Caixa 276

Monty meets the farm for the first time

The Farmhouse

A view from the farm

Another view from the farm

Harry takes to wearing wellies on dog walks to avoid getting bitten (by insects)

You've been framed.  Mrs Fatima supplies materials and asks Harry to make mosquito screens for the windows

Installation of one of the mosquito screens

A praying mantis reciting Ave Maria in Portuguese

The view from Monty's hospital bed

Sunset one misty evening

Harry enjoys the free Wi-Fi in Almodôvar's square perhaps a little too much

Baa!  I want to bite you too

Another pretty door, Ourique

Charming Ourique

Wonky Ourique

Monty agrees to take an extra passenger back from Ourique

Caixa 276

Monty's cousin, back wheel once removed

Festivities in Santa Clara-a-Nova

It's just gone seven (in the afternoon) and Harry and Ichiro are both asleep.  They seem to like keeping each other up at night, Ichiro panting as though he is hot (he is not, it's hotter now than overnight and he is breathing nice and slowly) and Harry fussing over him, giving him icy water to drink and manoeuvring ice blocks or frozen water bottles underneath him or between his legs.  Mrs Fatima continues to provide lively entertainment and the recent heatwave is now abating.

I've now paid a deposit on Herr van London's (HVL) second house so we can hopefully move in as soon as the renovations are complete in a week or so and release Mrs Fatima.  Initially, Harry and I were shown around this house by HVL's mother and I had some reservations about the bathroom and garage area where his two little dogs would remain.  When I went into Almodôvar a few days later with Mrs Fatima, I asked if she wanted to see the house as she hadn't seen it yet.  She was keen but before you can say 'steady-on' she had somehow managed to get me another on-the-spot house-viewing with someone who knows someone whose father-in-law has a house for rent.  I started to get worried that people in town would talk and I would acquire a reputation as some sort of house-viewing whore.  I didn't want news to reach HVL that I was looking at other houses when I'd verbally committed to renting his.  This other house of the father-on-law was actually very nice and entirely appropriate except they didn't want dogs and it didn't have anywhere to keep the van and motorbike.  Mrs Fatima explained over and over how docile our dog was and that he never barks or causes any trouble.  "The gentlemen will bring the dog to see you tomorrow!" she insisted.  The owner seemed half-convinced and gave me his number (but not last name) so I could let him know whether I wanted to press ahead with renting his ground floor flat.

Mrs Fatima and I then went to find HVL's house but to my slight disappointment, it was locked up.  I had been told that renovations were going to move at pace.  No sooner had I thought this that a couple came out from the adjacent house (which we had initially been offered and then refused) and I quickly surmised that one of them was the owner––HVL himself.  For a split second I had thought it was a couple (a man and a woman) but then realised one was a builder, dry like a prune from years of sun and smoking, and the other a slight and delicate gentleman.  After momentary confusion, introductions clarified I was who I was and he was who he was and we were led into the house.  Mrs Fatima jabbed me in the ribs.  I knew exactly what was coming.  "Is a man or a woman?!"  It's a man, Mrs Fatima, I said as I shushed and guided her into the house.  We had a good look around, probably taking up the best part of an hour of poor Herr van London's limited time.  It was with great relief that I heard the bath was being taken out to be replaced with a walk-in shower.  I had mixed feelings about being told that the two little dogs would be going to his mum's after all.  I really like them but it would be very difficult with Ichiro and the stink of their poo from the garden was terrible so perhaps it's for the best.  In case I didn't already feel compromised with information potentially leaking that I was looking at all the available houses and flats in southern Portugal, Herr van London said, "you know, I wasn't going to renovate this house but because I know you need somewhere to live, I decided to do it for you."

It may have been the next day that disaster struck for Mrs Fatima.  Without consulting me she went food shopping with Hannibal's brother to a German supermarket (you have a fifty percent chance of guessing what it's called) in Ourique, a town we had yet to visit.  She slipped and fell in a wet patch which lacked the usual warning sign.  Luckily no bones were broken but her telephone screen was.  After she got back and explained what had happened I spent hours trying to make things better.  I looked online for shops that would repair her phone and called them.  I tried to backup her phone on my computer so that she could buy a new phone and upload all her information to it.  But I was foiled with every attempt and Mrs Fatima seemed despondent and on the verge of collapse, so much so that she used our phones to call and tell anyone who would listen about the tragedy and her predicament.  We resolved to head to Almodôvar the next morning when it would not be so hot and hopefully be able to buy a new phone from the electronics lady who'd sold me a SIM card.  I asked Mrs Fatima if she knew what a sponge was as I had the feeling I had soaked up all her stress and panic that afternoon.

    The next morning, Harry stayed home whilst Mrs Fatima and I made the journey to Almodôvar on our mission.  I was not hopeful.  First, we visited the electrical items store to see about buying a new phone but they were still shut so Mrs Fatima led me to another shop.  A mobile phone repair shop!  You mean to say there was a repair shop right here in Almodôvar all this time!  Oh well...

    When we walked into the slick store, a young man played the part of cool and confident shop assistant to two customers who may or may not have attended together but appeared to know each other.  One was an old lady, dressed mostly in black and not striking me as the most tech-savvy resident of the municipality.  The other was Mr Paulo and I struggled to hold in laughter.  Mr Paulo runs the (only) pet shop in Almodôvar and had been the unwitting victim of Mrs Fatima's enquiries which led to us getting the house with Herr Van London (who is Mr Paulo's cousin in London).  Later that first evening I'd seen Mr Paulo walking his dogs in another part of the town and our dinner host (Andrea from the Airbnb) had said, Oh yes, I know Mr Paulo from the pet shop: he's my neighbour.  I'd seen him again somewhere else, but now, in the phone shop, it just felt a little absurd that he appeared everywhere, like something from The Truman Show.  It's as though there aren't enough actors to go around so Mr Paulo gets a panicked message "they're heading for the mobile phone repair shop and the extra we had booked is off sick.  Get your arse there now and look... not busy...!"  Despite the drama, Mrs Fatima's screen was fixed a few days later and everything, well almost everything, was in order.  One of her apps wouldn't work properly and she was fretting and saying she'd have to return to the repair store.  I regained something of a sense of achievement when I set her phone language to English (I couldn't deal with mobile phone settings in German) and worked out how to fix the app.  She and I were both beaming by the end of this.  Well done, Mister Doctor, she had said.  Well done.

Monty continues to provide material for my first heart attack.  He's been in and out the garage.  It's still not a hundred percent clear what's wrong and the mechanic is saying that it could cost thousands to address with no guarantees.  Then yesterday his hazard lights started going off on their own.  This had happened when we first bought him and a local mechanic from dodgy Didcot had changed the fuse and fixed the problem.  Harry has now had to strap in a complicated mechanism to keep the button held firmly in to the dashboard otherwise the hazards continuously flash.  Then today the electric passenger window just spontaneously broke and fell into the door.  Harry pulled it up with his hands and some thin black corrugated piping appeared (what the?!) before he quickly shoved it back down which somehow made the electric window work again.  And then, when I got back in the van after our late lunch, my door wouldn't shut as though it no longer fit in the doorway!  The recovery service are being quite useless about providing a solution and I suspect Monty's days are numbered either from natural causes or me killing him by driving him off a cliff.  But I still kind of love him for being the old, disabled persons' van who has probably done a lot of good in his working life.

We've been to the farm twice now, once about a week ago and again a couple of days ago.  Somehow, Monty made it both times despite the rocky dirt tracks.  The quinta presents quite a number of challenging feelings.  After the first visit I felt overwhelmed and unhappy.  It all feels like so very much and there are so many unanswered questions in my mind.  I recognise that the task, and this whole sabbatical year, offer both an external and internal journey.  I have a sense of where I want to end up but I'm not sure whether I'll get there nor how.  The house still has chickens living it, there were some pigs on the loose and the feel of the place is quite different to Mrs Fatima's hamlet, to Almodôvar, to the nearby villages, to everything else I've experienced in Portugal.  The farm sits higher up without much structure or life––human or otherwise––around it.  The ground is all one slope or another, dry and rocky with a thin dusty soil.  The view is farther and wider but more lonely and, in a teasingly ironic way, one of the country's major motorways sits a few hundred metres away, eliminating any possibility of feeling truly remote.

I felt a little better after we – what felt like too-easily – managed to get some paperwork processed with the two local parish councils, including acquiring our own little postbox in the village of Gomes Aires.  I'm told that you can now write to us:

    Caixa Postal 276

    7700-222, Gomes Aires

    Portugal

The lady who attended to us at Santa Clara-a-Nova (Saint Clare the New One) local parish council apologised that she couldn't offer a post box in her parish because the farm came under the Gomes Aires parish (despite the two parishes having been forced into an unhappy merger some years ago.  I get the feeling it's still the talk in town).  We were happy to drive over to Gomes Aires but as I got into the van, I thought it would be worth getting this helpful lady on our side.  I went back in to the office and said, "Ma'am, is there anything in particular I need to do when I get to Gomes Aires?"  My trick had worked and she started to wonder whether we might have some trouble and said she'd call as the lady who normally worked there was on holiday.  She was quite happy to share her distain about the holiday cover.  "She knows nothing!" she let out having barely hung up.  She then called the lady on holiday.  "She knows nothing!" she complained to her colleague about the temp.  The Santa Clara lady then explained that her colleague would meet us there now since the person covering knew nothing.  When we got to Gomes Aires, the lady who should have been on holiday was only too pleased to see us, gave us the little keys to the post box and got stuck into a conversation with a local lady and Harry about the farm.

We'd heard that there was another way to get to the farm from Gomes Aires so headed out from the village along the unknown route.  We quickly ended up on winding dirt tracks in the middle of nowhere before joining a familiar asphalt road to get us part way to the farm before the dirt tracks started again.  This time there were goats hanging out in front of the house.  One was demonstrating why there were no leaves left on the lower branches of the fig tree.  These goats are stunning.  Their coats are beautiful and usually a mix of white and black or brown mottled patches.  We weren't long out of Monty before a man approached.  A man we hadn't met before.  Could this be the elusive "George", owner of the next door farm and unauthorised user of ours?  Mrs Fatima's facial expression when she had said his name in the past made me expect the worse.  The owner of the estate agency had met with us a few days before, giving lots of very useful advice and contacts.  He'd also said, ominously, "You want to be sweet with your neighbours."  It made me think we were in for a challenge with Mr George.

    "Are you Mr George?"

    "Yes.  Are you the new owners?"

    "Yes."

To my great relief, Mr George turned out to be a very likeable gentleman.  He wore a farmer's cap, sported a shortish grey-white beard and had a burnt V on his upper chest from where his shirt was unbuttoned.  He had a rare smile which came with warm charm.  A clench of his teeth as his cheeks and eyes smiled.  Rather than being a grumpy or awkward character, he was very amenable and offered to move the chickens in the next few days and was happy to move the pigs too if we wanted him to.  We found out very little about him but picked up a few things about his animals and our farm.  Apparently we have two wells.  We thought we had only one.  Well, well.

In amongst the mild bureaucracy and drifting from day to day, we have made some trips to nearby towns.  You can give São Bartolomeu de Messines a miss.  We did as soon as we arrived.  The nearby dam is also worth a miss as there was not a single drop of water in it.  Ourique (of phone-breaking reputation) is perhaps my favourite place so far.  Sitting atop a hill, I believe it was an Arab stronghold in the 700s which now offers stunning views from the fortress.  Today we tried another dam and this one had water but no fishing, no, no sailing, no, no swimming, no.  It also turned out to be no eating, no.  The restaurant was open.  We walked in.  I said "good day" (which actually means good morning in Portuguese) to which the old man tersely replied "good afternoon".  Oh yes, sorry.  Then I asked if they were serving food.  "No."  Snacks...?  "No."  I saw the chilled drinks counter but couldn't manage more rejection so thanked him and turned away with a very unhappy Harry in tow.  The good old internet suggested a nearby village had somewhere to eat and although we had missed lunch they were happy to offer us a table and bring a full meal which we hadn't ordered.  Both dishes were local and traditional, new to me and thoroughly enjoyed.