I am an Ass.

I got up for a wee in the middle of the night last night, and as I sat there in the dark, bleary eyed and half asleep, I noticed a small bright blue light shining on the floor between the loo and the wall.  I stared at it, blinking, before I realised there were two small dots of light, close together and glowing like an LED.

Brain-muddled by sleepiness I thought:

'That's odd I didn't notice an electric socket down there and why is it glowing it must be a power point of some sort why is there an electrical power point in the bathroom by the loo but I cleaned in here the other day and didn't notice one oh hang on it must be a mobile phone but my phone's on my bedside table and anyway it doesn't have two small blue lights on it it must be Richard's phone or some other electronic device oh hang on IT'S MOVING!'

Turned out to be a black, slow-moving, larvae about 2 cm long, like an elongated wood louse or a squat centipede - a glow worm of some sort, glowing from its head or tail, not sure which.  It was fricking AMAZING. Or at least I assume it was a glow-worm. Either that or I'm off my rocker.

I've never seen a glow worm before, but my parents used to talk about how they could often be spotted, glowing away, in the grass verges at night time. This would be in the days before we poisoned everything with weed-killers and insecticides. But I'd always imagined a sort of yellowy light-bulb glow, rather than a pale blue neon high-tech LED type of thing. Just as well I'm not on drugs or I may have imagined it was a NSA tracking device and freaked.

However, glow worms and biting spiders aside, the flora and fauna of this part of Portugal are similar in many ways to that of the UK, but there's just more of it. The weeds in my little patch of rented garden are very familiar (But no dandelions! Hoorah!), and I was thrilled to see wild foxgloves on the road side the other day, amongst the cow parsley and poppies -  because my garden in Wales was full of them, and I would've missed them. Sparrows, goldfinches, herons and red kites abound. And there was a gorgeous crested red bird with striped wings in the garden the other day. I'd love to know what it was.  I need a book. For Christmas please. Thanks.

And roses! Amazing roses everywhere.  Front gardens are bursting with them, billowing over balustrades and clambering up columns. I've no idea why England has associated itself with the rose  - seems they do far better in Portugal. I've never seen so many beautiful roses.

We've settled into a sort of happy routine as we wait patiently for the red tape involved in buying a property to untangle itself.  The weather, initially sunny but with a chill in the wind, and then all kinds of variable, has suddenly become very hot, with a warm breeze. The floor tiles remain cool though and the animals all seem quite contented and have come to view this little farm cottage as their own.

Titty the Maine Coon is causing a bit of a stir - the local cats are all quite tiny and runty (google 'Maine Coon images') and she's been spotted strolling the orchards (Pierre: 'My father say he see a 'UGE, beeeeautiful cat, ees your cat? I want to see thees cat!'), and at night-time the local boy cats come to the garden and howl for her, while she growls at them scathingly through the window like Ertha Kit, keeping us all bloody awake.

This morning she lunged at a fly and managed to attach herself to the sticky fly strip we'd hung on the window frame. She panicked and flew around the house with the sticky strip and dead flies ever more firmly entwined around her long limbs and flowing locks. That stuff is like black treacle - it won't wash or comb out - and poor Titty has had to undergo a humiliating hatchet-job hair cut. She's mortified. And Fat Babs keeps sniggering.

Misty disgraced herself by biting Pierre on the calf when he came round to fix the kitchen tap.  It was a sheepdog herding 'nip' rather than an aggressive attack and she didn't hurt him, or even leave a mark, but biting is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE, and she got a good telling off.
Pierre was completely mystified.
'But ees GOOD dog, ees GOOD she bite strange man in house! Why you shout at her?'
I guess he had a point.

Gwilym has substituted fish-herding for squirrel-chasing. He herds shoals of small silvery sea bass through the shallows of the lagoon at high tide - hilarious to watch. And Wooly has moved on from gate-crashing picnics, in his never-ending quest for food, to actually jumping into German motor homes and helping himself to a bit of brockwurst. Embarrassing.

Rich has started playing golf at the Royal Obidos golf course, which he's ecstatic about because it's everything and more than he'd hoped it would be, what with its views of the lagoon on one side and the ocean on the other and the special man called Andrez who looks after his clubs and keeps his trolley battery charged. I haven't dared to venture into the clubhouse myself yet - just dropped him off and picked him up. It's posh and I'll have to have a make-over and a new wardrobe first, at the very least. Although I was nearly forced to dash in the other day, with mad hair and wearing dungarees, because I had a bit of traveller's tummy and thought I was going to crap myself.   Fortunately for Rich I managed to hold myself together and he was saved from that particular humiliation.

Languages are not Richard's forté, so I've been teaching him one relevant and useful phrase a day. His pronunciation is crap though and the other day he introduced me 'Esta é a minha mulher, Lucy' (this is my wife, Lucy), but mispronounced 'mulher' as 'mula' and so introduced me as his donkey. Oh how they laughed.

Whilst he was playing golf, I had a disaster. I lost my iPhone. My iPhone has my LIFE on it. It's not just a phone, it's my email, my calendar, my diary, my source of all info, my contacts, my very SOUL is on that iPhone. Oh, yeah, and FB.

I was walking the dogs on a vast and empty beach and as I threw the ball for Misty it must have plopped out of the pocket of my hoody. It was in a knitted sock cover thing. I didn't notice until I was almost back at the car and my heart sank as I turned to look at the massive expanse of sand that I'd been randomly wandering along for half an hour. Trying not to panic I decided I'd walk straight to the furthest point that I'd been to, then systematically 'comb' the beach in a zigzag fashion all the way back, even if it took me three days, and I couldn't even phone Rich and tell him. After about ten minutes of rising panic and palpitations, my eye was caught by a piece of paper that was flipping across the sand diagonally towards me from afar.  I chased it and picked it up and realised it was the bit of paper that had been slipped inside the cover with my phone, with a website address on it.  It had come from a part of the beach that I never would have searched because I didn't think I'd been that far. I deduced, because I'm bloody clever, like, innit Sherlock, that if I walked directly into the wind, from the point I found the paper, then I would find my phone. And about fifty yards later there it was, lying naked in the sand, the knitted cover gone forever, I know not where. A miracle.

I've since made a new cover for it. A crocheted affair with drawstring top and a long crocheted 'cord' attachment that I shall pin to my clothes, making it impossible for me to drop it or leave it anywhere. It looks a bit naff but then so do those spectacles on a chain and dummies on a curly cord that people attach to themselves or their offspring. Naff but functional.

It reminds me of a pen I once had. Anyone who's worked in A&E knows that pens are impossible to keep hold of. You may start a shift with three pens and go home with none, six or three entirely different ones. So I got a special pen that had a long chain attached to the end of it and a pin at the end. I'd pin it to my lapel and it transformed my life. I always had a pen. People could borrow it for a second to sign some drug chart or whatever, but they couldn't nick it. I couldn't put it down and walk off without it. Whenever I wasn't actually writing I would sling it around my neck, like a scarf. It became a part of my being.

Then one day, after about two years, the chain broke and there was no fixing it. I had to go back to using an ordinary pen.  But I'd formed a habit. As soon as I finished writing anything I'd sling my pen around my neck. Trouble was, because the pen was no longer attached to a chain I would, for example, go to see a patient, write something down, then as I walked away, randomly chuck my pen over my shoulder, often narrowly missing the bewildered patient and nearly taking his eye out. Went on for weeks. Was like I had some form of Tourette's.

Anyway. Let's hope I don't end up slinging my iPhone around the place. And let's hope we don't have any more disasters, and if we do that they're as short lived as our recent batch.

And let's also hope that the eating of marmite on crackers every evening will continue to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

Number of mozzie bites during 7 days prior to marmite = 2
Number of mozzie bites during 11 days since marmite = 0

Sent from my iPad