so confusing that it took 2 phone calls to the pensions department for us to straight things out. I finished the day with an 11-hour session at Online and cycled home in the early hours of Saturday morning. I have the weekend off.
Rather later the same morning, I called Bevan to see how he was placed. He had been out on the tiles, as was evident from very sleepy voice. We met in St Johns Wood to view a flat whose details he had received from agents. But the owner, who should have been expecting us, wasn't & after kicking our heels for 10 minutes, we walked back to Shirland Road. The only person who did well out of it was a charity collector into whose box I emptied a pocketful of coppers while waiting for Bevan.
After lunch (Mr Sainsbury's admirable microwaveables) we headed for Leicester Square see "Mrs Brown" (the tale of Queen Victoria's relationship with a Scottish servant). A bus appeared as we left the house & we sprinted to catch it. Bevan confessed himself quite impressed by his uncle’s turn of speed in extremis. (I blessed the surgeon who did the miracle on my back.) "Mrs Brown" was excellent. I heartily enjoyed it & I suspect that Bevan did too, although he doesn't always confess these things. We stopped off in a pub on the way home. I find that Bevan has bad effect on me when it comes to pubs. (Strangely, he says the same thing!)
Let me take myself off to lunch.
Blessings ever
T
My dear folks,
Good morning to you from a grey London. Old Mave has wandered in to see what's up, found nothing of interest, & wandered out again. Sunday morning music is coming from the lounge, courtesy of Radio 3. There’s the twittering of birds from the garden and the occasional grumble of an overhead aircraft. The city seems to be at peace with itself.
I have bought myself one of those programmes that enables one to speak to a computer. When it works, it works amazingly well. But it has absolutely no sense of context & the most irritating habit of deliberately misunderstanding one. Some sentences go down in as little time as it takes to speak them. Others require five minutes of fiddling about with, that is, if you play by the book and do verbal corrections rather than grabbing for the mouse and keyboard in sheer bloody frustration. (Try explaining to a computer that you want ‘grumble’ and not ‘crumble’ or ‘rumble’, and why doesn’t it bloody listen to what you’re saying!)
I truly empathise with those parents who can be seen wandering desperately up and down, cradling a squalling infant who is deaf to every entreaty. The sellers of the programme warn you that you have to spend some time training it to the way you speak. But it is a little bit like adopting the cutest-looking, curly-haired child only to find that it comes pre-programmed with a totally different set of ideas. Also, the programme is very memory hungry & it stops regularly for up to 30 seconds while the hard disk grinds away doing the millions of calculations necessary. I have had a brief word with Dan computers who assure me that it is the simplest task to adjust the settings after inserting additional RAM chips - & that’s next on my agenda.
The reason I bought it that I have run into a bit of RSI as a result of too much keyboarding & mouse-work. But I am beginning to think the RSI the preferable companion. Persistence is clearly going to be called for. The programme has made me think much of the conclusions that Steven Pinker draws in his book ‘The Language Instinct’ about the way we anticipate what a speaker is about to say – and the vast selection of phrases & contexts that we constantly draw on. It was a very satisfying book, especially if one is willing to skip over the denser sections.
Now I’m in to Michael Hawkins’s Hunting Down the Universe. He’s trying to sell the notion that the missing matter is in the universe is contained in vast numbers of black holes. Unfortunately, he lacks Pinker's elegant phrases and does himself no favours with a turgid introduction. Still, the book contains some of the loveliest photos I’ve ever seen of supernovae & other mind-blowing galactic events and I hope the coming chapters prove equally rewarding.
I am getting used to the idea that I have only two weeks remaining with the BBC. Jonesy asks me from time to time whether I am having second thoughts. The answer is a resounding ‘no’ - none whatsoever. I did wonder for a short while, after declaring my interest in redundancy, whether I was really ready for it. It was, however, a very short while indeed. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the notion. My dread this previous month has been that the BBC would not see its way clear to doing a deal. My patience and Jones’s were both sorely tried as we awaited the outcome. My thanks to you for the many kind thoughts that have come my way.
Jones will be back in London this coming Thursday. We then have 12 days to wrap up our London lives before taking the Rocket down to Portsmouth & the ferry on the 36-hour voyage to Bilbao. We are giving ourselves 2 days to drive down to the Quinta & several weeks before I return to London to sort out our affairs here. Today I am to have lunch Stef & Herman with whom I have many things to discuss.
Among the interim arrangements I am making is the cancellation from the end of March of the second phone/fax line into the London flat. So those of you who still have the 2664211 number pencilled in, please pencil it out. It’s about to vanish. 2864592 will remain as a phone and fax number. From time to time over the weekends and evenings it may be engaged for lengthy periods while I’m surfing the net – something that I have been doing on the other number.
I cycled into Trafalgar Square on Friday to fetch my newly-renewed passport from the SA High Commission & then on to Hammersmith for a long session with a financial adviser. I was very grateful for the latter because the pension-option explanations from the Beeb were so confusing that it took 2 phone calls to the pensions department for us to straight things out. I finished the day with an 11-hour session at Online and cycled home in the early hours of Saturday morning. I have the weekend off.
Rather later the same morning, I called Bevan to see how he was placed. He had been out on the tiles, as was evident from very sleepy voice. We met in St Johns Wood to view a flat whose details he had received from agents. But the owner, who should have been expecting us, wasn't & after kicking our heels for 10 minutes, we walked back to Shirland Road. The only person who did well out of it was a charity collector into whose box I emptied a pocketful of coppers while waiting for Bevan.
After lunch (Mr Sainsbury's admirable microwaveables) we headed for Leicester Square see "Mrs Brown" (the tale of Queen Victoria's relationship with a Scottish servant). A bus appeared as we left the house & we sprinted to catch it. Bevan confessed himself quite impressed by his uncle’s turn of speed in extremis. (I blessed the surgeon who did the miracle on my back.) "Mrs Brown" was excellent. I heartily enjoyed it & I suspect that Bevan did too, although he doesn't always confess these things. We stopped off in a pub on the way home. I find that Bevan has bad effect on me when it comes to pubs. (Strangely, he says the same thing!)
Let me take myself off to lunch.
Blessings ever
T
11March1998
11 March 98
My dear folks,
I shall be leaving the BBC at the end of this month. My departure is at my own initiative but as a result of the cutbacks that World Service Television is about to make.
When these were announced back in January, the bosses said that they would be pleased to entertain any inquiries about redundancy. I indicated my interest and have been in the process of negotiation ever since.
I had confirmation today that my application has been accepted. I have long intended to retire in my mid-Fifties and because this is a redundancy rather than voluntary early retirement, it means that I depart with a slightly enhanced pension.
Jonesy is very pleased and I am rather relieved myself. The uncertainty of the past few weeks has been a bit unnerving. Jonesy will be back in London on March 19 & we plan to take the ferry from Portsmouth to Spain at the start of April.
I intend to leave the car in Portugal and to return to London within a few weeks to make arrangements to rent or sell our London flat.
Depending on how quickly I can wind up affairs in London, I will join Jonesy down in Portugal again within a month or two. We are heavily booked for much of the summer and the idea is that we would move out of MCP towards the end of the year and into Casa Four which would then become our home.
As you know, I have been talking to a travel company about taking over our bookings from next year. If it does so, it will solve our bookings problem.
There are all kinds of questions that lie ahead but none that need immediate answers.
Sufficient, I think, unto the day.
Blessings ever,
T
My dear folks,
I shall be leaving the BBC at the end of this month. My departure is at my own initiative but as a result of the cutbacks that World Service Television is about to make.
When these were announced back in January, the bosses said that they would be pleased to entertain any inquiries about redundancy. I indicated my interest and have been in the process of negotiation ever since.
I had confirmation today that my application has been accepted. I have long intended to retire in my mid-Fifties and because this is a redundancy rather than voluntary early retirement, it means that I depart with a slightly enhanced pension.
Jonesy is very pleased and I am rather relieved myself. The uncertainty of the past few weeks has been a bit unnerving. Jonesy will be back in London on March 19 & we plan to take the ferry from Portsmouth to Spain at the start of April.
I intend to leave the car in Portugal and to return to London within a few weeks to make arrangements to rent or sell our London flat.
Depending on how quickly I can wind up affairs in London, I will join Jonesy down in Portugal again within a month or two. We are heavily booked for much of the summer and the idea is that we would move out of MCP towards the end of the year and into Casa Four which would then become our home.
As you know, I have been talking to a travel company about taking over our bookings from next year. If it does so, it will solve our bookings problem.
There are all kinds of questions that lie ahead but none that need immediate answers.
Sufficient, I think, unto the day.
Blessings ever,
T
9March1998
Monday, 9 March 98
My dear folks,
I have discarded my recent issue of Private Eye but, if I recall accurately, one of its headlines read: “Fat rich woman not very ill.” It was the Eye’s verdict on Princess Margaret’s recent setback & I strongly suspect that it was close to being the nation’s. HRH’s fondness for gin, tobacco & being entertained – preferably in Mustique -, together with her record as a bone-lazy royal, has not exactly endeared her to the people. Certainly there was more interest in the newsroom in the football results than the lady’s health problems. That may not be representative but it’s certainly indicative. You don’t sell newspapers by putting Margaret’s face on the front page. Interesting, too, to see the changes being mooted by Buckingham Palace as the monarchy tries to hold on to the nation’s affections by catching up with the times (including 1st-born child of which ever sex to inherit the crown & severe trimming of the fringe royals).
My dear folks,
I have discarded my recent issue of Private Eye but, if I recall accurately, one of its headlines read: “Fat rich woman not very ill.” It was the Eye’s verdict on Princess Margaret’s recent setback & I strongly suspect that it was close to being the nation’s. HRH’s fondness for gin, tobacco & being entertained – preferably in Mustique -, together with her record as a bone-lazy royal, has not exactly endeared her to the people. Certainly there was more interest in the newsroom in the football results than the lady’s health problems. That may not be representative but it’s certainly indicative. You don’t sell newspapers by putting Margaret’s face on the front page. Interesting, too, to see the changes being mooted by Buckingham Palace as the monarchy tries to hold on to the nation’s affections by catching up with the times (including 1st-born child of which ever sex to inherit the crown & severe trimming of the fringe royals).
6March1998
Friday, 6 March 1998
My dear folks,
Can it be that I have not written to you for a full week? I guess it must. Not that you have missed much. Mainly I’ve been working – long hours too. It’s the norm to arrive early, take a short break & leave late. We all commune silently with our computers, lost in our little worlds! The bustling gang at World TV, on the other side of the glass windows, say we look like a lot of librarians. Be that as it may, I have not only settled into Online, I even spent a day inducting another newcomer into its mysteries. He was luckier than I was for, having fallen through most of the trapdoors, I was well placed to advise him where not to put his feet.
I’ve still much to learn but at least I can fly the thing now. I’m still getting to grips with the audio editing software & I haven’t touched the video editing programme. We have specialists who do most of this work although we’re all expected to be familiar with it. It’s been raining lots. I got wet two mornings in a row & sloshed my way along the corridors to Online in my bright yellow waterproofs, looking like an oilrig worker.
On Wed I cycled into town to renew my South African passport which runs out at the end of this month. On the last occasion it was a relatively painless process. This time I found myself filling out numerous lengthy forms that demanded to know all kinds of impossible details of my wife’s and parents’ history as well as my own. Then I was fingerprinted, five & five. I thought I might as well apply for the new 10 year passport until I learned that it would take 3 months to issue. This is now the prerogative of Pretoria. The days when I had a passport renewed in 15 minutes (I happened to know the embassy minister) are gone for ever. Three weeks, I was told, if I was lucky. And £14 to fax the application to Pretoria!
I fell into conversation with the fingerprint lady who had been posted in London for 23 years & remembered the Dawie de Villiers era with me. We both remembered the dignitaries who’d occupied the ambassador’s office in the 80s. She relaxed sufficiently to muse over the twists of fate. “The people who used to demonstrate outside on the pavement are now inside running the high commission,” she informed me. It might be more interesting to know what had happened to the people who used to be inside, making discreet free drinks available to the London constabulary who ensured that the demonstrators toed the line. “We look after our friends,” as one of them once confided. Not that it did them much good in the end.
Stef caught sight of me yest. as I was setting off for the bank. She said I looked so miserable that she felt compelled to invite me to supper last night. I didn’t know that I was looking down but I was pleased to join her & Herman. He turned out an elegant tuna steak & salad while we plotted our futures. They have been outgrowing their garden flat where they both work as designers, he in the study, she in the bedroom. They made approaches to purchase the flat above them but without success. She does all the computer work while he uses more traditional methods. They’re in great demand from artists & galleries & do lots of fat glossies.
I’m reaching the end of Steven Pinker’s language book where he mocks the elegant grammar rules developed mainly by the Victorians to distinguish the well-bred from the working class. He’s no time for those offended by split infinitives or dangling participles. That would probably come as good news for a lot of my colleagues who couldn’t tell a participle from a propeller shaft. I confess I still throw up my hands at some of the mangled constructions that even BBC journalists are regularly guilty of. But then our prejudices are our oldest friends and it’s a cruel person who robs us of them.
I work Sat/Sun from 1100 to 2100. I’m off Mon/Tues; the rest of the week I work shifts that begin either at 0600 or 1400. I responded to an ad in my computer mag for a free ticket to the Windows 98 exhibition at Olympia next week. It’s a saving of £15. The downside is that everybody in the computer business gets your details to flood you with emails & offers.
Sampson could be heard barking loudly as I chatted to Jones this evening. She had planned to join friends for a dinner party but had her plans disrupted by a leaking pipe that required emergency attention. She’s had enquiries from one or two potential guests down there & I’ve had a steady dribble of responses this end to our latest ad in the BBC magazine. We’ve still got gaps either side of the 3-month high season but it’s looking like a busy year.
Blessings
T
My dear folks,
Can it be that I have not written to you for a full week? I guess it must. Not that you have missed much. Mainly I’ve been working – long hours too. It’s the norm to arrive early, take a short break & leave late. We all commune silently with our computers, lost in our little worlds! The bustling gang at World TV, on the other side of the glass windows, say we look like a lot of librarians. Be that as it may, I have not only settled into Online, I even spent a day inducting another newcomer into its mysteries. He was luckier than I was for, having fallen through most of the trapdoors, I was well placed to advise him where not to put his feet.
I’ve still much to learn but at least I can fly the thing now. I’m still getting to grips with the audio editing software & I haven’t touched the video editing programme. We have specialists who do most of this work although we’re all expected to be familiar with it. It’s been raining lots. I got wet two mornings in a row & sloshed my way along the corridors to Online in my bright yellow waterproofs, looking like an oilrig worker.
On Wed I cycled into town to renew my South African passport which runs out at the end of this month. On the last occasion it was a relatively painless process. This time I found myself filling out numerous lengthy forms that demanded to know all kinds of impossible details of my wife’s and parents’ history as well as my own. Then I was fingerprinted, five & five. I thought I might as well apply for the new 10 year passport until I learned that it would take 3 months to issue. This is now the prerogative of Pretoria. The days when I had a passport renewed in 15 minutes (I happened to know the embassy minister) are gone for ever. Three weeks, I was told, if I was lucky. And £14 to fax the application to Pretoria!
I fell into conversation with the fingerprint lady who had been posted in London for 23 years & remembered the Dawie de Villiers era with me. We both remembered the dignitaries who’d occupied the ambassador’s office in the 80s. She relaxed sufficiently to muse over the twists of fate. “The people who used to demonstrate outside on the pavement are now inside running the high commission,” she informed me. It might be more interesting to know what had happened to the people who used to be inside, making discreet free drinks available to the London constabulary who ensured that the demonstrators toed the line. “We look after our friends,” as one of them once confided. Not that it did them much good in the end.
Stef caught sight of me yest. as I was setting off for the bank. She said I looked so miserable that she felt compelled to invite me to supper last night. I didn’t know that I was looking down but I was pleased to join her & Herman. He turned out an elegant tuna steak & salad while we plotted our futures. They have been outgrowing their garden flat where they both work as designers, he in the study, she in the bedroom. They made approaches to purchase the flat above them but without success. She does all the computer work while he uses more traditional methods. They’re in great demand from artists & galleries & do lots of fat glossies.
I’m reaching the end of Steven Pinker’s language book where he mocks the elegant grammar rules developed mainly by the Victorians to distinguish the well-bred from the working class. He’s no time for those offended by split infinitives or dangling participles. That would probably come as good news for a lot of my colleagues who couldn’t tell a participle from a propeller shaft. I confess I still throw up my hands at some of the mangled constructions that even BBC journalists are regularly guilty of. But then our prejudices are our oldest friends and it’s a cruel person who robs us of them.
I work Sat/Sun from 1100 to 2100. I’m off Mon/Tues; the rest of the week I work shifts that begin either at 0600 or 1400. I responded to an ad in my computer mag for a free ticket to the Windows 98 exhibition at Olympia next week. It’s a saving of £15. The downside is that everybody in the computer business gets your details to flood you with emails & offers.
Sampson could be heard barking loudly as I chatted to Jones this evening. She had planned to join friends for a dinner party but had her plans disrupted by a leaking pipe that required emergency attention. She’s had enquiries from one or two potential guests down there & I’ve had a steady dribble of responses this end to our latest ad in the BBC magazine. We’ve still got gaps either side of the 3-month high season but it’s looking like a busy year.
Blessings
T
27February1998
Friday, 27 February 98
My dear folks,
Mave is tucked up in a furry ball on his blanket. Carmina Burana echoes around the study. A wealth of conversations & faxes has brought me up to date with several of your lives. Thank you for your news. After four long shifts, I’ve the weekend to myself. The shifts have been getting easier as I get to grips with the job. The hours this week suited me well, 1400 to midnight. Gave me time to get things done before work & a ride back home along quiet roads in afterwards. Next week, it’s 0600 to 1600. We’re promised foul weather this weekend, snow storms up north & general nastiness elsewhere. Violent winds in northern England have already stripped roofs off buildings & left a trail of capsized trucks along the motorways. If it’s not too nasty, I shall try to get some walking in. I need it.
In-between shifts I’ve been doing the little things that wait upon us. Someone nicked one of our dustbins – we suspect the builder renovating a flat next door - so I bought a new one & painted several large white “90s” on it before installing it. I also changed the light switch on the bathroom ceiling. Don’t sniff. It’s a delicate & challenging job.
For safety reasons British bathrooms have the spring-loaded pull switches whose string-pulls dangle just inside the door. The springs wear out after a few years. Problem is that one has to turn off the power to get at the light switch on the ceiling of a windowless bathroom. And the new switches are much bigger than the old variety that we still have. This means that, having dismantled the switch in semi-darkness, I have to transfer the innards of the new switch to the old switch housing & put it all together again while the spring tries to blow the thing apart. I’m pleased to say the switch works again. Makes me think of the fellows who dismantle bombs for a living.
I cycled out to the fringes of Chiswick one morning for a chat with Simply Travel, the company that may take over our bookings next year. We’ve met their representatives several times & know several people in the Algarve who have gone in with them. Their regional chief is flying to Portugal shortly & will call in on Jones again for a further look at the units before we conclude any deal. Out of interest, I asked a couple of local estate agents around to value the flat. I may one day do a deal with one of my flat owners and I wanted an idea of what the apartment might fetch. Inevitably, the agents’ estimates varied widely. What they did agree on was the strong demand for property in the area – which is nice to know.
Midweek the postman rang the bell with a parcel that turned out to be the new power unit for my Logitech scanner, all the way from Switzerland. I’d spent hours getting the scanner checked by the suppliers who told me (before the guarantee ran out in December) that it worked fine for them. But it wouldn’t work off either of my computers. So I got on to the Logitech Helpline who, in their efforts to revive it, sent me first a new connecting unit, then (when that didn’t work) the latest software package & finally the new power unit – all free of charge. I plugged the power unit in with my fingers crossed. To my great joy, the scanner promptly returned, like Rip van Winkel, to life & has been hard at work ever since. I wrote a sincerely grateful letter to Logitech, thanking them for their extraordinary service.
Such are my small successes. The inevitable flat repairs & Quinta correspondence have filled any other spare moments. And I’ve gone through 18 years of files with a fine toothcomb & emptied tons of redundant paper into the paper bin on the opposite pavement. In spite of the activity I’ve been feeling a bit restless as if there was something missing from my life without my quite knowing what. I’m well aware of my absent wife. Mave has missed her too.
He hates being left alone in the flat all day. And he wants to go out in the early hours after I’ve fed him. I don’t mind his going out during the day but it’s out after midnight. He got so frustrated the other night that he nipped me, something he used to do to Barbara from time to time & for no obvious reason, to her great irritation. I explained to him that he might be able to get away with it with her but as far as I was concerned it was tantamount to a suicide note. After an hour of somewhat strained relations we made it up & he went to sleep on my lap as usual. Mavis is not one to hold a grudge, not while there’s only one lap & feeder in the flat, anyhow.
What many of you may not know is that Mavis writes secret letters to my younger niece in Germany, mainly of a plaintive nature & with atrocious spelling. It’s a correspondence that both parties appear to enjoy to judge by his missives (of which I sometimes catch a glimpse) & the replies he gets. He’s a dreadful whinger & can be a bit of a tittle-tattle but at least he writes with feeling & from the heart.
Jones, for her part, has been spending much of her days looking after our dog, Sampson. Sampson has been walked & brushed & cooked for within an inch of his life. Jones can’t believe how much he eats, although his ribs continue to show. He has been much bothered at times by an itchy skin that he scratches until he bleeds. Still, he appears, by the sound of things, to have settled in well enough. Jones’s cat, Noite, for her part, has ignored her & continued to live her contented life in the cottage with our house sitters. Jones misses the comfort of her cat which, I assure her, will move back into MCP the moment the house sitters depart. Jones accepts this but still misses her cat.
Saturday:
No sign of that weather yet, not in this part of the world anyhow. In fact, apart from a really cold wind, it’s been a lovely day. I walked into the computer fair via Regents Park and home again via Hyde Park. There were signs warning of the traffic chaos tomorrow when an estimated 250,000 country life enthusiasts are expected in London on a mega-march in support of a variety of causes. The legally threatened fox hunting fraternity are said to be the moving spirits but the march’s aims are sufficiently diverse to have attracted leading lights from both government & official opposition. It’s a good day to stay out of town. And I guess the foxes will get a day off as well while the huntsmen rally.
Jones, I found two Portuguese language CD ROM courses at the computer fair, one for absolute beginners at £25 and a 2nd one that didn’t specify for £14, which I bought. I’ll load it up and let you know how it looks. Strange that after months of looking in vain for anything on the subject, I should walk into a choice. The proprietor showed me a selection of similar courses in languages ranging from Finnish to Chinese. I also managed to change my new mouse for one with the right fitting although I have yet to persuade it to function properly.
I stopped over at Dillons to get Steven Pinker’s new book “How the Mind Works”. It’s had some excellent write ups here. At the same time I bought Michael Hawkins “Hunting down the universe” which has also enjoyed favourable reviews. One of these days I shall know a great deal.
Bevan is joining me for a Chinese supper this evening, whether ordered in or consumed out remains to be seen.
Blessings.
T
My dear folks,
Mave is tucked up in a furry ball on his blanket. Carmina Burana echoes around the study. A wealth of conversations & faxes has brought me up to date with several of your lives. Thank you for your news. After four long shifts, I’ve the weekend to myself. The shifts have been getting easier as I get to grips with the job. The hours this week suited me well, 1400 to midnight. Gave me time to get things done before work & a ride back home along quiet roads in afterwards. Next week, it’s 0600 to 1600. We’re promised foul weather this weekend, snow storms up north & general nastiness elsewhere. Violent winds in northern England have already stripped roofs off buildings & left a trail of capsized trucks along the motorways. If it’s not too nasty, I shall try to get some walking in. I need it.
In-between shifts I’ve been doing the little things that wait upon us. Someone nicked one of our dustbins – we suspect the builder renovating a flat next door - so I bought a new one & painted several large white “90s” on it before installing it. I also changed the light switch on the bathroom ceiling. Don’t sniff. It’s a delicate & challenging job.
For safety reasons British bathrooms have the spring-loaded pull switches whose string-pulls dangle just inside the door. The springs wear out after a few years. Problem is that one has to turn off the power to get at the light switch on the ceiling of a windowless bathroom. And the new switches are much bigger than the old variety that we still have. This means that, having dismantled the switch in semi-darkness, I have to transfer the innards of the new switch to the old switch housing & put it all together again while the spring tries to blow the thing apart. I’m pleased to say the switch works again. Makes me think of the fellows who dismantle bombs for a living.
I cycled out to the fringes of Chiswick one morning for a chat with Simply Travel, the company that may take over our bookings next year. We’ve met their representatives several times & know several people in the Algarve who have gone in with them. Their regional chief is flying to Portugal shortly & will call in on Jones again for a further look at the units before we conclude any deal. Out of interest, I asked a couple of local estate agents around to value the flat. I may one day do a deal with one of my flat owners and I wanted an idea of what the apartment might fetch. Inevitably, the agents’ estimates varied widely. What they did agree on was the strong demand for property in the area – which is nice to know.
Midweek the postman rang the bell with a parcel that turned out to be the new power unit for my Logitech scanner, all the way from Switzerland. I’d spent hours getting the scanner checked by the suppliers who told me (before the guarantee ran out in December) that it worked fine for them. But it wouldn’t work off either of my computers. So I got on to the Logitech Helpline who, in their efforts to revive it, sent me first a new connecting unit, then (when that didn’t work) the latest software package & finally the new power unit – all free of charge. I plugged the power unit in with my fingers crossed. To my great joy, the scanner promptly returned, like Rip van Winkel, to life & has been hard at work ever since. I wrote a sincerely grateful letter to Logitech, thanking them for their extraordinary service.
Such are my small successes. The inevitable flat repairs & Quinta correspondence have filled any other spare moments. And I’ve gone through 18 years of files with a fine toothcomb & emptied tons of redundant paper into the paper bin on the opposite pavement. In spite of the activity I’ve been feeling a bit restless as if there was something missing from my life without my quite knowing what. I’m well aware of my absent wife. Mave has missed her too.
He hates being left alone in the flat all day. And he wants to go out in the early hours after I’ve fed him. I don’t mind his going out during the day but it’s out after midnight. He got so frustrated the other night that he nipped me, something he used to do to Barbara from time to time & for no obvious reason, to her great irritation. I explained to him that he might be able to get away with it with her but as far as I was concerned it was tantamount to a suicide note. After an hour of somewhat strained relations we made it up & he went to sleep on my lap as usual. Mavis is not one to hold a grudge, not while there’s only one lap & feeder in the flat, anyhow.
What many of you may not know is that Mavis writes secret letters to my younger niece in Germany, mainly of a plaintive nature & with atrocious spelling. It’s a correspondence that both parties appear to enjoy to judge by his missives (of which I sometimes catch a glimpse) & the replies he gets. He’s a dreadful whinger & can be a bit of a tittle-tattle but at least he writes with feeling & from the heart.
Jones, for her part, has been spending much of her days looking after our dog, Sampson. Sampson has been walked & brushed & cooked for within an inch of his life. Jones can’t believe how much he eats, although his ribs continue to show. He has been much bothered at times by an itchy skin that he scratches until he bleeds. Still, he appears, by the sound of things, to have settled in well enough. Jones’s cat, Noite, for her part, has ignored her & continued to live her contented life in the cottage with our house sitters. Jones misses the comfort of her cat which, I assure her, will move back into MCP the moment the house sitters depart. Jones accepts this but still misses her cat.
Saturday:
No sign of that weather yet, not in this part of the world anyhow. In fact, apart from a really cold wind, it’s been a lovely day. I walked into the computer fair via Regents Park and home again via Hyde Park. There were signs warning of the traffic chaos tomorrow when an estimated 250,000 country life enthusiasts are expected in London on a mega-march in support of a variety of causes. The legally threatened fox hunting fraternity are said to be the moving spirits but the march’s aims are sufficiently diverse to have attracted leading lights from both government & official opposition. It’s a good day to stay out of town. And I guess the foxes will get a day off as well while the huntsmen rally.
Jones, I found two Portuguese language CD ROM courses at the computer fair, one for absolute beginners at £25 and a 2nd one that didn’t specify for £14, which I bought. I’ll load it up and let you know how it looks. Strange that after months of looking in vain for anything on the subject, I should walk into a choice. The proprietor showed me a selection of similar courses in languages ranging from Finnish to Chinese. I also managed to change my new mouse for one with the right fitting although I have yet to persuade it to function properly.
I stopped over at Dillons to get Steven Pinker’s new book “How the Mind Works”. It’s had some excellent write ups here. At the same time I bought Michael Hawkins “Hunting down the universe” which has also enjoyed favourable reviews. One of these days I shall know a great deal.
Bevan is joining me for a Chinese supper this evening, whether ordered in or consumed out remains to be seen.
Blessings.
T
22February1998
Sunday 22 February 98
My dear folks,
Maida Vale is at rest, soaking up the welcome warmth of a sunny February afternoon. I took myself off on a long hike this a.m., up through Swiss Cottage to the further reaches of Hampstead Heath. En route I discovered parts of London, barely a mile away, that I hardly knew existed, including a none-too-savoury section across two railway bridges, past some factories & down a long graffiti-inscribed passageway - not an area to be out at night. At the Heath I joined the swarms of families & joggers & dogs that were celebrating the glory of the day. The dogs rush all over the show but with typical British reserve tend to mind their own business & bottoms & expect other dogs to the same. I’ve never seen a fight. The daffodils were out. I went my way again after a brief pause on one of the many benches installed in memory of one or other Heath lover, a far more sensible idea than a grave stone.
I’ve been off since Friday. It’s taking Mave & me a while to accommodate the change of pace and mood that has accompanied Jones’s departure. I gathered from her that Samson is safely retrieved from Sheila’s & installed at the Quinta. He’s getting lots of walks & food & love & we’ll see how things go from there. I was meant to see a rep from a holiday company on Friday to talk abut going into business with them. But the lady concerned went down with flu & postponed it. I spent most of the day at my desk instead, catching up on banks, recalcitrant tenants, lawyers & all the other detritus of looking after other people’s flats. I’ve also started a process of clearing out 19 years’ accumulation of files from the shelves in the study. Jones & I have both been trying to shed belongings. But we are both somehow more inclined to keep our own possessions & give away our partner’s so we haven’t made much progress.
After lunch, I borrowed Jessica, a neighbour’s dog, & went off for a wander through Regents Park. As we returned, I caught the sleeve of my favourite leather jacket on a nail sticking out from the wooden fence surrounding the mosque. The sleeve was rent, to my distress. I tucked away the flap as best I could. Was this, I wondered, a sign from Allah of his displeasure at the imminent bombing of Iraq by the perfidious Americans. I gave the thought some consideration before dismissing it as unlikely. It took me 30 minutes of fine darning that evening to repair the damage.
Saturday a.m.
I cycled off in the drizzle to the computer fair that’s held off Tottenham Court Road to get myself an Intellimouse. I’ve been using them at the Beeb & find they save a lot of arm work when one is drafting a long document. Prices at the fair are generally half of those in the shops. There’s nod-&-wink sales as well but that’s as may be. The intellimice go for £20, less than a third of the standard price. I carefully selected one with the right fitting for my computer & set about installing it on my return. The computer responded by playing seriously silly buggers with me. I eventually worked out that the fitting concerned was for my keyboard & I that was sitting with two mice plugged in but no keyboard. If you saw the mass of wiring that emerges from the back of the computer you’d understand. I shall take the mouse back next week & eat humble pie in the hope of an exchange. Meanwhile, I work afternoons through till midnight from Monday to Thursday.
My perseverance with my book, “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker, is paying dividends. I bought it because I have so often wondered how primitive peoples came to speak such complex & differently structured languages. The book hasn’t quite answered the question but has come close to it. Most interesting are examples of how children, whose parents are thrown together from different language backgrounds, rapidly develop their own language. The early chapters, on the innate structure of language, were hard work. But the author is gifted both with an exceptional knowledge of his subject & a pleasing turn of phrase in conveying it. His illustrations are a joy, many of them from Alice in Wonderland. Let me leave you with one, as he dissects the mystery of pronouns:
“I proceed [said the Mouse].
‘Edwin and Morcar, the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him; and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable....”.
“Found what?” said the Duck.
“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means.”
“I know what ‘it’ means well enough when I find a thing,” said the Duck:
“it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”
Indeed.
Blessings
T
My dear folks,
Maida Vale is at rest, soaking up the welcome warmth of a sunny February afternoon. I took myself off on a long hike this a.m., up through Swiss Cottage to the further reaches of Hampstead Heath. En route I discovered parts of London, barely a mile away, that I hardly knew existed, including a none-too-savoury section across two railway bridges, past some factories & down a long graffiti-inscribed passageway - not an area to be out at night. At the Heath I joined the swarms of families & joggers & dogs that were celebrating the glory of the day. The dogs rush all over the show but with typical British reserve tend to mind their own business & bottoms & expect other dogs to the same. I’ve never seen a fight. The daffodils were out. I went my way again after a brief pause on one of the many benches installed in memory of one or other Heath lover, a far more sensible idea than a grave stone.
I’ve been off since Friday. It’s taking Mave & me a while to accommodate the change of pace and mood that has accompanied Jones’s departure. I gathered from her that Samson is safely retrieved from Sheila’s & installed at the Quinta. He’s getting lots of walks & food & love & we’ll see how things go from there. I was meant to see a rep from a holiday company on Friday to talk abut going into business with them. But the lady concerned went down with flu & postponed it. I spent most of the day at my desk instead, catching up on banks, recalcitrant tenants, lawyers & all the other detritus of looking after other people’s flats. I’ve also started a process of clearing out 19 years’ accumulation of files from the shelves in the study. Jones & I have both been trying to shed belongings. But we are both somehow more inclined to keep our own possessions & give away our partner’s so we haven’t made much progress.
After lunch, I borrowed Jessica, a neighbour’s dog, & went off for a wander through Regents Park. As we returned, I caught the sleeve of my favourite leather jacket on a nail sticking out from the wooden fence surrounding the mosque. The sleeve was rent, to my distress. I tucked away the flap as best I could. Was this, I wondered, a sign from Allah of his displeasure at the imminent bombing of Iraq by the perfidious Americans. I gave the thought some consideration before dismissing it as unlikely. It took me 30 minutes of fine darning that evening to repair the damage.
Saturday a.m.
I cycled off in the drizzle to the computer fair that’s held off Tottenham Court Road to get myself an Intellimouse. I’ve been using them at the Beeb & find they save a lot of arm work when one is drafting a long document. Prices at the fair are generally half of those in the shops. There’s nod-&-wink sales as well but that’s as may be. The intellimice go for £20, less than a third of the standard price. I carefully selected one with the right fitting for my computer & set about installing it on my return. The computer responded by playing seriously silly buggers with me. I eventually worked out that the fitting concerned was for my keyboard & I that was sitting with two mice plugged in but no keyboard. If you saw the mass of wiring that emerges from the back of the computer you’d understand. I shall take the mouse back next week & eat humble pie in the hope of an exchange. Meanwhile, I work afternoons through till midnight from Monday to Thursday.
My perseverance with my book, “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker, is paying dividends. I bought it because I have so often wondered how primitive peoples came to speak such complex & differently structured languages. The book hasn’t quite answered the question but has come close to it. Most interesting are examples of how children, whose parents are thrown together from different language backgrounds, rapidly develop their own language. The early chapters, on the innate structure of language, were hard work. But the author is gifted both with an exceptional knowledge of his subject & a pleasing turn of phrase in conveying it. His illustrations are a joy, many of them from Alice in Wonderland. Let me leave you with one, as he dissects the mystery of pronouns:
“I proceed [said the Mouse].
‘Edwin and Morcar, the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him; and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable....”.
“Found what?” said the Duck.
“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means.”
“I know what ‘it’ means well enough when I find a thing,” said the Duck:
“it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”
Indeed.
Blessings
T
20February1998
Friday 20 February 98
My dear folks,
Jones has gone to Portugal. I drove her down to Gatwick early yesterday a.m. & kissed her goodbye at the entrance to the terminal. Mave & I will have to cope alone for the next few weeks. It will only be a few weeks because she returns to London on March 19. She needed to go down early, largely because our dog rescue scheme was not working out. You may recall that Samson had been retrieved from a barrel at the bottom of the road, cleaned up & taken out to live with our friend, Sheila. Samson appears to have approved of the scheme, making himself thoroughly at home. But Sheila’s cats did not. And Sheila, who is elderly, struggled to manage him & incorporate him successfully into the household. Eventually, she wrote to us, confessing that the scheme had run into trouble.
So Jones persuaded two of our regular guests to take her out to Sheila’s to fetch Samson who has now moved to the Quinta. Jones believes fervently that a dog is for life! His arrival raises all kinds of other questions but none that need instant answers. In the meanwhile, Jones & our winter house sitters will walk & feed Samson who has taken up temporary sleeping quarters in my workshop. He will need to remain on a chain for much of the time, initially at least, while Noite adapts to the situation. How Noite copes remains to be seen, not that I have any fears on this score. Noite is one of life’s great survivors & has wooed and won over our house sitters in Jones’ absence, taking over their bedroom in due course.
Our plan is to drive down to the Quinta early in April. That depends a bit on the Beeb. But, all going well, we shall take the ferry – either to France or to Spain - & then amble down to the Algarve. It’s the first time we’ve contemplated driving down, something that Jones has always wanted to do. It appeals to me as well. Some of our guests regularly motor down but the drive takes at least 2½ days as compared with 2½ hours in the plane. Jones hopes to get the place ready for its summer influx in the meanwhile so that we can relax a little in April.
Back in London I have been working quite hard, with 3 long overnight shifts closed followed by 2 equally long (12-hour) day shifts. The working process in Online is very different to that in television which calls for a lot of interaction & frequent rushings off to the gallery or VT suites. In Online, people tend to glue themselves to their desks for hours at a time as they build up the stories they are working on. It’s very intensive & there’s minimal conversation.
The text for the story comes off the news wires. The pictures come either from television broadcasts or web-based picture-libraries. The audio, equally, comes from radio or TV, or from BBC radio files that are collated on databases to which one dials in. Experienced workers have half a dozen applications open on the desktop & whirl through them at bewildering speed. Finding stuff in the maze of ever growing files is an art in itself. Once you have, every picture needs to be processed, trimmed to size, filed & placed on the page. Each bit of audio has to be edited down, transferred to a Web-friendly format, filed & entered. (I haven’t had a crack yet at video editing!) The pages need to be laid out with sub-headings & breaks, for easy reading. And, of course, as the story changes or new pictures become available, so the pages are updated.
I had thought of myself as reasonably fluent on a computer. But I’ve felt this past fortnight as though I were learning to drive all over again, & being taught largely by people who could be my children. The place is full of 20 & 30 somethings. It’s not an old man’s game! The technology is so complex that a squad of “teccies” is constantly engaged in maintaining, uprating & fixing the awesome array of equipment. In spite of their 128 megabytes of RAM, the PCs sometimes slow down to speeds when you want to shake them in frustration. At times I’ve felt that I should have stuck to what I know. On the other hand I have learned more this past fortnight than the previous year - & it’s useful knowledge.
The schedule meant that I was working most of my last week here with Jones. On our last day together we drove up to Hampstead Heath in glorious sunshine for a long, reflective amble. The weather has remained unseasonably mild although the latest forecasts are warning us of a coming winter blast. No doubt, Mavis & I shall survive it.
Blessings ever
T
My dear folks,
Jones has gone to Portugal. I drove her down to Gatwick early yesterday a.m. & kissed her goodbye at the entrance to the terminal. Mave & I will have to cope alone for the next few weeks. It will only be a few weeks because she returns to London on March 19. She needed to go down early, largely because our dog rescue scheme was not working out. You may recall that Samson had been retrieved from a barrel at the bottom of the road, cleaned up & taken out to live with our friend, Sheila. Samson appears to have approved of the scheme, making himself thoroughly at home. But Sheila’s cats did not. And Sheila, who is elderly, struggled to manage him & incorporate him successfully into the household. Eventually, she wrote to us, confessing that the scheme had run into trouble.
So Jones persuaded two of our regular guests to take her out to Sheila’s to fetch Samson who has now moved to the Quinta. Jones believes fervently that a dog is for life! His arrival raises all kinds of other questions but none that need instant answers. In the meanwhile, Jones & our winter house sitters will walk & feed Samson who has taken up temporary sleeping quarters in my workshop. He will need to remain on a chain for much of the time, initially at least, while Noite adapts to the situation. How Noite copes remains to be seen, not that I have any fears on this score. Noite is one of life’s great survivors & has wooed and won over our house sitters in Jones’ absence, taking over their bedroom in due course.
Our plan is to drive down to the Quinta early in April. That depends a bit on the Beeb. But, all going well, we shall take the ferry – either to France or to Spain - & then amble down to the Algarve. It’s the first time we’ve contemplated driving down, something that Jones has always wanted to do. It appeals to me as well. Some of our guests regularly motor down but the drive takes at least 2½ days as compared with 2½ hours in the plane. Jones hopes to get the place ready for its summer influx in the meanwhile so that we can relax a little in April.
Back in London I have been working quite hard, with 3 long overnight shifts closed followed by 2 equally long (12-hour) day shifts. The working process in Online is very different to that in television which calls for a lot of interaction & frequent rushings off to the gallery or VT suites. In Online, people tend to glue themselves to their desks for hours at a time as they build up the stories they are working on. It’s very intensive & there’s minimal conversation.
The text for the story comes off the news wires. The pictures come either from television broadcasts or web-based picture-libraries. The audio, equally, comes from radio or TV, or from BBC radio files that are collated on databases to which one dials in. Experienced workers have half a dozen applications open on the desktop & whirl through them at bewildering speed. Finding stuff in the maze of ever growing files is an art in itself. Once you have, every picture needs to be processed, trimmed to size, filed & placed on the page. Each bit of audio has to be edited down, transferred to a Web-friendly format, filed & entered. (I haven’t had a crack yet at video editing!) The pages need to be laid out with sub-headings & breaks, for easy reading. And, of course, as the story changes or new pictures become available, so the pages are updated.
I had thought of myself as reasonably fluent on a computer. But I’ve felt this past fortnight as though I were learning to drive all over again, & being taught largely by people who could be my children. The place is full of 20 & 30 somethings. It’s not an old man’s game! The technology is so complex that a squad of “teccies” is constantly engaged in maintaining, uprating & fixing the awesome array of equipment. In spite of their 128 megabytes of RAM, the PCs sometimes slow down to speeds when you want to shake them in frustration. At times I’ve felt that I should have stuck to what I know. On the other hand I have learned more this past fortnight than the previous year - & it’s useful knowledge.
The schedule meant that I was working most of my last week here with Jones. On our last day together we drove up to Hampstead Heath in glorious sunshine for a long, reflective amble. The weather has remained unseasonably mild although the latest forecasts are warning us of a coming winter blast. No doubt, Mavis & I shall survive it.
Blessings ever
T
12February1998
Thursday 12 February 98
My dear folks,
Midnight looms. Jones has retired to bed. She wilts after 10. Mave is curled into his usual furry ball on the blanket that we now lay on the couch. It’s not for his comfort but to collect his hairs. Jones says he’s losing weight although I can’t say I’ve noticed it myself. Mavis too likes to retire early, preferably after a back scratch & a warm up snooze on one’s lap. He’s up early mind you, clambering over the bed to remind us that he’d like breakfast sooner rather than later. Dr Hannibal Lecter is glaring at me from the miniature TV in the corner as The Silence of the Lambs builds towards a heart-pounding conclusion. Damn scary I found it when I first saw it – and it’s pretty damn scary the second time too.
Two fairly pleasant days have drifted off into history. Wednesday we walked into town to see an exhibition of the history of British art collecting at the Royal Academy. Jones decided she was going to be smart; put her hair up & wore glad rags. Looked pretty good too. We stopped for a bite of lunch at the crypt of a church in Marylebone Road. Several churches now offer food in the crypt & do good business. This one did good quiche too. A small boy solemnly counted out our change.
Thence to the exhibition, which was huge & fortunately not too full. Jones is the arty member of the family although I did spot a Turner from a distance. I don’t suppose you get many marks for that. There were lots of Virgins and Child, most of them featuring distinctly unattractive models. Maybe virtue was thought incompatible with beauty or maybe it’s the eye of the beholder problem. There was lots of everything in fact, portraits, landscapes & modern stuff, certainly enough to linger over & to talk about afterwards. Jones loved it. I was pleased I’d been. There were more than a few I’d have gladly put up on our walls. We cheated & took a bus part of the way home.
Thursday we had ideas of going for a walk along the Thames but I was distracted by flat problems. “My” apartments have been full of faulty boilers & other hassles. Means making arrangements with the tenants & then getting keys to the fixer & getting them back again. And I’ve been engaged in a daily exchange of faxes with a set of rogue tenants & our lawyer. I also had to cycle into the Beeb for a meeting. When we finally got in our walk after lunch, it was to Kensington High Street for some minor business & purchases. The sun came out. It’s been marvellously warm these last few days. We headed up through Notting Hill. Jones loves the houses there & wishes she could have one. If we win the lottery I dare say she can. We came back through Hyde Park, stopping for coffee at a kiosk & watching the kids chasing the pigeons.
We’ve seen a little of the Nagano Olympics. But mainly it seems that the events we’re keen on are postponed & we get curling instead. I’ve learned more about curling these past few days than in the whole of my previous existence. I didn’t even know that those items they slide down the ice were made of solid stone. The competitors take the game with desperate seriousness, pulling agonised faces & yelling like the devil at the stones to slow down or speed up. As for the sweepers, they’re like religious fanatics. We did get to see the ski event, involving the amazing mogul descents & stunts. I ached for the competitors’ knees.
Friday p.m.:
It’s a day May would have been proud of, never mind February. Temps of C15, birds raising families, daffodils shooting up. Makes you wonder what happened to winter. We drove out to Cookham & went walking down the Thames towards Maidenhead, stopping midway at our regular café for teas & carrot cake. “Anythink more?”, the waitress asked each customer in turn. Jones even took off her coat, so warm did it become. Lots of other folk were strolling around in T-shirts. Absolutely balmy – the weather that is. We walked back talking of future plans and prospects. I work the next three nights, so I’ll go & put my head down.
Blessings
T
My dear folks,
Midnight looms. Jones has retired to bed. She wilts after 10. Mave is curled into his usual furry ball on the blanket that we now lay on the couch. It’s not for his comfort but to collect his hairs. Jones says he’s losing weight although I can’t say I’ve noticed it myself. Mavis too likes to retire early, preferably after a back scratch & a warm up snooze on one’s lap. He’s up early mind you, clambering over the bed to remind us that he’d like breakfast sooner rather than later. Dr Hannibal Lecter is glaring at me from the miniature TV in the corner as The Silence of the Lambs builds towards a heart-pounding conclusion. Damn scary I found it when I first saw it – and it’s pretty damn scary the second time too.
Two fairly pleasant days have drifted off into history. Wednesday we walked into town to see an exhibition of the history of British art collecting at the Royal Academy. Jones decided she was going to be smart; put her hair up & wore glad rags. Looked pretty good too. We stopped for a bite of lunch at the crypt of a church in Marylebone Road. Several churches now offer food in the crypt & do good business. This one did good quiche too. A small boy solemnly counted out our change.
Thence to the exhibition, which was huge & fortunately not too full. Jones is the arty member of the family although I did spot a Turner from a distance. I don’t suppose you get many marks for that. There were lots of Virgins and Child, most of them featuring distinctly unattractive models. Maybe virtue was thought incompatible with beauty or maybe it’s the eye of the beholder problem. There was lots of everything in fact, portraits, landscapes & modern stuff, certainly enough to linger over & to talk about afterwards. Jones loved it. I was pleased I’d been. There were more than a few I’d have gladly put up on our walls. We cheated & took a bus part of the way home.
Thursday we had ideas of going for a walk along the Thames but I was distracted by flat problems. “My” apartments have been full of faulty boilers & other hassles. Means making arrangements with the tenants & then getting keys to the fixer & getting them back again. And I’ve been engaged in a daily exchange of faxes with a set of rogue tenants & our lawyer. I also had to cycle into the Beeb for a meeting. When we finally got in our walk after lunch, it was to Kensington High Street for some minor business & purchases. The sun came out. It’s been marvellously warm these last few days. We headed up through Notting Hill. Jones loves the houses there & wishes she could have one. If we win the lottery I dare say she can. We came back through Hyde Park, stopping for coffee at a kiosk & watching the kids chasing the pigeons.
We’ve seen a little of the Nagano Olympics. But mainly it seems that the events we’re keen on are postponed & we get curling instead. I’ve learned more about curling these past few days than in the whole of my previous existence. I didn’t even know that those items they slide down the ice were made of solid stone. The competitors take the game with desperate seriousness, pulling agonised faces & yelling like the devil at the stones to slow down or speed up. As for the sweepers, they’re like religious fanatics. We did get to see the ski event, involving the amazing mogul descents & stunts. I ached for the competitors’ knees.
Friday p.m.:
It’s a day May would have been proud of, never mind February. Temps of C15, birds raising families, daffodils shooting up. Makes you wonder what happened to winter. We drove out to Cookham & went walking down the Thames towards Maidenhead, stopping midway at our regular café for teas & carrot cake. “Anythink more?”, the waitress asked each customer in turn. Jones even took off her coat, so warm did it become. Lots of other folk were strolling around in T-shirts. Absolutely balmy – the weather that is. We walked back talking of future plans and prospects. I work the next three nights, so I’ll go & put my head down.
Blessings
T
3February1998
3 February 1998
My dear folks,
I am inspired to respond, briefly, to the welcome arrival of faxes & emails from around the world. Many thanks to those responsible.
The week is rushing past slowly in the way that some weeks do. My cold is going away. I had no sooner mentioned in my last letter that my condition had improved than I was afflicted with sneezes more violent than before. I thought of the man in the bible whose old devils were driven out, only to be replaced by new devils so that his last state was worse than his first. Jones was sympathetic and steadily increased the size of the porridge bowls she prepared for my breakfast until a whole tribe might have fed from the pot. Much as I enjoyed the porridge, it did not get to work on my condition. I did try one night to see if it was possible to expel cold germs with red wine. (You can’t!) This was the night before I began my attachment to News Online so my first day was distinctly rough. I arrived with streaming red piggy eyes, as much from cycling in sub-zero temps as other afflictions – I & drizzled miserably for the rest of the day.
Jones has been busy attending to the needs of her nephew, Bevan, who has moved into a slightly run-down townhouse belonging to absent friends of ours in a very posh part of town. We drove 90 mins down to Balcombe on Sunday to load up the Rocket with Bevan’s possessions & bring them back to town. The car braced itself for the trip back to London, every inch crammed with belongings. Bevan himself had to take the train. To his credit, he’s one of the few people we know whose entire worldly possessions can be divided between the back of the Rocket & a rucksack.
Jones spent Monday doing up his kitchen. On Tuesday she arrived with a carpet cleaner to find that the plumbing had run wild as Bevan tried to take a morning shower which then refused to turn itself off. She was met by a soaking & wild-eyed nephew at the door. Luckily she had the number of a fixer who rushed over to save her (and the carpet cleaner) from gushing pipes & leaking ceilings but not until the townhouse had undergone a thorough soaking. Matters were made worse when the fixer flushed the contents of a (disconnected) loo cistern into a cupboard as part of his repair attempts. The dwelling is due to undergo far-reaching renovations in a few months’ time when the owners return from abroad. Meanwhile, Jones is anxious to keep maintenance costs to a minimum on their behalf.
Online is kinda interesting. I have spent two days getting to grips with the in-house software used for constructing the BBC website. There’s the application used for building up illustrated pages, a huge graphics package, software for capturing live video grabs off air, browsers, the BBC’s Intranet, the old radio & TV news systems, email & about 20 other applications, all lurking on the desktop. The money that’s been lavished on software & equipment is just mind boggling. Every worker sits with a large monitor, a potent computer, & a TV & video recorder clustered around the desk, & there’s lots of workers. All have immediate access to every newswire, audio report & video image that comes into the BBC. These are stored in huge computers as files that can quickly be retrieved & built into stories. The problem is finding them.
On the far side of the room, programmers work constantly to build up the underlying structure as the site grows. Those who dial into the site, if they prefer, can listen to the latest radio news bulletins (in several languages) or watch the TV news or do the interactive stuff - or whatever takes their fancy. It’s serious & ambitious as well as very high tech, clearly the way the BBC believes the industry is moving. It’s fascinating to see how technologies are converging. Clearly, within a few years, only one item of electronic equipment will be required in the household. Whatever you call it, it will combine the family’s computer, radio, television, cassette player, CD player, fax, phone & much else. It will supply programmes on demand. The huge advantage of the technology is that every “hit” on every page is recorded & the Beeb knows the following morning exactly how many people have looked at the site the night before & what pages they’ve been interested in.
That’s enough, I think. I am in danger of running on!
Blessings as ever
T
My dear folks,
I am inspired to respond, briefly, to the welcome arrival of faxes & emails from around the world. Many thanks to those responsible.
The week is rushing past slowly in the way that some weeks do. My cold is going away. I had no sooner mentioned in my last letter that my condition had improved than I was afflicted with sneezes more violent than before. I thought of the man in the bible whose old devils were driven out, only to be replaced by new devils so that his last state was worse than his first. Jones was sympathetic and steadily increased the size of the porridge bowls she prepared for my breakfast until a whole tribe might have fed from the pot. Much as I enjoyed the porridge, it did not get to work on my condition. I did try one night to see if it was possible to expel cold germs with red wine. (You can’t!) This was the night before I began my attachment to News Online so my first day was distinctly rough. I arrived with streaming red piggy eyes, as much from cycling in sub-zero temps as other afflictions – I & drizzled miserably for the rest of the day.
Jones has been busy attending to the needs of her nephew, Bevan, who has moved into a slightly run-down townhouse belonging to absent friends of ours in a very posh part of town. We drove 90 mins down to Balcombe on Sunday to load up the Rocket with Bevan’s possessions & bring them back to town. The car braced itself for the trip back to London, every inch crammed with belongings. Bevan himself had to take the train. To his credit, he’s one of the few people we know whose entire worldly possessions can be divided between the back of the Rocket & a rucksack.
Jones spent Monday doing up his kitchen. On Tuesday she arrived with a carpet cleaner to find that the plumbing had run wild as Bevan tried to take a morning shower which then refused to turn itself off. She was met by a soaking & wild-eyed nephew at the door. Luckily she had the number of a fixer who rushed over to save her (and the carpet cleaner) from gushing pipes & leaking ceilings but not until the townhouse had undergone a thorough soaking. Matters were made worse when the fixer flushed the contents of a (disconnected) loo cistern into a cupboard as part of his repair attempts. The dwelling is due to undergo far-reaching renovations in a few months’ time when the owners return from abroad. Meanwhile, Jones is anxious to keep maintenance costs to a minimum on their behalf.
Online is kinda interesting. I have spent two days getting to grips with the in-house software used for constructing the BBC website. There’s the application used for building up illustrated pages, a huge graphics package, software for capturing live video grabs off air, browsers, the BBC’s Intranet, the old radio & TV news systems, email & about 20 other applications, all lurking on the desktop. The money that’s been lavished on software & equipment is just mind boggling. Every worker sits with a large monitor, a potent computer, & a TV & video recorder clustered around the desk, & there’s lots of workers. All have immediate access to every newswire, audio report & video image that comes into the BBC. These are stored in huge computers as files that can quickly be retrieved & built into stories. The problem is finding them.
On the far side of the room, programmers work constantly to build up the underlying structure as the site grows. Those who dial into the site, if they prefer, can listen to the latest radio news bulletins (in several languages) or watch the TV news or do the interactive stuff - or whatever takes their fancy. It’s serious & ambitious as well as very high tech, clearly the way the BBC believes the industry is moving. It’s fascinating to see how technologies are converging. Clearly, within a few years, only one item of electronic equipment will be required in the household. Whatever you call it, it will combine the family’s computer, radio, television, cassette player, CD player, fax, phone & much else. It will supply programmes on demand. The huge advantage of the technology is that every “hit” on every page is recorded & the Beeb knows the following morning exactly how many people have looked at the site the night before & what pages they’ve been interested in.
That’s enough, I think. I am in danger of running on!
Blessings as ever
T
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