Singing for my tea

So, out of the blue, just like that, on a sunny afternoon at the end of March, he calls, and says, the council is interested in doing lessons at the local school for English. Great, I say. It’s about time I learned to speak better Portuguese, and how considerate that the council is putting on lessons for the steadily increasing numbers of English people living here these days. Good thinking. I'm in.


Oh, but you’re mistaken, says he, you’ve misunderstood me (I hear that a lot). We want, nay, we need, a part time English teacher for the 3 primary schools in Oleiros for the summer term, cos the last one left kind a sharpish like for South Africa. So I thought of you. Why? I’m not a teacher. Ah, but you are more than qualified my dear Andre, you actually speak English. No denying that, I thought. Quick nip in to town to look up on the internet what teaching English as a foreign language in a primary school might involve, loved what I saw, knocked up a quick CV from scratch (most bizarre having to remember all that education, experience stuff that once I held as having a resemblance of importance, a bit like I was taking a sneaky peak at someone else’s life, as I said, simply bizarre) handed it in that same day with a cover letter to the President of Oleiros as my application and waited 3 weeks to hear back from the powers that be in Coimbra and then Lisbon to decide my fate.

I called in last Monday morning, for the news so I thought. Here’s the contract to sign, says he, then I’ll take you over to the school in town (where Josh and Eli go) to meet the head, and then you’re off to Estreito (20 mins drive from Oleiros) to teach the 3.30pm class and after that to Orvalho (25 mins from Estreito) to teach the 4.45 class there. Righty-O then. No induction? No right. Of course not. Any materials? Ah the internet, of course, silly me.

And so it came to be, armed only with echoes of rhymes sung to the kids when they were wee, that this little old foolish useless nobody, began to sing for his tea.

4 classes, 2 hours each day, in 3 different schools, five days a week, for the next 8 weeks and maybe beyond into next year, and the years to come.

My ten year plan written at 29, included setting up an advertising agency for charities and other good causes I liked, selling it after 5 years to someone nice, retraining to be a teacher in a year (the teaching bit so I could get my life more in synch with the kids), 4 years of experience and then off round Europe and the world teaching as we went. But, that urge to get my life more in synch with the sprogs, took over from the teaching bit, and after selling the agency, bought a motorhome, rented our house, took the kids out of school, and went looking for an altogether different life in southern Europe (see the 1st blog, Poop in Europe Tour, for a refresher on how that worked out). And now I am actually doing the teaching bit too. And it’s wicked. Here’s why.

One. Kids are fun. And here in rural central Portugal, they are not only fun but also really open and well keen to learn English.

Two. For a couple hours a day, in the heat of the afternoon when we wouldn’t normally be doing much restoration work or gardening outside anyway, I drive through some stunning, curvy, perfect-to-drive-on roads through mountain forests and valleys, to go sing nursery rhymes and play games.

Three. After all the kindness and generosity we’ve been shown by our Portuguese neighbours and by those we’ve got to know in the wider community of Oleiros, shop keepers, café owners, engineers, accountants, teachers etc, it is a real privilege to be able to give something back. To teach, to impart the joy of learning a new language to their kids and grandkids.

Four. Someone is paying me for it. Not much. But it all helps and somehow it has taken the worry off about whether or not our yoga, acupuncture, massage, arts, self-sufficiency, honeymoon cottage type retreat will work or not.

It feels like something shifted in us too. We are now not even talking about things finishing. When we finish the houses up there, when we finish the yoga sala, when we finish the moon gate terrace, when we finish the almond blossom terrace etc etc. Our conversation has drifted this last fortnight more along the lines of maybe we should give people a chance to be here while we’re building all this stuff. Maybe there is more value to the process, the journey, than the end result. Maybe the reality TV deluge that’s all over airtime in the States and Europe is somehow symptomatic of a deeper desire to partake in the process of the real, even, perversely, if it’s vicariously through other people’s experience. (Thanks to Paula & Alfie and their delightful 2 year old Elwood for helping us in this shifting process too. Seeing Paula early one morning with outstretched arms tingling from the magic of the place and watching Alfie ecstatic as he chopped up fire wood with a big axe, were real wake up calls for us in remembering the power of the beauty of this place as it is now.)

As a result of this shift, Von and I now have some cool emerging ideas about opening the doors to Moses earlier than planned. Watch this space.

Update on the restoration work at Moses

We made a new pergola with old olive tree wood and new eucalyptus beams, up which are now beginning to trail a grape vine, a fragrant jasmine and a sprawling white rose, under which is a (surprisingly solid) deck put together from recycled old wooden floorboards and joists, all of which shaded with thatched bunches of flowering heather, which we had to cut down to clear the overgrown hillside path leading to the Adega round the corner. And surrounding the deck and in front of the house are now some stone and wine vat wood flowerbeds, in which we’re planting in some yummy plants. In between a few exotics, you can find strawberries mingled in with miniature red roses. (Another big shout out at this point to our brethren back in the humming bird tipi world of the UK, Ian and Merle and girls Evie and Anna, for inspiring us so tremendously with their own patch of gorgeousness in Eira do Miguel – “truth is best expressed without words dudes”).

So finally, after just over a year of being here, we have started on what we came here to do. The plants. The flowers. The blossoming fruit trees. The climbers with more flowers. The grasses. Because they don’t need to flower. And those roses. Oh look and more over there too. Then the other flowers you hadn’t noticed yet. And then yet more in the abundant wild heathers, blooms and cystus engulfing the mountain forest in front of you, to the sides of you and behind you. It’s the stuff that simply makes one’s heart stop and then skip a beat as your breath is sharply inhaled and released with the expulsion of an honest “Wow. That’s just beautiful man”. For us, and we think for quite a few others too, witnessing the way that nature sings like that in lovingly tended gardens, so melodiously, so harmoniously, so generously, so effortlessly, is about as good it gets with this little life of ours.

As you can tell, we’re feeling pretty swell to be gardening at last. Of course we know we couldn’t be doing that if we didn’t have a house to stay in, with running water for drinking and watering, all of which took months installing and restoring. Or without the big structural landscaping of five new terraces carved out of the hillside done last summer. Or in the particularly cold and harsh winter we just had. We know we couldn’t be starting this at any time other than now. That feels pretty sweet as well. To be in the flow of it all. And to recognise that we’re flowing. We’re still waiting for stone masons to start on our other 2 houses, but we can wait; if waiting means we get to plant more pretty flowers in the meantime. All the other stuff will happen when it happens.

Lastly, my mobile is lost. Poor thing. Served me well. May it rest in peace wherever it may be. So the hot new contact number for us now is 00351 96 880 9068. Sorry to all those who left any unreturned messages on the other phone. Desculpe. And sorry for no videos this week. Movie camera was on that phone too. I’ll have to sort a new camera phone out. Sometime. Meanwhile, just off to water the veggies and the new gardens as the sun sets down the valley. Oh, and bless you, Eloise just handed me a cup of tea and another slice of her delicious new cake to tuck in to. Top stuff peeps.

I can’t find the words to tell you about this next last thing. So I thought I’d write a poem instead.



Ode to Slinky

You popped into the world
All shiny and new,
Then suckled a dog
When Mum died day two.

We gave you a home
And your shots, jabs and pills,
You weren’t half a cheeky one
Playing your heart out until,

Your fighting with Angel
Came too much to bare
You couldn’t come inside
Causing chaos everywhere.

So we found you a new place
To run around in,
With a grandma and Michelley
Giving their bestest lovin’.

In just over a week
You caught mountains of mice
Then curiosity gripped ya
You didn’t think twice

One night when you should’ve been
In for your tea
You jumped right in the road
“Don’t do it Slinky!”

It was over in a heartbeat
Your life cut short to nil
And now we’re all in mourning
Missing the Slinkster, we always will.

Thanks for the pranks
The company, and laughs,
We’re honoured that we knew you.
You captured our hearts.

What do I believe?

It’s a question that’s been bobbing around my head for a couple of months now, and came into sharper focus after I read ‘Elizabeth Costello’ by J.M. Coetzee in which a celebrated writer at the end of her life is forced to petition a panel of old judges in a small literary Italian town square before she is allowed through to the afterlife. I have no idea if one day I will have to endure the same ordeal, but if ever I am, I thought it might be a good opportunity to prepare my answers in advance. So here we go. Heart on sleeve. Feeling as apprehensive about the task as Moses looks in this photo. Think of it as work in progress if you will.

The first thing to say, as only the West Wing’s Press department could have taught me, is it’s normally prudent in today’s politically sensitive environments, never to accept the premise of any question. And the premises behind this old chestnut run to a long list. In the last few years I have more or less come to the conclusion that the nature of stating one’s believes, moreover, even the nature of belief itself, has been such a conflict-ridden and troublesome affair for mankind since our inception, that at best it has served to separate brother from brother and at worst to rationalize and justify brother killing brother on such an horrendous disastrous magnitude that it surprises me how we still, en masse, knowing the probable consequences, continue to desire to classify each other simply by what we believe. You’d think we’d have learnt a thing or two by now.

Just pick any one of the multitude of regional or global conflicts taking place on planet earth at this very hour, and you will, without doubt, find their roots in some kind of historical difference, disagreement, dissimilarity over belief of one type or another. Often the most vicious, the most malignant of these disputes originate between people groups whose belief systems are actually quite similar, in the same relative ball park as it were, they’re merely now only a deviation from, or a variance of, exactly the same original shared philosophy. Often it is actually the same original guy and the problems arising from the interpretations, or as each side would have it, misinterpretations of what he was reported to have said or believed himself. Abraham, Gautam Buddha, Lao Tsu, Jesus, Mohammed, Elvis.

Throw in a few other ingredients such as current, or for that matter ancient, incidences of vast inequalities in power or wealth between people groups and you create the perfect conditions for vindicated, hideous, self-perpetuating and utterly destructive warfare. Yet, at its roots, all our wounded history appears to have arisen at some level or other from our differences in belief.

Consequently, the premise behind the question of “what do I believe?” is so inextricably linked to those notions of religious, socio-cultural delineations and differentiations leading ultimately and inevitably to various stages of separation, segregation, oppression and violence, that I have tended in recent years to avoid answering it at dinner parties, but more particularly, avoided answering it for myself. Until now, that is.

I suppose one could argue that my reluctance to be drawn into a statement of belief is in itself a belief. “I believe it would be best not to say what I believe.” But I couldn’t honestly sign my name to that one. A bit of a cop out. So what are the other options out there?

“I believe in fairies. (I do, I do).” And, as an unavoidable corollary, in their tales. Fairytales. I could sign up to that one I think. The world, well at least my world and that of my children’s, has been the better for the existence of fairies and their tales, proven or otherwise. The joint realms of religion and science have systematically robbed us of the right to believe in fairies and therefore, I feel quite predisposed to undersigning for that very reason alone. Or maybe because we just watched ‘Neverwas’ on DVD last week, which if you have not seen, is a must. Although I have to say, Eloise sporadically chastises me for telling her when she was “only 6 Dad!”, at a time when I had felt she should know the truth, that both Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy were, in fact, actually only her mother and I conspiring in secrecy to perpetuate their myths. Rightly, Eloise is letting me know in her own special perturbed way that, “I, not you Daddy, will be the one who decides when or if I want to be enlightened thank you very much!” She has a point. Fairies stay. I believe in fairies.

“I believe in man.” This is a statement that would need a deal of unpacking. After a few volumes, you might not even succeed in explaining it. So, for the blogness of it all, and because it’s more fun to be trite, I would have to sign a “Yes”, but with the postscript “Rarely”. As touched on above, man does not have a great track record overall. ‘Selfish oppressive polluting exterminators’ is probably how we will be remembered by the aliens (or the evolved ants or the artificial intelligent machines) who will browse through the summation of our annals in future. Although we do sometimes get it right. Eloise, Josh, Vonnie. They are 3 examples I would cite. I believe in them. That will do. That’s enough.

“I believe in love.” Yeah baby. No doubt. Makes the world go round. Unashamedly, I am a true believer in love. Not only the romantic stuff, but the full gritty real total acceptance of another, type of love. Love love love. I love love!

“I believe in God.” Now here’s the biggy, is it not? Who is this God to be believed in? Or whose God are you thinking of? Depending on what or who you think he or she is (or not as the case maybe), might influence my answer. Yet for the sake of this brief distillation of my own beliefs, it is who I think God is, which will have to suffice. Of my own limited understanding, of my own limited experience to date, I believe in God. I believe she made all that I see, all that I cannot see, and she made me. I believe she waited a mind boggling amount of time after initiating the entire universe (even though most eminent scientists concur that the majority of stuff in existence took form in a breathtakingly short space of time – measured in parts of one solitary second no less) before experimenting with creating living things on Earth, and then a vast more imaginable, yet still ginormous, length of time before facilitating the emergence of humans. Whether she used the processes of evolution to achieve this or took some dirt and made an Adam, I’m not that bothered, but the scant evidence that demonstrates we evolved from Apes let alone air breathing fish is hardly a compelling argument. As such, I also have to believe she had to have an intention for creating Man and one that is probably, because I love it so much, is bound up with the notion of love. Love for the whole of what exists, for ourselves, for our fellow human beings, and at varying degrees of blindness and intimacy, love for her herself. I will never know for certain all this mystery, but I have an inkling that it is indeed possible to believe and even to love the creative force behind the entire cosmos.

In the miniscule chapter of life on earth that includes mankind, I tend to believe, probably because I feel the same as well, that God became and becomes utterly frustrated with us. And that a couple of thousand years ago she sent herself in our own form, in the miracle moment of a life that is Jesus. He had some pretty awesome things to share (as have a very few precious others from other cultures and other histories), but it was in his life, death and resurrection that I see the ultimate vision of love that grips me today as firmly as it did the first time I properly saw it, understood it, felt it in my teens. What an example. What an inspiration. What a magical, compelling, irresistible fairy tale. It is enough to sustain me until the end of my days and in all probability for a good while longer than that. Jesus is enough. His father is enough. His spirit is enough. For me. For you? Well, that’s your question, not mine.

So there you have it. I have my answer. I believe in fairies. I believe in man, rarely. I believe in love, always. I believe in Vonetta, Joshua and Eloise (and Moses, sorry me ol' china, almost forgot you there). I believe in God and in her son Jesus.

Hardly an original or imaginative response to that incommodious question but one that must be, as far as it possible to be, a true reflection and one under which I would be more than happy to pen my autograph one day, if it is ever required, in that Italian purgatory town square. Whether it would be enough to let me through the old Pearly Gates, would be to completely miss the point of what it enables me to appreciate this side of them. As the evangelicals like to say “Cake on the plate while you wait rather than pie in the sky when you die.” Or as John Banville in ‘The Sea’ more eloquently writes, “Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”

It is the Easter holidays at the moment and the kids are ever present with us once again. We popped over to the coast the day before yesterday to discover a completely deserted beach just south of Figaro de Foz and savoured the refreshing power of the Atlantic surf for a couple of days, camping overnight 300 metres behind the dunes. The vid below provides a sneaky peak of the uninhabited bliss of it all.

On the beach near Figaro de Foz...

Today, back at Moses, on the terrace in front of the bathroom, Von built a little stone wall to border a flat patioesque area under a white rose and another white flowering bush (an Easter something) growing in the slate walls, and on which we have placed a garden table and chairs for our forthcoming al fresco delights. Eli duly responded by baking another fabulous lemon sponge for the occasion, we supped gratefully on real English tea sent Airmail by Arlene and Sally, then before sharing this blog aloud with them, I undertook a quick vox pop family poll. “Fill in the following sentence for yourself.” I said. “I believe in….?”

“Cake”, declared Eloise instantly.

“Life”, proposed Joshua definitively.

“Blossoms”, giggled Vonetta cheekily.

“Walkies”, thought Moses hopefully.

Me too, folks. Me too.

Green for Grey - by Josh

Olá, it’s been a while, but I'm finally writing another blog. I don’t really remember the last time I wrote a blog so I won’t write about everything but at least some of the many highlights.

I'm going to start where anyone reading this will have most questions. School. School is going really well for me (actually now I think about it I should probably say really, really, really well). I'm “classified” by my friends as one of the top three students depending on the lesson: maths 1st; sciences 1st; and of course, Portuguese 3rd (although I got the equivalent of an “A” in my grammar test which was the best mark in the class). The other top two students are Anatoly and Andreia.

My three best friends Anatoly, Fábio & Rodrigo are really cool. Anatoly (or Anatoli as he likes to write it) is from the Ukraine and he’s the only other person in my class apart from me that has authorization to leave the school during school hours, so we tend to do a lot together like walk around the town or go to the Internet Café. Fábio, who is Portuguese is literally like my Portuguese double, he loves taking photos (yay!!!), loves graffiti (not those stupid little squiggles but the really big designs that take like 4 hours to do and 5 people so I said that he should go to London just to admire the “art” of the city), and thinks that bikes, computers and cameras are the best things invented so far. My other friend is Rodrigo who is French, and won’t let me stop thinking about it. He talks about Cristiano Ronaldo so much that I almost think he’s got a crush on him. He also thinks that the world revolves around football and that he’s a “babe-magnet”. He makes me laugh at him more than with him and I'm not the only one.

I’ve got 11 subjects at school and I participate in two clubs: ICT and football it would be nice if I could get a Cricket club going and the student will be teaching the teachers this time.

Right now I'm on Easter holidays but I can’t manage to sleep past 7am at the latest. School really gets you into a rhythm and I think I’ll go mad if I don’t get out of it so I tend to lie in bed until 10am just because I can. But waking up at 6 in the morning has its upsides (they are few but there are some), but before I get to them here are some funny sides leading up to the up ones. Every morning I fall out of bed and whack my head on the ground. Then I stand up straight and whack my head on the central beam. I then pull on my clothes while holding my throbbing head and afterwards I tumble down my super steep stairs but as I look out the window to see the morning world, I forget about my head (maybe that’s half because my ankle’s hurting now). At 6:30 in the morning you can see the first rays of the morning sun shining on the facing hill and the undergrowth makes the world look all fuzzy (or maybe that’s the tears falling down my face from my hurting head, ankle and now leg because Slinky is using it as a scratch pole). Seeing this dawn marvel, I remember my concrete birth place. Looking out your window in New Cross you see the sun rays shining on a drunk by the side of the estate begging for money because his wife has kicked him out the house at 3 in the morning without letting him get any breakfast (don’t worry, that wasn’t you Keith). If you could combine these two views, London and Amieira, you might get green flats (aka: eco-flats, which apparently exist according to Dad) and concrete trees (that I’ve seen in front of the Tate Modern and said “wow”). Just thinking about the dramatic change that we have made makes me shiver with shock.

Life here is different in many ways in comparison with the city in which I was born and grew up in (mummy says that I give London a hard time which is a little true considering the people, memories and places that are good there). At school in the big cities the teachers say that everything comes in different seasons of the year at different dates but you can never see it. Here suddenly 50 flocks of mallards fly in on the same day or 15 lines of processional pine caterpillars each 2 meters long march in. One day the pumpkins are still tiny vulnerable little things then suddenly they are the size of a couple of bowling balls. The Portuguese culture isn’t much different either. I’ll give an example: last weekend I went to stay over at Fábio’s house and in the morning they had killed the pig (to give him a name he will be called Bert). The whole day while Fábio and I were playing his family was working. In the evening we ate pork. I said that the meat was very sweet for pork and Fábio’s mum said that was because the pig was killed that day aka: Bert. I asked if they had already sorted out all the eatable bits (which in Portugal is everything) and she said no, all that was left was the right front leg. So they had basically killed, gutted, cut up and sorted out Berty in less than 12 hours which is quite an accomplishment. Sadly it’s the same with the forests. One day they’re here the next they could be gone.

So as not to leave you on that sad note I shall write my about my hilarious school trip. We went to Lisbon last Thursday to go see the planetarium and the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos. We left our little town at 9am and set off on a 3 hour journey. We got to Lisbon with time to spare so we ate lunch and another of my friends Paulo & I took a bath in the sprinklers (when it’s 30 degrees and you’ve got nothing else to do what would you do?). We then walked to the planetarium and after a 20 minute talk about what we were going to see we saw exactly what I see every evening out my front door basically whole constellations and galaxies. We then proceeded to the monastery that I had already seen when we still had the MosieMobile. With time to spare we went to a café that is the only place in the world that sells pasteis de Belém which are little tarts with cream, cinnamon and sugar. While we were eating them Anatoly & I saw a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, 5 Porches of which two were Locusts and a Formula1. Seeing the last we both looked at each other and then at the sports car with our mouths open and saliva hanging from them. Maybe the trip was worth it after all.

This is my last paragraph. Everything is rushing through my head so fast that I can’t actually focus on any one thing and most of my thoughts are in Portuguese so now I'm going to get my well earned beauty sleep and I shall do my homework in the morning (when dad reads this he will say “ha” and frown and mummy will tell me to go and do it there and then to which I will complain).

Tchau. Josh.

Ice creams in Sertã...

As still as a small weed dancing in the breeze - by Von

It’s a year and a day since we moved here. To be honest I really can’t believe it and yet so much has happened. Every day some part of this land is transformed by us being here and working here. Sometimes I am worried about the impact of our actions because romantic fool that I am I really like the falling down bits: the ‘weeds’ that grow through the house walls, terraces that have long collapsed, overgrown olives, perilous walkways and such like. On the one hand nothing has gone to plan. We are still waiting to put the roof on our house and our intention was to be living there within the first year of being here. Instead we are living in the house that was originally going to be Indie Michelley’s house and we have not really had any communication with Moonbeam and Sunshine since we left Bacelo. Yet these things are never really the plan. The plan perhaps goes deeper and further than we can ever see with our physical eyes. The plan has its own rhythm and impetus once it gets moving. This means that we have to learn to dance with the changing winds yet remain still, quiet, action within non-action.

Our patch of land is mirrored by a fairly steep, wild plant inhabited hillside, populated by a few pine trees, some small oaks, cistus, strawberry fruit trees and an impenetrable thicket of what the Portuguese call ‘mato’, and of course wild boar. It amuses me that this is our reflection so to speak. It is utterly satisfying to turn our backs on our side of the hillside and gaze on nature’s capacity to ferociously replicate herself. It reminds me that no matter what we do she will always reclaim her space as soon as us humans leave her earth alone. Often in the process of playing in the soil I stop take a break and lose my thoughts looking at that hillside and am calmed by its abundance of green. It is frustrating at times too as I wish I could be like the wild boar, or perhaps more poetically like the butterflies, happy to take rest in one of the abandoned cottages, needing neither roof, nor floor, nor clear pathway nor electricity, nor clothing, free from the constraints of attainment or desire. But most of the time I find it amusing, amusing that so much time, effort, energy must be spent making a home for ourselves, and I wonder who is the better adorned for life, certainly not me. This hillside always makes me smile at myself. It makes me feel like God is watching me impenetrable, unmoving and saying ‘relax it really isn’t that hard and there really isn’t that much to do I will look after things, I always do and I always have, let go’.

So, last week I woke up and my darling Memphis, (who always seems to hear my inner thoughts) decided I needed a fresh perspective and that we would take a trip to the other side of the hills. When we first moved here there was a fire or logging access road made along the very top of the hillside, but it is rarely used and we had never been on it. So off we went, with great excitement as soon as the kids were off to school, and after several stops to move fallen trees, some very heavy, out of the road we finally made it to the side immediately facing our patch.

It is hard to describe the experience of standing on the other side looking at our Moses (the place). You see when you are there working or walking or sitting it seems vast, too big for four hands and four feet, two heads and two hearts. The rocks are huge, the fallen trees are heavy, everything we do every impact we make seems small and insignificant on the huge landscape. But from the other side, it well, shrank. It’s tiny, gloriously wonderfully tiny. I couldn’t believe it. It is a speck on this landscape, a mere backyard to all the wild uninhabited landscape that surrounds. From there we could see that nature was eager to swallow every scar that we had made and that boulders to us were mere pebbles to her. I could see myself, watch myself from that side of the hill, a mere ant, or little weed just trying to etch out a life for herself and I could see that though we may be just two, with four hands, four legs, two heads and two hearts that we were not alone, my Memphis and I, that we could paint out a life for ourselves here with time and patience.

So now that I am back on my side of the hill I feel I have a true friend on the other side, one that I can just sit and look at to help calm my quivering mind and body and one that I can also climb (or drive) to the top too and take a fresh perspective, feeling comforted wherever I am of just how small I am, how small my efforts are and that no matter how much I f..k up here, nature with time and patience will always close the gap.

Times of a quivering come to us all and while lying in bed this afternoon I felt that some of my friends might be quivering just now. So whether you feel like you are living in the Babylon of attainment or the Paradise of acceptance I have a story of comfort to tell you. It’s a true story as true as any story can be once it is being told…

In the land of giants...

There was once a young woman who grew up on a very small Rock. She lived on this Rock for many years and while she was there she was told stories of giants. She was told that these giants knew many many things of great importance. These giants had done some horrible and terrible deeds but they were also creators of great beauty. She was told that these giants housed their treasures in enormous buildings unlike anything she could imagine and that in their land you could wear beautiful robes, see all that you could ever hope to see about the world of man and learn great secrets of how the universe and how all things in it worked. But in order to get there you needed loads of paper with special symbols on it and this paper wasn’t easy to make on the Rock. This young woman, audacious, as she was decided, that she would find a way to get to the land of the giants, even if she couldn’t make the special paper. So she worked and worked and read and read and found out the secret way to get to the land of the giants without the paper money.

She got there and it was just as was told. The streets were lined with so many lights it seemed as if the giants had captured the stars and used them to light their way as they strolled down wide avenues and spent many hours sitting and laughing just drinking this stuff called coffee which only seemed to make them laugh even wilder and become more excited. They had huge beautiful buildings, where not even the sun it seemed dared to peel the paint from the walls. Huge green spaces were carved out of their landscape and not even a carrot grew there just plants for looking at and smelling, a setting for giant mothers to walk with their giant babies and for giant fathers to have lunch or a beer with other giant fathers. Huge fat giant ladies sang in buildings painted with gold and lined with red velvet, small tiny giant ladies danced on tippy toes and captured her heart. She decided to try and learn some of the secrets of the giant world and spent many delicious hours in the vast libraries and museums, parks, art galleries and theatres. And in time she too could drink coffee and laugh with her mates and spend endless hours doing nothing but growing flowers and learning and finding ways to make more of the symbolic paper that the giant world seemed to love so much.

By the last day of the first year of her time in the land of giants she knew she was beaten, she had no place to sleep that night and had eaten nothing but beans for several months. She grew tired of all the knowledge and all the talking and longed for a piece of fresh fruit picked from a tree or a cuddle from a grandma or a walk in the Temple yard listening to the old Rastas who lived on the Rock. Tired and beaten she heard one of her favourite Rastas warning as she left, “Be careful daughter you can really lose yourself in that place, remember you are a princess growing into a queen.” At her wits end she opened a book that her Grandma had slipped into her bag as she was leaving the Rock. She opened the book and read these words,

"For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!"

"Do not worry then, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear for clothing?' For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

She went onto one of the forbidden rooftops and looked out at another rooftop, one with no apparent windows or doors and saw the most hopeful site she ever saw: a bird eating, feasting on some food that had arrived to his benefit. “How did it get there?” she wondered and “how did he know to go there to eat it”.

Still tired and hungry and scared she made a promise to herself. “I don’t know how I will eat tonight or how I will finish this thing that I came to learn but I do know that I need to write some words to feed the giants and I do know that I need to go and learn to use one of their writing machines and I do have a little of that giant paper money captured on this plastic card I am holding in my hand so I will go to the place where they keep their machines and their many books of learning I will do this next thing I have to do. I will do it gladly I will do it with joy I will do it as best as I can and be as kind as I can in the doing of it. I will not take what is not mine and I will share anything that I have even if that is just a kind word”.

So off she went and in she went and on to the machine she went, tired, broken and lonely but with a little more faith and a little more hope. She fed her plastic card into one of the machines to see just how little she had left, but instead of the card showing digits it flashed three times (just to make sure her dull mind was awake and her shuttered eyes were watching) and it said five letters, letters, not numbers. These letters spelt the word…

"HELLO"

Immediately after, the screen came up with an impossible number of digits (these digits represented what the giants called a sum of money). This money would continue to exist on her card for the entire duration of her time in the giants’ hall of learning until the very last page she needed to photocopy or print and at that very last page the card went blank and never worked again.

And so it came to pass that she finished her time in land of giants and in many ways became a giant herself, she found giants to love and to call family and friends, but in time she grew tired of the land of the giants and went to a new land, a vast land of small people and became a small person herself to see what miracles could happen there.

Wherever we are and whoever we are hard times come to us all, but take heart have hope and faith. The next time you are in a place where you can see the horizon, go outside, find the furthest point you can see and try to pick out the details of the furthest thing on that horizon. Chances are all you can see is sky, earth and indistinguishable shapes somewhere in the space between. If it is a tree, all you can tell is that it is a tree, you can not tell what kind of tree or what its leaves are like or whether it has been planted or just grown up there all random like. If it is a building you can tell it is a building but not what kind of building it is or what is going on inside. If it is a person you can not tell the shape of the face or whether that person is friend or foe. In other words we do not know, we never know what is on the horizon for us in our lives, it is a mystery until we reach it and then there is another horizon just waiting for us to reach if we so desire.

So relax and let go be supported by your little patch like a tough little weed, roots dug deep into an apparently impenetrable mountainside. Still in the knowledge that you are rooted in the earth but prepared to dance and move to the slightest breeze. Who knows there just might be something positive on the horizon that you just can’t see, miracles do happen they happened to the girl from the Rock and they have more than likely happened to you.

River.

Later that night...

A Foolish, Unlearned, Nobody in Peasantville.

Hey ho. Hope all is well in the lands across the seas and beyond or from wherever you maybe reading this today. Welcome.

Here in the land called Moses, deep in the heart of the forgotten Portuguese interior, it has been a most fascinating season. After the rush and madness that was the end of 2008, the joy of Arlene and Annie’s Christmas visit, the reflections that followed in the stillness of those long cold, wet, winter evenings, Spring is now emerging all around us. Bright pink cherry blossoms nudging through here and there, white and yellow daisies devouring the roadside verges, heathers under the pine and eucalyptus forests bursting into purpleness, warm sunny afternoons, all revealing the promise of much much hotter and longer days ahead and the full glory of nature that we know is about to explode just round the corner.

It should now, you’d think, be the perfect temperate weather and, after our long winter’s rest, the perfect moment in time for Von and I to now be in top gear with the restoration of our other 2 houses. But au contraire.

I am not exactly sure why, but we’re not too concerned. It feels like we are riding the flow of natural rhythms in this most enchanted of places and consequently we’re in no hurry to push things along at the hectic pace of 2008. Slowly, slowly and all things shall come to pass. Não é, Shanti? We have though, managed to clear both the other houses ready to start the first part of renovation – raising the old stone walls by a metre or so in height (in stone, not straw bales, cos we’ve found an old local guy who can do it brilliantly and quickly, prepared to also teach us how in the process, and we haven’t been able to find a decent straw baler near here for love nor money) and then installing new wooden roofs on top with a carpenter roofer who happens to be the boss of Michelle’s gorgeous young Brazilian boyfriend, Warley (captured here squatting down by one of the granite pools in the river that flows round Moses).

We’ve also been able to do a few cool odd jobs around the place: like carving a drain out of the lime floors to transport the sudden emergence of an underground stream that ran through the house after all that rain fell in January (the most for 20 years in Portugal); pruning a dozen or so of our 40 silver leafed olive trees (like this one in the photo); building a neat tri-chamber compost structure from old floorboards; making the house feel even more like a home with simple bookshelves of long sweet chestnut planks on red fire brick pillars and some much needed kitchen storage space; a chimney in the bathroom so we could fire up the elegant old wood burning stove that we’d found abandoned in the ironmonger’s car park in Oleiros; new fascias for the bath and toilet from sawn off pieces of old broken wine barrels; vegetable beds edged with boulders fallen when the new terraces were carved out last Autumn; and new graduated steps along the path that connects the houses at the top (Cabeco) with the house at the bottom (Moses) heaving chunky trunks of felled pine trees up the hill and then back filling them with rubble and clay. That actually sounds like quite a lot of work now I have written it, but it really has only taken us a couple of hours a day and nothing approaching the generally accepted notion of ‘strenuous’.

Meanwhile, the kids have both had their birthdays, Eli’s 10th & Joshua’s 12th, and continue to fly at their lovely school in Oleiros, making great grades and even better friends. They are fantastic little creatures and we love them lots. The very sweet little Brazilian lass in the photo is Ju Ju, Eloise’s best mate here, (Hatti will forever be her bestest mate in the whole wide world) and she’s spending the weekend with us at the mo’ making cookies and cakes every few hours. Josh will be entering another photo competition this week called Splash Flash 09 featuring the best of the waters in Oleiros. He won the prize for the most original photo in the council’s last competition, so he’s keen to do well again this year. Here’s just one of his amazing shots. If he ever finds the time between his full-on studies to write another blog, you might get to see some more of his talent. Last weekend we nipped over to Coimbra to buy them new clothes and shoes cos they were looking a tad dishevelled. The clips below are from that trip to Portugal’s University City.


Coffee and bike rides alongside the Montego river in Coimbra…







Anyway, enough of the catch-up, let me explain the title of this blog entry as well as the reference to peasantville in the skits above.

Our closest neighbours are old. Joao and Eugenia (not the ones in the village but the other ones round the corner in Vale da Figueira) and José & Eugenia (whose Father built our houses over 80 years ago) have lived in these parts, in their current houses in fact, all their lives. They, like so many people round here, are kind, generous and expert stewards of their lands. We can’t help but admire the way they live, so simply yet enjoying the rich abundance of the fruit and cultivation of their toils. Not much cash and as such, together with their rustic lifestyles would be thought of by townsfolk and city folk as mere peasants. In the next 20 years or so, if we are able to learn even half of what they know how to do, we will be gloriously content.

In contrast, the so called civilised learned sophistication of the London we left behind and in the shopping malls and universities of Lisbon or Coimbra, doesn’t really seem to make much sense to us out here in the sticks. On so many levels, we have been unlearning, deconstructing, dropping much of what we thought we knew and in response are in the process of seeking the authenticity of a more firsthand physical and, in particular, spiritual existence. We have no idea if anyone will ever pay to stay here and therefore whether we will have ‘enough’ cash to live. But, strangely, we’re really not that bothered, most of the time. This place, the potential of the land, in itself, in ourselves, is more than enough. To some we know this will appear like pure irresponsible foolishness. Maybe it is.

Moreover, we were previously surrounded by a world where people, including us, were seeking, often with all our might, to become important, or at the very least useful to our employers and/or to society at large. Here, however, we’re slowly recognising that we’re moving towards a lifestyle where most of those people would consider us useless nobodies. And boy, let me tell you, it feels just great.

When I grow up, I want to be a foolish, unlearned, nobody.

Ironically, this label for my new found self awareness makes for quite an apt acronym. F.U.N. So much fun in fact, that if ever our kids tell us one day they are off to the mountains to renounce the world and become foolish, useless, nobodies like us, it will be a delight. (As would be the case if they said they’re off to become doctors or actors, scientists or artists – just in case the grandparents get too worried by all this new fangled babble.)

I went fishing early this morning with Josh by the Rio Zezere (not in the pretty little stream in the photo which runs at the bottom of our place, but the big river just over the hill). Didn’t catch a thing. Obviously, hapless fisherman that I am. But to spend a couple of hours with my boy, appreciating the awesome tranquil beauty of a thick cold March mist being dispelled by the heat of a rising Springtime sun, chitchatting philosophical nonsense together about life’s existential quirky dilemmas, while waiting with not so rock solid faith for the trout to bite, is one treasure I would not swap for all the treasures of this world. Well, maybe I would to land an actual fish one day. (Just for the record I should note that what we were doing probably shouldn't be called fishing until I catch a fish, so if you wouldn't mind please re-read that para to begin 'I went sitting this morning...)

I will leave you with this video clip of Von and Slinky sharing a quiet moment on the yoga terrace yesterday. For the more discerning of you, you will note that Slinky begins to move into a very familiar yoga position, which I, unsurprisingly, misname, and which Von, the yoga teacher, even more surprisingly, can’t remember. Correct answers on a postcard to Moses, Amieira, Oleiros, Portugal, 6160-052. Previous experience of yoga, or of anything else for that matter, is not a requirement for entry. Prize winners will be chosen next month. By Moses the dog. Of course.

Cheerio.

Everybody loves the Sunshine

Only time to post up a few videos today. Will update you on renovation works on the houses and gardens next month.

River on the road to Cambas...

The snow covered mountains of Serra de Estrella...

Joshua's 12th birthday pancake picnic with a rare cameo appearance on film of the elusive Shanti B...

Right after, we took Moses (!) for a swim in the Rio Zezere...