Feliz Ano Novo from the 'Gal

January brings out the S&M in me. Not only do I insist on inflicting 'Dry January' on everyone in the household, I also declare it to be 'Low Carb January' (I do the shopping and cooking so Tough Titties) and 'Start Running Again January' (a perennial struggle, need someone to invent bottom-bra). Sometimes I attempt 'Caffeine Free January' too but I've found it's not really compatible with life.

I dislike the term 'Dry January'.  It brings to mind nappies and pull-ups and the smell of urine-sodden sheets. Some people call it a Dryathlon and request sponsorship for not drinking alcohol for 31 days. What? I'm a bit bewildered by that.  Isn't the point of sponsorship to do something challenging? And by that I mean not something that 75% of the worlds population do as part of just existing. What next - sponsorship for remembering to clean your teeth every day for a month? Or changing your pants? Or - (Hah! Don't be ludicrous.) - not bothering to shave for, like, the whole of November?   Oh.

Besides, if someone's sufficiently impressed by you quitting booze for a month that they're prepared to cough up good money then they must be either very worried about your drinking, or very worried about their own. You should probably take the sponsorship money along to Alcoholics Anonymous. In person.

Anyway, on the International Scale of Debauchery, I elect to recalibrate to zero every January, knowing that I'm likely to gradually slink back up to 10 over the next twelve months.  Boring, definitely,  but it's why I'm not a fat alcoholic. Shut up.

Weather-wise our first winter in Portugal has been uncommonly fine - dry and sunny since early December, until a few days ago, when all the pent up rain fell out of the sky at the same time. The weather here is generally quite changeable, on an hourly basis, which excites R a great deal. He fancies himself as a bit of a weather buff and the forecast has always been his favourite telly program. For Christmas this year I bought him a super-duper weather station. It has a data collecting gadget that he's attached to a pole in the garden, and an indoor digital monitor and information display and it all hooks up to some funky software on the computer. He loves it.  Personally I prefer to look out of the window.

The warm sunshine made our first Portuguese Christmas a bit peculiar on occasion - mince pies, sausage rolls and mulled wine on the patio whilst swatting mozzies was different. And our annual Boxing Day trek - last year an inappropriately under-dressed hike, blinded by the snow in the freezing Black Mountains - was this year an inappropriately over-dressed swelter,  blinded by the sun reflecting off Òbidos lagoon.

But everything else was comfortingly similar and we had a lovely Christmas, thanks very much for asking. The boyfriends went back to the UK shortly before Xmas, so there were just four of us. We had a real tree (albeit a pine from the garden, rather than a Norway Spruce), a roaring fire, consumed waaay too much of everything, and thanks to some satellite jiggery-pokery we even have British telly. Not that we watched much of it because it was all crap. The only thing we didn't have were parsnips, which don't really exist in Portugal.  But I intend to remedy that situation before next year.

On New Years Eve we got drunk and played 'Cards Against Humanity' (or 'Carbs Against Feminism' as my peculiar eldest daughter's subconscious has renamed it). I highly recommend it if you want to literally LOL, ROFL, and PMSL. My laughing muscles ached for days afterwards and I got cramp in my pelvic floor, with the effort of it all.  Afterwards R and I stayed up until 3-ish, dancing to Queen, with a brief interlude at midnight when we watched fireworks exploding over Òbidos and Caldas in the distance below us, whilst The Youngs went out at 11pm to actually witness the fireworks close up. They crawled back in at 11am the next morning looking like they'd definitely had a good time but there were a number of inconsistencies in their stories about what they'd been up to. *raises eyebrow*

My portuguese is progressing slowly. I need more practice speaking it but people take one look at me and talk in English before I've even opened my mouth.  I reply in Portuguese and they reply in English. I ask if we can speak Portuguese and they smile indulgently, say something in machine gun Portuguese, I stare at them blankly and we're back to square one. Although I'm quite good at chatting about the weather now. R isn't great with languages so he signed up for an intensive 40 hour course with a proper portuguese teacher, in order to grasp the basics. He thinks it's helped a lot, although I'm unconvinced.

Me:  Oh look there's a sign for a charcutaria down there.
Rich (looking puzzled):  Why do you need to get your feet done?

I'm now looking for a chiropodist so I can send him in for some sausages. Unfortunately the portuguese word for 'chiropodist' is 'pedicure', I think.  Might still get away with it if I ask him to get 'cured' sausages. *winks*

He's progressing with his golf though, as well he might, given the amount of time he spends on the course (and probably necking crafty pints in the clubhouse). I have no objections btw - it gives me more time to garden in peace without having to dodge haphazardly falling trees.  Meanwhile Daughter #2 has gone on a jolly back to the UK, and Daughter #1 has buggered off to India.  It's amazing the lengths some people will go to to escape Mummadoc's January Regime. Bloody defectors.




For those who are interested I've started writing a mostly-gardening blog. It's here:

http://blogs.angloinfo.com/moving-on-life-in-the-slow-lane/2015/01/12/new-year-new-country-new-life/

Six Months an Immigrant

Here I sit, on a lazy Sunday morning in late October, at the oak dining table I sat at as a child, with the sun streaming in through the open french windows, my piripiri plants sizzling in the scorching sun on the terrace, and Fat Babs snoring on the chair beside me. If it weren't for the snoring it would be perfect.

It's six months since we left the UK, three months since we bought our new home and precisely one day since we finished decorating/arranging/unpacking in the main (now) open-plan living area.  Life is very good indeed. I'm obsequiously grateful and I'm so, so sorry for sounding smug.

If it's any consolation, it's not all been plain sailing. Problems have arisen as regularly as the tides, but fortunately, so far, so have solutions.

The house we bought is on the outskirts of a little village on a hill above the beautiful medieval town of Òbidos. The views are fantastic and on a dewy morning Òbidos castle stands proud above a sea of mist and reminds us of St Mary's church spire on the drive down through Lydart into Monmouth.

The house itself consisted of a very large roughly hexagonal living area with an adjacent tiny little useless pokey corridor for a kitchen. The house was designed by the previous owner - an elderly wealthy Lisbon couple who used it as a holiday home.  I can only assume he designed it and she did the cooking. 

There are three bedrooms and two bathrooms on the ground floor and a small single bedroom/office in the converted loft-space.  

Outside there is a deep wrap-around verandah, a very large garden (I shall write a separate blog about the garden for my mother-in-law and other gardeners), and a pool (which we didn't really want but are quite enjoying).  The garden has a timed irrigation system consisting of fifty squirters that emerge sequentially from under the ground like something from a James Bond movie. And electric gates. Everyone has electric gates in this country, it's a bit weird.

One of the major selling points, apart from the view, were the low running costs. The property isn't connected to mains water (which can be expensive, particularly if you have a garden to irrigate) but has its own borehole and pump. Hot water is provided by a solar tank on the roof, and there are also photovolteic panels on the roof supplying electricity.

So, we moved in and gave the nod to Pickfords to send our furniture over.  Fortunately the previous owners left one double bed, and the Youngs, who had tumbled in, sleep deprived and covered in dust after a week at Boom festival, had their vans to sleep in, because the furniture took ten days to arrive. We made use of that time by getting the Youngs to build a shed and painting all the walls white.

Next job was to get the kitchen walls knocked down to create a large open plan kitchen/living/dining area.  We'd heard bad things about Portuguese builders' time-keeping but we found them incredible efficient. Toothless Sr Baltazar gave a quote on Friday, started on Monday and finished by Wednesday. We then had a hiatus of a month whilst we waited for the tiles we'd ordered to arrive, the day after which Sr Baltazar turned up at 8 am to do all the tiling. Then Sr Botelho and his team arrived and fitted the kitchen, which took two days.  Terribly efficient, particularly considering that neither of them spoke a word of English. I've been studying Portuguese very hard and through a combination of my poorly pronounced Portuguese, and, annoyingly, Richard's universal Man Speak (consisting of much gesturing, back slapping and laughing) we managed to make ourselves understood and now have a fabulous kitchen. Having been without a decent functional kitchen for six months this makes me disproportionately happy. I keep stroking it and polishing it like one of those crazy clean-freak people.

            

There have been hiccoughs though.  For example, it turned out that the solar hot water system was old and leaky and rubbish, and we had to replace the whole thing. 

Then we had torrential rain which somehow got into the defunct outside lighting system and kept tripping all the electrics. There was one memorable week when the electrics kept tripping, resulting somehow in the irrigation system activating itself at 5 am and refusing to switch off, the electric gates jamming shut, effectively imprisoning us, and the burglar alarm (which wasn't even switched on) going off repeatedly throughout the night - a week which culminated in me climbing under the duvet having a nervous breakdown.  

Oh and the leaky toilet cistern saga which resulted in Richard almost giving me a heart attack and me almost giving him a divorce at 4 am one morning.

Then the pool went green. It's a salt water pool which has a filtration system that has an electronic cell which dissociates the salt (sodium chloride) into sodium and free chlorine, on a loop (clever, huh?). Turned out that the electronic cell was all furred up with calcium.  Nothing that an hour soaking in a bucket of acid couldn't cure.  

Then there was the time Rich, whilst messing about with his chainsaw, felled a pine tree and simultaneously split the only mature plum tree in the garden in half. (Nothing that an hour soaking in a bucket of acid couldn't cure.)

And the haunted baby crying in the garden in the dead of night (turned out to be a mongoose).

And the time Rich managed to smash the Landrover windscreen from the inside with a larch pole (turns out I'm married to Frank Spencer).

And the time Holly and Angus managed to hit one of the electricity cables when digging a hole for the pergola....

Ah well.  I'm not going to list all the fabulous moments and special times - and there have been many - because that might just be a bit bloody annoying for those of you who are still shackled by your mortgages and shitty jobs. But it seems to me, as I sit here on this glorious morning, that we finally got to where we were headed, and, amazingly, it's as good as we'd hoped it would be.  

Actually it's better. (Soz.)

The End of the Beginning.

We've finally done it. We've completed the last stage of a three part plan we concocted nearly three years ago. 

Part one: sell our lovely house in Monmouth. 

Part two: transport ourselves and seven animals across Europe. 

Part three: buy a lovely house in Portugal. 

I'd imagined that Part Two would be the trickiest but it turned out to be a relative doddle in comparison to the trials (literally) of Part One and the tribulations of Part Three. 

We arrived in Portugal in 29th April and finally bought a house on 28th July, a three month period consisting of prolonged periods of waiting interspersed with episodes of hysteria.

We changed our minds about the house we had arrived in Portugal intending to buy, but quickly found another - one we'd first viewed a year ago - and made an offer that was accepted. Hooray! We'd soon be out of our very basic and frankly a bit stinky rental. We made plans and mentally moved in, decorated, arranged the furniture. We'd been assured a quick sale, but there was a hitch with one of the necessary documents. We were promised it would be resolved 'next week'. The following week we were promised it would be resolved 'next week'. The following week we were promised 'next week'.. etc. etc. etc.

Suspended in an undulating limbo we tried to make the best of things. 

At the start of the second month we needed to pay another month's rent, so Rich went off with €300 to find Pierre. 

Me: Did you find Pierre?

Rich: No. But I saw his mother doing some gardening in a house up the road but she couldn't understand me so I slipped the cash into the pocket of her housecoat. 

Me: What?! Are you sure it was Pierre's mother?

Rich: It was the woman who was cleaning our house when we arrived...

Me: The woman we ASSUMED was Pierre's mother...

It was short-lived disaster, and another month went by, consisting of our hopes being raised then dashed, then raised then dashed, with boring bits in between during which I'd pick arguments with unknown idiots on the interwebs for something to do. 

A meeting was arranged with the Estate Agent and the owner of the house we were trying to buy, during which she wept and pleaded with us to wait for the elusive document she required, and left us feeling uncomfortable and confused. 

Then our lawyer got stabbed. 

He wasn't killed, fortunately, despite being hospitalised having been stabbed several times in the abdomen, arms and legs by a irritated opponent in a 'friendly' football match.

Then the owner of the house threatened to commit suicide if the deal didn't go through. 

So we decided NOT to buy her house on the basis that giving in to emotional blackmail is always the wrong thing to do, and started looking at other properties. 

We saw this brilliant house on top of a hill with spectacular views over Obidos. It was more expensive so we transferred another wadge of money from our English bank account into our Portuguese bank account, and made an offer, which was accepted. 

We now had three quarters of all our eggs in one basket - the Portuguese bank. 

Then on a Friday morning two days later, I happened on a heart-stopping news feature which suggested that the Portuguese bank THAT HELD THREE QUARTERS OF ALL OUR EGGS was in financial crisis and about to crash. 

Yes, I know. Scary stuff. We rushed to the bank and requested a bank draft for a very large sum 'because we needed to buy a house immediately, yes, that very afternoon'. (We're British. We didn't want to appear rude to the poor bank. Or for them to think we were panicking, and selfishly adding to their troubles.)

Then we gave the bank draft to our stabbed but now almost recovered lawyer for safe(r)-keeping in his bank, and spent the weekend hoping he hadn't done a mid-night flit to the Bahamas. 

Then all the Youngs arrived! Hooray! You can't have the ups without the downs, as they say. Holly, Grace, Paul, Angus and Nick had been at a festival in the middle of the Spanish desert and they texted from the Spanish/Portuguese border to say they'd be with us that evening. But Holly and Grace are their mother's daughters and tricks and surprises are in their blood and so as Rich and I drove back from the supermarket at lunchtime there they were, in two multi-coloured vans driving towards us, shouting and waving and tooting and we had a very happy reunion outside the huge medieval church in Óbidos.

The purchase of the new house went without a hitch and we completed two days ago, two weeks after our offer was accepted. We've moved in but have no furniture - hopefully it will arrive in two weeks - but it's so lovely here that it doesn't matter. Holly and Angus are still here and Grace and Paul fly back on Friday. 

So we got to where we wanted to be, at last. There's loads to be done - building work, decorating, veg garden - but that's how I like it. I'm not very good at being bored. Makes me narky. 

We've had our ups and downs but it's been a truly amaaaaazing journey, as they say on The X-factor. 

*bursts into tears* *clutches photo of long-deceased grandmother* *sells story to Daily Express*

Creature Comforts

Creature Comforts

I know that I shouldn't value material things and that people and experiences are far more important, but I can't help it, I miss my STUFF. 

I miss my radio, and my books, and my cooking utensils and my clothes. I miss my hair drier and my garden fork and my wifi and my sofa. And I miss the telly.

There, I said it. 

I know it won't be long, in the overall scheme of things, before we regain our creature comforts, and I'm not complaining, honest, but it does rather seem at the moment that it's more about the creatures and less about the comforts. 

There's not much to be getting on with in our rented cottage, except tending to the tomatoes and peppers in the garden, so most days are spent either walking the dogs, or fretting about not leaving them in the vehicle for too long (fortunately it's not too hot at the moment and the Landrover stays pretty cool with its white roof and vertical windows) whilst we drink coffee and/or beer.  The evenings are spent playing Contract Bridge on a loop (I'm winning).

The dogs are all OK, although Woofta has been showing his age (14) for a while now, and is pretty decrepit. We took him to the vet this week because his breathing has been deteriorating. It wasn't a huge success because as soon as we took him through the door of the pristine, state-of-the-art animal hospital he recognised it immediately for what it was and started trembling from head to toe. 

Woofta DETESTS the vet. Any vet, it seems, even pretty young Portuguese ones he's never met before. The poor vet, who was lovely, couldn't get anywhere near him because he turned into a Devil Dog, snarling and snapping at her if she so much as looked at him. He was so distressed when we attempted to X-ray him that he became cyanosed and we had to abandon the attempt. She prescribed some heart tablets anyway but they're not making a jot of difference. 

He keeps buggering on though, with a sniff sniff here and a widdle widdle there. He's always been Top Dog, despite forever being the smallest in the pack, and he retains his position through sheer force of personality. We love that little dog and it's painful to witness his decline. 

Gwilym, meanwhile, is trying to get us deported. He's attempted to murder at least three cyclists, by going for their pedals (because they whizz round and round provocatively) and then he tried the same trick on an old boy who was phut-phutting along the edge of the lagoon on his moped. On another occasion he ran up to a fisherman who was bending over fiddling with his boat and stole his hat OFF HIS HEAD and sprinted round the beach, killing it, and refusing to give it back. He imagines that life is one huge game, staged for his benefit. Only his cuteness allows him to get away with it. (So far.) 

The cats are cool, as cats are wont to be. Fat Babs and Titty seem to have almost entirely resolved their differences. Odd, because they have wanted to kill each other for five years. 

ME: Fat Babs and Titty have stopped fighting. Have you noticed?

RICH: Yes. They almost seem to be friends. 

ME: I know. I saw them kissing each other in the kitchen just now. ON THE LIPS. 

RICH (slightly shocked): Are you saying they're lesbians?

*rolls eyes*

We've also acquired a couple of extra, unwanted creatures.

There's a mosquito (who I've called Mozzie Marianne). She wakes me up by buzzing right in my face, waiting for me to expose the tiniest bit of vulnerable flesh so she can strike with her venom. Vicious little fecker. She doesn't bother with Rich and it honestly feels like a personal attack. She's had me twice but I don't think she likes Marmite. And Rich has bought a swatter so the big-nosed parasite and her Mozzie Munter clan had better go and find something useful to do with their lives, other than needlessly irritating people and spreading disease. (What is the actual POINT of mosquitoes?)

We went for a walk in the woods the other day, and collected a load of pine cones. And ticks too, it would seem. 

The animals have all been treated against ticks but that didn't stop one from crawling up Richard's trouser leg. Fortunately he felt it creeping up his calf at lunch, and squished it. Ticks are insignificant looking little creatures, like flattened money spiders. But the creepy little perv crawls ever upwards, headed towards some warm, dark, body crease, preferably in the groin region, where he engorges himself on your life blood until he's just a huge fat body with tiny stumpy legs sticking out. Like Violet Beauregard when she turns into a blueberry. Nick the Tick, I call him. Gluttonous little parasite. 

Rich has had prior experience of them, being a forester, and when we were camping in Poland he had one embed itself in his buttock, which the girls and I thought hilarious at the time. I pulled it out and its head came off (and is still there, I presume, in his buttock). One of our friends, Steve, also a forester, discovered one on his foreskin. It was huge and purple and engorged. (The TICK was. *rolls eyes again*)

Anyway, I started to itch, imagining I had a tick crawling on me somewhere. Kept checking. As I wandered through AKI, (the Portuguese equivalent of B&Q) scratching, I gave myself a good talking to about psychosomatic itching. Then I spotted something crawling up the side of my nose. MY NOSE ON MY FACE. 

I did a River Dance amongst the lighting section, slapping myself repeatedly on the face, threw the little bastard on the floor in disgust, and jumped up and down on it.  I don't think I can ever go in AKI again.

Not really mentioning the house purchasing thing, for superstitious reasons (not that I'm superstitious), but things are progressing, I think, and hopefully we shall soon once more have somewhere we can call home. 

Touch wood. Fingers crossed. *checks knickers for ticks*

PS. Weather = sunshiny with mental spells (like you, haha). 

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

Finding Nemo / Looking For Wifi

What a peculiar week. What with 'Tittygate' and 'Tyregate' and trying to remind ourselves that this isn't a holiday; that we don't have to spend every day visiting somewhere new or taking advantage of every ray of sunshine or worrying about tan lines. Yet at the same time, without any of our worldly goods, including a permanent home, a radio or a cheese grater, it's not that easy to settle into a domestic routine. 

The little house we're renting is ideal for the moment, in that it's cheap, perfect for the animals, and has the basic things we need i.e. a bed, a stove, a fridge, a washing machine, a shower, a table and chairs, two small armchairs and a barbecue. 

We have brought with us the remaining life essentials i.e. a few clothes, lots of knickers, bedding, two saucepans, two knives, two forks and a spatula. And a bottle opener obviously. 

Our days so far have been spent looking at properties, walking the dogs on the beaches, going for runs around the lagoon, looking for wifi, getting a lawyer, wondering what on earth you do with bacalhau and sorting out a fiscal number.  Also listening to unfamiliar birdsong and effusing over wild flowers and the smell of eucalyptus. And pinching ourselves. 

Our evenings have been spent sitting in little armchairs surrounded by tea-lights, listening to all the music on my iPhone (via the mini speakers and amp that I so cannily packed), trying to pronounce Portuguese words and drinking cheap alcohol. 

The cats have all been allowed to venture into the garden, after being confined to the house for several days. Generally cats are very wary creatures and will gradually get their bearings, bit by bit, and flee back into the house if so much as a rustling leaf should alarm them. 

Not so Fat Babs. As soon as we opened the door she marched straight round the side of the house and pointedly waddled up the garden path without so much as a backward glance, her furry legs swishing around each other like a fat girl in a too-tight velour onesie. She headed straight for a hole in the fence and disappeared into the farm yard as if to say 'I'm not living with you bunch of wankers a moment longer'. She came back of course. She's streetwise that cat. Probably just wanted a crafty cigarette. Proper Valleys girl. 

A few nights later we thought we'd lost Titty. She disappeared for hours and hours. Titty is not like Fat Babs and it was completely out of character for her not to come when called. After several hours of searching (which included Rich wandering the streets of the village with a bottle of beer in his hand shouting 'TITTY! TITTY!' in a girl's voice), we sadly came to the devastating conclusion that she must be dead. There seemed to be no other possible explanation. Trapped or poisoned. Tragic.

Before bed - drunk, tearful and bereft -  we had one last look in the barn next door. And there she was, eyes like saucers and crouched under a vehicle, stalking rats, mice, bats and birds and having the time of her life. Bloody animal. 

(Leia the Dud Bengal hasn't actually noticed that she now lives in a different house in a different country and the dogs care not where they are as long as they are with us. I love dogs.)

For several days, we've noticed a tapping sound coming from one of the front wheels of the Landrover.  You can only hear it when the windows are wound down. May have been going on for weeks for all we know, but definitely at least several days. Rich said it was a stone in the tyre tread and yesterday, trying to locate it, I spotted a metal tack embedded in the tyre. 

Rich: Blimey. That shouldn't be there.

Me: Well, no. Clearly.

Rich: We need to get it out. It'll give us a puncture. 

Me: If it was going to give us a puncture it would've done so by now. Let's leave it. 

Rich: I don't like the look of it. I'm going to pull it out. 

Me: No. Don't do that. It might be plugging the hole. If you pull it out the tyre might go down. Leave it. 

Rich (looking doubtful): I'm not so sure. 

Me: JUST BLOODY LEAVE IT. 

This morning we had an appointment at 10am. As we piled into the Landrover, Rich did that dramatic thing he does.

'OH MY GOD!' he shouted, pointing at the front tyre, which was completely flat.

 

Me (really pissed off): DID YOU PULL THE TACK OUT?!

Rich: (looking sheepish, says nothing)

Biting my lip and without saying 'I bloody told you!' even once, we set about changing the tyre. This isn't that easy in a long wheel-base Landrover Defender. Having eventually worked out how to get the spare unbolted from the back door and how the enormous jack probably worked, it turned out the spare tyre was completely bald. Because when we last needed a new tyre about two years ago Rich had just decided to put the old knackered one on the back and forget all about it. So basically we had just travelled across Europe with no spare tyre. I KNOW. Unbelievable. I wanted to kill him. 

The rôles in our relationship have never been particularly traditional but in our case putting the rubbish out and ENSURING THE VEHICLES ARE ROADWORTHY are HIS jobs. (And cleaning up cat sick, obviously.)

He was saved from the full blast of my fury by a particularly pushy estate agent, but that's another story. 

House hunting has been up and down. When we were here in March we fell in love with a property that we had every intention of buying as soon as we arrived here last week. But when we went to view it again (for the third time) we promptly fell out of love with it. This was mainly because, since our last visit, the owners had nuked the entire 10,000m2 plot with weed killer and it looked positively post-apocalyptic. As a an organic gardener whose intentions are to grow vegetables this fairly broke my heart and the whole place completely lost it's charm. And you can't by a house that has no charm, can you?

So, it was back to square one. The good news is that yesterday we revisited a place we first viewed a year ago - a cute, boxy little place in the middle of a large, flat, virginal plot. A blank canvas, if you will. We think it may be THE ONE. Watch this space. 

Day Four. The end of the road. 

Squeezed out from between two articulated lorries and hit the road by seven thirty.  Beautiful weather, beautiful scenery. 

The idea is that we drive to a village just south of Òbidos, called Olho Marinho, and when we get there we phone a chap called Pierre, who we've never met but is friends with a woman called Steph, who we've also never met. Pierre's father has a farm and on his farm he has some... PIGS eee iy eee iy ohh haha, sorry. On his farm he has some cottages, two to be precise, both of which are empty and would be suitable for animals and have somewhere to park a caravan. We've kind of arranged, through texting Steph, to arrive at about mid-day.

Turns out we've done better than expected and we find ourselves driving into the sleepy little village at about 10am. We pull over and I'm just dialling Pierre's number when a car pulls up along side us and toots. 

'I see ze Ingeesh caravan I seenk maybe thees ees ze one. Follow me,' he says. 

The cottage is perfect for what we need until we buy our own place - two bedrooms, fully enclosed and gated little garden, private yard for the caravan and little patio facing the setting sun. 

Pierre's mother was there when we arrived, cleaning. She can't speak English but she loves dogs, and fell in love with little Gwilym, our playful Jack Russell.

I'm trying to learn Portuguese, but the pronunciation is difficult. 

'Se chama 'Gwilym'' I said. 

'Ah... Bulla' she said, patting Gwilym on the head. 

'Gwilym'

'Bulla'

'GWI-LYM'

'BULL-AHH'

'Gwii-lumm' I over-articulated. 

'Boooo-laaahhh' she over-articulated back.

She walked off laughing, Bulla skipping about at her heals. I guess Welsh pronunciation is tricky too. 

Walked the dogs on the beach at Gronho, on the south side of the lagoon - so lovely to see them charging about, having been cooped up for 3 days - before stocking up on essentials (wine and beer). 

Had a minor heart attack when we got back to discover Titty and Fat Babs were missing - eventually discovered them sleeping in a drawer that they'd managed to climb into through the back. 

Sat on our little patio listening to Gwilym setting off the village doggy telegraph and got tipsy on Vinho Verde. 

Well, pissed actually. But we felt like we deserved it.