A Gem in the Gloom

The drive east was curiously autumnal for the second day of summer.  The heavy overnight rain had turned to drizzle and the clouds were touching the road.  More autumnal than anything else, though, leaves on many trees were already turning red.  Not enough water in the soil, said the missus sagely.  Big cork trees loomed up out of the murk on the bendy road.  Great dripping ferns leaned out from the banks.  I never attempted to get above third gear.

The weather being what it was, we had decided to have lunch not too far away and in town.  The only choice was which town.  Going west or south would quickly have brought us to semi-urbanised areas and we both wanted to stay rural.  East won because the roads that way are prettier than going north.  The fact that we couldn’t see the roads because of the mist made that a particularly academic exercise in making choices.  We headed for Celorico which is our ‘home’ town on account of it being the heart of ‘our’ concelho even if it isn’t the nearest town to our house.  As the missus always tells me when we head that way (which is frequently) Celorico is a poor town in a poor district.  As we tell each other, we have a soft spot for the town, warts and all.

It was the missus’ turn to choose the venue and Restaurante Adelina was our target.  The food came very highly recommended, she said.  Tucked behind the courthouse, the dining room is on the first floor of a suitably solid piece of nineteenth century granite house building but with doorways more suited to the sixteenth century, if height of the door frame was to be a measure.  I skimmed my skull a couple of times, my thinning hair barely any protection at all these days.  The dining room was half full and, as we breezily reached the top of the stairs into the room, all heads turned to look our way.  I assumed that our presence had induced a hushed reverence but I soon realised that the hushed state was simply a reflection of the torpor which seemed to hang over the place.  For some reason, pink was the colour chosen for the under-cloths on the tables and for some drapery on the wall.  It was quite a dark, dusty pink and it gave the room the feel of a place that had been frozen in time in about 1962.  I half expected young women in beehive hairdos to arrive in petticoat-stiff frocks, with young men sporting oiled quiffs and drainpipe trousers and to order frothy coffees and put a tanner in the juke box.  I don’t know if I was relieved or saddened by the fact that they didn’t turn up at all.

A lugubrious air settled quickly again on the assembled diners and even the arrival of a young child in a tantrum didn’t lift the mood.  The owner, a cheery woman named Adelina (we supposed) who had a bright manner, sparky voice and beaming smile was unable to dispel the heaviness in the air.  She retreated back to the kitchen.  The young Eeyorish waiter carried gloom with him as well as plates of food and he managed to ladle despondency on every table he waited on, a melancholy dish which seemed welcome at all the table except ours.  Oh dear, we thought.  Perhaps this was a bad choice.

We had rung ahead and ordered roast goat.  We were celebrating going out.  The platter arrived with an enormous portion of meat and roast spuds and, shortly after, a bowl of rice appeared as well.  As an afterthought, the sombre young man asked if we wanted a salad.  I could have done with some grelos or couve but we would take what we could.  Ironically, the previous week I had had Sunday lunch in a gastro-pub in Wales where I was bewailing the excess of veg served with roast dinners these days in British eateries (come on, seven different veg?) and here I was bemoaning the opposite.  Something in between, guys?  But the food that was served?  Well, we have hardly ever eaten better, anywhere.  Just about everything was as perfectly prepared and cooked as it is possible to be and, though it took us some considerable time, we managed to finish the entire works in front of us, bar half the rice.  When the bright woman from the kitchen came to ask how the meal was, I ran out of superlatives.  I know I used mesmo a lot.

It was the missus’ turn to pay so, naturally, the bill was cheap.  Too cheap, we thought.  I don’t see how they could have bought the meat (let alone anything else, and prepared it all) for the price they charged.  We left Restaurant Woebegone before they discovered their mistake.

A little wander around our frequently overlooked vila before heading home.  It always cheers us up – though the food had already done that, in spite of the surroundings.  Over the years, Celorico has worked hard to make the most of its hidden charms.  It had its work cut out.  When I first visited some twenty something years ago, it was a very run down and forlorn little place (a mirror of what we’d left behind at the restaurant) but some talent and ingenuity has been applied and the results are a pleasant little place to wander around.  No grand structures or monuments but they have turned the old Tâmega rail line into a long distance cycle/walking path (and the pretty tiled station is now a youth hostel) and the old eighteenth century ‘industrial’ site of multiple water mills has been turned into a water featured leisure park while the old municipal buildings and the small palace have been or are being restored.  And, always, there are views across the valley to Alvão (partially hidden by low clouds today) from under the wisteria-laden pergola and the avenue is filled with flower-laden trees.  It’s our town and we like it.

Lunch on the Slate

Our local concelho seems to have come up with a cunning plan for the roads.  We were mainly travelling on municipal (M) roads today and one thing that these roads don’t have much of are road signs.  Reach a crossroads or another kind of intersection, perhaps resembling a plate of spaghetti, and there are unlikely to be any signs to help you on your way.  Mostly, this does not bother us.  Not these days, at least, because we are locals who have traversed these roads time and again and we know which lanes lead to someone’s barn, which ones give up all hope of being roads and just stop in the middle of nowhere, and which ones actually go to places you might want to visit.  That’s why these roads don’t have signs.  The thinking is that the only people who use them regularly are locals who already know where to go – so why waste money on unnecessary signage?  Of course, there are the occasional Dutch number-plated cars you might see, or possibly it’s the same Dutch number-plated car we see every time, still lost.  They are on their own, pal.  The revelation we discovered today was that every time we stopped at an intersection to check if the roads were clear, we heard a blackbird chirruping loudly close by.  (At least, I assume it was a different blackbird each time.  If one was following us, then that would really be creepy.)  No, it’s obvious.  What the concelho have done is to train blackbirds to inform travellers at intersections of the choices they face and the dear little Turdus merula is simply trilling a whole wodge of data for the lost motorist.  All that is required is to speak Blackbird.  We knew we should have paid more attention to the Avisos Pontuais which the Câmara send out at regular intervals.  One of those must have addressed this issue.  Still, we know where we going anyway, blackbird or no blackbird.  Unlike that couple in the Dutch car over there.

The reason we were on M roads is that we had decided to have lunch at altitude, it being such a hot day.  Altitude meant mountains and that meant small, windy roads.  In fact, we went on the M roads of two concelhos, the other being Mondim de Basto (who didn’t deploy blackbirds at intersections, thus helping to support our thesis outlined above) because our intended destination was the tiny village of Ermelo in the middle of Parque Natural de Alvão.  When we crossed the Tâmega at Mondim we had entered the region of Trás-os-montes.  We were stopped at the border.  Damned road works and automatic traffic lights.

To our shame, we had never visited Ermelo before, though we have frequently been to the nearby waterfalls, Fisgas de Ermelo, a truly unspectacular spectacle (we really ought to go in the wet season, if there ever is another one).  The village is almost a classic version of its ilk, as if it has grown from the ground up rather than having been built.  The local stone on the eastern side of Alvão is mainly schist, shale, slate and quartzite and the slate-built houses and slate-built roads were almost invisible against the sheer slate wall of mountain rising up one side, even as you stood on the street.  It was a bright day but it felt dark, nevertheless.

 

Sabores de Alvão is in the middle of the village, between the minuscule church and the even tinier building for the local parish council.  Outside the window of the medium sized restaurant are plunging views and we could trace the zig-zag of the road we had followed.  There are two views in Ermelo – a plunging one or a cliff-face.  The small car park had been mainly occupied by a small tour bus which had found its way from Famalicão (near the coast) and consequently there was a large group of famalicense aged from 9 to 90 chomping their way through a mountain of grub and occupying all of the far end of the room.  We settled somewhere in the middle of the room, with a window view, but not too far away from the loud group as they seemed to be an interesting source of lunchtime entertainment.  Looks can be deceiving, though, and they behaved themselves with boisterous decorum and talked mainly about wines – and football.  I was pleased to spot the older men with enlarged prostates making regular trips to the loo and I timed my visits to dovetail neatly.

The restaurant is family run and mum was in the kitchen, daughter was serving the food and dad was running the bar-cum-café.  It was comfortably busy for such a remote place but then it was a pleasant Sunday and there was a coach party to boost numbers.  The menu was not written down – usually a good sign – and the choice was small – another good sign.  Vegetarians would have left at that point as the mixed salad plonked on the table before you ordered anything is as far as the veg went.  Unusually (for me) we both had soup to start.  A decent leek soup made with the green parts of the leek rather than the white.  That is how it should be.  A good start, I thought.  Roast pork and roast turkey were dished up, both served with roast spuds dosed in lashings of paprika.  Good stuff.  The menina who served the table was quick, friendly and highly efficient.  What more could you ask for?  She didn’t come back to the table every five minutes asking if everything was OK either.  She came just once, as we had nearly cleared our plates, to ask if we wanted some more.  Put it this way, either of the portions we had been served would have been enough for two of us so, we calculated, we had already eaten two lunches.  A third just wasn’t possible.  And neither was a dessert, even though they did have pêras bêbados on the menu.

This lunch trip was as much about the journey as the meal.  We were (just) within our self-imposed twenty-kilometre radius from our house but it had taken us 45 kms of road to get here.  Part of the distance is accounted for by the fact that, in this region, the only two crossings of the Tâmega are at Mondim or at Amarante and the rest is taken up with twists and turns of the road, curva contra curva.  But what wonderful twists and turns they are!  Hardly a minute goes by before another valley, another long ridge or another richly mixed forest reveals itself.  There is no chance of speed and it is simply a matter of choosing between second and third gear most of the way.  The roads were largely empty and it was an absolute joy to be out in the mountains.  We decided to return by going across the park and via Bilhó and down the side of the celebrated Monte de Farinha but before we did, we had to witness the coach trying to back out of the small car park across a very narrow road and attempt a three-point turn.  It managed, but not before the driver lost control for a vital few seconds and the coach lurched into the back of a parked Mercedes, pushing it forward and through the chain-link fence, leaving it with one wheel precariously hanging over a steep drop.  Strong, wine-fuelled men pulled the car back from the brink, damage was examined and handshakes exchanged.  No harm done and all was well in the post lunch haze.  I bet the coach driver was regretting having started that second bottle, though.

X Marks the Spot

The requirements of civic duty and putting a cross in the right box on a piece of paper (about two thirds of the way down the page!) meant that this Sunday we had to go to Porto. That is where we are both still registered to vote. The plan was we’d pop into Polling Station AA and then wander off towards the Rotunda at Boavista where, we assumed, we’d easily find some lunch.

 

You would think that between us and our not-inconsiderable combined ages, some kind of wisdom regarding ‘assumptions’ might have crept in. Of course, it hasn’t. One of the golden rules of my life has always been ‘Never Assume Anything’. That gives you a clue as to how good I am at sticking to the rules. Even my own. Of course, 90% of the places we might have expected to eat at were closed for lunch. Sunday lunch, at any rate. We had kind of calculated that quite a lot would be, but not the overwhelming number that were. What’s more, the ones that were open didn’t serve Sunday lunch. Yes, they served lunch but it was Monday to Saturday lunch and while we might have enjoyed eating the lunch on offer there on a Wednesday, it simply would not do for a Sunday. Standards, you know. Either the food looked it might be OK but was in the wrong setting – like plaza style ‘eating outlets’ – or was simply the wrong kind of food, like burgers and pizza. Burgers are fine in the week and brilliant on a Saturday but there should be a law against them being served on Sunday. As for pizza, well, all I can say is the last pizza we ate was in Italy and the next pizza we shall eat will also be in Italy. So there.

 

We were getting weary and despondent (well, I was; the missus is a hopeless optimist) – and I was getting close to accepting anything that had been prepared with a modicum of care – when we stumbled upon one of those places that we must have walked past a hundred times in the past but never realised it was actually there. Passatempo looks as if it is a small café from the road but pass inside and it opens up into a lovely dining space which has retained some of its art deco beginnings.

 

The waiters were pleasant and efficient and the older man had learned to glide in the manner that waiters of old used to do, as if an expert on ice. There was a menu – enough of a novelty for us to pass comment – with prices that made us blink twice: is that for two or one? The list was quite extensive but, of course, the thing I first chose was the only thing they no longer had. In the end, we ordered the same: ceviche followed by grilled tuna steaks.

 

While we waited – the essence of the waiters’ job, we thought – we wondered what it was that made this place so clearly a city restaurant. I suggested that if you had been brought to the place blindfolded, you would have had no problem whatsoever in knowing, instantly, that it was in an urban and not a rural setting. We couldn’t see the outside of the building from where we sat, so there was nothing exterior that gave that impression. The missus immediately identified the rather lovely art deco windows which were behind me, a chique sophistication that might have been out-of-place out of town. She also pointed out the TV, which was turned off and we both commented on the smooth modern jazz being played in the background, just within the lower audible range. The clientele appeared, on the surface, much the same as they might in a village restaurant, though there were one or two women who were dressed expensively and, conversely, one or two older men who looked as if they might teach art at college. More importantly, they all spoke quietly and the children were well behaved and we tried to imagine the same number and mix of people in one of the casa de pastos that we have frequented, where the noise level is often off the scale. “Gente fina,” says the missus. I was also interested in the staff. They were smartly turned out but the thing that gave them away were their professional smiles. They looked at you directly (except when you wanted to attract their attention, of course: Rule Number One of Waiters) and they smiled on each contact. These were professional smiles done when transacting business. Their country cousins will smile, but only if they think they have a genuine reason to do so. When the rural waiter smiles at you, you know it is genuine.

 

The food was good. A ceviche of salmon and tuna with just the right amount of red onion was a nice, clean start to the meal and the tuna steaks were exceptional. They were brought by a chef in his smart striped apron and hipster beard and had been smothered in seeds before being grilled on very hot coals. The centre was barely cooked and the outside had a slight charred look to it: just perfect. It was served with a feathery light veggie couscous and pureed sweet potato. City sophistication.

 

In the end, the bill wasn’t too bad considering what we’d feared – at the top end of what we’d normally pay but not above it. Much. And they brought the bill in a flash – something that almost never happens out in the sticks.

 

So, election day turned out just fine. Let’s just hope that the radical right has been kept at bay at the urns.

A pig of a day

It was a late lunch. Mostly, this was the fault of the Catholic church.

The missus decided she wanted to spend her birthday weekend within easy striking distance of Fátima. Fair enough. I got to explore some hills I didn’t know so I was ticking boxes as well. Fátima twice in two days, though, is pushing it a bit for the likes of me. There are only so many shops full of religious tat and kitsch that you can explore while the missus does the Mass thing. In Fátima you can either go to some religious service or you can explore the many religious trinkets shops. There is nothing else. There is a visceral pleasure to be had by studying the sheer awfulness of the gee-gaws on sale.  So, while Mass number two was going on I was an observer, (certainly not a player) simply because I’d been trinketed-out during Mass number one on the previous day. The Mass was one of the open-air versions so, given the phenomenal sound system the church has installed, there is nowhere in the town you can escape it anyway (I think they can hear it in Rome) so you might as well have a gander as well. All two hours of it. There were lots of false endings, when I was tricked into thinking it was over, but the real end, when it came, was unmistakable. It was the Roman Catholic version of the end of the 1812 Overture – no cannons but plenty of canons, an emotional fully-stopped organ at fortissimo with church bells peeling riotously, as if the French were at the city gates.

An hour up the road to Mealhada for lunch and it was now gone two thirty and I was still feeling dizzy from the experience, so choosing the popular choice for lunch (according to my mini FB survey) was completely the wrong thing to do. Metas dos Leitões might be popular but it is huge and cacophonously noisy. We got seated easily enough but I got the distinct feeling that all of the 50 million people who had been at the Mass that morning had collected some friends and all come along for lunch too. If there weren’t 65 million people in the restaurant then it certainly sounded as if there were. I lasted about five minutes. I could feel myself go pale. I stood up and insisted we left. To go where? By this time, I would have settled for a sandwich but a braver spirit took charge and we decided to try the place that Dave T had first suggested – Nova Casa dos Leitões – a couple of clicks up the road. It was still large, though comfortably smaller than Metas. That is not hard. You could park a fleet of jumbo jets in Metas and still have room for the population of the city of Tokyo.

Being smaller, we had to wait, so it was about 3.30 before we got our table and by 4 o’clock we had even ordered. After that it was quick and thumpingly good stuff; arguably the best bit of suckling pig I’ve ever tasted. And the whole sliced orange to go with it was a great idea – like having your dessert at the same time as your main course; to save time. The mistake I made was sitting so that I could see the guys behind the counter cutting up little piggies so they fitted onto platters and into boxes (for the take-aways). Of course, this meant I got to see the size of the whole, oven-hot piggies before they got cut up which inevitably led me to wonder how many baby pigs are plucked from their mother’s teats every Sunday just to feed the punters along this stretch of the EN1. Mind boggling. On a scale with Fátima.

So, all in all, a day of excesses. Looking forward to a much quieter Sunday next weekend, when hopefully the loudest event will be putting a cross on a voting slip for the elections.

Brutish Newt – The **** Old Days

Brutish Newt Archive

Anna and the Archbishop

We didn’t expect Anna to adopt the role of tour guide but she did anyway and that would have been a lovely idea except for one thing: she didn’t seem to know anything the history of Braga, the place where she had worked for decades.

“This,” said Anna, pointing to the building which bore a prominent sign saying palace, “is the Palace.”

We murmured our appreciation and asked how old it was.  There was a brief pause.

“Very old,” said Anna.

We muttered our thanks again for her insight and we walked on to the cathedral.  We could tell it was the cathedral because it said Cathedral on a sign outside.

“This,” said Anna with evident pride, “is the cathedral.”

It was our turn to pause as we struggled to form the next question.

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Anna quickly, before we had the chance.

We once again nodded our appreciation of her candour and wisdom and we trooped inside the cloister.

“You have to pay to go into the cathedral,” said Anna defensively, as if searching for reasons to stop us going into the main building and asking questions that she didn’t know the answer to.

“They are very expensive to maintain,” said my brother.  I think he was championing Anna’s cause – that of leaving someone’s ignorance unchallenged.  Both of us were suitably impressed that anyone could live in a city for so long and know so little about it.  That takes real skill.

We didn’t have to pay to go into the little chapels around the courtyard so we popped into a couple of them.  Actually, ‘pop’ might be the wrong verb because one of them was so dark that Anna didn’t see the Archbishop lying on the floor and she snagged her foot on the old fellow.  Anna teetered and Anna tottered but she just managed to save herself from falling face first into the arms of the supine, alabaster archbishop.  Above the old boy’s tomb random boxes of bones jostled and murmured in alarm.  It was close call.  We displayed too much levity at the narrowly avoided intertwining of limbs and a serious ten year old studying a Latin inscription scolded us with a severe look.

Outside the cathedral we walked past the town hall and turned up to the Santa Bárbara gardens.  We stood aside as a delegation of a few hundred farmers bearing banners marched in protest  about the scandalously low prices farmers were paid for their produce.  Anna recognised some acquaintances from the Communist Party in amongst their ranks and her back straightened in pride and solidarity with the farmers and her moment of teetering in the presence of the Archbishop was forgotten.  This was a woman who could stand on her own two feet.  We read through one of the leaflets handed out by the protesters and bemoaned the wicked ways of all-powerful supermarket chains and noted the universality of the problem.

The gardens of Santa Bárbara were pretty in their spring clothes and Anna, determined that we didn’t ask her any questions about it or the ancient arch standing at its southern end decided that she needed to take photographs of us against the scenic backdrop.  We posed suitably, slightly tight-lipped, perhaps, due to the fact that our collective store of knowledge was now no greater than it had been an hour earlier.  Anna did what photographers do and stepped back to get in the full scene.  Call it the Archbishop’s revenge if you like (I know that I will) but in the next moment Anna’s heel caught on the surround of the flower bed and before we had time to turn our cameras on her, she had tripped backwards and this time there was nothing to stop her falling.  To the accompaniment of hoots of laughter from a couple of old women standing nearby, she toppled quite gracelessly into a bed of pansies.  Without doubt it was a most inelegant collapse, with legs and arms flailing amongst the crushed leaves and crimson petals and I am sure I could hear the echo down the ages of an Episcopal laugh.  Needless to say the result was when she finally got to click the button our smiles – broad grins even – were quite genuine and heartfelt.

Soon afterwards we took our leave.  We didn’t want to burden Anna with any more questions that she couldn’t answer and she, I felt, wanted to leave while she was standing upright, on her own two feet.

 

 

Nicked

I wonder how many Porto people know that there are only two police stations within the VCI which are open to the public. One is in Paraiso and the other in Ribeira. Today, we found ourselves in paradise (someone has redefined the meaning of that word if the inside of that little police house was anything to go by) by walking between two others. They were Cedofeita, now closed permanently, and Praça Col Pacheco, which does not invite the public into its shady interior and which was guarded by a fierce, pockmark-faced officer who ran his hand over his open-holstered gun rather too lovingly for my taste. When we suggested that the police, too, were facing this ‘crisis’ we read about he got red faced and even more angry and said it was not the police in a crisis but the government. Well, fair dos to him, I say, especially as the gun was nearly out of the holster by then.

The fellers at Paraiso were as helpful as they could possibly be. All I actually needed was a bit of paper with Participação on the top and a stamp and an explanation of how I had come to commit a mortal sin and lose a government document. Now I didn’t know that you mustn’t lose a document of this note under any circumstances, though the one I am talking about is a Cartão de Residência, arguably the most useless piece of paper ever issued as I have never, ever used it. Even when I have tried to use it and it has been poo-pooed and horribly rejected by other officials. It is the kind of document that should remain in an envelope in a drawer until such time (ten years later) when you need to renew it. If you do lose it and you don’t report it to the police then the whole bureaucratic machine just grinds to a halt and nothing can go backwards or forwards. This I found out when the whole bureaucratic machine ground to a halt right in front of me, going neither forward nor backward, at the offices of Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras. When this machine stops like this all that can be heard is a deep, echoing silence that stretches to the furthest reaches of the universe. All you are aware of is the incomprehension – the disbelief – of the red-tape pusher to your cardinal sin of not following protocol as laid down in art.º 519/C de Lei 23/2007 de 4 de julho. Hand on heart, I hadn’t read the whole protocol. Well, as the hand is on the heart I might as well admit that I didn’t even know of its existence. So there.

It took over an hour of walking the steeply hilly streets of Porto to find the police station in paradise that would admit us and allow me to report my grievous loss. Once I did manage to gain entry, as I said, they couldn’t have been nicer. Such sunny dispositions from the boys in blue (for they do wear blue here as well as over there). Mind you, I did notice that the officer on the door also had a skin complaint. Do they do this deliberately? Is a ploy to deter people from entering the police station to report lost documents? The other question that popped into my mind was: why is it so small? It’s more like a Toy Town lock-up than one of only two police stations in the city centre. There was just one small room which only had space for one medium sized policemen and one large or two small citizens. That was it (for the public area) for the half of the entire aggrieved population of a major city. I can now see why scar-faced men stand at the door. All but the most desperate walk on by. More than half a dozen bereft citizens a day and they’d become overwhelmed.

We sat on the wooden bench just inside the front door to wait. We didn’t have to wait long but this meant that the bubble-skinned man with the gun could watch us and make the occasional witty remark (which I totally failed to understand each time). The officer who took my details was close cropped, like all his colleagues, but had very large spectacles which made him look like a thin Alan Carr, ‘The Chatty Man’, in uniform, which made my eyes swim and I felt slightly sick (which might have been the lunch I wasn’t having). He deftly typed on the keyboard with two very fast fingers and a whimsical smile on his face, which set off the occasional frown and sigh as he stared as something impenetrable on the screen (probably some reference to art.º 519/C de Lei 23/2007 de 4 de julho). Then a fresh faced copper (straight off the farm, by the look of him) offered to make me a photocopy of another document just so I could have one all to myself. Wasn’t that nice? Of course it was, but not nice enough to want to lose another of the state’s vital documents. I am renting a bank vault for the new, if useless, residência once I get to smudge a print of my index finger onto its inner page in the required manner.

The Faff Queue

Choosing the right queue dilemma – part 4,516. The supermarket checkout today and I knew I was making a mistake by choosing the line with the fewest number of people waiting. It’s always a sign. But did I listen to myself? Did I heck. I have witnessed some epic faffing in my time – haven’t we all? – but this was a queue of specially gifted faffers, all of them, so i must be one too or else i wouldn’t have stayed. Right? But at least I thought the tough looking woman in front of me would be fine when her turn came, if it ever did. She had a no nonsense haircut, earrings useful as attack weapons and a stare so piercing you could hear masonry crumble if she glanced at the wall. What’s more, she only had twelve things in her basket. Twelve small things. However, in my mind’s eye I could imagine that every single one of those items had lost their bar codes – and that would mean the infernal internal phone and a bit of scurrying on the part of Marta from the padaria and Nuno from the merceiria to find out the prices, not that they do much scurrying hereabouts. No doubt the bar codes had been burned off when she had looked at the prices. But no, I was wrong, the bar codes were all intact (which is more than can be said for the baguette she was buying – she obviously wanted it folded into four to fit into a pocket or something). No, our lady with the laser eyes was on a buying expedition for all her neighbours – or five of them anyway, because she wanted to make six separate purchases to buy these twelve items. Each purchase required the appropriate store card to be found and each payment had to be made from a separate twenty euro note, each located in its separate purse. Of course, our fiery-eyed buyer didn’t actually look for the appropriate purse until the dutifully patient cashier told her the amount. Each time, the woman looked startled, as if the last thing she had expected was to have to pay for anything. Then began the search for the appropriate purse, followed by the careful tucking of the change into its recesses. Naturally, she wanted a proper NIF receipt for each of these transactions so this caused another delay – well, five mini-delays – while she hunted for the appropriate card with the correct number on. Of course, the NIF numbers hadn’t been stored with the relevant purse and money, oh dear me no. At least I got to know which of the purchases was hers as she knew her own number by heart, of course, and I was relieved to learn that the folded baguette was going back to her house.

The whole queueing thing had taken longer than it had taken me to drive the seven kilometres to town, park the car and do my shopping. Still, I wasn’t in a hurry. Back in the car I headed towards home, following the road signs out of town pointing to Fafe – pronounced ‘faff’.

Limey Ahoy!

Of course, buying the lime tree was never going to be easy. Given the success of citrus fruit trees in the fields hereabouts plus our proclivity for lime juice, it made sense to have a go at growing our own. It is the obviousness of the deed that contains the seeds of its difficulty: anything that is not worth doing is easy to accomplish, which is probably why the world is filled with so much rubbish; doing something worthwhile is to take a path which meanders through a whole host of unforeseen obstacles. So, though we knew where to buy it and we had folding money to pay for it, it took five attempts over a number of weeks before we acquired the arboreal accouterments. One of the discoveries on this quest was that planting lime trees are (for want of another expression) the flavour of the month, or perhaps year, and so no sooner had the friendly feller at the market got some in stock than they were all snapped up – he hardly had a chance to unload them from the van. To get ours, then, required advance planning and an early start but even so I only managed to grab the last one off the van by bundling an old lady into a thorny thicket before she had a chance to put her hands on it herself (though I have no idea if she actually wanted a lime tree but she was nearby and I could not take any chances).

Getting the deed done was important not just because we wanted a lime tree but because that damned Black Dog has been pursuing me again. The lack of success in obtaining our own Citrus latifolia was just beginning to haunt me and I could hear the inky hound growling around the corner. Small setbacks had been causing bother and this has been the case ever since the last hospital appointment. Good news, you would think, would brighten up the days, but no. Up until the results of the biopsy there had been a clear date, a focus, a cut-off point visible on that stretch of the road and that had somehow made it much easier to be upbeat and positive and, apart from one relatively brief run-in with aforementioned mutt, I had been feeling very optimistic. Since that day, however, the highway seemed less defined and more uncertain and the doctor’s warnings about unwanted come-back tours and shows had dampened a tendency towards positivism. The secret, as always, was in keeping very busy, but I hadn’t accounted for how I might deal with obstacles and failures. Normally, such things present no problem. I usually see them as being part of the process of moving forward and would normally welcome them as useful learning tools. This time, though, I was plunged into dispiriting gloom by even minor snags and slight hiccups and there has been enough murkiness for the Black Dog to drag me into his kennel from time to time.

So, getting the lime tree home was more than just an exercise in ensuring our future supply of citrus juice. I needed the rest of the week chug ahead with fewer clouds and sunnier spells simply by completing the task. The fact that, after a few days, the lime tree is still sitting in the plastic bag in which it arrived just goes to show that the purpose of the assignment was not entirely motivated by agricultural demands. And, anyway, it is well known that dogs like trees for sniffing and leg-cocking purposes, if nothing else, and so it keeps The Dark One occupied. For now.

Bright Socks to Scare Away the Black Dog

Woof, woof. Bad dog. The black hound – let’s call him Winston for the sake of clarity – failed to appear this bright and sunny morning and what a relief that was. He’d been hanging around for a couple of days and hadn’t been at all welcome so it was something of a relief when I woke and found the beast not there. For now, anyway; perhaps – hiding in the shadows or locked in a cupboard somewhere – he is just waiting for his moment to growl behind my back or snap at my ankles. Strange thing is, when I turn to face his yellow eyes straight on, he’s never there. Never to be seen. So how do I know he’s not there? Believe me, I just do, and it’s a relief to discover when he’s not..

On the other hand, I had been a bit concerned before last weekend that I hadn’t been aware of the black dog at all over the past few weeks. Surely that couldn’t be right? Melancholy and measurable levels of glumness were to be expected, weren’t they? Surely it would have been unnatural to proceed in an unbroken, sunny and optimistic mood with no shadows cast and no dark canines snarling from Stygian recesses. In one sense, then, his unwelcome arrival was also something of a relief: a measure of normality and balanced mental health.

I’m normally very fond of dogs, to the point of being quite soft about them, really. I just haven’t learned to live with this one yet. He prevents me from concentrating, stops me from reading, listening, watching, planning; he trips me up when I try to do something positive in an effort to break the uninspiring drudge of the day and gets tangled up in my legs and once I’m down on the floor he drags my mind and my imagination to places I would rather they didn’t go. He wakes me in the middle of the night with his snuffling – which can barely be heard above the distant hooting of the tawny owl – and then keeps me awake by being maliciously silent as I wait in vain for his grumbling in the dark. I can feel his yellow eyes in the dark though I may never see them.

But today he is gone. Cavorting in some unlit meadow somewhere, no doubt. I know he will be back and I know I must prepare for his return. Perhaps I can teach him tricks? I don’t think he should learn to fetch sticks, though, as I fear he would use them to beat me. Perhaps I need, first, to teach him to sit and behave. Good dog. Sit. S-i-i-it. And then I might find the courage to pat his head and later to scratch behind his ears. I would work hard to get him to wag his tail with pleasure. First, though, I must learn to see him, not just feel him, and talk to him rather than be just commanded by him. Afterwards, I will learn to stare straight into his eyes and not be distracted by his teeth.