Letter from the Algarve: October '08
It is cold.
It is blowing a gale. It is raining. It is dark and dreary. Oh well,
what can one expect? It is late october, and I am standing on the
tarmac in the UK.
Three hours later I am walking across the car park. I have taken off my
pullover. The only reason I am wearing a jacket is because it is the
easiest way to carry it.
I pick up the hire car. An hour later I am home.
So which is it to be: the good news, or the bad news?
The good news of course is that I am standing on the balcony in my
shirt sleeves looking across the valley. The crickets are making a
dickens of a row. It is quite dark, but still very mild.
The following morning I walk under the bright red bougainvillea.
Various trees in the garden are threatening to flower. There are pale
yellow flowers, there are blue flowers. Along the roadsides there are
quince bushes laden with big fat green fruit. There are pale red
persimmons in the fields, and bright red &*()*& on the trees at
the bottom of the garden. The lemons are almost ripe, and the oranges
are plumping up nicely. Everywhere is colour. Spring is all around me.
The Algarve weather system is upside down. Winter is when everything
dies down, but in the Algarve that happens in the summer. The fields go
brown. There is no rain for four months. Then, sometime during the
first or second week of september, it rains. Very often the rain comes
with a vengeance and it simply chucks it down, maybe for three days.
Then we are back into summer, but the ground jerks back into life, and
the grass starts to grow and everywhere bursts into flower.
In September and October I wander around the house only wearing a
swimming costume. But I still have to have the mosquito net over the
bed.
But what about the bad news?
I arrive home. The car is parked in the drive with the headlights
facing the front door. I open up, reach in and throw a switch to put on
the outside lights. Nothing happens.
There is a paper stuffed in the electric box. I have been cut off, or,
as they charmingly put it, terminated.
I have only been here for a week during the past four months yet I have
somehow managed to rack up an electric bill of almost €600. This is
well-organised theft. How do they get these figures? Even if I had been
here all the time I couldn't have used that amount of electricity. I
live alone, I cook on a gas cooker, I have solar powered hot water. All
I use is a fridge, electric lights, occasional bursts of air
conditioning, and a pump for the water.
Electricity in Portugal is seriously expensive. I need to go eco! More
voltaic cells on the roof and a couple of small wind turbines should do
it. I must get some quotes. Does anyone have any experience of rigging
up wind powered electricity?
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